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

METHODOLOGICAL ECLECTICISM

‘self-subversive anti-statement’ attached to it. At the very least, in their detailed exposition of interlocked social-organizational frameworks, of rich systems of symbolic categories, and of multiple modes of production and class distinctions, the anecdotes offer simultaneous grist to the explanatory mills of functionalism, structuralism and Marxism. But by the same token, any attempt at a totalizing truth-claim by any one such explanatory ideology may be easily deconstructed. As Chagga attachment to any single or consistent order and ordering of things is fragmentary and intermittent, so can be the anthropologist’s attitude to any one episteme; the anecdotes reveal a multiplicity of epistemes, in creative combination, in terms of which anthropology, like the Chagga, should continuously construct the social world as meaningful and as new. In this way, the anthropologist might write an account which converses with itself in a plurality of different voices, each epistemologically calling into question the possible completeness of any other.

In sum, just as there is no single or coherent or commondenominatory social structure which underlies any one socio-cultural milieu (which explains, grounds, contextualizes or determines its goingson), so the latter warrants no single or coherent or commondenominatory mode of interpretation. Instead the anthropologist might provide a description which represents the conversation of social life as it is (diversely) lived in individual interactions. In such ‘provisional writing’ (Cohen 1992b), the anthropologist might evoke in the reader a sense of the ‘incomplete project’ (James 1993:234) that is both socio-cultural life and its representation.

An ethos of eclecticism

This gives to anthropological accounting a particular character. As Deborah Tannen puts it (1989:197), the anthropological project is at once scientific and humanistic and aesthetic; it is fraught with tensions between knowledge, value and ethics which are ultimately irresolvable.

Philosopher Richard Rorty (1980:357–72) has drawn a useful distinction between two kinds of disciplinary pursuit, one being essentially constructive and systematic, the other reactive and edifying. A systematic discipline seeks objectivity: a system of monologic explanation, argument and agreement, which will possess universal commensurability, which can become the paradigm of all cultural knowledge, which will last if not for all eternity then until it acts as the foundations of future progress. An edifying discipline, by contrast, distrusts the notion of essences and is dubious about claims that reality can be accurately, holistically, singularly or disinterestedly explained and

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described; for not only is there the contingency and diversity of existing epistemological regimes, there is also the poetry of the new. In the face of an essentialist inquiry, therefore, the edifying account seeks to maintain a conversation between different ways of being in the world, and eschews any singular, authoritative framing. It offers aphorisms, satires, parodies in the face of systematic arguments, and esteems the continuous metamorphoses of metaphor and poetry.

The edifying account does not only deal in conversation as subjectmatter and style, it also makes for conversation to continue. In describing and analysing being-in-the-world it composes another chapter within it; it adds to the array of epistemic construction and interaction. As Rorty concludes (1980:378): to be wise is to ‘sustain a conversation’ between epistemes, while ‘to look for commensuration rather than simply continued conversation…is to attempt escape from humanity’.

Clearly, both the elucidation of the conversation of socio-cultural life and the representation of conversation in the account of socio-cultural life proposed above would make of anthropology an edifying pursuit. It is an edifying anthropology which endeavours to secure a representation of human beings not as singular and limited epistemic objects but rather as their own plural and limitless subjects.

See also: Contradiction, Conversation, Literariness

METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM AND HOLISM

Holism and collectivism

Geertz once advocated viewing culture as ‘a set of control mechanisms’—plans, recipes, programs, instructions—which reduce the individual potential for living thousands of lives to the narrowness and specificity of his or her actual accomplishments in one (1970:57; also cf. Schneider 1968:5–8). By virtue of this notion of culture, anthropologists could hope both to ‘seek complexity, and order it’ (Geertz 1970:48). In this formulation he continued a long methodological tradition in anthropology which may be characterized by the term ‘holism’. Whether arguing in terms of ‘culture’, as here, or ‘society’, ‘social structure’, ‘community’, ‘class’, or some other collective notion, the assumption persisted that both elucidation and explanation of sociocultural phenomena—what precisely they were, what they meant, where they came from, what their implications were—could be derived only

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from an abstract and holistic contextualization. Socio-cultural phenomena, in the common shorthand, were to be known as ‘greater than the sum of their constituent parts’: individual actors and acts, individual lives, gave onto something other, something transcendent— onto the phenomena of socio-cultural wholes. Here were total systems, social or cultural, structural or symbolic, linguistic or behavioural, which might be seen to emerge out of everyday individual interactions but which were in fact ontologically prior to both actors and their exchanges, and overdetermining of them. To explain the individual and actual, in short, was to contextualize it within the general, the collective, the impersonal.

Indeed, there is a venerable tradition of regarding a ‘methodological holism’ or collectivism of this kind not merely as a virtue of socialscientific analysis but as a sine qua non of its verity. For Durkheim (1966 [1895]), the notion of a ‘social fact’, of an objective and institutional phenomenon which was external to, constitutive and coercive of the individual, encapsulated both the fundamental explicans and the explicandum of ‘sociological’ method. While the notion of a generalized, formal social reality above and beyond the actions, subjectivities, motives and intentions of individuals forms a central plank in Anthony Giddens’s centennial reappraisal (1976). Social action becomes, for Giddens, an impersonal concept, pertaining to a holistic domain, to which interaction between individuals can be seen objectively to give rise— and which ultimately comes to embody the causal conditions and structuring force of that interaction (1976:155–60).

