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

AGENT AND AGENCY

forms of social life and its creative processes provides the dynamic of cultural history.

For Burridge, the very same dynamic pertains to the world and writing of social science. Individual creativity provided the apperceptions which made an anthropological world-view possible, but then routine anthropological analysis tends to fix, objectify, generalize and institutionalize its socio-cultural object. Individuals become transformed into persons, events into categories, and the continuous vicissitudes of life into a constraining and stultifying, logical and orderly structure.

It has seemed, therefore, that individual creativity has remained a submerged strand in anthropological elucidation, drowned out by socialstructural rigours and demands. The latter, especially in their ‘deep’ French manifestations (Lévi-Strauss, Godelier, Dumont), but also their ‘conventional’ Anglo-Saxon ones (Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, Gellner), have been seen as more or less sui generis mechanisms which determine relations between elements of a society—indeed, to an extent determine those elements (their being and behaviours) tout court (cf. Park 1974). Individual agency has come to be buried under the vast weight of the collectivity. But then, contemporary ethnography, and a disinterring of a line of thought (from Bateson to Leach and Barth,Turner and Burridge, and on) which recognizes (à la Existentialism) an intrinsic agency to human being whereby individuals possess the power to be self-caused and free, does serve as a corrective.

For example, defining creativity as ‘human activities that transform existing cultural practices’, activities that, courtesy of a ‘creative persona’, emerge from traditional forms and yet move beyond them and reshape them (Rosaldo et al. 1993:5–6), the volume Creativity/Anthropology (dedicated to Victor Turner) brings together cases of creative ‘eruption’ from different societies and cultures: the !Kung (Shostak), for instance, the Cochiti (Babcock), and Asturias (Fernandez). Here is social structure understood as ‘discursive idiom’ (Jackson 1989:20): a shared language which may provide the basis (the form) of individual interpretation, which may articulate, mediate and typify individual experience, but which cannot be taken at face value as encompassing, capturing or determining that experience (cf. Parkin 1987:66). Social structure, here, is not sui generis, and does not exist through inertia; it depends on the continuing, conscious, concerted activity of different individuals to intend, produce and sustain it (cf. Holy and Stuchlik 1981:15–16). Furthermore, social structure does not inexorably give rise to homogeneity, stability, consistency or communication. As a discursive idiom, a fiction, it is always subject to creative interpretation, to

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individualmanipulation and re-rendering, to ‘alter-cultural action’ (Handler and Segal 1990:87).

In this way, anthropology has begun more concertedly to fill in the gaps in the ethnographic record of relations between convention and creativity, social structure and individual agency.

See also:Consciousness, Individuality, Transaction, World-Making

ALTERITY

The concept of alterity has only recently, in the 1990s, acquired an important place within the vocabulary of anthropology. This more general acceptance of the notion of ‘otherness’ as a major concern for anthropological consideration comes in the wake of innumerable writings over the past two decades that have been seriously engaged in a critique of all those grand ‘isms’ of modernist thought (evolutionism, functionalism, structuralism, and so forth) that are implicated in Western civilization’s imperialist and capitalist past. A striking characteristic of this literature is that it consistently blurs the boundaries normally held between such disciplines as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history. For instance, the writings of Zygmunt Bauman, a ‘sociologist’, are relevant to all the neighbouring fields of study within the human sciences, and also those of literary and cultural studies. Two very interesting and significant results of such crossing of disciplinary boundaries are that (1) unless one is ‘in the know’ it is often very difficult to pinpoint the author’s disciplinary attachment, and (2) the traditional boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities are being systematically dissolved. The reason for the latter is that the primary resolve of this recent talk about ‘alterity’—about, in other words, the concept and treatment of the alien objectified other—is to shake the foundation of the objectifying thrust of the human sciences, along with all its claims of scientific authority and objectivity.

Anthropology and the imperialized other

By definition anthropology’s primary object for study has been the Western imperialized other (while sociology has had the task of objectifying the West’s own internal subaltern classes).Thus, as anthropology is the academic discipline most overtly involved in an objectified imagery of otherness, it has become the obvious target of much post-colonial critique (e.g.Asad 1975;

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Said 1978;Thomas 1994;de Certeau 1997;Bauman 1995;Fabian 1983).The incorporation of the concept of alterity into anthropology itself reflects a strong contemporary awareness within the discipline of the iniquities of its past, its own particular programme of scientific objectification. It must face its own centrality in the provision of constructions of otherness central to the vision of modernity (cf. di Leonardo 1998). Having lost its innocence, anthropology is now in an ‘age of self-reflection’,a process through which it often joins other post-colonial voices in a critique of the grand narratives of modernism. This exercise of addressing the past engagement of the discipline (whether naive or otherwise) in the creation of colonial agendas can be painful, especially when addressing what the political implications of some of our narratives of otherness have been for the great majority of peoples who have been marginalized in the name of the dogma derived from them. One thing is certain.The programme of decolonizing our ways of thinking about otherness means that the anthropology practised today is not the same as yesterday’s.

