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

LITERARINESS

‘literary turn’, in short, is to surrender anthropology to its antithesis, to precipitate its demise.

But this can equally well be turned around. If anthropology would conventionally constitute itself through a contrast with literary ‘otherness’, then it cannot isolate or even separate itself either; it cannot exist without literature since it needs this other to describe the ‘factual’ nature of the problem it sets itself. If the latter has been called into question, then might not this ontology of self and other? Might not both come together as different versions of the one ‘factional’ project?

In their intent to produce realistic representations of social life, then, there is perhaps much in the anthropological and literary enterprises which might be seen to overlap. Certainly, between the anthropological fieldworker-cum-analyst and the ‘social novelist’—Fielding, Dickens, Eliot, Forster, Woolf, Lawrence, Greene, and others ‘concerned with detailed and prolonged observation and comment on the manners and mores of a social milieu in which he is at the same time a participant’ (Rapport 1994a:67)—there are compelling correspondences of a historical, methodological and experiential kind. If there is something fundamentally anthropological in cultural comparison and critique, then, equally, literature is grounded in a transcending of the apparent and a critiquing of the conditions of its own existence. The station of the novelist, as Graham Greene described it, is ever to be on the ambiguous borderline, promulgating an alternative world and providing novel insight into people’s perceptions, evaluations and sensations (cf. Hoggart 1966:247)

That is, looking beyond distinctive disciplinary and generic institutionality (at ‘anthropology’ versus ‘literature’) is to see the figure of the individual writer who puts these institutions to use in the writing of social reality. This writing, whether in anthropology or literature, is a poetic enterprise. It entails stepping back from experience, reflecting upon it, and then transforming this into orderly text. It also entails personalizing institutional verbal forms so that they may convey a novel individual sense of reality. To author a ‘literary-cum-anthropological’ text, in short, is to impart personality to language and to express a personal construction of the world. Both anthropology and literature come together under the rubric of what Leach dubbed ‘divine inventiveness’ (1969:90). Indeed, the anthropological destination, for Leach (1982:53), should be the insight which great novelists display: that quality of deep understanding into the behaviour of others.

Nor does such questioning and realigning necessarily threaten anthropology, or detract from its practical purpose or efficacy. These practices, in fact, could be seen to be intrinsically ‘anthropological’.

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LITERARINESS

Certainly, if anthropology, as cultural comparison and critique, is intent on juxtaposing one viewpoint and symbolic construction of the world against another and identifying their ongoing relations, then this applies to its own viewpoints and preconceptions, its own practice too; maybe especially so. There is perhaps a routine need for anthropology to be non-routine: through comparison and critique, to step outside its own symbolic constructions so as to contextualize and evaluate its relations with other disciplines. For, if anthropology is a discipline, then, to borrow Keith Hart’s phrase, it is also a ‘virtual anti-discipline’ (1990:10). It ought not to bound itself; it should recognize categorical differences (such as in ways of writing, in genres), but not be restricted by them in its search for as complex an appreciation of experience as possible. Anthropology was ‘born omniform’, as Geertz puts it (1983:21), and should continue to be thus.

Individual writing

In Works and Lives, Geertz analysed the writings of four anthropologists—Malinowski, Benedict, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss— and compared how they imparted their own identity and very personal signatures to their texts. Here we find individual writers bringing their ‘creativity’ (Parkin 1987) and ‘imagination’ (Finnegan 1977) similarly to bear upon the socio-cultural realities they find around them.The results are ‘factions’ which belong to the ‘romancer’ who created them.

‘Imagination’, ‘creativity’, ‘faction’, still do not sit easily as terms of anthropological self-description. We might grant that, in its way, literature can ‘take stock of a culture’, its efforts evincing a ‘reflecting mind and feeling heart’ (Turner 1976:78); we might even admit that literary writing can be ‘free-floating’—its meaning too flexible to be directly or closely tied to the social exchanges in which it appears, its life-in-use not rigidly bound by a socio-cultural environment (Finnegan 1977:260). However, we are immeasurably more leaden when it comes to appreciating how our own writing works (is worked).

And yet we write in the same way. At least, when Malinowski, Benedict, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss (Bateson, Leach,Wallace, Geertz) use ‘fieldnotes’, ‘papers’ and ‘monographs’ to write up their field experiences, their work is great in its individuality. In use, the cultural forms and social relations of anthropology are personalized and transformed: given meaning, brought to life, within the particular contexts of individual lives. In other words, anthropological writing is free-floating stock-taking too, for it can be bound (predicted, determined, encompassed) neither by the field experience nor by the

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METHODOLOGICAL ECLECTICISM

disciplinary genres which preceded it. Its greatness, perhaps, can be measured by the extent to which it rewrites both: ‘explains’ the other and ‘extends’ the discipline.

The American novelist Don DeLillo has described each writer as his or her own language, ‘building himself word by word and sentence by sentence’ (1991); it is here that the novelist and the anthropologist ultimately meet.

See also: Movement, Science, Writing

METHODOLOGICAL ECLECTICISM

In 1964, Max Gluckman and (economist) Ely Devons collaborated on a book entitled Closed Systems and Open Minds: The Limits of Naivety in Social Anthropology. Their topic was anthropological method; more precisely, given the complexity of that human reality which anthropology set out to investigate, their topic concerned how the investigator could both open himself or herself up to socio-cultural complexity and close off a manageable portion for presentation. The solution, Gluckman and Devons maintained (1964:162–8), turned upon the notion of naivety; naivety was an anthropological duty, inasmuch as it was in naivety that openness and closure met. Open to all manner of socio-cultural complexity, the anthropologist circumscribed, delimited, incorporated, abridged, isolated and compressed his or her experience into a distinct narrative of interrelations which contained its own order: a closure which specialists of different particular fields may inevitably find to be naive.

