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

INTERACTION

appreciation of the dialectical interdependence between the institutionalism of interactional routine and the diversity of individual purpose.

For instance, in an influential treatise, The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckmann described conversation as a most important vehicle by which the contours of a homogeneous social reality are maintained and developed; by way of conversation individuals are integrated within a set of social practices, and a common cultural worldview is objectified and crystallized (1966:140). This is brought about by sharing in what Brown and Levinson (1978:256) dub a cultures ‘interactional systematics’. As elaborated upon by Gumperz and Tannen (1979:307–22), partaking in a successful interaction is a matter of a subtle and complex coordination of conversational elements, such as: turn-taking, direction of gaze, establishment of verbal rhythm, cooperation to produce identifiable lines of thematic progression, orderly sequencing, and recognition of and assistance in formulaic routines. Participants in an interaction are called upon to identify familiar and conventional types of activity and styles of speech which ‘frame’ the words they hear and the behaviours they observe so that they are able to define habitual and shared ‘speech-situations’. Finally, a combination of an understanding of semantic content and an appreciation of cues of contextualization within such formulaic routines enable the signalling and interpretation of shared meaning.

In short, the shared rules of conversational conduct are seen to entail common techniques of interpretation, and a constellation of features of conversational form are seen as directing fellow interactants into interpreting one another’s words in the same way. Successful interaction is a manifestation (a resultant and a constituent) of an ongoing community born out of common expectations concerning conventionalized co-occurrence between potentialities of words’ semantic content and aspects of discourses’ surface style.The interaction becomes a joint activity, whose performance replicates part of the coherent and ‘corporate’ structures of the societies and cultures to which the individual participants belong. As Hymes sums up, shared rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech represent the primary determination by a community of the competence and belonging of its members (1972:54–8; also cf. Garfinkel 1967:11; Schegloff 1972:350).

Symbolic interactionism

However, to appreciate the consciousness of individual participants as something distinct from the various structures of socio-cultural exchange

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in which they partake is to understand interaction as entailing both more and less than the above portrayal. More individual creativity may go into its negotiation, and less commonality or sharing be occasioned by its successful maintenance.

As Hymes would also recognize, then, what counts as a ‘communicative event’ is not something that can be predicted or even easily identified, for its status ‘is entirely a question of [its] construal by a receiver’ (1973a:22–6).To identify a successful interaction and its sociocultural ramifications—even to identify what passes for an ‘interaction’ as such—is a subjective judgement, a matter of what Winch has called ‘internal relations’ within a system of ideas or world-view (1970:107). It is rash to extrapolate, therefore, from the seemingly orderly nature of an interaction between individuals, and the superficial systematics in which they partake, to the character and extent of a culture or society of sharing in which they are members.

This is the starting-point of Herbert Blumer’s work (1969, 1972), and the furthering of an appreciation of ‘symbolic interactionism’ which had its roots in the thinking of the social theorist G.H.Mead. It is wrong, Blumer begins, to consider interaction as a medium through which socio-cultural determinants move so as to constitute the forms and contents of human behaviour; interaction is between individual actors, not factors imputed to them, and individuals’ actions are a consequence of their interpretations of situations and the meanings that things hold for them, rather than an expression of socio-cultural forces. Lines of action are built up step by step, Blumer suggests, by a process of ‘selfindication’ or self-communication whereby people, relations, events, objects and situations are defined according to their possible significance to the individual concerned. Individuals communicate with themselves in this way continuously, indicating things to themselves, making sense, dealing with what they note, and moulding their behaviours. ‘Instead of the individual being surrounded by an environment of pre-existing objects which play on him and call forth his behavior, the proper picture is that he constructs his objects on the basis of his on-going activity’ (Blumer 1972:182). Importantly, the process of self-indication stands over and against so-called external forces of the make-up of society and culture. Through self-designation and self-interaction, individuals manifest how they are pro-active, not passive or merely reactive: the nature of the interactions with others in which they partake consists of the meanings that they have for the individuals for whom they are objects of consciousness.

The picture of society, culture or community which emerges is neither of systems nor integrations but of aggregations of variable

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numbers of jointly occurring actions, of variable linkage, all pursued for their individual participants’ interests, not a system’s requirements. Society entails ongoing negotiation between individuals engaged in their own multitudinous activities and lines of action. Its study is the story of many individual lives recurrently intersecting in symbolic routines which exhibit shared forms and endlessly variable individual meanings. ‘Interaction’ conveys the sense in which actions carried on by, and belonging to, an aggregation of individuals come to be fitted together into a developing matrix or routine (cf. Watson and Watson-Franke 1985:205–6; also Rapport 1997a:12–29).

