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

GOSSIP

All those kinship structures through which men established important relationships with each other through the exchange of their muted women, which became the model of ‘society’; all those ‘political’ roles and statuses through which men who controlled the political domain became the knowledge-holders of their culture—these were the topics that once were recognized as primary anthropological concerns.The recognition by gender studies of the critical importance of allowing the authorship of a multitude of voices has led to energetic debate over the epistemological foundations of anthropology, which in turn has transformed the question, the topics and the methodology of the discipline—and in the end its own self-image as having the right of authorial privilege.

See also: Ecriture Feminine, Kinship, Moments of Being,

Post-Modernism, Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies, Society, The Unhomely

GOSSIP

In any socio-cultural milieu, people may be occupied in gossip for a substantial part of their every day. Recognizing, since Malinowski, that studying the world of the everyday is the key to an understanding of how people behave, anthropologists have long appreciated the significance of gossip.

Nevertheless, sustained analysis of gossip per se remained intermittent (cf. Radin 1927; Herskovits 1937; Colson 1953) until the 1960s, when three broadly distinct approaches emerged: the functionalist, the transactionalist and the symbolic-interactionist.

The functionalist approach is exemplified by Max Gluckman (1963b). Gossip, Gluckman begins, is a culturally determined and sanctioned process, a social fact, with customary rules and with important functions. Notably, gossip helps maintain group unity, morality and history. For, the essence of gossip is a constant (if informal and indirect) communal evaluation and reaffirmation of behaviour by assessment against common, traditional expectations. Furthermore, gossip enables groups to control the competing cliques and aspiring individuals of which they are composed; through gossip, differences of opinion are fought out behind the scenes (through customary innuendo, ambiguity and conceit) so that outwardly a show of harmony and friendship can be maintained. Finally, gossip is a hallmark and a privilege, even a duty, of group membership. A group gossips, gossip is group property, and to be a member is to gossip—about other members.

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The transactionalist approach, spearheaded by Robert Paine (1967), eschews the presumptions of seeing groups as united and equilibrated, and social-structural convention as being always geared towards this end. Paine argues that it is more apposite to see gossip as a means by which individuals manipulate cultural rules and to see individual gossipers as having rival interests (in power, friendships, networks, matériel) which they seek to forward and protect. Individuals, not groups, gossip, and they gossip primarily not about group values but individual aspirations, others’ and their own. Indeed, any appeal to group unity should rather be seen as a managing of self-interest: an attempt to have a particular definition of a social situation prevail. In short, gossip allows the moral order to be bent to individual purpose. It is instrumental behaviour which uses a genre of informal communication for the partial effecting of competition between individuals through the selective imparting and withholding, the manipulating, of information.

To an extent, the above dichotomy between groupand individualoriented analyses is collapsed in the symbolic-interactionist approach. Here (Haviland 1977; Heilman 1978) the emphasis is on how, through everyday talk, cultural reality and social relations are continually being represented and debated; in gossip, individuals can be seen actively speculating together on the nature of their lives and world. Hence, gossip provides individuals with a map of their social environment and with current information about happenings, inhabitants and their dispositions. This then provides the resource by which they can devise a programme of action.Also, gossip is the means by which individuals align their actions: negotiate between themselves the scope and import of cultural rules and the social behaviours to which they apply. Gossip is essentially a metacommunicative process: an activity through which individuals examine and discuss together the rules and conventions by which they commonly live. Moreover, since rules are relative and ambiguous in their application, such interpretation is never final or consensual. Hence, gossip at once disassembles, evaluates and reconstitutes the everyday world.

See also: Community, Ethnomethodology, Interaction, Narrative

HOME AND HOMELESSNESS

Anthropologists have long been interested in migratory processes, often of people in search of work (possibly later followed by their families) and often from rural areas to urban ones, and from relatively or seemingly

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deprived areas to less deprived ones. Indeed, the complexities of the relationship between labour migration and (momentous) social, cultural, economic and political change, and the numbers of people involved or affected by such movement in search of a better ‘quality of life’, have been a major conceptual concern (cf. Kearney 1986).

Hence, there have been studies of communities of poor rural labourers in overcrowded cities (cf. Parkin 1969; Scheper-Hughes 1992), and the networks of contacts by which people move and move again in search of work, and information moves with them (cf. Mitchell 1969; Gardner 1995). There have also been studies of the traditions of labour migrancy that can flourish as generations of men and women move from their homes (cf. Lloyd 1979; Marx 1987), and the problems that can accrue as returners hope to find their original homes again (cf. Gmelch 1980; Ballard 1987). Migratory processes have been seen to cast significant light on questions of socio-cultural reproduction and development, both concerning those who move and those who stay put (Redfield 1960; Meillassoux 1981), and on the relationship between individual (migrant) actors and global (modernizing) processes (Frank 1965), and to call for an elucidation of the meanings imparted to migratory processes by those who move and those who ‘host’ them (Lewis 1961; Grillo 1985).

