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

CONTRADICTION

normative staging served as a prelude to their nomic reinstatement. ‘Rites of reversal’ and ‘rituals of rebellion’ (1959), in short, were extraordinary, topsy-turvy stages which removed the significance and, to an extent, the cognizance of the contradictory in ordinary social life so that the tensions (social and psychological) which derived from these contradictions came to be dissipated. Hence, while a social system may no longer be conceived of in terms of a stable equilibrium, at least dynamic equilibria persisted. In a more radical appreciation of this dynamism, Leach (1954) theorized that this might entail societies in continuous change, swinging, pendulum-like, between contradictory ideal-typical versions of how, symbolically, social life was to be conceived of and lived.

It remained unclear, in the Durkheimian picture, however, just why recognition and embrace of the contradictory should be cordoned off in, and only cognized as, the extraordinariness of ritual. Upon this, Victor Turner sought to elaborate (1964). If symbolic behaviour ‘created’ society, then ritual performances could be described as dynamic moments in social groups’ creative practices wherein symbolic creations adjusted to internal or external pressures for change. The symbols in terms of which rituals were structured provided points of junction, and enabled compromises to form, between social needs of classification and control on the one side, and innate (anarchic) human drives on the other. For what symbolic formulations afforded, Turner theorized, were unifications of disparate, contradictory significata; ritual symbols brought together, in condensed form, what was otherwise divided and kept apart. They juxtaposed ideological against sensory meanings, the normative against the emotional, and the cognitive against the affective. Symbols thus effected an interchange of qualities such that what appeared tense, contradictory and potentially anomic in the everyday came to seem a unity. As a result of ritual catharsis, normative social classifications were revitalized.

In sum, the anthropological orthodoxy which began with Durkheim problematized contradiction to the extent that it saw social order as wedded to an everyday eradication of symbolic contrarieties. Societies, as social facts, as things-in-themselves, were unitary and orderly; the institutional structuring of societies took place in non-contradictory fashion; and individuals, as members of societies, cognitively mirrored the institutional structures in which they were habitual role-players. At best, contradiction was recognized in this formulation as pertaining between the states of order and disorder or un-order—between different social-structural episodes, between structure and ritual—but not as a state in itself.

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What is absent from this line of thought is an appreciation of the possible ubiquity of contradiction: people saying and doing and thinking inconsistent things as a matter of course; people employing multiple, contradictory symbolic classifications at the same time; people able to construe classificatory systems which are in themselves contradictory. In a well-known example provided by Foucault (1973), a Chinese encyclopedia suggests the following division of animals:

a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, 1) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.

It is with cognitive-symbolic contradiction of this kind (not either/ or but both/and) that anthropology has come slowly to recognize it must deal.

A Nietzschean treatment of contradiction

Inasmuch as Durkheimian notions of social order were in sympathy with nineteenth-century natural-scientific notions of homeostasis and an emphasis on the conservation of energy, an appreciation of the ubiquity of contradictoriness in human social life coincides with a postEinsteinian emphasis on the contingency of order, its pertaining to perception and perspective, and on entropy (cf. Bateson 1951:246ff.). There is now a far more reflexive anthropological appreciation of the implicatedness of human beings in the order they construe and the uncertainty this gives onto; constructions are situated and diverse, and constructions change. Even as human beings seek meaning and order in themselves and their world, their lives remain unpredictable—to themselves as to others—even chaotically so (cf. Abrahams 1990; Prigogine 1989).

Part of the reflexive revolution which anthropology has embraced of late concerns the implications of its own expectations for the sociocultural realities it ‘discovers’. ‘[E]thnographic reality’, in Dumont’s words (1978:66), is something ‘actively constructed, not to say invented’; while ‘other cultures’ might be understood as anthropological imaginings of plausible explanations of what other people seem to have been doing (Wagner 1977:500–1). If anthropology has traditionally eschewed contradiction, then, this is so because of the dogmatic,

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axiomatic and doctrinal nature of its own analytical discourse and not the nature of socio-cultural reality. Perhaps now, other discourses should be chosen for anthropological analysis, ones more ‘commonsensical’, in Geertz’s terms (1983), than specialized, technical or theoretical, and so closer to those employed in the everyday by informants. Is it not now possible to imagine an anthropological way of looking, knowing and inscribing which is heterogeneous and self-contradictory, even wildly so, a way which transcends what Kundera refers (1990:7) to as that ‘“eitheror” [which] encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge’? Perhaps only a pot-pourri of disparate analytical notions is capable of grasping the vast multifariousness of human social life (Geertz 1983:90–1).

As Marilyn Strathern puts it (1990a:6), the ‘diversity and multiple character’ of phenomena (including their contradictoriness) need not necessarily give way, in analysis, to any more systemic representation; one can imagine an anthropological account which specifies complexity without simplifying it. Moreover, any one anthropological account can flag its own provisionality, insist on its own perspectivity and timeliness (Cohen 1992b); while the contradictions between such accounts serve merely to point up the fluidity and multiplicity of human social life and classification, and the aggregation of ‘limitless discursive perspectives’ (Parkin 1987:66) to which the latter amount.

