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

IRONY

Oppenheimer (1989), meanwhile, attaches an ironic consciousness to certain literary forms. Irony was present in Socratic dialogue, then, and also in the poetics of Classical Rome but thereafter, through some seven centuries of the Dark Ages, it disappeared. Only with the rise of the sonnet in a twelfth-century Rome was there an ironic renaissance. The sonnet might be described, therefore, as the lyric of ‘personality’ and the ‘private soul’ for with its invention came a new way for people to think as and about themselves. Irony, in short, is a matter of that introspection and self-consciousness which the possible silent reading of the sonnet literary form made fashionable, conventional, esteemed, and hence possible.

Giddens (1990), however, makes an argument that only modernity— that recent sociological condition characterized by capitalism, industrialism, cosmopolitanism and the massification of complex society—is characterized by an ironic detachment. Indeed, the presumption of this reflexivity (including our sociological reflection upon our reflexivity) is an intrinsic part of modern social practice. We constantly examine and reform our practices in the light of incoming information about those practices, which thus alters the character and constitution of the practices we next examine. In short, irony is part- and-parcel of the process of structuration by which modernity reproduces itself and knows itself.

Finally, Appadurai (1991a) sees irony as part of the ‘cultural economy’ of contemporary globalization. The deterritorialization of ideas, images and opportunities brought about by mass communication enables people to lead complex lives more of projection and imagination than enactment or prediction.The balance between habitus and improvisation (Bourdieu 1977) shifts, such that fantasy becomes a social practice in even the meanest, poorest and harshest of lives, and conventional cultural reproduction succeeds only by conscious design and political will. People no longer view their existence as a mere outcome of the givenness of things, in short, but as an ‘ironic compromise between what they [can] imagine and what social life will permit’ (Appadurai 1991a:199).

Notwithstanding the above, it can convincingly be argued that the cognitive displacement and detachment of irony is a universal human trait, capacity and cognitive resort. As John Berger sums up the case (1994): ‘[T]he human condition actually is more or less a constant: always in face of the same mysteries, the same dilemmas, the same temptation to despair, and always armed unexpectedly with the same energy.’ Or, in more strictly anthropological vein: ‘[T]here were never any innocent, unconscious savages, living in a time of unreflective and

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instinctive harmony. We human beings are all and always sophisticated, conscious, capable of laughter at our own institutions’ (Victor Turner, in Ashley 1990:xix). Always and everywhere one finds ‘individuals engaged in the creative exploration of culture’ (Goody 1977:20), intellectually distancing themselves from the existing conceptual universe and looking at it askance. Any notion of a binary divide between those (intellectual individuals, times and places) with irony and those without, Goody concludes, is a nonsense (cf. Shweder 1991a:14).

An extended endorsement of this position is provided by Handler and Segal’s (1990) anthropological examination of the writings of Jane Austen. Writing in and of a time and society (early-nineteenth-century England) where irony might seem a far cry from a stable, unambiguous, axiomatic and largely conventional way of life, Austen shows no ironic ‘reticence’. Readily ironizing any claims of a homogeneous, integrated or bounded socio-cultural system to give onto a singular or unitary truth, she offers her readers an appreciation of the normative, the institutional and the principled in culture (here, the implicit cultural principles of genteel English society of marriage, courtship, rank and gender) as symbolic forms always subject to, and needful of, creative interpretation, and always affording independent manipulation and individual re-rendering. Handler and Segal call this ‘alter-cultural action’. Clearly, for Austen, the schemata of cultural classification and social structuration, being arbitrary, and being recognized to be arbitrary, should be seen less to regulate conduct or ensure the unconscious reproduction of an established order than to give communicative resource, significance and value to what Handler and Segal dub her characters’ ‘serious social play’. Rather than norms which are taken literally, conventional etiquette and propriety become matters for meta-communicative comment and analysis; and hence come to be displaced in the process of individual constructions of situational sociocultural order.

The writings of Jane Austen, Handler and Segal conclude, are a celebration of the ‘fiction of culture’, and of individuals’ creative potential for alter-cultural world-making: of an enduring human disposition to render all socio-cultural norms ultimately contingent. Moreover, what is true for Austen’s language can be argued as true for language as such: it is ‘of its very nature, an ironic mode’ (Martin 1983:415), imbued with the multiple ironies of there being no certain or necessary accordance between the meanings of different individuals, or between those and the way the world is. Hence, what is true for Austen’s age is true for all times.

Hutcheon notes (1994:9) that the historical claim to be an ‘age of irony’ is a repeated one, but perhaps equally or more true is its denial; for

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the socio-cultural milieux in which the cognitive freedom (scepticism, creativity, idiosyncrasy) which irony flags is welcomed (the will and the practice to complexify, multiply and call into question socio-cultural realities) are at least balanced by a blinkered absolutism or fundamentalism in which the substance of inherited verities alone is validated. But whether it is celebrated or negated on the level of public convention, irony exists as a cognitive proclivity and practice, embodying a certain imaginative movement from the world(s) as is, a certain reflection upon the latter and differentiation from it.

Non-ironic displacements

Not all such cognitive movement, reflection and differentiation need be identified as ironic as such, however. Irony amounts to cognitive movement as an endemic mode of being; it is a continuous process to treat the world ironically because every truth reached is recognized to be contingent and perspectival, and bound to be left behind in a progression of meaning which is without limit. Irony thus represents something of a royal road to recognizing infinite regress and contingency: a necessarily limitless revaluation of values. Certain other cognitions partake of part of this movement, then, but not its habituation. It might, however, be worth briefly referring to these so as further to isolate the ironic mode.

