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

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moved. And even if the subjects engaged in ritual journeys outside everyday space and time—rites of passage; pilgrimage; vision quests—in search of sacred centres to their lives (Eliade 1954:12–20), these antistructural events served in fact to fix them even more; as special, extraordinary, aberrant experiences, the rituals merely emphasized and legitimated an everyday identity which derived from fixity in a social environment. Ritual pilgrims used their moments of (imagined) movement to establish routinely fixed orientations to a world around them (cf. Yamba 1992). Similarly anti-structural and marginal, finally, were the passages undertaken between status-groups by individuals in hierarchically organized societies (between classes, between professions, between age-grades), for here was movement whose experiential purpose, whose successful conclusion, was eventual stasis. As Lévi-Strauss concluded, myths should be understood as machines for the suppression of the sense of passing time and space, giving onto a fixed point from which the world took and takes shape (1969b:14–30); a conclusion Leach then extended to ritual acts in general (1976a:44).

In short, under this traditional anthropological dispensation, movement was mythologized as enabling fixity. As cultures were rooted in time and space, so cultures were seen to root societies and their members: organisms which developed, lived and died in particular places. Finding a stationary point in the environment from which to engineer one’s moving, perceiving, ordering and constructing was regarded as a universal necessity. Movement and travel, as Auge quipped (with Lévi-Strauss in mind), was something seemingly mistrusted by this anthropology to the point of hatred (1995:86).

Movement and identity

Of late, however, there has been a conceptual shift in the norms of anthropological commentary.As Keith Hart begins (1990), socio-cultural fixity and stasis no longer persuade; the world is not divisible into framed units, territorial segments and the like, each of which shares a distinctive, exclusive culture, a definite approach to life. There are no longer traditional, bounded cultural worlds in which to live—pure, integrated, cohesive, place-rooted—from which to depart and to which to return (if there ever were), for all is situated and all is moving. Human society is fluid and inclusive, such that ways of life ‘increasingly influence, dominate, parody, translate and subvert one another’ (Clifford 1986:22). There is a complex movement of people, goods, money and information—variously depicted as: ‘modernization’; the growing global economy; the migration of information, myths, religions, icons,

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languages, texts, entertainments, imagery, cuisine, décor, costume, furnishing, fashions, above all, persons (Geertz 1986:120–1); the new technologies of communication and ‘knowledge engineering’ exploding distinctions between localities, and between the local and the global (Schwartz 1987); the induced, often brutally enforced migrations of individuals and whole populations from ‘peripheries’ towards EuroAmerican metropolises and Third World cities (Chambers 1994a:16)—all of which causes even the most isolated areas to belong within a cosmopolitan global framework of socio-cultural interaction. As Hart concludes: ‘everyone is caught between local origins and a cosmopolitan society in which all humanity participates’ (1990:6).

In this context, John Berger makes the argument that movement around the globe be regarded as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’, while emigration, banishment, exile, labour migrancy, tourism, urbanization and counter-urbanization, are our central cultural motifs (1984:55; cf. Minh-ha 1994:13–14). Being rootless, displaced between worlds, living between a lost past and a fluid present, are perhaps the most fitting metaphors for the journeying, modern consciousness: ‘typical symptoms of a modern condition at once local and universal’ (Nkosi 1994:5).

To bring different contemporary forms of movement together in this fashion, as Berger does, furthermore, is not inevitably to essentialize movement: to claim ‘it’ is phenomenally somehow always the same, or sui generis. Movement remains a polythetic category of experience: diverse, and without common denomination in its particular manifestations. Nor is it to underrate either the forces eventuating in large-scale population movement in the past (famine, plague, crusade, imperial conquest, urbanization, industrialization), or the forces arrayed against movement in the present (restrictive or repressive state or community institutions, state or community borders). To talk about the ubiquitous experience of movement is not to deny institutionalized power and authority, nor the differential motivations and gratifications in that experience which hierarchy might give onto. Rather, what Berger draws our attention to is the part movement plays in the modern imagination, and in our imaging of the modern; ‘[m]ore persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of “possible” lives than they ever did before’ (Appadurai 1991a:198). Movement is the quintessence of how we—migrants and autochthones, tourists and locals, refugees and citizens, urbanites and ruralites—construct contemporary socio-cultural experience and have it constructed for us. Wandering the globe, as Iain Chambers puts it (1994a:16), is not now the expression of a unique tradition or history; for the erstwhile particular chronicles of diasporas—

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those of the black Atlantic, of metropolitan Jewry, of mass rural displacement—have come to constitute the broad ground-swell of modernity; modern culture is practised through, and the work of, wandering.

Anthropological movement

In this context, anthropology has had increasing recourse to ‘write movement’. Through such concepts as ‘deterritorialization’ (Appadurai 1991a), ‘creolization’ (Hannerz 1987), ‘massification’ (Riesman 1958), ‘compression’ (Paine 1992), ‘hybridization’ (Bhabha 1990), ‘interreferencing’ (Clifford 1986), and ‘synchronicity’ (Tambiah 1989), it has sought to comprehend the processes that movement effects in sociocultural milieux—and so to apprehend the relations between movement and identity.

