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

CONTRADICTION

through. Socio-cultural milieux are neither systemic nor singular, for they are constituted by the aggregation of a multiplicity of private symbolic—classificatory orders which collide, abut, overlap, and need not consistently coordinate or coincide. Furthermore, the muddle is ongoing, brought on by interacting individuals continuing to influence one another and themselves in all manner of possibly unintentional ways.

From the traditional Durkheimian image of singularity, coherency and consistency, of symbolic—cognitive classifications expressing the structural—functional solidarities of their societal origins, we have arrived at a rather different conclusion. Here is an image of a diversity of contradictory symbolic realities or perspectives in use at any one moment and between moments, even in the ‘same’ sociolinguistic milieu, and in no necessarily singular, clear, uncontested or coherent relationship one with another. Individuals may live in a diversity of constructed world-views and identities, their contradictory cognitions giving existence to a plurality of social worlds in any one time or place. This, it can be argued, represents a more authentic picture of ethnographic reality, of individual and society, than a denial of the contradictory or its sidelining as something extraordinary if not pathological.

Muddling through the myriad of versions of symbolic reality in use in a socio-cultural milieu may not make experience easy or comfortable. Notwithstanding, there is an inexorable relationship between symbolic order and the contradictory, and perhaps it is in the latter that there is to be found evidence of our human being and becoming, its creativity and artistry. In the symbolism of society and culture, things can be both/and because human worlds run along poetic lines, and in terms of momentary cognitions. Both/and amounts to a cognitive norm, and it points up the constructed, provisional nature of the social worlds which we inhabit and for which we are individually responsible.

See also: Classification, Cognition, Methodological Eclecticism

CONVERSATION

For Michael Oakeshott (1962), conversation is what human cultures accomplish and what human societies inherit. Conversation is a meeting of individual voices speaking in different idiom or mode. Science, poetry, practical activity and history are such modes of speech, different universes of discourse. It is the very diversity, the manifold of different

88

CONTRADICTION

voices, speaking in different idioms or modes, which ‘makes’ conversation. The voices need not compose a hierarchy, and the conversation need not amount to an argument; the diverse voices may differ without disagreeing, and they may appear to be saying the same without agreeing. Hence, conversation is not an inquiry or contest, exegesis or debate; it does not set out to persuade, refute, or inform. Conversation has no truth to discover, no proposition to prove, no conclusion to seek; reason is neither sovereign nor primary, and there is no accumulating inquiry or body of information to safeguard. Instead, as ‘thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another’— responding to and provoking one another’s movement, obliquely interrelating without assimilating—so their individual thinkers engage in the ‘unrehearsed intellectual adventure’ of socio-cultural life (1962:198). Going on in public and inside themselves, a conversation between individuals ultimately contextualizes every human activity and utterance.

For anthropology, perhaps the key characteristic of conversation is that it gives onto socio-cultural reality; ‘[i]n every moment of talk, people are experiencing and producing their cultures, their roles, their personalities’ (Moerman 1988:xi). Conversation is a kind of interaction in which human reality—a constructed reality which does not objectively exist beyond the consciousness of its individual agents—is continually created and recreated. A sensitivity to the micro-processes of conversational interaction is a growing anthropological concern (cf. Bauman and Sherzer 1974; Bruner 1983).

Conversation and anthropological accounts

Conversation as focus, theme and image is no stranger to anthropological representation. It is expected that the anthropological text will convey conversation between informants; oratory, disputation, curing and cursing might all elicit precise reportage of the verbal and other expression and exchange in the field (cf. Favret-Saada 1980; Rapport 1987; Cohen 1989). Similarly, it has come to be acceptable, even expectable, for there to be conversation recounted between informant and anthropologist; as the anthropologist enters into relations in the field, verbal and other, so that field takes shape for him, is indeed shaped by his interactions (cf. Briggs 1970; Dumont 1978; James 1993). Likewise, the anthropological text may be expected to engage in conversational exchange between the writer and his academic reference group; as the anthropologist makes sense of the field so his sense-making is informed by accounts he has read before, and mediated by the effect he would wish his writing to have on others (cf. Rabinow 1977; Clifford 1986;

89

CONTRADICTION

Campbell 1989). Finally, it is anticipated that the anthropological account achieves its effect only through engaging in conversation with its reader; as objective and positivistic representation no longer persuades—is denigrated as epistemologically mistaken and morally questionable—so the reader is expected to make sense through an evocation and performance of the text (cf. Bruner 1986; Tyler 1986; Brady 1991b).

What might be added to the above varied appreciation of conversation is an emphasis on conversation as perhaps the fundamental ground on which social life rests.We use conversation as anthropological focus, theme and image because of the ‘naturally occurring’ importance of conversation; conversation is a feature of every socio-cultural milieu, and its practice radically affects the nature of both social exchange and cultural process.

