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

INDIVIDUALISM

Notably, Alan Macfarlane (1978), tracing the ‘origins of English individualism’, spectacularly refutes those theorists (particularly Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Dumont) who would see individualism as a recent socio-cultural development, an issue (variously) of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of capitalism, the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, upon a previously holistic, collectivist, closestructured, traditional society. For, in England at least, historical records (local registers, legal text-books, court rolls, autobiographical journals) evidence an individualistic, open, egalitarian society with political and intellectual liberty, with private property rights, with legal rights of the person against the group, in existence since the 1200s if not long before. As Macfarlane summarizes: ‘the majority of ordinary people in England from at least the thirteenth century were rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically “rational”, market-orientated and acquisitive, ego-centred in kinship and social life’ (1978:163). Here, at least, the traditional anthropological evolution towards individualism can be abandoned and the conventional anthropological eschewing of conscious individuality obviated, for one does not find a time when ‘an Englishman did not stand alone…in the centre of his world’ (1978:196). Contrariwise, it is the individual and his nuclear family which may be looked to for originating those sociocultural changes which traditionally have been taken to be causative.

Moreover, even focusing on non-Western areas of anthropological concern (as above), Godfrey Lienhardt (1985:143–50) observes how ‘African’ literature celebrates individual eccentricities, inner consciousnesses, which defy and subvert collective judgement and behaviour. Meanwhile, drawing on his fieldwork in New Guinea, Kenelm Burridge (1979) describes how most people are ‘individuals’ and ‘persons’ in different respects and at different times, where ‘persons’ may be understood as those who realize the given and embody the categories which are prescribed by tradition and the social order, while ‘individuals’ are those who use their intuition and perception to create anew. If persons are created by current intellectualizations and moralities, then individuals are creative of new ones (including new persons); if persons are products of socio-cultural conditions, then individuals exist in spite of them. Moreover, each ‘spatially bounded organism’ is able to switch between the two: leave their personhood behind and realize their individuality. This realizing may take a variety of ethnographic expressions, Burridge admits, and the Western recognition of individuality (conceptualized as ‘individualism’) may indeed originate with Christianity, but nevertheless, an expression is everywhere possible. Certainly, in ‘New Guinea’ there are individuals who seek in events a

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‘truth’ which goes beyond established moralities and which transcends material conditions. Indeed, Burridge concludes, such individuality would seem constitutive of our very human being, deriving from a universal imperative which pre-exists culture.

Burridge’s ethnographic summation is also commensurate with Edmund Leach’s general theoretic stance (developing a somewhat submerged Malinowskian recognition of individual ‘needs’) wherein the essence of humanity is a ubiquitous individual proclivity to break with normative social structures, reinterpret cultural conventions and create afresh (1977:19–21). Here it is the individual actor and not the social system which should be looked to as source and guarantor of cultural vitality and social process.

Leach’s insights have been perhaps most famously developed in the work of his student Fredrik Barth (e.g. 1959) and the school of transactionalism with which his name came to be associated (along with Fred Bailey’s, Robert Paine’s and others’). However, an emphasis on the individual actor—an interest in individualism; an appreciation of individuality—also found expression in early anthropological theorists of consciousness and personality (such as Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wallace and Ward Goodenough), in the work of network analysts (such as John Barnes, Clyde Mitchell and Jeremy Boissevain), and more recently in the flowering of studies within symbolic anthropology which focus on the constructions and interpretations of symbolic realities as made by particular individuals (Edward Bruner, Anthony Cohen, Michael Jackson).

Imbuing all of these approaches, perhaps, is an insistence that, in Macfarlane’s formulation, ‘individuals and their attitudes, their assumptions and mental life’ should not lose out to macro-social (statistical, material, collectivist) ‘facts’ (1970:3).

Current approaches

In much mainstream debate, sensitivity to the individualistic is still denigrated as ‘methodological individualism’: as erroneously couching explanation in terms of characteristics of individuals, their behaviours and interests, and so procuring insufficient purchase on the broader and deeper conditions of socio-cultural ‘realities’. The centre-ground of anthropology, in other words, continues to be a preserve of ‘methodological collectivism’—positing social phenomena as determined by factors which bypass individual rationality, and hence envisaging cultural development quite independently of individual consciousness. Here is a continuing insistence that the distinction

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between the individual and the societal is specific to the West and must be collapsed in favour of the latter—or at least of ‘social relations’ (cf. Strathern 1990b)—for anthropology persuasively to encounter cultural others.

On the other hand, there is a continuing insistence that it is a peculiar ethnocentrism for anthropologists to fail to ‘extend to the “others” we study a recognition of the personal complexity which we perceive in ourselves’ (Cohen 1989:12).We are individuals and persons, role-players and rebels, conventional and creative. We may be self-contradictory, personally paradoxical, socio-culturally situated, but we are always interpretively (helplessly, proudly) autonomous and agential, inevitably and inexorably ourselves (cf. Rapport 1993a). It is not good enough simply to say that only Western culture valorizes the concept of the individual (‘individualism’) and therefore only in Western society do individuals act distinctively (‘individuality’). For, whether it is socioculturally confirmed or not, the individual is the crucial actor in every social situation and individual consciousness the crucial factor in the interpretation of any cultural artefact.

