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

CONSCIOUSNESS

Finally, by participating in and observing this present, by taking account of the storifying process by which individuals continue to write their lives into a narrative whole, the anthropologist can hope to gain access to the consciousness of others as it moves from past awareness to future (cf. Tonkin 1992; Hastrup 1995a). It is their memory and their anticipation that individuals express and perform in their use of cultural symbols and social institutions.

An anthropology of consciousness

The anthropologist seeks the subtleties of intimate knowledge: knowledge behind the ideal-types, categories, generalities and abstractions of public exchange. The quest is for the knowledge which animates these collective forms, forms which far from revealing this knowledge may well mask it beneath the vagaries of symbol or conventional idiom. For much of its history, social anthropology has lived with the comforting notion of collective representations. However, to continue to resign itself to the inaccessibility of consciousness is for anthropology to abide by a view which it knows from experience to be false: that behaviour can be taken at face value, and that what people appear to do equates with what they do do and what they think. Anthropology cannot be concerned solely with what is public or revealed, for this is, or may be, mere gloss on what is concealed or not obviously apparent.To gloss consciousness either by notions of society or by culture, so that an individual experience is treated as if it were simply identical to or derivable from that of the collectivity to which he or she supposedly belongs, is to deny or, at best, misrepresent individuality and selfhood by gross simplification. Moreover, with the collapse or redundancy of the old positivistic orthodoxy which stipulated a strict difference between the anthropologist and the anthropologized, consciousness has certainly become more accessible to valid study than previously. It is no longer acceptable (à la Durkheim, or Mauss (1985)) to claim a consciousness for ourselves which we deny to others.

In a sense, of course, this is not so much a new departure in anthropology as a matter of rediscovering what its practitioners have always enjoined; anthropology has been concerned with consciousness (as a method and a subject) since Malinowski first wrote in his field dairy in 1917: ‘Principle: along with external events, record feelings and instinctual manifestations; moreover, have a clear idea of the metaphysical nature of existence’ [1989:130].Anthropologists have long made claims about other people’s consciousness and their grasp of it, and ethnographic reports have been replete with imputations of belief,

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thought, knowledge and emotion to members of the societies and social groups with which they were concerned; anthropologists have sought to make sense of what they have seen and heard, and have taken this latter as evidence of conscious sense-making beings. Of late, however, they have been more prepared to admit that this is necessarily the case, in studies of consciousness as this pertains to: creativity (Fernandez 1993), individuality (Rapport 1993a), childhood (James 1993), psychopathology (Littlewood 1993), healing (Kapferer 1983), spirit possession (Stoller 1989a), or altered states (Lewis 1971).

Ultimately, an anthropology of consciousness translates into a ‘decolonizing’ of the human subject: a liberation both from overdetermining cultural conditions and overweening social institutions (discourse, collective representation, social relationship, habitus, praxis), and from their social-scientific commentator-apologists. This is not because of a desire to change anthropology’s object from society to the individual, but because anthropology can no longer rest content with traditional assumptions that social behaviour originates or resides in forces (social, historical, cultural) beyond and ‘outside’ the individual.

See also: Cognition, Individuality, Narrative, World-View

CONTRADICTION

In an influential collection of essays (1990), the philosopher Isaiah Berlin elaborated upon the Kantian aphorism that ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’. Between the supreme values, the true answers and the final ends as construed within the diverse world-views of different individuals and societies there can be expected no necessary commensurability, no final reconcilability and no true synthesis. ‘Great goods’ can always be expected to collide for there is no determinate means of putting different ‘goods’ together, no single overarching standard or criterion available to decide between or harmonize discrete moralities. Moreover, this is so not merely in the case of the values of a succession of civilizations or nations, persons, times and places, but also of contemporaneous ones. Every social milieu, in short, can be said to be grounded in incompatibility and contradiction. These, indeed, are perhaps the only non-contradicted human realities.

Anthropologists have had cause to consider the contradictoriness of social life, the ‘disharmony of ends’ (Douglas 1966:140) of which individuals and societies are in pursuit, in a number of contexts. First,

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there is what Malinowski perhaps first enunciated, the contradictions which come to be contained in an anthropologist’s field notes.The fieldjournal, ‘in which everything is written down as it is observed or told’, amounts to ‘a chaotic account’ (Malinowski, cited in Wedgwood 1932– 4: notebook 18 May 1932). In part, this can seen to be due to an elision of the spoken with the written. Oral exchange involves ‘the flow of speech, the spate of words, the flood of argument’, and here ‘inconsistency, even contradiction’ can prosper in ways which appear chaotic when seen through the ‘critical scrutiny’, ‘explicitness’ and ‘fixity’ of the written (Goody 1977:49, 37; also cf. Clifford 1990:64).The field-journal contains a chaotic aggregation because of recontextualization: because the grammar of oral exchange, and the rubrics of intelligibility and consistency, are not those of written exchange (cf. Rapport 1997a:93–105).