Conversation as naturally occurring

An awareness of the significance of naturally occurring conversation (albeit more sociological than anthropological) is nothing new in social science. Symbolic-interactionism (Blumer), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel) and sociology-of-knowledge (Berger and Luckmann) approaches all make it central to their projects. As Blumer would put it, if individuals act towards things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them, and these meanings are the sine qua non of the socio-cultural existence of things per se, then it is in conversation with their fellows, in the processes of interaction, that this construction of meaning takes place (1969:3). For Garfinkel, meanwhile, it is in conversation that the shared but implicit competency, knowledge and common-sense assumptions of culture members comes into play; it is here that members do the work of artfully (if contingently and unwittingly) apprehending order and reasonableness in social life (1972:323). And again, for Berger and Luckmann, just as social reality is a precarious human construction, an ongoing everyday work in the face of encroaching entropy and threatening anomy, so conversation is the most important vehicle of reality-maintenance; working away at his conversational apparatus, the individual protects and confirms the consistency of his world (1966:140).

For each of the above theses, furthermore, conversation gives onto, and can be treated in terms of, an epistemic singularity. In each case, conversation connects with (is preceded and followed by) a single social structure and a consensual culture. Through (Blumerian) symbolic interaction and mutual indication, then, a group of common objects

90

CONTRADICTION

emerge for a group of people, objects which bear the same meaning; conversation eventuates in shared perspectives, in a high degree of consensus over what people call ‘reality’. This consensus then enables group members to define and structure in common most situations in which they meet, and to act alike (Blumer 1972:187). Meanwhile, by complying with (Garfinkelian) common background expectancies of interpretation in conversation, the stuff of everyday life gains not just an accountable and ‘methodical’ but also common character; thanks to the stable social structures underlying the processes of unconscious interpretation, cultural systems thereby replicate themselves: a world its members know in common and take for granted (Garfinkel 1964: passim). Finally, the conversation which (après Berger and Luckmann) ongoingly maintains a construction of reality against chaos also serves to structure subjective perceptions into a typical, intersubjective, cohesive and universal social order.This constrains what individuals experience in terms of what they can communicate, since conversation cannot but accommodate itself to the edifice of coercive categories and objective norms that is a society’s language (Berger and Luckmann 1969:66).

Epistemic diversity

Epistemic singularity arising out of conversation might now be regarded as questionable. Indeed, it has become a commonplace of contemporary anthropological reportage that today’s world (‘globalized’, ‘postmodern’) is characterized by a diversity of discourses, narratives or epistemes per socio-cultural milieu with no necessary consensus or synthesis between them (cf.Tyler 1986:132). No single locale is possessed of just one local (symbolic or structural) order of things through which the world is understood and normalized, and rather than any overarching ideological totalism, the locale is home to the intersecting of a multiplicity of systems of meaning. It is recognized, in short, that conversation gives onto epistemic diversity and interaction, with individuals negotiating their ways between competing centres of philosophical gravity and the shifting balances of their power, playing off one episteme against another as different existential strategies at different moments (cf. Jackson 1989:176–86).

Furthermore, it can be argued that there is nothing particularly new (or ‘post-modern’) in this condition, and that cognitive and practical manoeuvring between a plurality of socio-historically situated epistemes has ever been characteristic of human life. Epistemic conversation is something which individuals practise everywhere, and have always practised, part-and-parcel of our ‘human realities’ (Fernandez 1985: 750).

91

CULTURE

Inasmuch as the world is constructed on an ongoing (ad hoc, contingent, conjectural, contesting, ‘poetic’) basis by individuals exchanging cultural forms in social interaction, a conversation between a diversity of epistemes can be seen to be the natural condition of human life.

See also: Discourse, Interaction, Literariness, Methodological

Eclecticism

CULTURE

Cultural pluralism versus culture in the singular

Given the fact that anthropology has usually been defined as the study of other cultures, it is not surprising to find ‘culture’ to be one of the most crucial concepts of the discipline.The focus of anthropology is upon the diversity of ways in which human beings establish and live their social lives in groups, and it is from this diversity that the anthropological notion of culture, at least in the twentieth century, is derived. This idea of the plurality of culture contrasts with the idea of culture in the singular, an interpretation that began its development in eighteenthcentury European thought (see Williams 1983a), and became predominant in the nineteeth century. Framed through the social evolutionary thought linked to Western imperialism, culture in the singular assumed a universal scale of progress and the idea that as civilizations developed through time, so too did humankind become more creative and more rational, that is, people’s capacity for culture increased. The growth of culture and of rationality were thought to belong to the same process. In other words, human beings became more ‘cultivated’ as they progressed over time intellectually, spiritually and aesthetically. De Certeau (1994:103) notes that such a model, which proclaims culture as a defining feature of ‘cultivated’ human beings (other people have something called ‘tradition’), can have a strong political agenda, and in the hands of empires it has served a rather useful tool for introducing elitist norms wherever they imposed power.

In contrast, the modern anthropological stance, on the side of cultural relativism and in confrontation with racism (cf. Boas 1911), has been startlingly liberal in its insistence that culture must always be understood in the plural and judged only within its particular context.Very early on, Franz Boas firmly placed all cultures on equal par, and scoffed at notions that wed technological might with social and cultural superiority (Boas 1886). In this view Chinese culture is different from, and equal to, that of

92