At the same time, inequalities in the distribution of wealth, resources and power have led to migrations which may be described as less than voluntary; hence the anthropological interest in the ‘exile’ and the ‘refugee’ alongside the labour migrant. Exile has been explored (après van Gennep 1960) as a rite of violent disaggregation from a home community which pitches refugees into a liminal zone (for example, the refugee camp) and which can only be overcome by a corresponding rite of reaggregation into new identities (Conquergood 1988). Exile has also been explored as a categorial anomaly, a ‘pollution’ (après Douglas 1966), which derives from the collision of cultures and their incompatible systems of symbolic classification (Malkki 1995). In particular, anthropological study has focused upon a mediation between the definition of ‘refugees’ under international law—being those who have fled their country of former habitual residence out of fear of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a specific social group—and the experiences on the ground of the exiles themselves and those agencies set up to deal with them (cf. Gilad 1990; Harrell-Bond 1986). Finally, as exile experiences extend over the years, anthropologists have explored the cultural adaptations exhibited by long-term refugee communities, and the tensions involved in their self-identification: not ‘acculturation’ to new

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identities so much as a practising of a permanent in-betweenness or transnationalism (Hirschon 1989; Gonzalez 1992).

In this way, study of migratory processes also includes an appreciation of diasporas. Originally a term referring to the exile and dispersions of Jews from the land of Israel following persecution in Classical and preClassical times (and thence the migration of Jewish communities around the Gentile world for ensuing millennia), the term has since been applied more widely to include those populations separated from an erstwhile home and scattered around the world who nevertheless retain a sense of themselves as present strangers. Armenians (Amit-Talai 1989), Italians (Gans 1965) and Greeks (Moskos 1989), for example—like Jews (Avruch 1981)—seek to maintain an ethnic unity, a cultural continuity, and a sense of peoplehood across the globe. They retain distinctive practices, a myth of their uniqueness, memories of their past home, and a hope of eventual repatriation: ’…Next year in Jerusalem’.

Migration and ‘home’

It may be argued, however, that the labels ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’, ‘exile’, ‘expatriate’, betray differences in evaluation and orientation, differences in strategic dealings with the phenomenon of migration, more than differences in the migratory process as such. By ‘expatriate’, then, is conveyed a sense of wealth and voluntary detachment, by ‘migrant’ a hope for upward mobility, by ‘exile’ a sense of loss, and so on (Tedlock 1996:341). Beyond these labels, however, lies the migratory process whereby people operate as ‘transnationals’—ever transgressing so-called socio-cultural borders rather than operating strictly within circumscribed fields.

It was a thesis of Edmund Leach’s (1977) that individuals spent their lives crossing socio-cultural boundaries—whatever the norms might have prescribed and law-keepers sought to realize in terms of their closure. Hence, Leach posited, most categorial distinctions (the orderly frameworks behind socio-cultural routinization) evaporated when anthropologists observed what people did as opposed to what they were supposed to do. Recently, this has found more general anthropological favour. The thesis of ‘transnationalism’ (Schiller et al. 1992) signals a move away from the notion of bounded socio-cultural units of analysis in favour of an appreciation of individuals who move cognitively and physically through their lives: who throughout their lives move shorter and greater distances across the globe, and who imagine communities of belonging (and invent their traditions) on their way (cf. Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). It is as a result of this shift in

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anthropological sensibility that an analytical focus on home and homelessness becomes timely.

‘Home’ did not much figure in traditional anthropological conceptualizations, except perhaps as a synonym for ‘house’ or ‘household’ (cf. Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995). Here was ‘home’ as stable physical space, and a place which amounted to an ‘embryonic community’ (Douglas 1991:289), in which territory and time were structured functionally, economically, aesthetically and morally; so that even if the potential mobility of home was attested to—the tent of the nomad, say—still the focus was on the necessary routinizing of time and space. As Douglas elaborated, home could be defined as a pattern of regular doings, furnishings and appurtenances, and a physical space in which certain communitarian practices were realized. Homes began by bringing space under control and thus giving domestic life physical orientations: ‘directions of existence’ (Douglas 1991:290). Homes also gave structure to time and embodied a capacity for memory and anticipation. In short, homes could be understood as the organization of space over time, and the allocation of resources in space and over time.

Then again, the routinization of space—time was also aesthetic and moral; it provided a model for redistributive justice, sacrifice, and the common, collective good. Homes were communities in microcosm which coordinated their members by way of open and constant communication, a division of labour, rights and duties, a commensal meal, and a rotation of access to resources. They encompassed totalprestatory systems which exerted possibly tyrannous control over their members’ minds, bodies and tongues in their search for solidarity.

However, to understand homes in this way—as being synonymous, in microcosm, with Durkheimian notions of solidary communities and coercive institutions—is anachronistic and provides little conceptual purchase on a world of contemporary movement. A broader understanding is possible and necessary, and one concerned less with the routinization of space and time than with their fluidity and with individuals’ continuous movement through them (cf. Minh-ha 1994:14). A conception of home is required which transcends traditional ways by which identity is analytically classified and defined (according to locality, ethnicity, religiosity or nationality) and is sensitive to allocatings of identity which may be multiple, situational, individual and paradoxical. As a concept, ‘home’ must encompass cultural norms and individual fantasies, representations of and by individuals and groups; it must be sensitive to numerous modalities: memory and longing; the conventional and the creative; the ideational,

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