Anthropology, as variously canonized (van Velsen 1967:145–6; Pelto and Pelto 1978:36; Peacock 1986:83), has been a willing partner to the above Durkheimesque holism and impersonalism. In crossing what Fortes referred to as the threshold between description and analysis (1970:130–3), anthropology has looked to overcome the complexities and untidinesses of actual individual lives and thereby accede to a level of generality, homogeneity and simplification where social forces and cultural practices take on their own form, logic and routine (cf. Gellner 1959:200, 263). Hence, anthropology has reified certain epistemological constructs—‘collective conscience’, ‘collective representations’, ‘social facts’, ‘the cult of the individual’—it has routinized and generalized certain forms of social interaction—joking relations’, ‘segmentary lineages’, ‘dynamic equilibria’—and it has hypostatized certain forces and powers which lead lives of their own determination, orientation and evolution—‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘kinship’, ‘ritual’ and ‘religion’, ‘political and economic relations’, ‘language’. Anthropology claims to gain access to sociological data (on ‘suicide’, on ‘mechanisms of solidarity’, on

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‘marital prescriptions and preferences’) which, due to a lack of learning or impartiality or self-reflexivity or freedom of thought, are beyond the personal ken of actual individual participants in a socio-cultural milieu: the ‘members’ or ‘role-players’, if not ‘tribesmen’ or ‘primitives’ (cf. Lukes 1968, 1990; Bloch 1998).

Treated unsympathetically, it almost appears as if, for much of its history, actual actors and social interactions have been absent from this Durkheimian project: incidental if not departicularized, generalized into one impersonal (defining, limiting) category or another. The reductions that emerge amount to ‘synthetic fictions’ on this view, fictive matrices of uniformity. As Sapir once put it (1956:200–7), ideas of societies and cultures as objectified patterns which provide each group with its own ‘tidy table of contents’—with (à la Geertz) plans, recipes, programs, instructions—might be convenient, but they are fallacious, assigning ‘society’ and ‘culture’ to misleading metaphysical loci.This reductionism, Anthony Cohen more recently has expounded, is not merely dull and unambitious, redundant and intellectually barren, but arrogant and insensitive, discreditable (1989:10–12, 1994:5).

Reductionism is persistent, however, even where it is recognized as a failing, because of the way the Durkheimian project in social science was originally conceived. Hence, holism, ‘impersonalism’, the imaging, knowing and phrasing of the world and its features in terms which deny or devalue the individual, the particular and the personal, remain ubiquitous. Giddens, for instance, after initially criticizing the reductiveness of functionalist and structuralist notions of social process for their removal of individuals as competent and practical subjects, responsible for actively re-constituting social life, would still appear to conclude his New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), with a similar eschewing of individual agency, a divorcing of the micro and macro, and a disdain for micro-social mundanities in favour of institutional analysis of the ‘macro’ alone.

Briefly doffing his cap to individuals’ constitutive agency in social life and their constructing of society through ongoing speech-acts, Giddens goes on to explain that since not all actions and outcomes are as individually intended, a concept of social action must needs be distinguished, whose sense and meaning is ‘free’ from notions of individual intention and reference. Moreover, the concept should properly be located in pure sociological realm where the ‘triviata’ of everyday interaction and ordinary exchange can be removed (1976:15). Here, analytically juxtaposed with structures of social morality and power, action can fuel more incisive institutional analysis of macro-social form and process. For individuals’ actions are transformed, unbeknownst

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to them, into instruments of social-structural replication, and thus merely serve to further the institutional historical conditions which de facto constituted those actions in the first place. Hence, individual cognitive processes achieve sociological relevance, if at all, as features of societal symbolic classifications; individual differences are swept under the carpet of collective and coordinated interactional identities. In this way, for Giddens, social-scientific generalizations can be arrived at, describing the societally reproduced alignments of the ‘unintended’ consequences of individual actions.

Methodological individualism

But this need not be the case. An impersonal holism need not be taken on board as an ontological or methodological postulate of human reality; at best, holism represents, in Jackson‘s phrasing, an instrumentality rather than a finality (1989:1). The human world can be and certainly is made to seem ‘impersonal’, totalized and totalizing, but this is not its necessary or actual nature. Holism is a strategy, a rhetoric, an instrument to denaturalize the world; anthropology may set out to analyse the above impulses toward impersonalization and their working-out in a sociocultural milieu without allowing itself to become party to them (cf. Rapport 1997a:12–29).

For, if one looks beneath the impersonal (categorial, stereotypical, generalized) surface of such a world, one sees the complexity, the multiplicity and diversity, the inconsistency and contradiction of a congeries of personal relations abutting against one another.The actual nature of the human world is of individuals in interaction. This is its causation—the cause of there being human worlds of culture and society—and its manifestation. Ideologies may seek to obscure such facts, may transmogrify the personal into the impersonal, but, to borrow a phrase from E.M.Forster (1950:26), ‘personal relations are the real life’.

Moreover, knowledge of these personal relations is individual knowledge. There is nothing else that it can be. There are no collective knowing organisms to which human beings are party: cultures and societies, institutions and associations cannot know, only individuals have the minds and memories to know. Which means, furthermore, that personal relations may be known differently by their different individual participants. While it is true that human life is lived in personal relationships, and while human individuals depend on others (living and dead, real and imagined, particularized and generalized) for all manner of securities (physical, emotional, intellectual), nevertheless, individuals

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