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

METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM AND HOLISM

begin their knowing from different points (bodies, brains, consciousnesses) and, ultimately, they end there too. In short, the personal relations in which individuals live may eventuate in sharing and intimacy of a variety of levels and kinds, but not necessarily in a common or even consistent knowledge of the relations which are being practised.While the true nature of the human world is of individuals in interaction and of individuals contextualizing one another within sociocultural worlds of action, the ultimate knowledge of these worlds is individual per se: the possession of individual bodies and brains.

The above insights may be pulled together under the approximate title of ‘methodological individualism’. Here, as Popper advocates (1966:91–8), is explanation which avoids a vulgar use of collective, impersonal terms (from ‘Zeitgeist’ to ‘state’, ‘nation’, ‘social group’, ‘institutional structure’, ‘division of interest’ or ‘labour’, or ‘asymmetry of power’) in favour of explanation in more descriptive, individualistic terms. This does not deny the pertinence of notions of class or gender, role or status etc., but says that the meaning and effect of these latter must be derived from how they are constructed in situations of interaction. For it is use of these notions by interacting individuals which affords them social life—use which may be very far from consensual, homogeneous or uniform (cf. Blumer 1972:185–7). Equally, this does not suggest that individuals’ actions are free from constraint or deleterious outcome, or that their socio-cultural worlds are objects of their own making ex nihilo and in vacuo. It says that societal configurations are to be understood as resulting from the decisions, attitudes, dispositions, taken-for-granted expectations, relations and actions of specific individuals in specific situations, and the unintended consequences and repercussions of these; and that it is a misleading misconception to claim that notions of collectivity and constraint possess their own internal dynamic and obey their own laws, as if deriving from a separate sociological reality. It says that the meaning and effect of historical and structural conditions is never something immanent and unmediated but, even as action and outcome ‘break free’ of interactional setting and the moorings of the sender’s intention, something always dependent on individual interpretation in order to arrive.

If individuals appear subject to ‘general socio-cultural conditions’, then upon closer inspection those conditions may themselves be seen to be constituted by networks of other individuals, acting with their own dispositions and interacting in their own situations. Hence, what seems impersonal and imposing and objective to one person is the personal of another; it is a matter of perspectives and distance, not of phenomenological thresholds and domains.

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Methodological canons

To adumbrate a number of other methodological—individual canons, briefly, one might begin with MacIver (1961: passim):

Generalisations are true or false in proportion as they represent or misrepresent all the individual doings and happenings. …‘The Book of the Recording Angel’ may be regarded as the ideal limit to which [social science] approximates as generalisation tends to zero.

Since individual human beings are not mere theoretical postulates— they are met in the flesh—their description in social science is never merely for the convenience of supposition (as it is for ‘societies’, ‘cultures’, ‘ethnicities’, ‘traditions’ and ‘spirits of the age’) [Simmel

(1971:27): a society may be informed by an extraordinary multiplicity and variety, but this is no reason to hypostatize or autonomize it]. Moreover, it is the countless individual acts and doings of such individuals taken together which give rise to the ‘stuff’ of social science [Simmel

(1971:27): society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction; society is interaction]. Hence, the ideal social-scientific text would tell the whole story of everything that ever happened to every individual, everything that every individual caused to happen. And while such an ‘Book of the Recording Angel’ remains a mythic ideal, the project of the social scientist can still be to précis a greater or lesser part of the Book while misrepresenting its contents, through generalization or reduction, as little as possible.

Such a précis, Watkins continues (1953), must configure the complexity of socio-cultural situations, institutions and events out of the particular situations, dispositions, beliefs, understandings, interrelations and resources of particular individuals [Popper (1965:37): sociological models and analyses must be constructed in terms of individuals’ attitudes, expectations, actions and relations]. For since individual human beings are the sole ‘moving agents’ in history, and since socio-cultural phenomena are nothing but the product, intended and otherwise, of the interaction of individual characteristics—individual knowledge and ignorance, individual action, reaction and inertia—it is to the latter that the social scientist must turn for insight [Mill (1875:469): the laws of social phenomena can be nothing but the laws (actions and passions) of individual human nature]. No socio-cultural knowledge can be arrived at which is not also individual knowledge. A socio-cultural system is a collection of people ‘whose activities disturb and influence each other’

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(Watkins 1959:511), and no socio-cultural reality exists which could not be altered by appropriate and sufficient individual knowledge and desire [Hayek (1969:60): in social science, things are what individuals think they are].

To talk of individual knowledge and desire is to talk of psychological processes and influences.And just as any general characteristics of a social situation must be derived from piecing together what is known of individual situations, so the socio-cultural derives from piecing together the psychological; there is no irreducible socio-cultural domain sui generis [Simmel (1971:32): a description of a social situation is an exercise in psychological knowledge]. This is not to say that socio-cultural realities are direct reflections of individual psychological realities, are individual psychological realities writ large, because individual intentions often have unintended repercussions as these intentions are construed and reacted to by other individuals. Nor is this saying that individuals always operate with knowledge which is sufficient or appropriate to their desires; the outcome of action and interaction may be very different, opposite, or only vaguely related to the intentions of those involved.And nor is this saying that individuals do not run into obstacles and constraints which can frustrate, even destroy them. What it is saying, to return to where we began, is that one must eschew seeing routine collective phenomena as something possessing their own internal dynamic, obeying their own laws and having their own qualities and effects; eschew seeing individuals as the playthings of inhuman, impersonal, historicist, determinist conditions or tendencies; eschew seeing individuals as confronted and constrained by other than the desires, intentions, habits, loyalties, inertias, rivalries—also the miscarried plans—of other individuals [Hayek (1946:8): the only way to understand social phenomena is by understanding the actions of the individuals who compose them, actions directed towards other individuals and guided by their expectations of their behaviour].