Socio-cultural life, Blumer says, is individuals interacting with one another. To the extent that there is joint action, group action or ‘interaction’, then, this can be seen as an interlinkage of individuals’ separate acts, an articulation, a coming together, that is new in each instance. Initially, individuals coming-together in interaction do not know what to expect from others, so they test inferences and gradually identify one another as beings who behave according to certain rules. Interaction thereby becomes a form of mutual typification. From a routinization of this process of mutuality, of equivalent structures of individual interpretation, socio-cultural structures emerge.The process is ongoing, however, and constantly revised. It is often also precarious, for the negotiated norms of interaction depend on the reciprocal but distinct interpretations of the participants; the routines are adhered to only as long as they are separately felt to be meaningful or useful, or at least better keeping to than not.

In short, the process of mutual individual self-indication or interpretation, giving onto the construction of a socio-cultural reality of common structures of behaviour is never to be taken for granted (cf. Dreitzel 1970). Even while many instances of interaction will occasion a repetition of forms of coming together which have been negotiated in, and recalled from, the past, they still call for the work of individual management and interpretation; they are maintained because they continue to be worked by—and work for—the individuals involved. Socio-cultural structures and institutions do not work themselves.

It is important to emphasize this point. Routine interactions do not possess or assume an independent power, logic or life-force; nothing emerges from them which is greater than or distinct from the sum of the individual energies of which they are made up. Routine interactions are like inert moulds or masks in which, and behind which, individual meanings are made and interests pursued, and it is wrong to talk as if these interactions worked themselves, or had requirements; they are rather worked, serving as vehicles for individual users. Moreover, they

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may be seen to be worked, not as a machine which is switched on and off for the performing of a set task, but more as a piece of music which is jointly interpreted by an ensemble of instrumentalists. Different noises come together, different parts are played in the whole, different senses are made of the whole. The interaction, in short, does different jobs for different participants. It may be incumbent upon each to know and employ certain routine, even standardized, forms (musical, behavioural) in order to enter into the exchange, but these serve a diversity of ends; they are not a constraint. In the poet Shelley’s formulation (1954:281): ‘a single word, even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought’.

Focusing more precisely on the nature of linguistic interaction for a moment, one can say that a shared language provides a fund of forms and cases which individuals adapt to their communicational requirements. However, past linguistic practice does not determine present communicational possibilities, and so interaction eventuates in varied and inconsistent usage, with the repetition of words and syntax regardable as only partial replication; the language becomes home to polythetic readings without end. In contrast to portrayals of structural determinacy, then, a linguistic grammar should be seen as neither overwhelming nor sacrosanct. Rules of grammar represent only very approximate and unstable summaries of past regularities, and aggregations of individual interactants need not assume any regimented sameness in their linguistic practices or competencies (cf. Steiner 1975:204–5). Individuals continuously improvise, innovate and make meaning as best they can, and notions of linguistic predetermination make little sense in relation to their construings of acts of communication. Interaction represents a structure of exchange which individuals by and large make up, without convener or referee, as they go along (cf. Harris 1981).

Individuals do not engage in routine interactions willy-nilly. Rather, these linguistic and behavioural forms are available for implementation by those who choose to adopt them as instruments towards their own diverse ends. And while it is the case that not all interactions are equally freely entered into or followed through, still they do not run by themselves or for themselves, or in a realm separate from individual consciousness and will; interactional routines cannot force participants’ compliance and, even when adopted, cannot determine individual users’ states of mind.

Finally, the multitude of routine interactions under way in a sociocultural milieu (constituting a milieu of greater or lesser density of networks of relations between people) should not be seen to eventuate in one, integrated, working system. Society and culture can be thought

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of as funds of interactional forms (linguistic and behavioural) from which individuals concoct their personal relations. But the way some individuals develop routine relations with one another need in no way constrain those same individuals in their negotiations with others. Far from operating together in equilibrium or integration, one routine may oppose another—in time, in style, in consequence—or have tangential relations or none at all. Far from enactants of deterministic socio-cultural structures and members of singularly integrative communities, individual interactants can be depicted as negotiators of routine exchanges whose most vibrant and significant communities may ultimately remain private to themselves: it is within the boundaries of their selves that their most significant truths are construed and reside. In sum, socio-cultural milieux amount at one and the same time to arenas in which there is an ongoing exchange of shared forms and a continuous construction of individual worlds of meaning.

Ego-syntonism

The question remains of how common interactional forms are able to serve the interests of a diversity of individual users, and here, the phenomenon of ego-syntonism, as sketched by Devereux (1978:126), provides significant pointers:

[B]oth organized and spontaneous social movements and processes are possible not because all individuals participating in them are identically (and sociologistically) motivated, but because a variety of authentically subjective motives may seek and find an Ego-syntonic outlet in the same type of collective activity.

Ego-syntonism is a process whereby a number of discrete consciousnesses come harmonically to interact one with another.

A great advance in the appreciation of the processes of sociation, of interaction and socio-cultural participation, Devereux felt, would be to recognize that the collective or joint act (the family meal, the clan ritual, the regional market, the national war) should not be construed in terms of either a homogeneous set of individual experiences or a single massive, social one. Instead, the collective act represented the embodiment of an institutional medium, a channel, an occasion, afforded by ‘society’ or ‘culture’ through which was achieved the public actualization, ratification and gratification (in different ways and to different extents) of any number of individual meanings and motivations

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