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

COMMUNITY

mechanical linkages between working parts so much as ‘repositories of meaning’ (1985:98), and it is these which come to be expressed as a community’s distinctive social discourse. In short, membership consists not so much of particular behavioural doings as of thinking about and deliberating upon behaviour in common; here is attachment to a common body of symbols, a shared vocabulary of value. Moreover, it is the ambiguities of symbolic discourse which allow members to unite behind this vocabulary when facing what they perceive to lie beyond their boundaries but also, when facing inward, to elaborate upon differences in its interpretation and hence affirm a variety of cherished individualities. Community is an aggregating device which both sustains diversity and expresses commonality.Thus it is that community comes to represent the social milieu to which people say they most belong; community, its members often believe, is the best arena for the nourishing of their whole selves.

Furthermore, to say that any understanding of ‘community’ must be situational, that the concept is a matter of contingent symbolic definition, is also to talk about ‘community’ in relation to other types or levels of sociation. Here, Cohen continues, community can be understood to represent that social milieu—broader than notions of family and kinship, more inclusive, but narrower, more immediate, than notions of society and state—where the taken-for-granted relations of kinship are to be put aside and yet where the non-relations of strangerness or the anti-relations of alien-ness need not be assumed; community encompasses something in between the closest and the furthest reaches of sociation in a particular context. Hence, the notion of community encapsulates both closeness and sameness, and distance and difference; and it is here that gradations of sociality, more and less close social associations, have their abiding effects. For, members of a community are related by their perception of commonalities (but not tied by them or ineluctably defined by them as are kinsmen), and equally, differentiated from other communities and their members by these relations and the sociation they amount to. In short, ‘community’ describes the arena in which one learns and largely continues to practise being social. It serves as a symbolic resource, repository and referent for a variety of identities, and its ‘triumph’ (Cohen 1985:20) is to continue to encompass these by a common symbolic boundary.

Evolutionary approaches

For many social scientists, the problem of defining community is to be explained not by its situational qualities, however, but its anachronistic

63

COMMUNITY

ones. Community is said to characterize a stage in social evolution which has now been superseded, and the problems of definition arise from the fact that what is seen as ‘community’ now is a residue or throwback to a mode of relating and interacting which was once the norm but has now all but been eclipsed by more modern notions of contractual relations in complex society (cf. Stein 1964). Such formulations are by no means new; indeed, they can be seen to imbue the evolutionary schemata of such nineteenth-century luminaries as Maine, Durkheim and Marx. In particular they are associated with the work of the German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies, who, in 1887 [1957], posited the transcendence of ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) by ‘society’ (Gesellschaft). What he hypothesized was that the traditional, static, ‘naturally’ developed forms of social organization (such as kinship, friendship, neighbourhood and ‘folk’) would everywhere be superseded (in zero-sum fashion) by associations expressly invented for the rational achievement of mutual goals (economic corporations, political parties, trade unions). This was not an unmixed blessing, for while community relations might be moral, sentimental, localized, particular, intimate, ascribed, enduring, conventional, consistent, and based on intrinsic attachments (to blood, soil, heritage and language), societal relations were artificial, contractual, interested, partial, ego-focused, specialized, superficial, inconsistent, fluid, short-term and impersonal. And yet, community was inevitably (and absolutely) losing out to the advancing society of capitalism and individualism.

‘Community’ in current usage

Whatever the evolutionary prognosis, needless to say, (whatever ‘advances’ capitalism may have made over the past century) ‘communities’ have continued to flourish; as an idea, community has continued to possess both practical and ideological significance for people. Indeed, recent decades have seen an upsurge in ‘community consciousness’, ‘community development and rebuilding’ and ‘community values and works’ (at the same time as there has been a vaunting of migrancy and globalization). Whether that community is defined in terms of locality, ethnicity, religion, occupation, recreation, special interest, even humanity, people maintain the idea that it is this milieu which is most essentially ‘theirs’, and that they are prepared to assert their ownership and membership, vocally and aggressively, in the face of opposing ideas and groups (cf. Anderson 1983). Thus, anthropologists have continued to be interested in this idea in use, while Robert Redfield’s counsel (1960:59) remains timely:

64

CONSCIOUSNESS

As soon as our attention turns from a community as a body of houses and tools and institutions to the states of mind of particular people, we are turning to the exploration of something immensely complex and difficult to know. But it is humanity, in its inner and more private form; it is, in the most demanding sense, the stuff of community.

Anthropologists, in short, continue studying ‘community’ (Pitt-Rivers 1974; Meillassoux 1981; Cohen 1987) because this is what their subjects inform them that they live in and cherish.

It is perhaps sufficient to say, in sum, that, however diverse its definition, community ubiquitously represents a ‘hurray’ term (Cranston 1953:16). Whether ‘community’ represents a togetherness of the past (Toennies), contemporary behavioural commonality (Frankenberg, Minar and Greer,Warner), political solidarity (ethnic, local, religious), or a utopian future (a rural idyll, a world order), here is a concept of always positive evaluation and evocation, whose usage expresses and elicits a socio-cultural grouping and milieu to which people would expect, advocate, or wish to belong.

