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

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(1978:127–8). The institutional medium or movement may be regularly repeated (weekly church-going) or rarely so (the 1956 Hungarian uprising), and may be revolutionary or conservative in consequence, but what is important is that differently motivated persons can come to perceive in that certain socio-cultural moment or event a suitable outlet for their various gratifications.

The crucial distinction here, for Devereux, is between collective action and the ‘conglomerate’ of individual motives underlying it: between public behaviour and its personal meaning. Certainly, the notion of ego-syntonism would appear a useful instrument for construing relations between the individual and the collective, between the personal and the public (cf. Rapport 1994b). For here is a recognition that joint social events need not be singular in order to be maintained, and need not eventuate in singularity either. Individuals need not be in agreement when they begin to interact, and constant interaction need bring them no closer to a joint or standardized consciousness, or an overcoming of their idiosyncrasies: a great deal of their interaction can go on in a situation of misperception or misinterpretation of one another’s meanings and motivations. As Devereux sums up, quoting the Latin aphorism with approbation: ‘“Si bis faciunt idem, non est idem” (if two people do the same thing, it is not the same thing)’ (1978:125). A variable number of individual actors can come together in a group, form a public collectivity, and at precisely the same time remain apart, maintaining their discrete and diverse individualities. Indeed, in echoes of Simmel, Devereux recognizes how the two are dialectically conjoined; the development of collectivity and individuality takes place through a constitutive tension of opposition.

The key to ego-syntonism is the ambiguity of socio-cultural forms. For the latter to serve as significant synthesizing instruments by which the threads of different individuals’ lives come to be interwoven, they must possess a basic indeterminacy. A language of common forms is the means by which individuals both come together and remain apart. Always mediating between the actions of one individual and the interpretations of another, the ‘friendly ambiguities’ of interaction, as Sapir put it (1956:153), conspire to reinterpret for each the behaviour they observe in terms of ‘those meanings which are relevant to his own life’. The ambiguity of common forms also adds to their inertia. Vague and superficial, they can be inherited intact by different generations and adapted to a variety of settings; they are ready-made formulae always capable of being substantiated and revived by new motivations and moods (cf. Propp 1968:116): their inertia or conservativeness, their usefulness and prevalence, issue from their malleability in use.

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Interaction in Wanet

The paradigmatic form of human interaction, Blumer asserted, is that between two individuals; larger instances of human association are based on this ‘interactional atom’. Not only is the traditional micro-focus of anthropological study the strategic point of entry into a field, then, but the proper grounding of conclusive analysis. A number of well-known works have focused on the dyadic relations between anthropologist and key informant (Dumont 1978; Crapanzano 1980; Shostak 1983), and a number of others have sought to build up an analysis on the basis of small-scale, face-to-face relations between informants which gradually become more inclusive (Briggs 1970; Boissevain 1974; Cohen 1987).

In Diverse World-Views in an English Village (1993a), Rapport attempts to chart the relations between two long-standing neighbours in the English village of Wanet; by basing his analysis largely on interactions between the farmer Doris Harvey and the builder Sid Askrig, he seeks to construct an analysis of the diversity of interpretation and the ambiguity of interaction in a socio-cultural milieu in general. Doris and Sid are found partaking in interaction which is regular and routine and which both regard as appropriate and legitimate. They share, that is, notions of conversational propriety: of turn-taking, of politeness, of the use of space, and so on. Hence, their interaction can be described as a flowing sequence of mutual interpretings and part of a habitual talking-relationship which they maintain between themselves.At the same time, however, the ‘contours of reality’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966) which their interaction maintains and develops are seen to be far from shared or even compatible; Doris and Sid write themselves into often very different worlds. For, they use the conventional devices of expression in different ways. The behaviours they share and exchange prove ambiguous enough for each to impart to them their own meanings, and for each to house them in very different cognitive contexts or world-views.

More generally, the forms of behaviour in common use in Wanet village and beyond could be said to amount to polythetic categories rather than anything singular or common-denominational. While there are many forms of behaviour which people routinely employ in the locale—even regard as special to them in the locale—there are no standard definitions of what these forms mean. Rather, usage is individual, and connected to and expressed within particular relationships. A juxtaposition of these usages reveals a wide range of interpretations with possibly nothing in common other than their formal designation. In short, the forms which many would agree upon as common and proper to Wanet come to be mediated in use by a diversity

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of individual ends, and are the means for achieving satisfaction of a variety of kinds and amounts. Interaction in Wanet appears as both a uniformitizing phenomenon and a primary process in the development of individuality.

