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

MOMENTS OF BEING

we are necessarily always conscious of this, however. Rather, the conscious momentariness of our lives derives from our momentarily stepping back and forming mental images of what is to come and what has passed; we image momentary snapshots of past and future occasions. As Woolf described it in the case of emotion: ‘one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past’ (1980:18 March 1925).

Furthermore, it is rarely the ‘official’, collective moments of crisis or celebration which are the crucial ones in personal experience. Instead, the moments which we look back on and forward to, the moments by which we experientially age, achieve their significance through judgements and criteria particular to the construer. Hence: ‘it’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses’ (Woolf 1978:82). The individual experience of individual lives seldom runs to institutional design.

Finally, if we construct individual moments of being, if we ever live in discrete experiential units, of time, of self, of individuality per se, then equally, such moments are a constant, for we are never not being in a moment of some kind and degree or other. Our lives may turn on moments of greater and lesser significance, but our reflection on our lives is never non-momentary (or non-momentous) and hence the moments of our lives are eternal.

Socio-cultural time

In the social-scientific literature, the particularity to the West (the cultural and historical specificity) of cutting up the passage of time into moments of progression is well attested (cf. Gell 1992). At least since the Enlightenment, it is explained, Western culture has, unusually, imaged time as inexorably linear: stable, unrepeating and oriented towards a becoming: an ‘evolutive’ time. Such notions, indeed, are said to inform the very (deep-structural) bases of Western society; from neatly and constantly sectioned intervals of varying duration, timeliness comes to impose a certain ‘discipline’ on everything from the individual body to the institutions of state (Foucault 1977:151).

Hence, the experience of discrete temporal moments echoes equally discrete moments in ontological experience: we are babies, then infants, children, adolescents, adults and, finally, old-aged. We see time cut up into regular, precisely measured and constantly applied units of greater and lesser duration, and we see society segmented into a hierarchy of social levels and social beings of greater and lesser inclusivity. As seconds

258

MOMENTS OF BEING

are parts of minutes, of hours, days and so on ad aeternitatum, so individuals are parts of families, of neighbourhoods, clubs, churches, communities, ethnic groups, nations and confederations which become larger and larger. As minutes can seem to amount to hours, so heroic individuals can seem to represent entire communities; as hours can appear to pass in minutes, so lifetimes of whole societies and epochs can appear as ephemeral as morbid individuals; and so on. Temporal sectionalization and progression, in short, can be seen to mirror the conceptualization of stages of a life-cycle and components of a social hierarchy (cf. Gellner 1998:3).

The same effect is said to pertain in societies and cultures where time is circular or cyclical rather than linear, or possessed of some other rhythm. What is significant is that time always has a rhythmical (and hence momentary) quality and that, in Durkheim and Mauss‘s influential formulation (1970), it is seen as a representation and a manifestation of a conscience collective. As with other socio-cultural distinctions, that is, time can be seen as emanating from ‘the collective mind’ of society, and thus as coming to ‘express’ the socio-cultural milieu in which it is practised (Durkheim and Mauss 1970:85, 66).The rhythm of temporal distinction penetrates the individual members of a society or culture and instils a pervasive ‘anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour’; so that a correct use of time (thinking in momentary terms) precipitates a correct use of individual body and mind and the way they are conceived of (cf. Mauss 1985).

Moreover, the more temporal division is refined, it has further been argued, the more detailed the partitioning of experience into moments of individual being, so the more the activities of that individual, their stages, development and elaboration, may be subjected to detailed government. Foucault (1977) thus charts the rise in militaristic eighteenth-century Prussia of a modern, highly detailed structuring of time, an increasing refinement in the conventional recognition of minute temporal intervals, as that which also comes to determine an entire disciplinary regimen or discourse within which individuals live. Indeed, Foucault would tie in the genesis of this conception of time (the fetish for chronometry and timetabling) with the invention of the modern Western individual (and its ‘cult status’) as such. In the moments of being of an individual’s life, then, time may be seen as a social-structural, functional and ideological imposition which places that individual— body and being—within a collective social framework at once totalizing, integrative and disciplinary (1977:150–60).

In short, the social-scientific account of temporally sectionalized lives—lives classified into moments and statuses—has generally been

259

MOMENTS OF BEING

impersonal and collective. A homology is posited between the structure of a society and the cognitive structures of its (individual) component parts, brought about by time’s obligatory rhythm.

Phenomenological time

What is significant in Woolf’s account of moments of being is its centralizing of the experiencing individual. She might live in moments as formal units of time just as those around her, and she might deal with these units as conventional forms in her interaction with others, but the experiential time of her life, notwithstanding, she construes and maintains independently of, and most likely differently to, others. Ultimately, the significant moments of her life are hers alone.

What makes these moments of being are encapsulation and juxtaposition. Moments make moments, in short, a viewing of the times of one’s life from across an experiential boundary, from another time: one interaction, one holiday, one generation, status or identity, from another. The act of juxtaposition replaces a flowing continuity of lived-in time (an unconscious immersion within it) with a detached observation of it. Furthermore, since moments are constructed from outside, from across a boundary, their significance, their existence as ‘moments of being’, as moments at all, also varies according to the particular vantage-ground. Moments of being are contingent, therefore, upon their particular differentiation, connection and comparison with others.

