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

KINSHIP

action. Enxet kinship is about not making those with whom you live angry; it is about being generous. As such the personal quality of a relationship as made manifest through everyday practice is paramount to its classification as kin or not kin, or as a particular type of kin link.

More generally, the ongoing quality of an Amazonian personal relationship (as in the ‘growing’ of a child by a parent and child, the mutual care of brothers, or sisters, or of any other personal relation) may have generative value in a material sense that goes far beyond the minimal possibilities that are endowed through the act of sex (e.g. see McCallum 1989; Gow 1991; Lagrou 1998; Overing 1999). Teaching, feeding, working together tranquilly, all are generative processes pertinent to their personal idiom of kinship. For sure, the personal-kind terms that are here being applied to their nearest and dearest, and to those further afield, are about reproductory possibilities, but it is not ‘reproduction’ in the sense that the anthropologist conceptualized it in traditional kinship theory.To understand their language of reproduction, the anthropologist needs to turn to an anthropology of the emotions through which affect, thought and moral value can be highlighted, and to wed the pragmatics with the metaphysics of using the personal idiom of kinship.

Kinship is alive and well

In fact we can say that the area of kinship is as alive and well as ever in anthropology, in that the personal relationships and activities of parenting and nurturing and the whole process of generating and gendering of bodies into social adulthood hold central attention. Such studies are, however, unrecognizable as pertaining to the kinship theory of yesteryear. A similar reorientation of concentration is as clear in Melanesian studies as in those of Amazonia (e.g. see Strathern 1988; Gillison 1993) where personal relationships are discussed through categories very different from the former ones of prescriptive rule, roles and statuses, and social structure. Here instead, as among Amazonianists, talk is upon the indigenous understandings of such matters as gender distinctions, the content of the self and its mastery of them, and the construction of social bodies. It is about indigenous ambiguities over the nature of personhood and the various possibilities of agency in this world and others, and the elaborate relation of these issues to indigenous practice and metaphysics. In other words, a dialogue is being created between us, the anthropologists, and them, the peoples of New Guinea or Amazonia, over what it means to be human in this world (cf. Storrie 1999).What does it mean to be social beings in this world? And how do we go about attaining this state? If for other people the Western grand

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distinctions between society and nature do not hold, what other possibilities of an interesting kind are there? These are very different questions than were being asked in mainstream anthropology a couple of decades ago.

See also: Agent and Agency, Common Sense, Culture, Gender,

Moments of Being, Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies, Society, The Unhomely

LIMINALITY

The concept of liminality, from the Latin word for ‘threshold’ (limen) and implying all manner of interstitiality, of being betwixt and between, is most associated with the work of Victor Turner, and his extending of the original ideas of Arnold van Gennep; it has also been put to profitable use by Max Gluckman, Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach, and given rise to a host of spin-off applications. Through liminality, anthropology has found it possible to focus conceptually upon such phenomena as marginality, alterity, rebellion, ostracism, subalternality, pollution, eccentricity and deviance.

Rites of passage

‘The life of an individual in any society’, van Gennep observed (1960:3), ‘is a series of passages from one age to another’: from baby to infant to child to adolescent; from kindergarten to primary school to secondary school to university; from maiden to wife to widow; from warrior to elder to ancestor. In Rites of Passage (1960 [1909]), van Gennep examined and compared the way that these passages and stages were socio-culturally constructed, marked and effected, by the practising of certain ceremonial, public rites: rites which accompanied every change of place, state, social position and age. Indeed, such ‘rites of passage’ seemed to represent the majority of ritual or ceremonial occasions in any socio-cultural milieu.They at once proclaimed movement from one state or category of recognized existence to another and brought this about.

Furthermore, rites of passage seemed to partake of a common, tripartite structure, to share a grammar of three distinct phases, even though these were possibly differently emphasized on different kinds of occasion (a birth versus a death). There was a ‘rite of separation’ or

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disaggregation by which the old identity, status or frame of mind, was sloughed off, followed by a middle, mediatory or liminal stage of rites of transition, where the protagonist undergoing the change (the initiate or neophyte) was neither one thing nor another but betwixt-and-between, followed by a ‘rite of incorporation’ or aggregation by which a new identity was assumed. While the symbolism accompanying the rites of separation and incorporation often bespoke death and rebirth, and the moving from one socio-cultural condition to another was often represented by physical movement out of and then back into sociocultural space, the mediatory or liminal stage was far more complex and confused. For, having crossed the threshold beyond one status or identity while not yet having crossed into another one, the initiate was neither here nor there; beyond normal, everyday socio-cultural categories, beyond normal conceptions of routine identity, and also the conceptions of behaviour, rule, time and space that accompanied identity.

The liminal stage was a zone of socio-cultural non-identity, nonexistence. In different socio-cultural milieux, van Gennep found the liminal stage of rites of passage to be treated with very different kinds of attention (or inattention) and gravitas: from the honeymoon period of an English married couple to the vision quest of a Comanche brave (cf. Hoebel and Wallace 1958); but there were interesting symbolic overlaps. Individuals in this stage were often removed from everyday sight, or else treated as if invisible. They were often spoken about as dead or as dissolved into amorphous, unrecognizable matter, or as unformed or embryonic. They were often involved in tasks and occupations which were never normally undertaken in the course of everyday life. They were often treated as unclean and polluting to those still going about their everyday lives; also as potentially dangerous, as possessing the power to harm those engaged in quotidian routines should there be unmonitored contact between them. Hence, initiates in the liminal stage were often the responsibility of certain ritual officers or experts who managed their lives until the rite of reincorporating them into sociocultural space, time and identity was to be effected.