Conversion can be said to entail a cognitive shift or move such that one looks back at a position from which one has now become displaced— from which one has displaced oneself—due to an original sense of ‘meaning-deficit’ in one’s life and a need for revitalization (Fernandez 1995:22). This accords with the philosopher Kierkegaard’s understanding of religiosity per se. As he explains, religious identity derives from believing something which is deeply offensive to reasoning, for it is the very difficulty of belief which provides its reward: the believer feels alive and singularly inspirited in ways which believing something currently plausible could not achieve. The essence of religious belief, for Kierkegaard, is not being persuaded by the truth of a doctrine, but becoming committed to a position which is inherently absurd, which ‘gives offence’ to those criteria of truth which existed prior to the conversion.

This also applies to Gellner’s understanding of cultural or ethnic belonging. As he succinctly puts it, a culture is a collectivity united in a belief: ‘[m]ore particularly, a collectivity united in a false belief is a culture’ (1995b:6). Truths, after all, are universal and available to all; but errors are culture-specific and define a continuity of faith and its believers. Hence, non-facts, the currently unproven or unprovable, tend

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to become badges of community and of loyalty. ‘Assent to an absurdity identifies an intellectual rite de passage, a gateway to the community defined by that commitment to that conviction’ (Gellner 1995b:6).

Then again, this applies to various theorists who see consciousness—the coming to a consciousness of oneself—as something akin to a conversion experience.These theories have a Freudian tinge (‘self-consciousness begins in frustration’) inasmuch as they posit selfhood as deriving from a certain point in the maturation process when the individual achieves satisfaction only by repressing what he or she knows to be true. For Brodsky, then, the origin of consciousness is to be found in childhood lying (cited in Bruner and Weisser 1991:132). Giving a deliberately false self-report, distancing himself from what he knows presently to be the truth, the child first appreciates his power to change the world and become himself as the source of its perceptions. Being oneself is, to an extent, then living one’s lies. From Ortega y Gasset (1956) we hear something similar: ‘Man is a sort of novelist of himself who conceives the fanciful figure of a personage with its unreal occupations’. The life of the self is then taken up with converting these fictions or lies into a believed-in reality.

As mentioned, the above conversions of identity—religious, cultural and individual—are seen to entail certain cognitive movements and displacements, certain distantiations from what is, but they do not amount to displacement as an ongoing cognitive resort, as a conscious way of being.They do not compass being as an endemic becoming. And yet this seems to be essential to irony; it is a living with displacement, a living in cognitive movement, and a refusing to take any value as final or absolute, as free from revaluation, except the value of revaluation per se.

Holding an ironic attitude towards one’s current final vocabulary, Nietzsche argued, was tantamount to appreciating how the world was as full of final vocabularies as it was of other people. Choices could and should be made between these, as well as there being a recognition of the choice to compose a new vocabulary for oneself ab initio. This ‘ironic’ recognition was a resource which took an individual beyond any one final vocabulary, and indeed, beyond language as such.

From Nietzsche’s prescriptions can be disinterred an anthropological appreciation of the human capacity to transcend present ontologies and epistemologies, present appearances, and insist on the reality of an individual’s own being and becoming. Irony is part-and-parcel of this individual force which ‘insists on itself’ and proceeds continually to create and to live its own truth.

See also: Consciousness, Interpretation, Movement, World-View

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KINSHIP

KINSHIP

Studies in kinship, and the related institutions of marriage and the family, have until recently been central to anthropological investigation and debate. As Ladislav Holy remarks (1996:1), ‘if there was a subject which anthropologists could have rightly claimed to be their own, it was kinship’, and thus the problem of handling the topic of kinship crossculturally is the key to understanding the historical development of a large majority of anthropology’s central analytic concepts, theories and methods. Deliberations over the puzzles of kinship and marriage gave rise to the discipline‘s most sophisticated technical and theoretical elaborations, and also its most virulent, ever-present controversies. It was also assumed to be the area of technical expertise, the most demanding of rigour of thought, through which anthropology could best defend its scientific respectability. The issue of kinship became therefore the topic through which the most able minds in the history of anthropology could display their erudition. As a result, kinship was that aspect of social life that became the linchpin for the unfolding of all the grand paradigms of thought within anthropology, whether it be Morgan’s narrative of evolutionism (1871) or Malinowski’s of functionalism (1930), RadcliffeBrown’s of structural-functionalism (1962 [1952]), Lévi-Strauss’s of structuralism (1969a [1949]), or Meillassoux’s of structural-Marxism (1981). As Robin Fox could comment in 1967 (1967:10), ‘kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy or the nude is to art; it is the basic discipline of the subject’. The situation, however, has changed.

Today, anthropologists demonstrate such a decided lack of interest in the topic of kinship that it is tempting to declare it no longer to be a key concept. In 1984, David Schneider advised anthropologists to stop looking for ‘kinship’ which he claimed was but a vacuous and confused domain when applied cross-culturally. As he argues, there has been a drastic problem in the ways in which anthropology has treated the topic that takes us well beyond anthropology to the emergence and growth of the human sciences themselves, and to the modernist project through which they developed. Because kinship studies were the heartbeat of the discipline of anthropology, it is no wonder that ‘kinship’ can be dismantled as the emperor with no clothes, or rather the emperor fully clothed in grand-narrative imaginary dress. All the perils of the modernist stories through which anthropology developed as a field of study are highlighted in those passionate debates about the substance of ‘kinship’. To now ask why kinship was once so predominantly prioritized will take us then to problems in the major presuppositions underlying anthropology’s highly valued analytic constructs of kinship

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