See also: Home and Homelessness, Non-Places, The Rural Idyll,

Urbanism

CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness has been of modern philosophical concern since René Descartes (1596–1650) formulated what became known as the cogito: ‘I think therefore I am’. Thereafter, the centre of philosophical gravity shifted from the cosmos to the individual human being; forces which controlled human behaviour and destiny were felt to arise more and more from within the individual, while belief in the spiritual life and activity previously felt to be immanent in the world outside—gods, planets, herbs, humours, church ritual—grew feebler. Philosophers began to work outwards from the thinking self rather than inwards from the cosmos to the soul; and John Locke (1632–1704) adopted the new word ‘consciousness’ to mean: ‘perception of what passes in an individual’s own mind’. Consciousness came to be seen as fundamental to human behaviour, society, language and knowledge.

However, anthropological interest in consciousness is relatively recent, particularly in the UK. In North America, Franz Boas’s work helped the early formation of a psychological anthropology which was concerned

65

CONSCIOUSNESS

with the mode in which the mind of the individual became ‘enculturated’. Sigmund Freud’s legacy led to a psychoanalyticalanthropological focus (on the European continent and in America) on the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness, as elucidated via ‘ethnopsychoanalysis’ and the analysis of dream and myth. Finally, G.H.Mead’s emphasis on relocating the mind of the individual in the experience of social order led to symbolic—interactionist writing on the corresponding identities of ego and alter.

In much British (and European) anthropology, notwithstanding, a Durkheimian legacy, which insisted on a separation of the sociological and the psychological, and posited a social realm which was subject simply to social forces and hence home purely to social facts, caused individual consciousness to be seen as irrelevant, irretrievable or nonexistent. Instead, a ‘collective conscience’ was posited in which all members of a society were said to partake via ‘collective representations’. To the extent that individuals were recognized as possessing consciousness, this latter was identified with the structural logic of that individual’s social or cultural circumstances: to live in group X or class X or role X was to possess X consciousness. Anthropologists thereby provided themselves with a foolproof means of defining away the problematic of consciousness; only in pathological or deviant cases need it be questioned whether people who ‘shared’ culture or were located within common social structures did not also share similar kinds of consciousness. Anthropologists were content with the generalization of thought and belief to whole societies and the subordination of individuals to these collective thought-regimes.

Recent anthropological work has brought the relationship between individual consciousness and collective conscience into sharper focus, however (cf. Cohen 1994; Cohen and Rapport 1995). There is an increasing appreciation that attending to consciousness is not to privilege the individual over society but rather is a necessary condition of a sensitive understanding of social relations: of society as composed of individuals in interaction. Social reality cannot be described as other than a matter of ongoing interpretation by conscious individuals; there are perceiving, interpreting, intentioning, creative, imaginative—in a word, conscious—individuals within role-players, within languagespeakers, within social functionaries, within culture members.

That is, anthropologists have come recently to recognize that an inner/ outer dichotomy was in the past being employed as a methodological avoidance strategy By arguing that anthropology could deal only with what was empirically manifest (the outer), and must be content to treat anything else (such as ‘inner’ feeling) as either a matter

66

CONSCIOUSNESS

for imagination (fiction, philosophy), or else for other disciplinary investigation (psychology), questions of consciousness were simply preempted. As genres have blurred, however, following anthropology’s literary turn, so that it has become proper for anthropologists to write reflexively, personally and politically, so, correspondingly, it has come to seem inadequate to write as if the outer life of symbolic forms, institutions and norms was all there is, or as if an outer life of overt behaviours somehow spoke for itself or was intrinsically meaningful: a social fact somehow independent of the ongoing consciousness of the individual. It is necessary to connect up (however partially) the ideational and sensational world of the experiencing individual with the outer world of publicly exchanged behaviours.

In short, anthropologists in the UK and Europe, as in America, have increasingly come to a recognition that to approach other societies and cultures is to approach other conscious minds—albeit through the medium of their own. The consciousness of the anthropologist is, thus, inextricably implicated in those of his or her subjects since it is only in terms of the former that the latter come to be known. Hence, consciousness comes to be seen as not only a central plank of anthropological enquiry but also as a method which necessarily undergirds that enquiry as such.

Approaches to consciousness

To elaborate upon Locke, consciousness may be defined as denoting: ‘the movement of the mind both in recognizing its own shape and in maintaining that shape in the face of attack or change’ (Ellmann 1977:1). It includes sensations, perceptions, moods, emotions, propositional-attitudinal states, and narrative structures (Flanagan 1992:213), and it is embodied: there can be no mind without a body. Perhaps the diacritical feature of consciousness is its awareness of itself: we are conscious about being conscious. It is this, some have argued, which distinguishes human-like awareness (including, perhaps, that of the higher mammals) from animalistic awareness. All animals possess a ‘primary consciousness’, a present awareness deriving from the mental imaging, the perception and categorization, of things and events in time. But human beings also possess a ‘higher-order consciousness’ which entails the ability to model the world free of present awarenesses: to report on, correlate and study subjective states and phenomenologies, and to model such internal states free of time. As Focillon concludes: ‘[t]he chief characteristic of the mind is to be constantly describing itself (cited in Edelman 1992:124).

67