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

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though man’s purposes may be, at least none of them is wholly foreign to me, since every human purpose presents itself as an attempt either to surpass these limitations, or to widen them, or else to deny or to accommodate oneself to them.

Some of Sartre’s phraseology seems old-fashioned now, sexist and selfsatisfied; it can appear the credo of the secure and resourceful bourgeois, able to reflect on the self, to determine ‘his’ relations to the conditions or circumstances of his life, and to lay claim to a certain lifesome dignity Indeed, this has led some anthropologists to reject such an existentialist orientation tout court. However, such a reading is superficial, and mistaken; avoiding gender-specific linguistic formulations may still not be easy, but by his words Sartre succinctly points up a number of important truths. Let me elaborate upon a number of his phrases in turn.

(i) I think, therefore I am is the absolute truth of consciousness

Descartes‘s attempt to isolate a knowing subject as a foundation for a scientific exploration of the world has been heavily criticized in recent social science. The search for a res cogitans, a discrete substance and process of cognition, has been seen as responsible for setting up a number of misconceived dualisms, such as mind versus body, thinking versus feeling, reason versus emotion, thought versus action, individual versus environment, man (society and culture) versus nature. However, Descartes’s description of consciousness can be easily improved upon without being discarded by adding such words as ‘feel’ and ‘imagine’, ‘sense’ and ‘dream’, ‘evaluate’ and ‘experience’, to ‘think’; and by portraying the knowing being as always situated, as a body in a certain time and space. One thus retains Descartes’s insistence on a discrete consciousness as the ontological essence of being human. Hence: ‘I think and feel—I experience—at a particular moment, and therefore I am at that moment’ (cf. Cohen and Rapport 1995).

(ii) Outside of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable

What the individual knows with most immediacy, clarity and certainty is what his senses inform him, what he experiences first-hand. Indeed, this is the only thing of which he has certain knowledge. He knows what he senses but he cannot know the accuracy of those senses and measure them against an absolute standard because he ‘is’ his senses and not something over and against them. He can test, improvise and experiment

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with what his senses tell him, but these procedures also call upon his senses to effect and measure. He can compare what his senses tell him with what others’ senses tell them but, still, these efforts entail his sensual interpretation of the information he gleans from (what he interprets to be) others’. In short, the individual’s senses of self and world are the beginning and, in a way, also the end of knowledge. They are certainly the paradigm of knowledge, and give onto a sense of certainty that is never equalled in other forms of knowledge—however much they might inspire the wish for such comprehension. As Roy Wagner concludes (1991:39):

nothing could possibly be more clear, distinct, concrete, certain, or real than the self’s perception of perception, its own sensing of sense. It is the very archetype, the inspiration, of everything we have ever imagined for the objective

And yet such knowledge remains hermetically sealed within the personal microcosm. Hence: ‘I am certain of my own cognitions at a particular moment (and therefore I am) but I am not so certain about anything else’.

(iii) The necessities of being in the world, of having to live, labour and to die there, is a universal human condition

The notion of ‘independent existence’ Whitehead (1925) famously decried as a philosophical misconception since entities are more properly understood in terms of the way they relate with the universe. In the Heideggerian terms which have become popular in environmentalist anthropology, human beings can be said ever to dwell within worlds of nature and of socio-cultural exchange (cf. Ingold 1986; Weiner 1991). However, this dwelling does not detract from human beings’ individuality. For our being-in-the-world courtesy of individual bodily mechanisms of cognition and perception is such as always to make of the world something other, always something interpreted. One comes to see, to construct, the world and its objects in certain ways which have proven personally ‘valuable’ over time (cf. Edelman 1989:184), and one learns to recognize signs and symbols by which are expressed the experience of dwelling in the (‘same’) world of other sentient beings. But these signs and symbols remain ambiguous, and the world and its objects ever something refracted through the prism of a situated consciousness. Ambiguity, doubt, incoherence and multiplicity are the nature of the universal human (not to say animal) condition, dwelling alongside fellow

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sentient creatures, dependent upon one another and the remainder of the organic and inorganic universe for the environmental conditions of one’s life (even for the transient agglomeration of chemicals that underwrite one’s bodily existence), and yet never certain concerning one’s meaningful construction of that universe, its rectitude or sharedness. Meaning is a personal, subjective, internal perception (cf. Rapport 1993a). Hence: ‘I experience and become myself (I am) at particular moments while dwelling within environments comprised of other, similarly cognizing, beings and inorganic, non-beings; and while there is a relatedness, even a mutuality, to all this matter, I know of it only as an interpreted other’.