Anthropological applications

Since van Gennep’s comparative work, there have been detailed ethnographies of initiation and socio-cultural renewal which have instantiated and commented upon the above schema (cf. Richards 1982; La Fontaine 1985a). Gluckman developed the idea of rites of passage as entailing behavioural irregularities or reversals to explore the seeming ‘rites of resistance’ or ‘reversal’ which accompanied such things as regal

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investitures in African kingdoms, and which had clear echoes in Classical European festivities such as Saturnalia and Bacchanalia. Here, amidst uncommon revelry and behavioural unrestraint, there was a reversal of normal formalities and hierarchies such that commoners, slaves and women would temporarily lord it over their socio-cultural ‘betters’. For Gluckman, such rites of reversal represented preludes to the reestablishment of everyday relations of stratification (1963a). They were transitions between states of order which served in fact to bolster the systematization of inequality by periodically releasing tension and disquiet.

For Leach, as part of an exploration of the structures of communication by which socio-cultural milieux were maintained between individuals (1976a), liminal zones, stages and statuses made possible transitions between entities whose identity called on them to be at once discrete and bounded but not incommunicado. Lands must be divided between owners, worlds between gods and men, lives between bodies and souls, times between pasts and futures. In each of these cases (and others), ambiguous, liminal phenomena, partaking of the character of both sides of the divide, kept the identity of things both related and distinct.

Douglas, meanwhile, developed the van Gennepian notion that what was liminal and neither here nor there was at once polluting, dangerous and powerful.There is a human ‘yearning for rigidity’, Douglas began, a longing for ‘hard lines and clear concepts’ (1966:162). Hence, each socio-cultural milieu came to be based on and to embody symbolic classifications of the world which were indubitable, coherent and systemic, and from which the contradictory, the incoherent and the arbitrary were banned. Nonetheless, any systematic ordering and classification of matter inexorably rejected certain elements as inappropriate: it had to do this in order to arrive at clean lines of division between matter (which is otherwise, in reality, continuous). Hence, an inevitable by-product of a system of symbolic classification was ‘dirt’: that which contravened the ordering. Hedged about with taboo, the dirt which threatened the clear-cut ordering of the world, which would ‘pollute’ its cleanliness, was eschewed; while the notion that something was polluted served to protect cherished principles and categories from contradiction.The only exceptions to this eschewing were extraordinary, ritual situations. For while the disorder which dirt represented was a threat, it was also recognized to be powerful. Unrestricted by existing categories and order, it ushered in the imagined possibility of new patterns. In certain rituals, therefore, one could observe efforts to harness this power; the rituals represented ventures outwith social order and

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control in an attempt to tap supernatural, ‘cosmic’ power inhering outside the everyday nomos of human life. In ritual one found an acceptance of the wholeness of the real in contradistinction to the partiality of everyday nomic categories, and a surmounting of conventional differentiations. Human beings possessed a ‘common urge to make a unity of all their experience’, Douglas concluded, ‘and to overcome distinctions and separations in acts of at-onement’ (1966:169).

Victor Turner’s limin(oid)al

Like Douglas, Victor Turner was to move from ideas concerning ritual liminality to a theory of socio-cultural life as such. Initially (1964, 1967), however, he focused upon initiation rituals among the Ndembu of Tanzania, as seen in a van Gennepian light. Here was an oscillation between the individual experiencing of society and culture as highly structured, and the episodic venturing into ritual situations which were transitional and ambiguous in ethos vis-à-vis the preceding and following structures, if not purposely anti-structural. If Ndembu society was conceived of as a structure and classification of positions, standards, behaviours, customs, rights and duties, then the ritual periods and processes amounted to interor extra-structural situations.The Ndembu moved from one social status (with its attendant proprieties, moralities and identities) to another and to another throughout their lives, the moves sometimes involving great changes in behaviour, world-view and expectation, by way of ritual periods which were themselves asocial, amoral, out of time, out of sight and out of mind.

Certainly, liminality was the main focus of ritual activity among the Ndembu. There were liminal initiates, liminal officiants and liminal activities, taking place in liminal spaces. These spaces were powerful, even dangerous, phenomena, through which the Ndembu could be expected to be visited by otherworldly creatures and forces. It was with the assistance of the latter, for instance, as spirit helpers, that ritual officiants managed the transitions between social statuses of Ndembu initiates. Initiates were regarded as being ground down or rubbed clean of their earlier identities, so that they entered a uniform, formless state of pure potential, from which they were fashioned anew. Initiates were shown fearful and mysterious sacred objects which shocked them out of their complacency within existing identities and prepared them to learn and adopt new perspectives on life and themselves. Often monstrous in form, Turner hypothesized that the sacred objects and experiences to which the initiates were subjected provoked them into reconsidering the world, its nature and relations; so that it and they

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