Even if, as Giddens reminds us, not all individual action is unconstrained and not all outcomes are as intended, it is only through an analytical appreciation of the niceties of individual practice that the constraints of power differentials and moral injunctions can be properly accounted for and understood; the indirection of individuals is also a matter of individual intention. Moreover, if such argument appears to partake of circularity or infinite regress, as Gellner charges (1959:514), then perhaps this is something less to be ‘corrected’ than to be welcomed: the ‘impersonal’ and ‘holistic’, as viewed from one vantagepoint, dissolving into yet another relationship between particular individuals when viewed more closely.

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What methodological individualism guarantees, in short, is an affirmation of the mutuality of the individual and the socio-cultural, and a pertinent reminder of the need to understand how the socio-cultural and generalized is perceived and used by its individual recipients [Weber

(1964:101): ‘collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons’].

Overview

‘What is the “social condition” that has nothing to do with an individual condition?’, F.R.Leavis once rhetorized (1972:53–4), ‘what is the “social hope” that transcends, cancels or makes indifferent the condition of each individual? where is a condition, a life, to be located if not in individuals’ lives—lives which cannot be generalized, averaged or compounded?’ Due in large part to Durkheim and his followers, such generalizing, averaging and compounding has played a significant role in the holistic tradition in social anthropology, where identities and behaviours of individual actors have been derived from precisely such institutional contexts and conditions; individual selves have been invented in the image of the generalization ‘culture’, and as a replicate in miniature of ‘society’ (cf. Cohen 1994:128).

Dealing with, and inferring individuals from, institutions and structures in this way maintained a reductionism and redundancy in anthropological analysis and comparison. Even the changes occasioned by a Geertzian emphasis on meaning and interpretation did not alleviate the privileging of the collective, to the detriment of the experientially individual. For, through an identification of the cultural with the collective and the holistic, the individual, here too, came merely to refract the conditions and characteristics of collective categories.

How different it might have been if anthropology had had more time for Mill or Simmel, or even for Weber, for whom the individual is ‘the upper limit and the sole carrier of meaningful conduct’ (1964:101). Hence, Weber continues, it is in the understandable acts of such ‘participating individual men’ that social science must, without exception, deal: ‘social science must proceed from the actions of one or more separate individuals and adopt strictly individualistic methods’ (cited in Mommsen 1965:25).

Nevertheless, the experience of some anthropologists (as individuals as well as fieldworkers among individuals) has led them to oppose a holistic orthodoxy dogma. A submerged line of individualistic methodology also has its history in anthropology, which recognizes that individuals are more than their membership of and participation in collectivities. Moreover,

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since the latter are themselves the products of their individual members, individual identities and explanations of individual behaviour cannot be derived from impersonal collective categories; the relationship between the two is rather one of great complexity and ambiguity.

The proper description of culture, as Sapir elaborated (1956), should involve not the reification of words and behaviours into patterns of social structure so much as an exploration of the individual interpretation and animation of words and behaviours in their personal interactions. Any simple generalization and integration of these elements into objective structures represents a reification of ideas and actions which actually appear in endlessly different patterns of meaningful use. Every element of the reification may be true in some situation, then, but the elision of situations causes something fictional; it creates a mechanical order which seems neat, but with a vitality which is misplaced. For it is not the cultural elements which are alive but their creative usage in different situational configurations by different individuals: it is individuals who bring sociocultural categories and institutions to life.

Only via methodological individualism, in short, is one able to avoid the reductionism of an impersonal (and inhuman) socio-cultural world where a holistic collective grammar—a Durkheimian conscience collective, a Marxian infrastructure and superstructure, a Saussurean langue, a Bourdieuvian habitus—holds sway. To study collectivities is to treat individuals’ consciousness of them.

See also: Individualism, Individuality, Situation and Context

MOMENTS OF BEING

In 1961, in a collection of essays considered particularly timely, Edmund Leach reflected upon the paradoxical nature of time. Time was something in our experience which was at once repetitive and nonrepetitive; time was a human construction at once projected onto an environment via the collective structuration (and punctuation) of social life, and a matter of subjective experience, something relative to the consciousness and purpose of particular individuals (1961a:125–35).

Reflecting upon similar experiential paradoxes concerning the way we temporally make sense of our lives,Virginia Woolf coined the phrase ‘moments of being’ (1976). Whatever we are, Woolf asserted, we are in moments. Being turns on momentary thoughts, feelings, apprehensions, emotions; we experience being in the world in distinct chunks. Not that

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