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

INDIVIDUALISM

However, this abuse notwithstanding (and what discourse, finally, can protect itself from abuse?), humanism offers anthropology the best hope for describing both the universality and the universal particularities of human experience.

In particular, humanism offers anthropology an escape from imprisoning essentialisms such as ‘culture’, ‘gender’ and ‘race’. For these concepts have operated in anthropological discourse as means of making alterity: creating differences between people and enforcing separations which have come to imply inevitable hierarchy and inequality. Sameness within the category (‘culture’, ‘gender’, ‘race’), meanwhile, has come to imply inexorable homogeneity, coherence and determination.

To write ‘against culture’ and other such generalizing, fundamentalist—essentialist concepts is to produce humanistic ‘ethnographies of the particular’: narratives of particular individuals in particular times and places. For, human beings ‘all live in the particular’ (Abu-Lughod 1990b:157), and this is something they have in common over and against their so-called cultural (etc.) differences. Ethnographies of the particular will tell of the struggle to make meaning, of flux, movement and contradiction, of pain and success, of practices, strategies, contests, choices, improvisations and interests (cf. Langness and Frank 1981; Watson and Watson-Franke 1985). Paradoxically, these are individual experiences and activities that generalities cannot convey.

See also:Consciousness, Human Rights, Individuality, Literariness,

Post-Modernism

INDIVIDUALISM

Individualism should not be confused with individuality, difficult though it has been to separate their definition and implication in anthropologists’ work. To attempt this as a starting-point here, individualism pertains to a particular historico-cultural conceptualization of the person or self. Included within this conceptualization would be notions of the ultimate value and dignity of the human individual, his moral and intellectual autonomy, his rationality and self-knowledge, spirituality, right to privacy, self-sovereignty and self-development, and his voluntary contracting into a society, market and polity (cf. Lukes 1990). Individuality, by contrast, refers to the universal nature of human existence whereby it is individuals who possess agency. Moreover, since individuals engage with others by virtue of discrete sense-making

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apparatuses (nervous systems and brains)—discrete centres of consciousness in discrete bodies—their agency necessarily accords with distinct perspectives on the world. Not only is an individual’s being-in- the-world universally mediated by very particular interpretive prisms which distance him from it, then, but while intrinsically ‘of the world’, the individual also inexorably comes to know the world as ‘other’. Finally, this individuality of consciousness and agency is current whatever the acceptance of individualism as a cultural norm.

In much anthropological writing on individualism, however, a conflation is apparent. The study of the conceptualization of the person and his behaviour in a particular socio-cultural milieu spills over into a positing of the nature of the individual actor, also socio-culturally specified.The society or culture to which the individual actor belongs is looked to as the source of his agency, the origin of action and its interpretation; individuality, in short, is depicted as much prone to the vagaries of socio-cultural fashion as individualism.

The root of the confusion lies in the nineteenth-century tradition of social thought from which twentieth-century anthropology derives. In attempting social-scientifically to come to terms with what were felt to be the grand-societal changes wrought by the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution (to discover their origins, predict their evolutions, in mimicry of the science of natural organisms)—as well as guarding against the radical and individualistic ‘excesses’ which these changes were seen as portending—‘sociology’ was born as a popular explanatory paradigm. Grand changes could be seen to evidence grand forces and grand patterns. Hence, grand explanatory narratives were fashioned which turned on (and prescribed the naturalness of) the workings of such collective organisms as Society (generally in Europe) and Culture (generally in North America).

While Boas and American anthropology owed debts to the writings of Spencer and Morgan (and later, Weber), perhaps the key nineteenthcentury influence on the twentieth-century development of anthropological explanation—the key exponent of a collectivist narrative which subsumed the individual actor within grand-societal workings— was Emile Durkheim. It was from him that Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, Lowie and Kroeber adopted much of their theoretic programme and problematic, and it is from Durkheim’s French followers, especially Mauss and Dumont, that a narrative which conflates individualism with individuality has been propagated and elaborated. Let us trace this development.

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The Durkheimian individual

Durkheim conceived of human beings as homo duplex; on one side there was the biological and personal (comprising the individual body with its material senses and appetites) and on the other the mental and moral (the conceptual and conscientious). The individual thus led a double existence: one rooted in the physical organism and one (morally, intellectually, spiritually superior) in a social organism. And while the former was naturally egoistic and anti-social, the latter, accruing from society, effected by socialization, was able to be altruistic and impersonal. Between the two there was constant antagonism and tension, but through inculcation into a public language and culture, humankind was capable of rising above mean (animal) individuality and becoming part of a collective conscience in which the (sacred) traditions of a society were enshrined. Indeed, if individuals were conscious of themselves as individuals, then this too was a product of their socialization in a collective conscience.Thus, the Western centrality of the individual actor derived from the complexities of the collective division of labour in European societies, and could be traced back to the Christianity of the Enlightenment and to the rise of Protestantism. Individualism was a social product like all moralities and all religions.

