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

FORM AND CONTENT

two individuals may impart meanings to cultural forms alike; so that at the same time as they are exchanged in interaction between individuals, indeed serve to make that meeting possible, they may be being used and interpreted in a diversity of ways.

Notwithstanding the free play between form and content, individuals make new forms because they continue to find that their desired meanings are not expressible within existing ones. To understand, in turn, why this is so, is to appreciate that once invented by individuals to house and express certain contents, forms become to some extent autonomous. Once an individual has made his or her word, fact, icon or car, they cannot as easily be unmade; they have lives (in dictionaries, in encyclopaedias, in films, in churches, in garages) which are independent of their makers. Moreover, they function according to their own mechanisms and capacities (cars cannot be used to write poetry, words cannot be used to drive to Cardiff). And, finally, once invented, their individual inventor has slight chance of controlling their effect on or use by others, or the hypostatization and institutionalization that they might undergo. In short, forms may achieve a certain independence from their creators and their moments of creation, acquiring a certain self-sufficiency, stability, even objectivity, whereby they fix the world.

It is not that they acquire their own power or force; this point must be made clear. Forms do not become things-in-themselves; they do not live their own lives. Rather it is individuals who continue to lead their lives through them. Forms are inert: they embody inertia, not momentum. Words in dictionar ies, cars in garages, facts in encyclopaedias, icons in churches, call for continuing human agency for them to work and move, to have continued relevance in human lives. Forms continue to depend on individuals’ bringing them to interaction, habitually relating them together, routinely exchanging them, regularly using them in mental, physical, spiritual contexts.

The point is that, while lumpen and inert, cultural forms are still difficult to ignore. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias, garages and churches, make for cluttered (not to mention institutionalized) worlds, and individual users of these forms must carefully manoeuvre with and around them if they are to express themselves normatively and with propriety (and so join synthetically with their fellows in socio-cultural milieux). Indeed, manoeuvring around cultural forms, leading routine lives of habitual exchanges, can take up the whole of life of a society’s members. Moreover, as cultural forms pass between many hands, are used in many different interactions, so their shapes and qualities are reduced: smoothed, flattened, drained, distilled by common denomination. Words

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become clichés, facts become common sense, machines become furniture, icons become dogma. The clutter of forms can rigidify interaction, petrify further imaginative agency, estrange individuals from their creativity.

More historically usual, however, is the situation of formal inertia and individual invention proceeding side by side. Hence, as cultural forms ‘congeal’ and become independent, detached from the energies which produced them, and fill the world with habit, individuals are also creating new forms, and causing a world of further heterogeneity and flux. New energies, not incorporatable within old forms, create new forms. This happens as, first, amid the clutter of forms, individuals have the possibility of choosing between a number of often competing options (religion and science; Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis; Jaeger, Armani and St Michael tailoring; Manchester City, Man. Utd, Wolves and Hibernian football); and also of putting these forms together in a sequence and frequency which amounts to a new bricolage (Lacanian psychoanalysis; Punk tailoring). Secondly, as individuals may find that no existing forms suit their purpose, feel right, fit what they have in mind, so they invent new ones both for their own use and for possible later inclusion into the collective fund: new words (‘spliff’; ‘byte’), new facts (time is relative; one in ten children is sexually abused), new machines (aeroplanes; faxes), new icons (white witchcraft; electric guitars).

In sum, Simmel’s picture is one of inert forms and ‘energetic’ contents. The former are produced by the latter, but then the former stand still, become autonomous, objectified and institutionalized, while the latter progress and change—thus producing a potential tension and conflict between them. Creative energies, moreover, are in individual possession, while the inert forms come to be collectively owned. And so new individual subtleties are continuously coming into conflict with old collective formalities. Simmel described this as the sociological ‘tragedy’: the common forms of cultural exchange facilitating widespread communication and also making it practically ineffective; the routine exchange of objectified cultural forms acting as an impediment, a constriction, to the individual subjectivity which seeks continuing expression through them; individual creativity being threatened by the very forms it has produced. But then again, it is these tensions which are responsible for the dynamism of social life and for cultural development and change. Here, in sum, is a picture of society neither simply as something of systemic imposition or objective determination, nor as the mere momentary impulsions of subjective states of mind, but as the coming together of collective, autonomous

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FORM AND CONTENT

objects and relations with continuing individual creativity.To a fund of common forms individuals impart experiences of social life which are multiple, fragmentary, idiosyncratic, inexorably conflictual and endlessly processual.

Simmel and anthropology

The Marxian critic Georg Lukacs once dubbed Simmel the theoretician of Impressionism and advocate of Transitionalism (cf. Gassen and Landmann 1958:171–3); here is a vision of culture and society stressing not the systemic requirements and normative constraints of Marxism (or functionalism, or structuralism), so much as the equivocation and polyphony of interaction and the phenomenological contingency of those individual minds where interactions are experienced and hence ‘occur’. But then it is precisely to Impressionism (as represented by Cezanne’s six variant portraits, Still Life with Apples and Oranges) that David Parkin turned (1987:64–6) to furnish anthropology with an image of contemporary cultural life as composed of potentially limitless perspectives: a vast variety of visions and versions, complementary to one another but without any underlying structure of common denomination, any circumscribed set of generative principles, any single controlling logic. More generally, it is to the line of thought from Impressionism through Cubism to Dadaism that Parkin would now have anthropology look to for its social models; here is a mocking of the possibility of thinking in terms of fixed structures and certainties, to inspire in us new key metaphors of incompleteness, perspective and creativity (cf. Moore 1987:729–30).

