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

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individuals and their right to freedom and self-determination; and also on to social science, and its belief in the possibility and necessity of applying knowledge about human affairs and individual relations to an improvement of the socio-cultural conditions of human life.

Anthropology and humanism

On this view, anthropology is a humanistic pursuit, with a heritage of rationality, liberalism and advocacy which many would see as legitimately continuing today (cf. Gellner 1993; also Berger 1963). For others, however, the case is more complex, and the relationship between anthropology and humanism is one which might be subjected to a more or less radical critique. Certainly, the humanistic tag is one that can be associated more with some names in anthropology (Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Robert Redfield, Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach, Victor Turner, Anthony Wallace, James Fernandez, Miles Richardson, Paul Friedrich, David Riches, Michael Jackson) than others, while some have positively decried it, linking it, historico-culturally to Western acts of imperialism (over nature and otherness).

When Eric Wolf (1974) writes that anthropology, as a discipline, is to be understood as: ‘the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences’, it is clearly a more particular connotation of ‘humanism’ that he is dealing with. In fact, it is difficult to say what precisely the word ‘humanism’ denotes, and what conjoins its various expositions (the work of Erasmus and that of Milton, say, or that of Sapir and of Leach); even what it and they oppose (‘supernaturalism’, ‘theology’, ‘fundamentalism’, ‘totalitarianism’) has no singular essence. As Leach advised in another context (concerning the definition of the term ‘marriage’) it is best to treat humanism as a bundle of traits, a ‘polythetic category’ of concerns (Needham 1975), which are linked together by overlapping commonalities but have no one thing in common. Humanistic anthropology, then (cf. Fratto 1976; Wilk 1991; Brady and Turner 1994), would be expected to exhibit a range of characteristics (as follows), but not to show agreement, among its various exponents, concerning which characteristics properly belong nor how those that do ought to be prioritized.

Traits of humanism

1Human beings are to be regarded as centres and subjects of experience; human beings have experiences, and treating these is a central concern.

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2Human experiences are important because of what they give onto—knowledge—and what they intrinsically demonstrate: a capacity for knowledge, beauty, pleasure, love, reason, emotion and self-awareness. Through their experiences, human subjects are sources of knowledge, and of knowledge about knowing.

3There is, however, something mysterious in this knowledge and selfknowledge; human consciousness, the awareness of having experiences and of acting upon these, is a capacity and quality which makes human beings and their products (historical events, economic systems and literary works) unamenable, for the time being, to the kind of reductive, generalizing and objectifying analysis of certain brands of scientific materialism. The workings of human cognition and perception are at least qualitatively, if not ontologically, different from the material determinations which give rise to cause and effect in the physical world.

4This gives human life and action a value above all else: an importance and a dignity. It also makes human accomplishment, power, status and welfare a cause for celebration, while the finality of death is cause for the greatest sadness. For it would seem the end of consciousness beyond which there is nothing.

5Together with a belief in the human capacity to know, and an expectation that knowledge can be reasonably applied to the solving of problems, there is a scepticism felt for knowledge which claims authority on the basis of tradition alone, as dogma or institutional truth. For knowledge to be authoritative it must be subjected to proof in the light of current experience. Moreover, as experiences change, so knowledge can be expected to too. Human consciousness is dynamic and there is an inexorable evolution, becoming and change to the world which human beings inhabit.

6This is not to say that humanity cannot or will not accede to knowledge of certain eternal verities, rather that what is known to be true must always be treated sceptically and subjected to testing and critique. Continuous scholarship is the route to knowledge, as opposed to all manner of blind belief, doctrine or revelation. For human beings are responsible for discerning and defining the meaning of their lives on earth, through the critical exercise of their innate capacities to know, and so far as has been proven to date they are alone in this exercise; there is no superhuman guiding presence, and human capacities end at their bodily death.

7This places great emphasis on the human body, its potentiality, its fragility, its individuality and its mortality.What human beings know, they know as mortal individuals, secured in discrete, if permeable,

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sensory mechanisms (bodies and minds) which give rise to unique sensoria, unique awareness of the world around them. Individual bodies and minds are at once part of this world and the vehicles for distinct perspectives upon it (the mystery, again, of self-knowledge).

8Faith in the human condition, optimism concerning human potential and a celebration of human achievement, is thus tempered

with a recognition of the absurdity of the human position. So far as is currently known, humans are alone as a consciousness in a universe which has its laws but is otherwise meaningless and entropic beyond the range of the products with which human beings occupy themselves. In human terms the universe appears cruel, but this is simply a matter of perspective, and outwith human perspective nothing is certain. Moreover, what is human perspective but individual perspective? Nothing is known for certain outwith the bodily sensorium of human beings as individual entities.

9Are not ‘heroic’ individuals who live with certain knowledge of the absurdity of life and of the inevitability of death, and yet work towards creating for themselves and others full and meaningful lives, deserving of respect? These lives of knowledge and accomplishment are examples for all; as potential sources of new knowledge and of beauty, indeed, they may offer tangible and direct help to others.