Marcel Mauss (1985) took it upon himself to show in more detail how society exerted its force on the physiological individual: through collective representations and collectively determined habitual behaviours, submerged the individual within ‘a collective rhythm’. Nonetheless, Mauss’s account is confused. He begins with the unDurkheimian pronouncement that there has never been a human being who was not aware of his own body, also of his spiritual and physical individuality. However, conflating such universal individuality with cultural individualism, he then proceeds to outline an evolution in how people in different ages and societies have been differently aware of themselves as individual beings, and how these differences can be traced back to different forms of social structuration. First, then, comes the tribal stage of personnage. Here individuals are conceived of as ephemeral bearers of a fixed stock of names, roles and souls in clan possession. Each name-holder is the reincarnation of an original mythical holder, and each is the locus in daily life of different rights and duties. But these individual name-holders have no existence independently of the clan and they possess no inner conscience. Here is the individual solely as a structural fact. Next comes the Classical stage of persona. Here individuals are conceived of as free and responsible, independent and autonomous citizens of a state; they are legal persons with civic identities. But still

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they have no inner life and no individual conscience.Then, with the rise of Christianity, comes the stage of personne. Here is the individual conceived of as indivisible and rational, with a conscience, indeed, with a unique sacred soul, who serves as the foundation of all political, economic and legal institutions. Finally, accompanied by modern schools of psychology, there is the peculiar Western stage of moi: the individual as a ‘self with an increasing self-interestedness and self-knowledge.

Louis Dumont (1986) agrees with Mauss that the Western notion of the individual—an autonomous actor, bearing supreme moral value—is an exceptional stage in the evolution of civilizations. Traditionally it is society as a whole which is thus conceptualized.Through a comparison with the archetypal holism of Indian society, therefore, Dumont attempts more precisely to plot the origination and progress of this odd idea. Looking (as a Durkheimian would) to religion as the cardinal element, it is Hinduism which provides the first clue. For despite the constraining interdependence ubiquitously imposed by Indian society on its members, in the Hindu figure of the ‘world-renouncer’—he who seeks ultimate truth by forgoing the world in favour of his own independent, individual spiritual progress and destiny—one finds a Western-like individualist. For him, society is recognized as having lost its absolute reality. Instead, in throwing off society’s fetters and becoming selfsufficient he is said to have discovered his own self. The crucial difference between the Hindu world-renouncer and the modern individualist is that the former can continue to exist only outside the everyday social world.

Dumont’s second clue is that these same ‘outworldly individuals’ can be seen to be present at the birth and ensuing development of Christianity. For Christ’s teaching that man possesses a soul of infinite worth and eternal value which absolutely transcends the world of social institutions and powers, which is absolutely individual in relation to God and meets others’ only in Him, engenders a community of outworldly individuals who meet on earth but have their hearts in heaven. The history of Christianity over the ensuing centuries then represents a triumphant overcoming of the dualism between the Christian and the societal so that life-in-society becomes synonymous with that of the outworldly individual. Initially through the institution of the Catholic church (with the fourth-century conversion of Emperor Constantine and thereafter the Roman Empire), and ultimately through the Protestant Reformation, the outworldly Christian message comes to repossess the world. Here is society run wholly along individualist lines, with modern Christians being both individuals and ‘inworldly’.

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Nevertheless, Dumont concludes, the evolution need not end here. The individualistic and the holistic represent two diametrically different conceptualizations of society, and although the former Western ‘liberal’ model is enshrined in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (recognizing the inherent dignity and equality and the inalienable rights of all individuals), it is the latter holistic conceptualization which still represents the common type. Indeed, through movements as diverse as multi-culturalism, nationalism, fascism and Islamic fundamentalism, the cultural future of individualism is, to say the least, unpredictable.

Anthropological applications

Characterizing the above line of thought (from Durkheim through Mauss to Dumont), then, is the idea that the individual actor of Western society is the result of a recent, particular and exceptional historicocultural development. Nor is it surprising that, learned in this (or commensurate) thought, anthropologists have been prone to find a lack of individualism (and hence an absence of individuality) in their ethnographies of traditional societies (cf. Carrithers et al. 1985).

‘The African’, Roger Bastide pronounces, is someone who defines himself by his position: is conscious of himself only as member of a lineage, a genealogical tree, a general category (a race, people, family, corporation) (cited in Lienhardt 1985:144). The New Guinean ‘Gahuku-Gama tribesman’, Kenneth Read (1955) asserts, lacks a concept of the individual person; hence, there is no ‘friendship’ between unique individuals, only relationships between socially defined positions, and if personalities are recognized as distinct, then this is merely the issue of unique combinations of social relationships.

In short, ethnographic exploration proves how the individual is unique to Western thought, Jean La Fontaine (1985b) concludes. The concept and its moral and social significance is absent in other societies, with no a priori differentiation being made between individual and role, self and society.

The Non-Durkheimian individual

Nevertheless, there have been exceptions to the Durkheimian expectation and conclusion: ethnographies and analyses which would distinguish between individualism and individuality, which build on individual agency, which deny the priority (ontological, developmental, historical) of the societal.

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