What makes moments of being more or less significant is their felt intensity; also their unexpectedness as experiences. In comparison with the moments which juxtapose or encapsulate them, far more has happened within them. Here are, in Fernandez’s words (1986:xi), ‘moments of a sudden constellation of significances’ which become ‘“revelatory incidents’”. There are crests to experience and there are troughs, in other words; and here too there is contingency. For, only afterwards, looking back on significant moments of being, can their heightened intensity (emotional, intellectual) be seen at some point to have begun and to have stopped. As moments and as intense experiences, moments of being are contingent upon individual acts of post facto construal.

In short, if it is a collective shadow which tends to fall across much contemporary social-scientific accounting of time, then ‘moments of being’ also calls attention to an individual phenomenology of experience over and against its formal sectionalization. As Woolf’s contemporary, E.M.Forster, phrased it: ‘man does not live by time alone’ (1961:199); the significance and resonance of the experience of time is individually variable and not appreciable simply in terms of its external, measurable

260

MOVEMENT

proportion.True enough, homologies can be drawn between the way we image social time in the West, say, and our image of individuals as components of society: between the logics of Time and Society as discourses in common usage. Notwithstanding, such formal overlaps between discursive logics do not necessitate cognitive overlaps, nor demand that these overlaps be used or experienced in a particular way. Human behaviour, after all, is less a matter of the formal properties of socio-cultural institutions such as discourse than of occasions of their individual interpretation.

What is evidenced ethnographically, then, is less the conventionality of temporal experience and its division than its personalization (cf. Crapanzano 1980; Campbell 1995). Individuals make their own significant moments, which are not necessarily others’, nor even ones others are aware of as significant or as moments at all (cf. Rapport 1994a: 156–88). The morphological logic is no guide to the sense that is derived from it: the formal conventionalities of Time and the Individual in no measure point to the embedding and control of the former discourse in the latter’s consciousness. Indeed, an emphasis on moments of being identifies those nature and the processes which make for an individual control over time; by conceptualizing their lives in terms of significant moments, moments of greater and lesser intensity, individuals gain a certain purchase upon their temporal experience. For, the idiosyncrasy and privacy of their moments of being, the fact that they do not involve collective participation or entail collective acknowledgement, mean that the moments become theirs to run and rerun, classify and reclassify, juxtapose and rejuxtapose, model and remodel, as they will; they become resources for facing the future (cf. Wallman 1992).

To cut up a life into moments of being, in sum, is for the individual to possess a means by which that life can be filled, shaped and reshaped in significant ways.

See also: Cognition, Individuality, Narrative

MOVEMENT

Movement conceptualized as a mode of human being ramifies into all manner of arguments concerning socio-cultural life and identity. The contemporary importance of the concept is forcefully stated by Paul Carter (1992:7–8, 101):

261

MOVEMENT

[I]t becomes ever more urgent to develop a framework of thinking that makes the migrant central, not ancillary, to historical process. We need to disarm the genealogical rhetoric of blood, property and frontiers and substitute for it a lateral account of social relations…An authentically migrant perspective would, perhaps, be based on an intuition that the opposition tween here and there is itself a cultural construction, a consequence of thinking in terms of fixed entities and defining them oppositionally. It might begin by regarding movement, not as an awkward interval between fixed points of departure and arrival, but as a mode of being in the world.

Anthropological fixity

Paradoxically, perhaps, what has been conventionally assumed in anthropology is a relationship between identity and fixity. In the promulgation of essential cultures, societies, nations and ethnic groups (embodying ways of life which were coherent, homogeneous, and more or less long-lived), the traditional anthropological understanding has been that the cognitive environment in which human beings undertake their daily routines is a fixed one—if not stationary then at least centred.

Hence, anthropologists have come to depict environments as normatively fanning out around the perceiver in concentric circles of greater and lesser degrees of consociality, with the perceiver at the perspectival centre: from house to lineage to village to tribe to other tribes, perhaps (Sahlins 1968:65). A language of classification has been seen to place the speaker reassuringly at the centre of a social space and fan out from there: from ‘self’ to ‘sibling’ to ‘cousin’ to ‘neighbour’ to ‘stranger’, perhaps; or else from ‘self’ to ‘pet’ to ‘livestock’ to ‘game’ to ‘wild animal’ (Leach 1968:36–7). To be at home in an environment, in short, has been to situate the world around oneself at the unmoving centre, with ‘contour lines of relevance’ in the form of symbolic categories emanating from this magisterial point of perception (Schuetz 1944:500–4).To know (oneself, one’s society), it was necessary to gain a perspective on an environment from a single, fixed and homogeneous point of view.

Even if the subjects were nomads, their myths were regarded anthropologically as making of the environment through which they passed a known place, an old place, a proper place, not only fixed in memory but to which their belonging was stationary because permanent, cyclical, normative and traditional; cognitively, they never

262