Nor is this anthropological meeting with a Simmelian ethos exclusively of recent vintage. Edmund Leach, after all, argued that the essence of our humanity was to be found in our continuous rebellion, as individuals, against received collective structures, laws, rules, customs and controls, and our creating of something new. Leach saw structure and creativity, tidiness and vitality as being in inevitable contradiction, and implicated in an inexorable dialectical process (1977:19). While Victor Turner’s adaptation of the Weberian dialectic of routine versus charisma into a universalizing theory of structure versus anti-structure, turned, essentially, on the same tension. Symbolic behaviour constituted society, Turner elaborated, and society as a process involved the uniting of structure and anti-structure in variable proportions. Moreover, it was the anti-structural which was prior to and creative of the structural, while remaining antithetical in character and embroiled in a continual struggle for individuals’ true loyalty (1974:231–69, 1982a:96–129).

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GENDER

What is demonstrated is how (Simmelian) form-and-content offers anthropology an apposite way of conceiving of creativity, diversity and ambiguity in social life (cf. Rapport 1993a:161ff.). This conception entails an appreciation of the diverse individual use of collective cultural forms (objects and relations, institutions and grammars): the diverse constitution of forms, combination of forms, and imparting of meaning to those forms.

See also: Culture, Discourse, Interaction, Society

GENDER

The ‘problem of women’

In 1972 Edwin Ardener published an article entitled ‘Belief and the problem of women’. In it he illuminated a methodological predicament of ethnography of the greatest magnitude, namely, the absence of speaking, thinking, believing, knowing women within ethnographic texts. In the anthropological writings of the 1960s, unlike those of earlier decades, there appeared almost always only the voices of men, whereas, whether the ethnographer be male or female, women were ‘muted’, erased as conscient beings. While the behaviour of women might be observed (they married, tended children, cooked, farmed), they were ‘effectively missing in the total analysis or, more precisely, they were there in the same way as were the Nuer’s cows, who were observed but also did not speak’ (Ardener 1975:4).

Ardener concludes his article by warning female ethnographers to resist ‘expressing the “maleness” of their subject when they approach the women of other societies’ (ibid.: 15). In short our own dominant (male) models about the workings of society, within which women are viewed as outsiders, invalidated even for the female anthropologist the very possibility of the worth and importance of the perspectives of women on the procedures and lifeways of their communities. Ardener challenges women ethnographers by remarking that ‘it may well be, too, that their positive reluctance to deal with the “problem of women” [the silencing of them] is the greater because they sense that its consideration would split apart the very framework in which they conduct their studies’ (ibid.).

The reappearance of women

Ardener’s prophecy about the implications of a female rebellion was brought home with a vengeance. In the 1960s, ethnographic publications

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GENDER

with ‘women’ in the title did not sell, while today the section on gender in any reputable academic bookshop is healthily large. This change of attitude, however, has to do with far more than the popularity of the topic of women, or the female perspective on things; for gender studies within anthropology, as in its sister disciplines, have played, along with the forces of post-modernism and post-colonialism, a salient role over the last two to three decades in a major critique of the grand narratives of the human sciences. This dawning recognition of ‘the problem of women’, not only in anthropology but in many of its sister studies as well, served as one of the major impetuses for the redrawing of sacred academic boundaries, visions and concerns.

Thus, the reason for this particular consciousness-raising exercise, or ‘the problem of women’, having such momentous effect, has been that gender blindness was but the tip of an enormous iceberg formed by the cold procedures of Western juridical, political, economic and academic thought and practice which have created all those other inequalities— beyond those between men and women—of class, race, ethnicity, nationality and sexual preference. Once women were firmly inserted within the parameters of ‘establishment’ discourse, either as objects of social research or as subjects conducting such inquiry (having shed their previous status of honorary males), the consequences were, as Edwin Ardener predicted, a true ‘Kuhnian’ paradigm shift. The epistemological and methodological foundations of ‘the disciplines’ are indeed shaken when females, fifty per cent of the world’s population, finally enter the picture. In the words of Seyla Benhabib (1992:178, her italics), ‘the definition of the object domain of a research paradigm, its units of measurement, its method of verification, the alleged neutrality of its theoretical terminology, and the claims to universality of its models and metaphors are all thrown into question’.

Once recognized, the ‘question of women’ did then play a large part in upsetting established ways of thinking and practice in the human sciences. Those systems and institutions once viewed as just, egalitarian and progressive came to be understood as unjust, unequal and regressive. Previously all those suffering from the inequities of dominant structures had been both unheard and unseen, for the most potent strategy of Western establishment ways of seeing, whether for political or academic intent, was not to see all those who had been categorized as not just like self, that is, the white, middle-class, propertied male (Benhabib 1992). Thus to recognize women as agents in the world has meant to actually see an other. The undermining by feminists, post-modernists and postcolonialists alike of hallowed paradigms has led to the recognition of this difference.

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