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

INTERPRETATION

become individual in the context of ‘cultural patterns’: under the guidance of the historically created systems of meaning ‘in terms of which we give form, order, point and direction to our lives’ (1973:52). Thought thus represents an ‘intentional manipulation of cultural forms’, of systems of symbols of collective possession, public authority and social exchange.The symbolic logic and the formal conceptual structuring may not be explicit, but they are socially established, sustained and legitimized.

They are, moreover, ‘out in the world’ (1983:151); tied to concrete social events and occasions, thought processes are publicly enacted and expressive of common social worlds. Giving meaning to behaviour is not something which happens in private, in short, in insular individual heads, but rather something dependent on an exchange of common symbols whose ‘natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square’ (1973:45). Hence, outdoor activities such as ploughing or peddling are as good examples of ‘individual thought’ as are closet experiences such as wishing or regretting, while cognition, imagination, emotion, motivation, perception, memory and so on, are directly social affairs.

In Geertz’s adumbrating of ‘an outdoor psychology’ (1983:151), then, culture (as systems of historically transmitted symbols) is constitutive of mind, while individual experience and memory of the social world are both powerfully structured by deeply internalized cultural conceptions and supported by cultural institutions. Social life entails a public traffic in significant cultural symbols; individual consciousness comes about via the co-embodying of a world under the auspices of a common system of symbols: ‘I think’ via ‘we name’ (cf. Percy 1958:640). Thus, while flagging Suzanne Langer’s phrase that ‘we live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making’ (1964:126), and seeming to adopt a Nietzschean (interpretivist—perspectivist) stance, Geertz concludes that the webs of significance we weave, the meanings we live by, achieve a form and actualization only in a public and communal way. There can be no private (individual, unique) symbolizations for mind is transactional: formed and realized only through participation in cultures’ symbolic systems of interpretation; while different ‘individual’ minds within the culture are in fact neither opaque nor impenetrable to one another, for they think in terms of the same shared beliefs and values, and operate the same interpretive procedures for adjudicating reality. To construe a system of cultural symbols, in sum, is also to accrue its individual members’ subjectivities (cf. Frake 1964).

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INTERPRETATION

Anti-Geertzian interpretation

An ‘outdoor psychology’ which is ‘out in the world’—for all its apparent expansiveness and openness—turns out to be rather a confining metaphorization. It appears to deny any inner, private life and language which is not readily accessible to others who employ (are employed by) the same cultural system of formal symbolic signification.At one and the same time, Geertz appears to champion a humanistic appreciation of the human condition and the anthropological project: ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’, whose analysis is ‘not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (Geertz 1973:5); but then he seems to fall foul of a most restrictive determinism: ‘culture is best seen as …a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”)—for the governing of behavior’, and it is the ‘agency’ of these mechanisms which is responsible for reducing the breadth and indeterminateness of the individual’s inherent capacity to live thousands of lives to the specificity and narrowness of his actual accomplishment in living one life (Geertz 1973:44–5).

In short, the interpreting—imagining, constructing, writing—which Geertz foresees is intra-paradigmatic: contained within a certain encompassing, collective, public and shared cultural context. Initially, he appears to follow Langer’s lead when she explains that ‘at the center of human experience, then, there is always the activity of imagining reality, conceiving the structure of it through words, images, or other symbols’ (1964:128). But for Langer, this places the imagination at the source of all human insight, reason, dream, religion and general observation: the greatest force acting on our feelings, and bigger than the stimuli surrounding us. Not only, therefore, does imagination make our human worlds, framing, supporting and guiding our thinking, it also ‘gives each of us a separate world, and a separate consciousness’ (1964:103). For Geertz, however, little leeway is left between the cultural patternings ‘of’ and ‘for’ social practice. Ultimately, Geertz would appear to sign up to a Saussurean—Durkheimian thesis wherein the varieties of individual interpretive paroles simply depend and derive from an enabling collective langue. Particular interpretive—linguistic performances are here prefigured by a structure of rules and possible relations, by a set of representations collectives, so that individual expressions within a socio-cultural milieu add up, at any one time, to a total and autonomous synchronic system of related parts, and so that individual consciousness is a manifestation, temporary, episodic and epiphenomenal, of a conscience collective.

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INTERPRETATION

Post-Geertzian interpretation

Geertz’s part in the refocusing of anthropological interest from the measuring of social structure to the interpretation of meaning, and in the re-reckoning of the anthropological enterprise as ‘fictional writing’, has been found liberating and inspiring (cf. Myerhoff 1974, 1978; Cohen 1987; Rapport 1994a). Ultimately, however, and despite his Nietzschean (and Weberian) borrowings, Geertz can sound conventionally Durkheimian (and structuralist). For, like other well-known exponents of a symbolic anthropology which came to focus centrally on the meanings with which human beings invested their worlds (e.g. Schneider 1968; Sahlins 1976), he saw these meanings as amounting to a collectively held, coherent and singular system; this might be abstracted from individual sayings and doings as if it were sui generis and autonomous.