Aggregations of perspectives

Routine interaction should not be confused with common understandings or a coming-together of individuals on anything but a superficial level. Interaction represents an aggregation of individuals who meet, initially at least, on the surface of their selves. In this dialectic between commonality and diversity, Simmel’s notion of form versus meaning, or content, as a mutually constituent, co-present dualism of socio-cultural life is a significant conceptualization. Society and culture come to be seen as phenomena wherein, to paraphrase Simmel (1971:24), the vitality of individual meanings attains the reality of common forms. The forms alone do not constitute society, do not determine social order, and severed from content they do not gain meaningful existence. But they do facilitate the imposition of individual world-views. Hence a society or culture can be conceived of as an aggregation of perspectives, possibly highly diverse, expressed and maintained in certain limited and common forms. In complex sociocultural milieux, these forms can be expected to have a particular distribution, some common to certain individuals, relationships, families, neighbourhoods, occupations, statuses, more than others (cf. Bakhtin 1981:293). But over and above what Bakhtin has called the ‘heteroglossia’ of formal usage, the way in which these forms are individually employed is the same; through their employ, people can be seen to be members of communities and living in individual worlds at one and the same time. Indeed, the two states may be inextricably related; people are able to manifest and develop their idiosyncrasies because they engage in habitual social interactions, and interactions exist in commonality because of continuing individual idiosyncrasies.

In any understanding of the systemics of socio-cultural interaction it is this highly complex relationship which must be grasped.To talk about the behavioural forms alone, abstracted from individual usage and context, is to produce something reified and sterile, to assign the forms a misleading metaphysic and reality. The necessary focus is instead on specific interactions where individuals regularly meet and interpret these forms—however manifold and intricate the analysis becomes, and however attractive a hypostatization of forms seems. Equally, to integrate these forms into a tight and objectified socio-cultural pattern is to

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decontextualize the realities of separate situations so as possibly to misrepresent them all. The more vital image is of the complicated and fragmentary: of a socio-cultural fund of forms amounting to a shifting collage of behaviours whose pattern no two members may configure quite alike (cf. Sapir 1956:200–3).

Instead of describing society or culture as mechanisms of encompassment and control, they may be more properly seen as means by which a host of individual world-views come to be expressed and realized. For through the exchange of common cultural forms we can say that members of a society are able to build one another into characters in a multiplicity of different worlds, and influence one another in all manner of indirect, incidental, contingent, contradictory and changeable ways. And a culture comes to be represented not as an entity with a positable, objective significance but as the forms in which subjective worlds develop, interact and are fulfilled and maintained: forms which derive their quickness from individual creativity. It is with individuals’ purposes and their reasons for coming together in interaction that the key to any understanding of the socio-cultural lies.

See also: Code, Discourse, Form and Content, Network

INTERPRETATION

In Nietzsche’s phrasing, human socio-cultural worlds are like art-works, something which can be interpreted—read, written—equally well in innumerable, vastly different and deeply incompatible ways: something with ‘no meaning behind [them], but countless meanings’ (1968: no. 481). Indeed, like an art-work, a world requires interpretation in order to be understood, made livable, mastered, by its inhabitants. These inhabitants may themselves be part of the world, may be making interpretations from situated, interested and partisan perspectives, but nonetheless, it is they who create their world, create themselves and their perspectives, through their interpretations. In this way, human social worlds are worlds of human making, dependent upon human activity and symbolic practice for their existence. Human beings compose the world as they interpret it; and their compositions add to the complexity, multifariousness and indeterminacy of the art-work that then continues to be interpreted—by others, by themselves—in the future.

The form human interpretations take, Nietzsche continues, are various. The books of the philosopher, certainly, but also the various

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habitual practices and modes of life of others. Amidst the profusion of versions and forms there is only one singularity: the continuation of profusion. Interpretations continue to be made because to interpret is to be human; while to make individual interpretations, self-caused and free, and to have these develop and change as one moves through life changing one’s perspectives, is to be an individual human being— likewise self-caused and free.

Nietzsche and anthropology

Nietzschean interpretation has been a major inspiration behind twentieth-century Existentialism, not to mention post-modernism (Nietzsche: ‘there is no immaculate perception’; ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’; ‘truth is a mobile army of metaphors’), and also the philosophy of consciousness (Henri Foçillon: ‘The chief characteristic of the mind is to be constantly describing itself (cited in Edelman 1992:124)); and anthropology did not miss out either. Indeed, Shweder goes so far as to say that the credo of modern anthropology—that society and morality derive from the projection of mental representations onto the universe and their imposition as symbolic forms; that socio-cultural reality is not other than the stories told about it, the narratives in which it is represented—derives from Nietzsche (Shweder 1991b:39; also cf. Thornton 1991, 1992).

The most celebrated Nietzscheanesque title in anthropology is, perhaps, Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Geertz is also content to borrow a Nietzschean tag—froehliche Wissenschaft (joyous wisdom’)—to describe anthropology as a discipline (1986:105). As he elaborates, if human beings make their worlds by making meaningful interpretations of them, then ‘our [anthropological] constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to’ amount to a form of knowledge more akin to that of the literary critic than the cipher clerk (Geertz 1973:9). Anthropological wisdom claims attention not on the basis of capturing exotic facts but of reducing puzzlement: bringing readers in touch with the lives of strangers in other cultures as these people involve themselves in seeking to reduce the puzzlement of their own lives (1973:16).

However, belying its seemingly Nietzschean and Existentialist form, ‘cultural interpretation’ comes to have rather a different understanding for Geertz. For, ‘culture’ Geertz wishes to be seen as ‘an acted symbolic document’ wherein individuals interpret only courtesy of systems of significant symbols in a particular cultural context. Hence, while Geertz admits that ‘becoming human is becoming individual’, he posits that we

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