See also: Agent and Agency, Individuality, Methodological

Individualism and Holism

INDIVIDUALITY

Individuality is tied inextricably to individual consciousness, to that unique awareness, and awareness of awareness, which is the mark of human embodiment.The body, and in particular the brain (‘a supremely well connected system of processors [an individual arrangement of neurons and synapses] capable of more distinct states, by several orders of magnitude, than any system ever known’ (Flanagan 1992:60)), gives rise to knowledge of the world, to a perspective upon the world, which is inevitably individual. Human beings come to know themselves within the world by way of cognitions and perceptions, thoughts, feelings and imaginings, which are unique to them.

The concept of individuality also bespeaks a host of ambiguities.The physical matter of the human body is in ongoing process of birth and decay (so that the assemblage of cells has changed completely in some seven years), while the individual’s sense and sensing of identity is continuous.The senses of the human body operate in terms of repeated, momentary apperceptions (‘moments of being’) which are singular and

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diverse, and from which the individual builds up a variety of different knowledges and perspectives, or world-views; and yet, one feels oneself to be consistent and coherent at any one time, and that one’s views develop logically over time. Being born and coming to consciousness very much within the world—thrown into the middle of a mêlée of ongoing processes of life, organic and inorganic, human and non-human, natural and socio-cultural, personally focused and ambient (family life, politico-economic conditions)—the individual nevertheless looks out upon this environment from a point of view which is both originary and original; each individual’s knowledge of the world is particular and discrete, and subject to its own perceptual mechanisms (or ‘subjective’).

In anthropology, recognition of these ambiguities takes a characteristic form. As Wallace has put it (1961:131):

The paradox [is] that cultures do exist, and societies do survive, despite the diversity of the interests and motivations of their members, the practical impossibility of complete interpersonal understanding and communication, and the unavoidable residuum of loneliness that dwells in every man.

While leading lives of unique experiences and interpretations of the world, individuals yet partake of routine interactions with others, and succeed in maintaining relationships (intellectual and emotional, human and animal, socio-cultural and environmental) which are symbiotic and (at different possible levels) communicational. It does seem possible, at some level, to overcome individual discreteness and exchange knowledge and perspectives which are commonly held; to what extent, therefore, is it possible to treat habitual interactions in socio-cultural milieux as objective? While human individuals are irreducibly distinct, is it legitimate to make generalizations concerning the relations and behaviour of individuals who regularly come together as members of communities, associations or partnerships? Even though it is individuals who originally create and ongoingly utilize and maintain the institutions and practices which come to characterize a socio-cultural milieu (common language, politico-legal arrangements, systems of marriage, socialization and health care, and so on), to what extent is it possible to treat these latter as things-in-themselves, as accruing an identity and a weight which makes them, in time, sui generis?

However much such questions are debated in anthropology (cf. Ingold 1997), it should not detract, as it has a tendency to do, from an appreciation of the concreteness of individuality.This latter is the human a priori, the physical—psychical basis on which all knowledge of the

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world and all human creativity within the world rests. Human consciousness is unavoidably and irreducibly individual, and all human constructs (including socio-cultural milieux and their socio-cultural anthropology) are shaped by and imbued with this truth (cf. Cohen 1994; Rapport 1997a).

Existential anthropology

The anthropology which has sought most deliberately to keep this truth in view has been termed ‘existential’ or ‘phenomenological’ (cf. Jackson 1989, 1996; also Douglas and Johnson 1977; Kotarba and Fontana 1984; Csordas 1994; Stoller 1997), after the philosophical traditions associated with such writers as Kierkegaard, Emerson, Nietzsche, Husserl, Jaspers and Heidegger. As adumbrated by Sartre (1997:44–6):

Our point of departure is…the subjectivity of the individual …not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teaching upon the truth…. And at the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I think, therefore I am, which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. Every theory which begins with man, outside of this moment of self-attainment, is a theory which thereby suppresses the truth, for outside of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable…. [T]here is [an absolute] truth which is simple, easily attained and within the reach of everybody; it consists in one’s immediate sense of self.

In the second place, this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of man, it is the only one which does not make man into an object…—that is, as a set of predetermined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone….

Furthermore,…[there is] a human universality of condition …, all the limitations which a priori define man’s fundamental situation in the universe. His historical situations are variable …[b]ut what never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labour and to die there. These limitations are [at once] [o]bjective, because we meet with them everywhere and they are everywhere recognizable: and subjective because they are lived and are nothing if man does not live them—if, that is to say, he does not freely determine himself and his existence in relation to them. And, diverse

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