Kundera’s reference, above, to ‘the absence of the Supreme Judge’ alerts us to the essentially Nietzschean nature of the new anthropological dispensation concerning the contradictory (cf. Shweder 1991b:39). For Nietzsche, human society and culture are above all poetic projects, artworks, and it is to artistic models and aesthetic evaluations (and not scientific assessments and rational judgements) that one may best turn for an understanding of them. Like an art-work, human worlds are something constructed and something requiring interpretation in order to be understood—made livable, mastered—by their inhabitants; being the joint product of ineffable matter and human interpretation, there is no absolute truth about the world, and it possesses no independent character. Moreover, the world can be interpreted equally well in innumerable, vastly different and deeply incompatible ways. The ‘death’ of God (as hero and author) means that the world is not subject to a single interpretation—God’s will or intention; it is something, instead, with ‘no meaning behind it, but countless meanings’ (Nietzsche 1968:267).This being the case, there could never be a ‘complete’ theory or final interpretation of the world or anything else, merely an array of succeeding perspectives.

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Human beings may themselves be part of the world, may be viewing it from situated, interested and partisan perspectives, but nonetheless, it is they who create the world, create themselves and their perspectives in their interpretations. They construct the world as they interpret it; and their constructions add further to the complexity and multifariousness and indeterminacy of the art-work that continues to be interpreted—by others, by themselves—in the present and future.Amidst the profusion of versions and forms of construction of the world, there is only one singularity: the continuation of their profusion. Interpretations continue to be made because to interpret is to be human, and to be individual, and because the human world has no objective character, no underlying or overarching structure, system or regularity to it. Moreover, with the death of God, one might expect the relationship between the profusion of interpretations to be anything but a clear-cut one; instead, it is indirect, tangential and contradictory.

In brief, a Nietzschean emphasis on the artistry of symbolic classification provides an approach to the latter which allows for contradiction, its poetic import and creative promise, in a way which Durkheim‘s insistence on singularity and system does not. With the ‘literary turn’ in anthropology, moreover, the value of Nietzschean aestheticism in the depiction of society has begun to be celebrated.

The contradictoriness inherent within socio-cultural milieux, and its phenomenological appreciation, has also begun to be emphasized in contemporary ethnography (Moore 1987; Ewing 1990; Rapport 1993a, 1997c). Here is a recounting of contradictory thoughts, beliefs and behaviours both between people and within people. Individuals are seen apt to construct and maintain a diversity of perspectives for themselves, each contradictory in terms of the elements, relationships, values, norms, desires, expectations and so on of all the others. Contextualizing their lives in terms of these perspectives, individuals can think, speak and act in any number of contradictory ways. The aggregation of these individual perspectives can also alter with time, as new ones are constructed, current ones developed and old ones sloughed off; and as the aggregation changes so does the array and range of assembled contradictions.

This diversity of perspectives, of world-views and identities possessed by an individual can be more and less conscious, the deployment of contradictions in thought, speech and action more and less strategic. Contradiction may be disguised by the momentariness of life, by the way that conscious existence turns on momentary thoughts, feelings, apprehensions, emotions, on what Virginia Woolf refers to as ‘moments of being’ (1976). Hence, while contradictory in their interpretations of

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the world, in the meanings they imparted to people and events, nevertheless, the contradictoriness of individual lives may be swallowed up by the experiential intensity of each moment—by the absoluteness of order which one particular perspective leads them to attribute to that moment—and by the constant movement of their conscious lives from moment to moment.

Then again, contradictoriness (as duplicity or hypocrisy) can be employed as a vehicle for all manner of purposive social gain: pleasing an electorate, confusing an enemy, being polite to a guest, keeping in with a friend, insulting, provoking, misleading, mystifying another or oneself. While between the more and less deliberate uses of contradictions are beliefs and assertions which might be described as vague or fuzzy, such that contradictoriness is not always so self-evident. One can envisage a graded scale, Wolfram suggests (1985:72–3), between blatant and nonblatant, self-evident and fuzzy contradictions, such that the complexity of an individual’s relationship with his or her contradictory representations of self and world is given full analytical measure. One thing that is clear, however, is that, as Hollis puts it (1982:72): ‘Mankind could hardly survive without beliefs which are incoherent, unlikely, disconnected or daft’. Or again: ‘private paradoxes can be allowed to stand indefinitely’ (Kelly 1970:12).

When the private becomes public, when contradictory individuals interact, the situation does not become any simpler, more coherent or consistent.The opposite, in fact, as the self-contradictory meanings of the thoughts, beliefs, words and actions of one individual meet those of others. That is, interaction between individuals and their variegated cognitions does not somehow give rise to ‘social systems’ which are consensual, coherent, coercive, or without contingency—or which are particularly singular or systemic at all. The picture is rather one of ‘chaotic relativism’ (Rapport 1993a) in which a diversity of individual perspectives influences a diversity of others in all manner of indirect, incidental, contingent, changeable—and contradictory—ways. Moreover, the ambiguities and abbreviations of public systems of symbolic exchange, of language and behaviour, are such that the contradictions and inconsistencies need not become apparent. Symbolic forms mediate between the words and actions of one individual and the thoughts, beliefs and cognitions of others, so that, as Sapir concluded (1956:153): ‘the friendly ambiguities of language conspire to reinterpret for each individual all behavior which he has under observation in terms of those meanings which are relevant to his own life’.

In short, an appreciation of contradiction gives onto a modelling of human social life not as something coherent, rather as a muddling

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