Secondly, anthropologists have sought to avoid a recontextualization of local notions of rationality; what appears ‘chaotic’ in their data, illogical and contradictory, may well evidence an alien logic and way of ordering matter which does not accord with Western notions. In debates over rationality, therefore (Wilson 1970; Hollis and Lukes 1982; Overing 1985a), anthropologists have sought ways of avoiding construing their data via the empirically based truth conditions and formal rules of logic of the West. Alien truths may contradict our own and in our terms may seem selfcontradictory, but this is something that we can neither ignore nor explain away as ‘poetry’: as examples of figurative or analogic or metaphoric thinking which exist still within the bounds of a (necessarily universal) Western account of human reason and reasoning (Overing 1985b:152).

Perhaps the central issue, however, concerns the question of consistency which the anthropologist can expect to encounter both within and between the people they are investigating. Are individuals and the societies they come to constitute likely to be characterized by contradictory thoughts, words and actions? Should the anthropologist expect, and expect to recognize, a certain non-contradictory consistency in the social milieux they are investigating?

Sybil Wolfram (1985:72–3) has warned anthropologists that logicians often distinguish between ‘contradiction’ and ‘inconsistency’.Two things are contradictory if they are of opposite truth-value, so that one is true if the other is false, and vice versa; two things are inconsistent, however, if they cannot both be true, but both could just as well be false. Anthropologists, notwithstanding, are usually satisfied to use the terms interchangeably, and to understand by ‘contradiction’ something whose existence appears to deny the possible simultaneous existence of something else: both/and rather than either/or (cf. Rapport 1997c).

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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.

(1948:194)

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 been undervalued. Hence, it has been an anthropological orthodoxy that human beings symbolically classify the world in such a way as to eschew contradiction, and follow social practices which call for, and ultimately maintain, consistency in thought and behaviour.

Primitive Classification (Durkheim and Mauss 1970 [1903]) was an important volume for drawing attention to the fact that order in human life is procured through the construing and imposing of systemically related symbolic categories. As Durkheim and Mauss expounded, complex systems of classification characterize every socio-cultural milieu: discrete things arranged in distinct groups and categories, separated by clearly determined lines of demarcation and hierarchy, standing in fixed relationships to one another and uniting to form single, congruous wholes. These classificatory systems are necessary to human understanding.They make intelligible the relations which exist between things, they connect ideas and they unify knowledge.

Moreover, Durkheim and Mauss insisted that classificatory systems were cultural products, derivative of, modelled on and expressive of, society. Such a view came to be widely shared, laying the foundation for much social-anthropological appreciation of the social-structural ordering of human things, from Radcliffe-Brown through EvansPritchard and Fortes to Gluckman. It found perhaps its most elaborated expression in Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966).

There is a human ‘yearning for rigidity’, Douglas begins (1966:162), a longing for ‘hard lines and clear concepts’, and all such epistemologies are to be found anchored to ongoing social realities. Each culture comes to represent a universe to itself, and members come to view their social environments in common as consisting of people and things joined and separated by boundaries that are socially sanctioned and must be

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respected. Here are indubitable, coherent systems from which the contradictory, the incoherent and the arbitrary are banned. However, having constructed symbolic classifications of the world, Douglas admits, we human beings have to ‘face the fact that some realities elude them, or else blind ourselves to the inadequacy of the concepts’ (1966:162).That is, any systemic ordering and classification of matter inexorably rejects certain elements as inappropriate: it must do this in order to arrive at clean lines of division between matter. An inevitable by-product of a system of symbolic classification, therefore, is ‘dirt’: that which contravenes the ordering. Hedged about with taboo, the dirt which threatens the clear-cut ordering of the world, which would ‘pollute’ its cleanliness, is eschewed; while the notion that something is polluted serves to protect cherished principles and categories from contradiction. The only exceptions are certain extraordinary, ritual situations. For while the disorder which such dirt represents is a threat, it is also recognized as powerful. Unrestricted by existing categories and order, it ushers in new possibilities. Ritual, therefore, represents a venture out of social order and control in an attempt to tap an extraordinary power which is seen to inhere outside the everyday nomos of human life and to belong to the supernatural cosmos. Here is a surmounting of conventional differentiations, Douglas concludes, and a confronting of ambiguity and contradiction: an expression of a common human desire ‘to make a unity of all their experience and to overcome distinctions and separations in acts of at-onement’ (1966:169).

However, if the universe of human experience is a purely sociocultural universe, and that universe is necessarily coherent and unitary, on the Durkheimian view, it is not quite clear where and how those ‘dirty realities’ intrude: how categories come to fray at the edges and so how individuals come to ‘see’ the contradictory. Seeking to marry Durkheim and Mauss to a Marxian critique which placed contradiction, via competition and contrast, at the centre of the societal model, therefore, was the work of Max Gluckman. Gluckman described ‘social systems’ as replete with ambivalence: as fields of tension, cooperation and struggle (e.g. 1963a:135–6). There were inherent tensions between principles of social-structural organization, between institutions, and between individuals. Nevertheless, some control of these tensions was achieved through their cathartic expression in ritual. Rituals effected an institutionalized expression of conflict and protest which worked paradoxically to renew, strengthen, and even sacralize, the established system; here were public statements of rebellion against, and hostilities within, the established social order, dramatizations of conflict, and annulments or reversals of hierarchy, whose regular, routine and

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