10Hence the importance of individual liberty, freedom of thought and expression, by which individuals can be expected to make the best of their potential to know and create, and the importance of overcoming those circumstances by which individual creativity is threatened. In other words, the bodily individuality of human experience and knowledge gives onto a certain morality: a set of ethical values concerning the rights to free thinking and investigation, to freedom from constriction or oppression, and concerning the benefits to all which accrue therefrom.

11Respect for human dignity and individual freedom and creativity also extends to the ways in which humankind is to be represented. Inasmuch as human beings gain self-knowledge, can gain vantage on their lives and reflect on what they know and do, they are able to express this self-knowledge in language and artefact and hope to communicate it to others; human beings continually compose narratives of their own lived-in worlds. Moreover, human beings also compose narratives of others’ worlds, and, recognizing that much (if not most) true knowledge of others remains inexorably hidden and unsaid within individual selves, these narratives (whether scientific, social-scientific or literary) ought to be of a certain character. Human beings should be seen to be in conscious

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control of their lives, creating the meanings and regularities by which they live and not subject to unconscious or determining forces, to independent causes and constraints. They should be described as possessing agency with regard to natural, social, cultural or historical phenomena. Above all, representational justice should be done to the complexities of human life: to its individuality and commonality, its idiosyncrasy, ambiguity and nuance as much as its conventionalism, its pleasures and glories as well as its cruelties and ignorances.

Anthropos versus ethnos

‘Doing representational justice to the complexities of human life’, the samenesses and the differences, introduces a problem for the humanistic anthropologist regarding the status of culture. Are human beings the same inasmuch as they all inhabit different cultural worlds or over and against their inhabiting such worlds? Do they become human within culture or does their humanity (consciousness, creativity, individuality, dignity) transcend cultural particularities? Geertz has called this anthropology’s ‘recurrent dilemma’ (1973:22): how to square generic human rationality and the biological unity of mankind with the great natural variation of cultural forms. George Stocking concludes that the entire ‘history of anthropology may…be viewed as a continuing (and complex) dialectic between the universalism of “anthropos” and the diversitarianism of “ethnos”’ (1992:347). Anthropological humanists, in other words, have been both cultural relativists and existentialists, some describing human consciousness as essentially individual and free, others describing it as culturally determined.

Cultural relativism can be taken much further, however, and become a thoroughgoing anti-humanistic critique, as has recently transpired under the monikers of ‘structuralism’ and ‘post-structuralism’. If consciousness, its form and content, are not prior to the symbolic discourses and social practices in which it is culturally embedded, then not only is identity—human, individual, whatever—subordinate to cultural matrices (which may remain unconscious), but the whole idea of humankind, humanism, human dignity, and so on, is a historically contingent cultural product: ethnocentric, mythical, teleological. ‘Man’, as Foucault put it, ‘is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old’ (1972:115).

Whatever one makes of Foucault’s history, the implication is clear: humankind and humanism are concepts to deconstruct and overcome.

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Far from being transcendent, humanistic values, methods, truths are part of specific discourses which have created the world in a certain image so as to serve certain interests and ends. ‘Humankind’—‘the subject’ or, better, ‘the subject-effect’—is ever, inevitably and inextricably enculturated: hence multiply and partially constructed, conditioned, elicited, motivated and gendered. Even the existential certainties of the Western humanist—whereby, in Lewis’s words (1982:55), ‘My distinctness, my being me, is quite unmistakeable to me, there can be nothing of which I am more certain’—amounts to a culturally derived (and rather unusual) ‘metaphysics of presence’.

Tactical humanism

There are a number of possible responses to this critique. One is simply to reassert an existentialist and rationalist position and say that cultural relativism and deconstruction are just plain wrong. Science, medicine, history, literature and travel prove the existence of a universal humanity, and the inherent individuality of consciousness and experience through which it is embodied (cf. Rapport 1994a, 1997a). Of course, this proof cannot force itself on those who would see otherwise—hence, the number of times the word ‘belief appears in the above exposition of (agnostic) humanistic traits. Nevertheless, it is believed that humanistic beliefs are subjected to the most critical attention and are accessible to all who approach with an open mind (cf. Popper 1966).

Another response, as adumbrated philosophically by Rorty (1992), is to admit to the historico-cultural specificity of the humanist perspective but to claim, nonetheless, that as a way of knowing the world it offers the best prospectus for a diversity of cultural world-views being able to live peaceably alongside and through one another.

In what she calls a ‘tactical humanism’ (1990b:138), Lila Abu-Lughod would seem to arrive anthropologically at a similar position. Humanism, she begins, may be a local discourse (despite its erstwhile claims) but it still has more speakers, writers and readers than any other: it carries most moral force as a language of equality. Of course, the discourse has suffered from being misapplied and abused. In the past, celebrating the example of heroic individuals has co-occurred with an eschewing of others’ systematic oppression; positing individuals’ autonomy has cooccurred with a masking of the inequalities of power; placing humankind at the centre of the world has co-occurred with a justifying of an exploitation of nature; and respecting a universality of human dignity and individual integrity has co-occurred with a denying of humanity to specified ‘others’ (women, children, natives, slaves, Jews).

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