Anthropology, the most humanistic of social sciences, the most comparative of humanities, thus could be said to make a specialism out of non-specialism. Anthropology was an interdisciplinary discipline which, through the exercise of an ‘intellectual poaching licence’ (Kluckhohn) and a seeming amateurish use of all manner of information, could expect to tackle the ‘vast intricacies’ (Bateson 1959:296) of the worlds of human cognition, sociation, construction and interaction.

Descriptive eclecticism

There is, in Michael Herzfeld’s formulation (1993:184), a strong temptation to reduce social experience to single models. Indeed, the representation of social life may be fatally prone to simplistic reduction,

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inasmuch as singular texts stand for plural exchanges, and concepts replace complex processes of interpretation. However, to represent the diversity, the openendedness, the chaotic relativism that comprises cultural process is not necessarily to attempt to re-present a social milieu singly, steadily and as a whole, if one maintains the ‘naivety’ of a certain epistemological pluralism and narrational eclecticism. That is, the seeming closure of the anthropological account is ameliorated by its embodying a certain methodological eclecticism, such that the account itself implies conversation: between different systems of sense-making, different universes of discourse, in a word, different epistemes. If the bringing together in one text of the distinct, diverse and incompatible voices and epistemes of a socio-cultural milieu in such a way as to point up their irreconcilability and their interaction may be described as ‘writing conversationally’, then it may be possible to aver that ‘the epistemological conversation of this anthropological text is a homologue of the everyday conversation of social life’.

Analytical eclecticism

To represent adequately the local conversation of epistemes is, to borrow from Feyerabend (1975:18) to be epistemologically ‘opportunistic’ in one’s analysis. This must be characterized by epistemological ‘complementarity’ (Claxton 1979:415), and a refusing of epistemological resolution (cf. Simmel 1971:xii). For no theory or episteme or narrative which the social commentator might bring to bear could cover all the ‘facts’ which are alive and being exchanged in a social milieu and convey the latter’s intrinsic complexity and diversity; while any attempt to force social life into one or other perspective ends in tautology and serves only to destroy the ‘reality’ under study. To eschew the endemic diversity of cultural construction in one’s account—‘the maze of interaction’ (Feyerabend 1975:17–18), rich in content, varied, many-sided, lively and subtle—may indeed make for neatness, system, clarity, the contentment of order, but only at the expense of a totalizing dogma and a totalitarian depiction (cf. Louch 1966:239).

To adopt an eclecticism of analytical narration and style is to free one’s account from an obsessional Aristotelian combat between battling singularities. In such eclecticism—locating human behaviour in more than one frame of reference at once; locating such (often mutually exclusive) frames of reference in conversation with one another in the text—one finally escapes the notion that epistemic diversity can and should ultimately be ‘resolved’ in terms of a finite limit of possibility (Society; structure) or an ultimately determining and integrating code (God; grammar).

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Eclecticism instanced

In modern physics, methodological pluralism or eclecticism has reached renown as a means of dealing with the mutual exclusivity of theories positing the nature of electrons as particles or as waves—as isolated material entities or as perturbations in a continuous field.The ‘reality’ of electrons is attested to by the plurality of explanations of which it admits (cf. Devereux 1978:1–3).A direct corollary of this in anthropology might concern the dispute between theories of meaning. Is meaning a function of (isolated) individual intention at a particular moment, and an act which can wilfully alter or subvert any collective system that grounds it? Or is meaning a (continuous) collective fact, deriving from culturally determined codes and textual mechanisms which transcend particular volition?

An anthropological eclecticism of analytical style would allow for such mutual exclusions, as well as others one could name—instance versus category, performance versus competence, event versus structure, subject versus object—and more plural oppositions as well— functionalism versus symbolic interactionism versus Marxism versus structuralism versus post-modernism—all to appear within the same text. Indeed, analytical eclecticism would insist that this were the case: that a text be constructed out of a conversation between different epistemic realities.

For instance, in her account of contemporary Chagga social life— 500,000 people living on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro—Sally Falk Moore (1987) is cognizant, above all, of the ‘fact’ that the events of local life are not coherent instantiations of shared, pre-existing structures (normative, conventional, grammatical), rather they are revelations of multiplicity and indeterminacy, contestation and change. Hence, Moore determines that the ‘event’ of her text should not be characterized or informed by any single mode of knowing or interpreting. She decides to construct her anthropological narrative around the analysis of three ‘chopped-off anecdotes’ (1987:734) which were told her (concerning the transfer of land), and to process (to converse) between and among their overlapping themes: the meaning of good and evil; the competition over a scarce resource; the contested powers and weaknesses of church and state. What the conversation of her text elucidates is that ‘like a sunburst’, the anecdotes can be seen to lead in all directions. They are shot through with ambiguity, with ‘a contiguity of contraries’. Every anecdote carries concomitantly antithetical messages, every theme open to contradictory interpretations; every statement made by their protagonists, or by her, their reporter, could be shown to have kinds of

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