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

INDIVIDUALITY

exclusion of their individual usage (creation, animation, interpretation, re-formation). Indeed, the intrinsic dichotomy between the individual and the world is often eschewed as a peculiarity of ‘Western’ sociocultural milieux, and hence as methodologically and analytically inapplicable. This is indefensible. At best it confuses individuality with individualism; and while the latter might be said to describe a particular socio-cultural form of behaviour (the pursuit of self-distinguishment), the former concerns a condition which is a human universal: by virtue of a unique consciousness, each of us perforce engages with the world as other and is possessed of distinct perspectives upon it. Such individuality remains consequential whether or not individual consciousness is an item of collective discourse, whether or not individual reflection is publicly eschewed, and whether or not individual distinctiveness is something which the institutionalization of a fund of common behaviours does its utmost to obviate. No process of socialization or enculturation overcomes the separateness of the individual body and brain, the phenomenology of the ideating, acting, breathing, eating, mating, dying, birthing subject. Individuals experience and interpret (and interpret themselves interpreting) and therefore they are.

Treating individual distinction as a matter of socio-cultural discourse, however, has allowed much anthropology to pass over individual agency and responsibility even where diversity is admitted into the analysis. For the diversity now becomes that of opposed social-structural interests, of competing status groups, of contradictory mores, of situational roles, of circumstantial norms, of a disequilibriated social organization, of a complex system of values and beliefs, of a social system in change. It is collective socio-cultural systems which become the sources and guarantors of meaning, and socio-cultural forces to which individual ‘members’ perforce respond and of which their behaviour is an expression. That is, individual distinction and diversity disappear as individuals are decentred from analysis, dissolved into various systems of convention which are said to be operating through them, constituting their beings.

In short, individuals become collective constructs. Psyches become defined and realized by society: universes of discourse reflecting social positions (cf. Berger 1970:375). Selfhood becomes allocated from sociocultural repertoires for use in certain collectively structured worlds of experience: pegs on which items of collaborative manufacture can be hung for a time (cf. Goffman 1978:245). Roles played become allotted and determined by society, representing bundles of obligatory activity (cf. Goffman 1972:76–7). Even imaginative explorations become emanations of certain pre-given and pre-structured life-worlds of

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socialization (cf. Psathas 1973:8–9): it is not individuals who think through their fantasies, then, but fantasies which think through them, unbeknownst and outwith their control (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1969b:20). In short, diversity is socialized and enculturated, and thereby sanitized; it is not the individuals who are diverse so much as the working parts of the complex social systems of which they are components and conduits. Their diversity is itself governed and part of a replicated pattern. In fact their diversity becomes an absence of diversity, of individual difference, and a triumph of cultural order. For culture, on this view, is essentially a set of ‘control mechanisms’, as Geertz would have it (1983:44–5): symbolic devices—plans, recipes, rules and instructions—which act like computer programs, reducing the breadth and indeterminateness of individuals’ potential lives to the specificity and narrowness of their actual ones (cf. Gellner 1995a:50).

Such modelling is existentially fallacious; it offers only a pale pretence at depicting the ambiguities inherent in human life and the complexities of individual interactions in socio-cultural milieux. Nor is it sufficient to say, as some apologists are wont, that social-scientific theorization is committed to holistic explanation and so is bound to seem out of place and ‘vulgar’ in the context of the individual and particular case (cf. Culler 1981:16). Because it is surely from individuals that any comprehension of socio-cultural milieux must proceed, since it is they who provide what A.J.Ayer dubbed ‘final testimony’ to the existence of a common socio-cultural world (1968:256–7): it is they who remain the ‘anthropological concrete’ (Auge 1995:20).

Far from entities with mechanisms and dynamics operating in their own right, what is socio-culturally institutional and systemic is made up of a complex and continuous interlinkage of individual actions, deriving in turn from how individuals define and decide to meet the situations in which they find themselves. The large-scale system of cooperation or conflict (the community, kinship group, class-uprising, political confederation, or religious sect) may be broken down into smaller-scale interactions between interpreting individuals in any number of settings and situations. Even if, in extremis, the socio-cultural milieu has come to be seen locally as a machine, a super-organism with a separate existence, then this state of affairs should be described as the ongoing construction of the individuals who serve it. It is they who remain responsible for this ‘phantasy’ of groupness, as Laing depicts it (1968:81), and for the ‘bad faith’ (Sartre) which is ever necessary for its maintenance.

To ‘decolonize’ the individual human subject from its common anthropological representations, in short, is to liberate it both from overdetermining cultural conditions and overweening social

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institutions (discourse, language-game, collective representation, social relationship, habitus, praxis), and from their holistic and hegemonically minded social-scientific commentators. Anthropological analysis should retain respect for individual cognitive processes and, to this end, apprehend that ambiguous interface between aggregation and individuality. It should take into account both the individual agency which brings socio-cultural milieux to life and also the common socio-cultural forms and practices by which individuals coordinate their activities and world-views within these milieux. In this way, an anthropological appreciation might be reached of socio-cultural milieux as encompassing and composed of individual difference, indeed, in a significant way constituted by it: by self-conscious individuals making an ongoing diversity of meaningful worlds.