The irony is that because of its historical expertise in the study of otherness, its specific voice can be a strong one raised against the dark side of colonialist excess. It has strengths unparalleled by other traditional fields of study, except perhaps history, in that it understands the importance of the particular, and thus the local, over against the universalist and the global. Anthropologists contextualize specific lifeways by keeping intact the systems of values and practice to which each is tied. Careful anthropologists do not usually go around making global, universalist sweeping statements. The cultural relativism of anthropology has been subjected to major attack by all those defensive defenders of universalist modernist models of human nature (cf. Hollis and Lukes 1982), and conversely praised by defenders of more humanist, perspectival concerns (MacIntyre 1985; Taylor 1985). Ever since Malinowski‘s famous work with the Trobriand Islanders in the South Pacific in the second decade of the twentieth century, the claim has also been that a major aim is to understand ‘the native’s’ point of view, which provides, it would seem, a multi-perspectival framework for all analysis and conclusions. In other words, anthropologists should know well how to understand the perspective of the other, and to refrain from creating a fantasized other easily digestible for Western colonialist and scientific consumption. So where did things go wrong?

The birth of anthropology and Europe’s intellectual climate

The fact is that anthropology had its birth as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during what we might

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label the height of modernist thought—and at the apex of Western imperialist endeavours. Modernist and imperialist ways of thinking about things go very deep, and since anthropology could but be the child of its times, the intellectual and political climate of those times is deeply implicated in its own development. This is why present-day anthropology is mainly involved in a scrutiny of its own discourse on the primitive other, an ongoing deconstruction of its major concepts toward the end of uncovering the intellectual effects of the imperialist, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, and the practical, political implications of them.

The brand new science of anthropology was faced at the turn of the century with the necessity of claiming its own intellectual space, over which it could be the guardian of truth and objectivity. It needed to produce its own object (cf. Fabian 1983). It was Malinowski, cited above as the promoter of ‘the native point of view’, who set the standards, the rules and norms, for modern ethnographic writing. Ethnography is the recording of an ethnos, and, as Peter Mason phrases it (1990:13), ‘a form of translation and reduction’. ‘All ethnography’, he goes on to say (ibid.), ‘is an experience of the confrontation with Other set down in writing, an act by which that Other is deprived of its specificity’. He notes that such writing conforms to particular stylistic and literary conventions. It must meet certain expectations. In producing a discourse on the Trobrianders, ‘Malinowski was creating a work which is of the same substance intellectually as, say, James Joyce’s Bloomsday’ (Mason 1990:13; cf. Ardener 1985:57). Thus there is a sense in which ‘the Trobrianders’ as presented through this discourse do not have empirical reality, for, being the product of the ethnographic scientific discourse, they are but fiction.

The rhetorical genre which Malinowski created led to what Mason calls (1990:13) ‘the naturalist or realist’ monograph. It was a form of anthropological writing that was followed throughout the period of modernism, which Ardener (1985) situates between 1920 and 1975 for anthropology. In short, this realist genre through which the ethnographer presented his or her object (as an example of the West’s colonized other of the South Pacific, Africa, or Australia) followed the naturalist pattern set by other studies of nature, those of the flora and fauna of far-flung parts of the world. Mason quite rightly classifies (1990:6, 15–17) ‘the objects’ of such studies of humans as the stuff of imaginary worlds, or the world of myth. Through the realist rhetoric of the anthropologist, the Trobrianders were naturalized, and thereby belong to one of those worlds transcended by modern civilization to be marked as an uncivilized part of nature, something which, to the

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modern spirit, was to be dominated and tamed. To objectify is to naturalize, and therefore to create distance between self and the object, whether it be animate or inanimate, human or stone.This ability of the scientist to move away from and transcend the object of enquiry is a measure of its arbitrariness, and thus lack of reason (cf. Bauman 1995:163).We see then that anthropological realism is not an innocent, value-free task, for it is a highly coloured presentation of a very specific kind. As such it is a creation of ‘the reality of the other’, and not a representation; as a creation it has its own ‘reality effect’ (cf. Mason 1990). Such presentations acquire their special signifying power by taking their place within a network of other imaginary worlds also created in the modernist spirit by the rest of the human sciences as they made their fit with the natural sciences. Within all these fields of human studies our own historically contingent and local values, truths and practices were usually raised to absolute principles from which all deviance was judged, dismissed, or, even worse, ignored. For example, the eighteenth-century value upon a particular type of logic and reasoning became the defining attribute of human nature.

Eurocentrism and the inferiorization of excluded others

It is probably a truism that all peoples are ethnocentric. It is also more than likely that ethnocentric constructions of the stranger always follow a process through which alterity is reduced to a familiar form that is easily accessible to self. All systems of otherness are structures of identity and difference that have more to do with the establishment of self- identity than with the empirical reality of the other—whether their neighbours, trading partners, enemies, conquered peoples, or spirits that populate other worlds. This does not mean that we should consider all ethnocentrism or concepts of difference as the same, or as following an identical structure. Strangers might often be considered monsters; but peoples’ concepts of the monstrous are not only splendidly diverse, they also have considerably different implications for the ways in which the self can interact with them. In all systems of alterity there is at least some interplay of the principles of inclusivity and exclusion which together provide the rules and norms for such interaction. In this play, the nature of the boundaries designating otherness varies tremendously from one people to the next: for some, who give weight to inclusivity, they are highly permeable, while for others they are rather rigid, which speaks of a more exclusivist set of values.

The literature on Western systems of alterity is now enormous, for Western civilization’s treatment of the other throughout its modernist

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