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

ECRITURE FEMININE

could be imagined as simultaneously one: a unity derived from a marriage of differences. If autonomy and equality were the masculine discoveries of the past century then difference might be a feminine addition in a future one: the equality of differences.

Anthropological resonances

Much of the above resonates, in ethos, with contemporary ‘feminist’ writings within anthropology and their ‘passion for difference’ (Moore 1994a). To focus on one such, Strathern (1991) describes the new aesthetic in which anthropology finds itself; here the old verities of singular fieldworkers becoming singular authors, in the translation of singular societies or cultures into singular objects of study, no longer convinces. Rather, there is an anticipation of the complexity of phenomena being retained in anthropological analysis without giving way to any more systematic representation of division and conjunction. Complexity might be specified without being simplified: complexity might be analysed without treating that analysis as anything but a controlled and convenient fiction.

One way to maintain a sense of the provisional and tentative nature of anthropological accounting, Strathern elaborates (1988), is through polemics: the continual overthrowing of extant analytical categories, so that the social world is continually apprehended anew. For example, inasmuch as conventional anthropological theories of symbolic classification are imbued with a Western folk conception of society as intrinsically plural and collective, as a gathering together (ordering, classifying and unifying) of irreducible individual persons, it is fruitful polemically to juxtapose against these notions Melanesian-infused anthropological theories which conceive of society as singular and its components as plural and ‘dividual’ (1988:13). Here, the singular person is imagined as a social microcosm, as containing a generalized sociality, so that the bringing together of many persons is just like the bringing together of one.

In a sense, the plurality of the person and the singularity of society can be imagined to be ‘the same’ (namely, homologues of one another), just as Melanesianand Western-inspired anthropologies are ‘the same’ (namely, opposites of one another). Melanesianand Western-inspired anthropologies are contradictory accounts (classifications) of individual and society whose contradictoriness is an enabling factor which extends each. The contradictions enable one to see the provisionality of each account, and enable one to envisage social life as consisting in ‘a constant movement from one state to another, from one type of sociality to

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another’ (Strathern 1988:14). It is through such movement, moreover, that anthropological analysis can hope to retain the flexibility and multiplicity of its socio-cultural objects of study; for here is the fixity and singularity of classification swallowed up in a plurality of classifications, each a displacement and extension (a contradiction but not a refutation) of what has gone before. Here is anthropology as a palimpsest of fictional analyses.

The future hallmark of social science, Strathern envisages, might be a regenerative overthrowing of fixed analytical categories and single symbolic classifications such that ever new meanings and viewpoints are born (cf. Moore 1988:186). Not only would this include displacing the category ‘social science’ in its opposition to, say, ‘literature’, but also the ‘domestic’ vis-à-vis the ‘politico-jural’, the ‘public’ vis-à-vis the ‘private’ (cf. Caplan 1987), the ‘observatory’ vis-à-vis the ‘contributory’ (cf. Grimshaw 1992), the ‘vocal’ vis-à-vis the ‘corporeal’ (cf. Callaway 1992), and the ‘dominant’ vis-à-vis the ‘subordinate’ (Ardener 1975).

See also: Contradiction, Cybernetics, Dialogics and Analogics,

Gender, Literariness

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann once opined (1966:140–1) that if human social reality is a precarious construction in the face of chaos, then conversation with consociates is our most important vehicle of reality-maintenance. Hence, an individual’s everyday life can be seen to represent the working-away, in collaboration with significant others, at a conversational apparatus by whose ‘realizing efficacy’ the world continues to make sense, possesses regular coordinates and is filled with meaningful objects. Moreover, since language, according to Saussure (1983), is a ‘social fact’, the reality which conversation gives onto is a collective and intersubjective one; by partaking of conversation, Berger and Luckmann conclude (1969:66), individual consciousness is structured in terms of the common-sense assumptions and norms, of the taken-for-granted values and categorizations of the social group as a whole.

Ethnomethodology, a school of social analysis associated in particular with the work of Harold Garfinkel, Aaron Cicourel, Harvey Sacks and others, elaborates and complexifies the above ideas, demonstrates them in micro-social practice, and draws out their macro-social implications.

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Bringing together Durkheim’s belief that the consciousness of members of a social group will be steeped in collective representations, Saussure’s theory that the everyday parole of language-speakers partakes of the unitary langue of the social whole, Husserl’s methodology that social wholes must be approached via the phenomenology of individual experience, and Schuetz’s notion that our experience is influenced inexorably (if implicitly) by common background expectancies which we learn to share as culture members…Garfinkel et al. focused on the everyday conversational ‘work’ by which people everywhere continue to give their lives and worlds a ‘methodical’ and shared character.

If our lives in society are structured, then this is not because social reality has a sui generis or even objective existence beyond social agents, the ethnomethodologist argues. Rather, social reality is something worked at methodically and collectively, courtesy of certain common systems of reasoning, comprehending and accounting, with which individuals have been socialized. It is constructed via an ongoing, face- to-face exchange of talk. Moreover, common background expectations of the world lead individuals to interpret the structure of both conversation and reality in routine ways; emerging out of this collaborative work is the continual reconstituting of social structures (cf. Coulter 1979). The project of ethnomethodology is to build models of the background knowledge and methods of interpretation which local actors ordinarily bring to bear in everyday situations.