See also: Agent and Agency, Consciousness, Individualism,

Methodological Individualism and Holism, World-View

INTERACTION

Collective behaviour, as Anthony Cohen puts it (1994:7), is a triumph; far from something mechanical it should be understood as the comingtogether for particular purposes of a greater or lesser number of individuals, for shorter or longer periods of time, in more or less formalized and institutionalized fashions. Above all, it should be understood as an aggregative rather than an integrative phenomenon. Collective behaviour entails the meeting of individuals but not their elision, their being subsumed within some super-organism: a group mind, a collective conscience, a reified society, community or culture.

Interaction as synthetic

How precisely is collectivity possible? This was a question Simmel posed himself (1971), and the answer he suggested entailed an appreciation of interaction, its moments, situations and processes. Interaction represented a ‘synthesizing phenomenon’ whereby individual and often private purposes intersected with public institutions in a routine, negotiated fashion. This meeting then gave onto, and itself embodied, structures of social exchange and cultural practice held in common; through interaction, individuals created and maintained societies and cultures.

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For something to be seen to exist, Simmel elaborated, contrast must be construed between it and other things distinct from, or opposed to, it; oppositional entities, processes and tendencies are, thus, ultimately complementary because a constitutive force inheres in the tension between them. In the social realm, we find this fundamental constitutive dualism in the opposition between individuals as members of societies and cultures and the routine socio-cultural behaviours, structures and institutions by which such membership is formalized. One can envisage the shared worlds of society and culture as a collection of common symbolic forms: languages; scientific, educational, historical and economic concepts; artistic, moral, religious and legal precepts. In interaction with one another, individuals come together and exchange these common forms, maintaining them in their usage. However, their usage is a personal and subjective one. As they employ or ‘consume’ the symbolic forms, so they personalize them; they incorporate them into their individual lives, deploy them in the development of a subjective world-view. Here are commonalities of interaction engaged in for the pursuit and fulfilment of personal, diverse and possibly contradictory individual ends. And the one feature or aspect is married inexorably to the other. Individuals express and realize their idiosyncrasies because they engage in routine social interactions, and routine interactions continue to take place between members of societies and cultures because of continuing individual idiosyncrasies. The social exchange is constituted by this inherent duality.

In any socio-cultural phenomenon, in short, purposes and institutions, meanings and forms, are distinct, opposed but intimately related. Indeed, they can be seen to constitute one reality. Interaction entails the comingtogether of common forms and diverse meanings or contents. Divorced from their socio-cultural form, individual meanings would not achieve public expression, while emptied of content, separated from individual goals, motives, purposes and interests, thoughts and feelings, the languages of common forms would fall into desuetude. Hence, the relationship between form and meaning is one of interdependence and multifactoriality; individuals depend upon these common socio-cultural artefacts in order publicly to express themselves, while the vitality of the forms depends on individuals with meanings they endemically want to express through them. Forms are the shared vehicles by which individuals and their meanings come together; they represent a mode of exchange and of continuing association.

At one and the same time, then, interaction is routine and something shared—something owned together by those individuals who partook of its regular exchange—and yet something multiple and diverse. It

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represents at once something institutional and, in its symbolic regimen, possibly constricting of free expression, and also a vehicle of idiosyncrasy, of creative expression and escape.This was the source of beauty in social interaction, and also its potential drama, Simmel felt: the tension between the surface agreements of the exchange, the orderly interactional form precisely structured, painstakingly developed, and carefully maintained between members, and the unique visions, the limitless avenues of thought that were motivating and animating the exchange, causing its regular re-occurrence, but dancing invisibly around its expression. The ambiguity of everyday interaction is translated into both an uncertainty and a release.

Anthropology and interactionism

Such thoughts are not strange to socio-cultural anthropology. A number of years ago (1961), David Pocock was advising that society is a dialectical process between principles making for aggregation and principles making for individuation, and urging that their interaction be the object of anthropological study (1961:103, 114). Indeed, a century of ethnographic exploration since Simmel wrote makes the latter’s portrayal seem in some respects truistic and anthropologically unremarkable.

However, there is the question of emphasis, and the extent to which the implications of a viewing of society as symbolic interaction—that the collective structures of social reality can only be fully grasped through an appreciation of the way they are personalized in individual lives; that the objectification of cultural objects is only to be understood in terms of the subjective psychic processes of the individuals who use them in interaction, the intentions which they bring to that usage and the experiences they construe—are carried into practice. All too often, it seems, following Durkheim, Simmelian insights are deemed inapposite: eschewed as social psychology, or decried as psychologisms. That is, tending to privilege the abstraction of a system of forms to the exclusion of their individual negotiation and usage, anthropology has approached the regularities of social interaction as if they pertained to a reality external to the individuals responsible for constituting and reconstituting it, which could satisfactorily be described in their absence. Thus, various kinds of interactional determinism have been arrived at— structures of exchange responsible for formulating the thinking of individual members—while little or no account has been taken of the consciousness of those involved: of their ability to reflect on their own behaviour, make choices and construct meaning. It is rare to find a full

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