But this is unsubtle. Such an abstraction belies the actual, everyday work of interpretation which anthropologists witness in their individual informants—its complexity and agency—and the radical diversities that issue forth (cf. Keesing 1987a). If systems of symbols are ‘vehicles for conceptions’, as Geertz puts it, then the systems of meaning which they give onto will necessarily be individual and highly diverse (cf. Cohen 1985). More precisely, a system of symbols in common usage is possessed of an inherent duality: a common surface and a private base, in Steiner’s phrasing (1975:173). Beneath the publicly consensual symbols which label social life, there lies the individual consciousness which is responsible for animating those cultural symbols with meaning. Here are pan-human potentialities, capacities and processes, which begin at birth (if not before) and continue throughout life, by whose works ‘the world’ (cultural categories, images, stories and language; people, interactions, social selves and things) becomes endowed, invested, infused, with personal emotion, fantasy and affect. It is these psychological processes of sense-making, of interpretation, which are finally responsible for shaping and constituting human life and society, for creating and recreating culture as a meaningful phenomenon in the life of each individual; thus are systems of symbols ever made subjectively, personally, individually meaningful. As Chodorow states (1994:4):

People personally animate and tint, emotionally and through fantasy, the cultural, linguistic, interpersonal, cognitive and embodied worlds we experience, creating and interpreting the external world in ways that resonate with their internal world, preoccupations, fantasies and sense of self and other.

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IRONY

Rather than according the interpretation of symbolic realities a primarily collective and cultural ontology à la Geertz (et al.), then, and rather than conceiving of individuals being inscribed into pre-given cultural texts, a notion of ‘the interpretation of cultures’ might be seen to give onto individual world-views. For, in using the various symbol systems which a culture places at their disposal as tools of their writing, individuals personalize them—and hence make of the symbol-systems something ‘of and for’ themselves. Individuals consume cultural symbolic forms in the construction of their own systems of meaning, and in terms of their unique biographies and personal histories of intrapsychic strategies and practices. The contexts in which individuals fashion, speak and live their world-views may be seen to be ontologically internal to themselves (cf. Rapport 1995).

For Nietzsche, for individuals to ‘find their own words’ in the language of the community was an ‘aesthetic’ experience; it was a way of coming to terms with the intrinsic nature of the human condition (as meaningless and absurd beyond acts of interpretation and outwith the aesthetic appreciation of beauty), and also a source of dignity. It represented both an individual’s particular responsibility to heror himself and the foundation of a general human power. For, to interpret was to become who we were; and to change how we interpreted was to change who we were: to reconstitute our worlds and ourselves. Human history was the history of successive metaphors, Nietzsche suggested, and the important dividing line was not between falsehood and truth but between old and new interpretations of ‘falsehood’ and ‘truth’.

There was nothing more powerful or important than ongoing interpretations, in sum, because these acts demonstrated that the notion of a single ‘true’ world was a fable; all human life was a construct of the particular individual employment of symbolic systems.

See also: Classification, Consciousness, Discourse, Thick

Description, World-View

IRONY

Besides its literary meaning, of certain figures of speech (antiphrasis, litotes, meiosis) where there is an inconsistency or contradiction between what is said and what is meant or apparent, irony can be understood to represent a certain cognitive detachment from the world as is or seems, and an imagining of its infinite possible otherness.

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IRONY

Nietzsche famously referred to this ironic imagining as a ‘revaluation of all values’, and he counselled its ongoing practice as the means of humankind’s continuous ‘coming-to-itself’.

Understandings of irony

Irony may be defined (ironically) as: ‘never having to say you really mean it’ (Austin-Smith: 1990:51–2), or never accepting that words mean only what they appear to say Treated more broadly, irony means being at home ‘in a world without guarantees’—without an Archimedean point of reference or transcendental truth—and prepared to explore ‘the tense truth of ambiguity’ (Chambers 1994a:98). Its definition may be said to include an ontological premise that human beings are never cognitively imprisoned by pre-ordained and pre-determining schemata of cultural classification and social structuration. They can everywhere appreciate the malleability and the mutability of social rules and realities, and the contingency and ambiguity of cultural truths. Hence, people always practise a certain detachment from the world-as-is for the purpose of considering alternatives. In unmasking the world as an ambiguous fiction, irony plays with the possibility of limitless alterity. Here is an ability and a practice, enduring and ubiquitous, by which people loose themselves from the security of what is or appears to be, and creatively explore what might be. Here is a process by which human beings render even the most cherished of their values, beliefs and desires open to question, parody and replacement. However momentary the impulse, irony represents an endemic reaction against ‘final vocabularies’ (Rorty 1992:88), a celebration of the fictive nature of all such human inheritances and the imaging of other worlds.

Such a broad understanding is controversial, and arguments have certainly been made for the ironical stance or attitude’s being historically and culturally specific. Ortega y Gasset (1956), for instance, suggests that the ability to become detached from the immediacy of the world and treat it ironically is a manifestation of the technological revolution in human civilization. Entering an intense, inner world in which ideas are formed which are then returned to the world as a blueprint for its reconstruction represents a concentration which humankind has created for itself painfully and slowly.The growth of irony has followed a growth in science, and the freedom not to be obliged inexorably to concern oneself with reacting to things as they are but temporarily to ignore the latter in favour of a created self and a plan of action. In short, irony as that detachment by which the world becomes anthropomorphized, a reflection and realization of human ideas, is a technological by-product.

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