This may be exemplified in the work of Drummond (1980), Hannerz (1987) and Paine (1992). For Lee Drummond, the culmination of some 400 years of massive global migration, voluntary and involuntary, of a continuous traffic in capitalist commodities, can be seen to have transformed most societies. However, the result of these transformations is neither new integrations of what were once separate societies and features of societies, now fitting neatly together as one, nor pluralities whereby old separate societies simply retain their cultural distinctivenesses side by side. Rather, what results are socio-cultural continua or combinations: ‘creolizations’. Rather than discrete social spaces with their own discrete sets of people and cultural norms, societies are basically Creole in nature: combinations of ways of life, with no invariant properties or uniform rules. A series of bridges or transformations lead across social fences and cultural divisions between people from one end of the continuum to the other, bridges which are in constant use as people swop artefacts and norms, following multiple and incompatible ways of life. Here is a world in which there are now no distinct cultures, only intersystemically connected, creolizing Culture: a ‘concatenation of images and ideas’ (Drummond 1980:363).

For Hannerz, the traditional picture of human cultures as forming a global mosaic must now be complemented by a picture of ‘cultural flows in space’, within a single field of persistent interaction and exchange (1993:68). Through mass media, objects of mass consumption, and the mass movements of people, culture now flows over vast distances; here is a continuous spectrum of interacting forms, which combines and synthesizes various local cultures and so breaks down cultural plurality; indeed, it may be better to conceive of culture tout court as a flow.

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Nevertheless, any new ‘world system’ results not in socio-cultural homogeneity but a new diversity of interrelations: many different kaleidoscopes of cultural combinations, amounting to no discrete wholes, only heterogeneous and interpenetrating conglomerations. For people now draw on a wide range of cultural resources in the securing of their social identities, continually turning the erstwhile alien into their own; they make sense to themselves and others by selecting from amongst a global inventory of behaviours and beliefs, ideas and modes of expression. Hence, each locality partakes in a global collage, a ‘Kuwaiti bazaar’ (Geertz 1986:121), and speaks in a stuttering, creole voice (Chambers 1994b:247). ‘[W]e are’, in short, ‘all being creolized’ (Hannerz 1987:557).

For Paine, however, such global movement among and between cultures is neither smooth nor is it singular. With individuals making different cultural selections and combinations—different from other individuals and different from themselves in other times and places; different in terms of particular items and their relative weighting, and different in terms of the willingness, loyalty and intensity of the selection—and with individuals combining cultural elements which were not just previously separate but are still incommensurable, so global movement can be expected to be volatile. Advocates of different selections, furthermore, can be expected to be exclusionary if not hostile. At the same time as there is globalization, therefore, and movement across the globe, between societies and amongst cultures, as never before—people treating the whole globe as the cognitive space within which they can or must imagine moving and actually do move, the space which they expect to ‘know’—there is also ‘cultural compression’ (Paine 1992): an insistence of socio-cultural difference within the ‘same’ time and space; a piling up of socio-cultural boundaries, political, ritual, residential, economic, which feel experientially vital, and which people seek to defend and maintain. A dialectic is born (not to say a Batesonian schismogenesis) between global movement and local compression. So that even if travel is ubiquitous, and one is ‘at home’ on the entire globe, to travel within one’s home is to encounter a world of socio-cultural difference; even to stay home is to experience global movement (cf. Featherstone 1990).

Moving from Drummond to Hannerz to Paine in this way is not to meet perfectly commensurable expositions of the contemporary world, then.There is disagreement over the extent to which a globalization of culture results in an ongoing formation of boundedness around social groups, as well as disagreement concerning the extent to which this globalization is experienced as colonial or post-colonial—as the

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imposition of a particular cultural way of being-in-the-world as opposed to the opportunity to constitute and reconstitute the set of cultural forms which go to make up ones lifeway (cf. Appadurai 1990). More significantly, there appears to be divergence concerning whether the thesis linking contemporary movement and identity is a historical one or a representational one. In particular, Drummond is happy to talk in terms of four centuries of change, while Paine’s central motif is a comparison of could-be anthropological representations between E.M.Forster and Salman Rushdie.The historical argument would seem to be the harder one to make, and would also seem prone to the kinds of grand-historical reductionism which characterized conventional anthropology in its traditional dispensation (from ‘fixity to movement’ as from ‘mechanical solidarity to organic’, from ‘community to association’, from ‘concrete thought to abstract’, from ‘hierarchy to individualism’). Certainly, the history and archaeology of frequent and global movement make generalizations about the uniqueness of the present foolhardy.

Movement and methodology

Where Drummond, Paine and Hannerz do meet is in a recognition of the contemporary significance of movement around the globe—its universal apperception, its ubiquitous relationship to socio-cultural identities. Now we have ‘creolizing’ and ‘compressing’ cultures and ‘hybridizing’ identities in a ‘synchronizing’ global society; there is a sense in which metaphors and motifs of movement are of the quintessence in the conceptualization of identity. Identity is seen as forming ‘on the move’: a ‘migrant’s tale’ of transitions and heterogeneities (Chambers 1994a:24).

‘Settled arrangements’ in socio-cultural milieux were always a story, Geertz admits (1995:15–16), and things were always actually fluid and multiform. What is different now is that we recognize our traditional categories of comparison—‘parts’, ‘norms’, ‘practices’ and ‘wholes’—and the master-plots and grand pictures of culture they gave onto—causal forces shaping belief and behaviour to a generalizable, abstractable pattern—as impossibly illmade and unworkable. What is called for, therefore, is representation more attuned to hints, uncertainties, incompletions and contingencies: ‘swirls, confluxions and inconstant connections’. Whether in folk commentary or in social-scientific, the personal myths and rituals that one carries on one’s journey through life (that carry one through a life-course) need not fix one’s perspective on any still centre outside one’s (moving) self

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