While his writings are not always the most accessible or succinct, Garfinkel’s work (1964, 1967, 1972) epitomizes the ‘school’ and is used below to set out its chief tenets. Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel summarizes (1967:11), is: ‘the investigation of the rational properties of indexical expressions and other practical actions as contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life’.

Garfinkel’s thought

Persons are members to organized social settings and affairs, to everyday moral orders which are taken-for-granted as natural facts of life. Nonetheless, such moral orders are something which members of a society are in the process of continually effecting, in collaboration with one another in face-to-face interaction. They are able to effect this because they share the same ‘background of common understandings’ and the same ‘socially structured conditions’ of the production of expression (1964:233); the moral orders can be understood as the ‘contingent accomplishments of socially organized common practices’ (1972:323).

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That is, people are intent on determining and demonstrating that their lives are arranged in rational, coherent, consistent, chosen, clear, knowable, planful and uniform ways. Moreover, as members of social groups they have common methods for achieving this and providing themselves with rational (etc.) accounts of their lives and activities. The common methods consist of recourse to conventional norms, tasks and troubles, methods which are employed collectively and continually. Hence, ‘every claim by practitioners of effectiveness, clarity, consistency, planfulness, or efficiency, and every consideration for adequate evidence, demonstration, description, or relevance obtains its character as a phenomenon from the corporate pursuit of this undertaking’ (1972:323).

Ongoing moral orders still demand work, however; acts of individual interpretation are necessary if prior, background, social-structural conditions are to be taken forward as members’ common social properties into the future.True, the conditions will tend towards certain interpretations fulfilling themselves and certain classifications, analyses, understandings and identifications in the world being prescribed. However, the underlying disorder and unpredictability of human life still calls for continuous ‘ad hoc-ing’ by members: filling in the gaps and sorting out the ambiguities of knowledge according to certain shared inferences, expectations and anticipations. Moreover, there is an inherent incompleteness or vagueness in the common understandings which members of a society share and employ, a vagueness which is a necessary adaptive feature if the understandings are to remain relevant and viable for long. Hence, much of everyday practice in society can be said to entail the serious task of carefully managing and negotiating the production of rule-bound, organized social activity by selecting among a communal set of alternative possible explanations, causes, senses, objectivities and facticities. In short, it is through a continuing negotiation of accounting practices—an ‘artful (if unconscious) accomplishment’ (1972:323)—that members continue to make the familiar, commonplace activities of their everyday lives recognizable to themselves as familiar and commonplace.

This all means that the paramount reality in which members live is a commonsensical world of everyday expectations, activities and interpretations. However, this everyday world also serves as a point of departure and return for occasional modifications of normal life—in such phenomena as play, ceremonial, theatre, theory, dream and mortification. For instance, individual identity and status are resultants of communal negotiations based on common grounds of expected behaviours; fellow members will reason how and why an individual

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should act. However, there are also instances—‘status degradation ceremonies’ (1968:205)—where the public identity of a member is temporarily or permanently lowered in status and he or she is shamed. This act of shaming may have the purpose and effect of making the social structures of members’ everyday activities more observable to themselves; stepping beyond the everyday, members look reflexively askance at it, becoming momentarily ‘lay sociological researchers’ and strangers to themselves (1967:78).

Similarly, by deliberately causing disruption to everyday routines, social analysts (‘professional strangers’) have the best chance to watch the ad hoc work of repairing and reconstituting normal reality.

Ethnomethodology in action

An apt illustration of the above thinking is provided by Sacks (1974) regarding a seemingly innocuous and casual piece of ‘natural language’.

A study of natural language shows how Garfinkel’s ‘everyday practical reasoning’ is employed, Sacks begins, for it is in communicative acts that social norms are maintained. Grammatical norms govern members’ interpretation of meaningful speech, while social norms govern members’ interpretation of meaningful events; members’ implicit social knowledge is thus revealed in their making of sentences and partsentences into coherent and structured social texts. It is knowledge of shared norms which enables members to perceive actions as intelligible, conversation as meaningful and events as orderly. A common social structure enables members to understand conversation, in short, whose shared understanding replicates social structure.

Take, for instance, the minimal verbalization (Sacks 1974:226): ‘The baby cried.The mommy picked it up.’ Among culture members a number of observations can be made. First, it is likely that members assume that the mother in question is that of the baby. Next, they assume that the event described in the second sentence took place after that described in the first sentence; indeed, they will presume a causal relationship such that the mother picked up the baby because it cried, and with a mind to soothing it. Finally, these sentences are recognized as a possible general description of a state of affairs without knowing which particular mother and baby are involved. These two sentences represent a complete story, and the ‘shared cultural device’ of grammar means that members have access to a common world of meaning and value.

Members are able to interpret in the above fashion, Sacks continues, because ‘the fine power of a culture’ is such that it ‘fills the brains’ of culture members ‘so that they are alike in fine detail’ (1974:218).

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