(iv) Being in the world and relating to its conditions is a subjective phenomenon because the world and its conditions are nothing if individuals do not live them

Whatever may be the ultimate nature of earthly physical reality, human beings gain access to it only through their senses. Moreover, this is not a passive or reactive exercise entailing the reception of external stimuli but rather the pro-active testing of original models and the adjudicating of consequences. To ‘interpret’ the world in this way is not only to give it meaning, then, but also form: to construct it, its objects and events in a certain way. In the world of human being, as Bateson has it (1958:96), the Berkeleyan motto cannot be faulted: ‘To be is to be perceived’. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that it is the individual who is the ‘energy source’ behind this act of worldly perception or interpretation (Bateson 1972:126). Knowledge is individual and subjective, deriving from individuals’ sensitive bodies, and the dr ive, the work and the habitude behind this are exemplifications of individual agency. This is especially important to recognize with regard to habit.Worldly order which they find valuable or satisfying, individuals tend to maintain. They also tend to maintain certain orders in common with those others with whom they dwell in ‘an’ environment—human and animal, organic and inorganic. (In a habitual way of farming, for instance, individuals will find themselves in symbiosis with human neighbours, with animals, domestic and wild, with crops and with soils.) However, these orders do not acquire their own energy or momentum; they are always inert unless continually worked and made meaningful by their individual users. Should they cease to be considered valuable, they cease to exist. These common orders (languages, social structures, ecosystems) are always ambiguous, always means by which a diversity of understandings and motivations

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are synthesized by common forms and practices which allow a diversity of gratifications. Moreover, they tend to be temporary and transitory, so that after a time individuals construct orders anew and old environmental arrangements and alignments die. Hence: ‘I experience and become myself by dwelling at particular moments in particular environments; but those environments (and that self) exist only so long as I continue to construe them in a particular way and practise them as such’.

(v) Individuals are responsible for determining whether to attempt to surpass the conditions they construe around them or to accommodate themselves to them

Individuals construe the world as they take it to be; nothing is certain but their own consciousness of self, but they construct the world in a way which proves valuable (successful, meaningful) for them. Once they have done so, individuals must also determine how to react in relation to this world. This is a decision which nothing and no-one else can make for them, because the decisions and behaviours of others must still be cognized and perceived, interpreted and made meaningful, within the world-views of the individuals concerned. Hence, individuals can be affected by the decisions of others, if they are something of which they take notice, but not determined. There is no alternative to individuality, in short, no certain or direct access to another consciousness or to the world ‘as is’, and there is no other source of an individual’s meanings but that individual himself. Hence his responsibility for deciding how to react to the world he has made: to do as before (maintain a habit) or to create anew; to try to fit in with what seem to be the expectations and aspirations of others (be a ‘good family member’, a ‘loyal client’, a ‘pious co-religionist’) or to cut a different path for oneself (as ‘poet’ or ‘rebel’ or simply ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’). Objects and events which he construes within his environment may affect his decision—say the wishes, deeds and words of other individuals—but these cannot determine his decision; there can be no external determination because the world beyond the individual is always something other to him which he is ultimately responsible for construing. Even trying to fit in to a social group or accede to others’ wishes is a creative act of individuality. The individual, as Sartre concludes, is inevitably ‘free’, of guidance as of determination (cf. Burridge 1979). Hence: ‘I experience and become myself by dwelling in particular environments, and I am responsible at every moment for deciding how to act (and be) in relation to my cognitions, and where to take the world around me’.

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(vi) This appreciation of individuality succeeds in not having humanity appear objectified

Human knowledge is something to which individuals subject the worlds they construe around them. There is no escape from individuality in human life, the latter being ever a subjective condition; human individuals are always subjects: always agents and always exercising their agency. Indeed, there is no other source of human agency but individuals. In search for relief from, or denial of, the burdens of responsibility in their lives, individuals sometimes imagine other sources—gods, ancestors, natural forces, linguistic grammars, cultural traditions, unconscious histories, social conditions—but these are fantasies, and serve as puppets in the hands of their individual users.This denial of responsibility and turning oneself into an object created, construed and controlled from without, Sartre calls ‘bad faith’: living one’s life ‘inauthentically’. What it is also important to say is that it too is an instantiation of individual agency and subjectivity; here are individuals making themselves into certain kinds of object. An existentialist appreciation of human life becomes ‘humanist’ at that point when it is felt that individuals can do better for themselves than spend their lives falsely objectifying the fantastical, and perhaps they can be influenced towards more truthful construals of their condition (cf. Rapport 1994a). Hence: ‘I experience and become myself in particular environments at particular moments, and in recognizing my responsibility for the above I abide by my individual integrity: I accede to the dignity of my individuality’.

Anthropology and individuality

To become human is to become individual, Clifford Geertz once expounded (1973:52), and we become individual in an environment of socio-cultural forms and patterns in terms of which we give form, order, direction and point to our lives. The crucial question which this begs is the precise relationship between socio-cultural forms and the individual lives lived by them. Becoming human and individual in an environment of socio-cultural forms is neither becoming ‘the same’ as others, or even necessarily comparable, nor is it becoming after a deterministic or directly influenced fashion. In becoming individual in certain sociocultural milieux, energy, agency, intention and interpretation remain the property of the individual, self-conscious subject.

This seems often to be overlooked or negated in anthropological writings, where a system of forms is foregrounded to the almost total

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