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

MOVEMENT

What is also called for is a pertinent methodology through which to address the ethnographic enterprise ‘in a post-structuralist’ era: how anthropologically to capture the sequentiality-of ‘part-structures being built and torn down’ (Moore 1987:730). Since no overarching ideological totalism can any longer be said to characterize an ethnographic setting—if it ever truly could—anthropologists are witness to events which instantiated not a priori social structures or symbolic systems but structural and symbolic orderings continually in the process of being created and dismantled. Hence, a ‘processual ethnography’ is called for, of parts and pluralities in time, accounting for situations which are constantly transitional regarding social organization, scale and identity (Moore 1987:736; also cf. Hastrup and Olwig 1997).

For a superficial sameness in cultural forms across the globe should not reduce to casual, homogeneous descriptions, or expected treatments of homogeneity (such as once characterized the work of theorists of ‘world systems’ (cf. Wallerstein 1974/1980)). As Drummond, Hannerz and Paine each argued, the dismantling of what were once conceived of as the structural (—functional) bases of discrete societies and cultures, and the prevalence of globalism as a popular motif, should not translate into homogeneous meanings or lives. Global cultural forms still find themselves being interpreted and ‘consumed’ (Simmel 1971) within individual (local and personal) contexts. There is, in short, a diversity of local acts of ‘appropriation’ of cultural forms (Miller 1988), by which the global comes to be animated, personalized and transformed. Only a ‘provisional writing’ (cf. Cohen 1992b) could accommodate the plurality of symbolic orderings which the anthropologist might adduce at any one place and time: the diversity of provisional normative codes in terms of which the world is locally apprehended.

Movement and travel

‘[O]ne comes to recognize the existence of an actual immortality’, Nietzsche proposed (1994), ‘that of motion’.The world in motion that anthropology has begun to address conceptually brings to our attention something perhaps universally true whatever the socio-cultural milieu, and whatever the conventions of representation; something which, over and against its history of conceptualization (and the will to fixed systems), is perhaps basic to the human condition. This is the relationship between knowledge (its acquisition and representation), identity, and movement: human beings conceive of their lives in terms of a moving-between—between identities, relations, people, things, groups, societies, cultures, environments and times. In and through the

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continuity of movement, human beings continue to construe moving accounts of their lives.

When the philosopher A.R.Louch proposed (1966:160) that anthropology should be seen as a collection of ‘traveller’s tales’—and that this was perfectly fine, the tales were ‘sufficient unto themselves’—few anthropologists would have been satisfied with his description. This has now changed (cf. Pratt 1986).Again in conjunction with a description of the ubiquity of movement in the world—with our heightened awareness of global interdependence, communication, diffusion, aggregation, sharing and penetration; our allowance that anthropologists are no more necessarily aware of the world cosmopolitan consciousness and its operation than their transient ethnographic subjects; and with our appreciation that there is no fixed and stable Archimedean point at which to stand and observe because we are all historico-socio-culturally situated, because all knowledge is in flux—anthropology now conceives of its enterprise very differently. There is an acceptance that cultures need to be rethought ‘in terms of travel’ (Clifford 1992:101). Anthropology, in essence, is a kind of writing and itself a kind of journeying, inscribing what it was like There and Then in the categories and genres of the Here and Now (Geertz 1988:1–5, 140–5).

In short, there is now an acceptance that anthropological knowledge derives from movement and represents itself through movement. To the travelling of ‘the other’, therefore, the informant (whether exile, migrant, tourist or counter-urbanite), now comes to be aligned ‘the increasing nomadism of modern thought’ (Chambers 1994a:18), no longer bolstered by sites and sightings of absolutism, no longer persuaded by fixed, totalizing ways of thinking relations. So that Louch’s statement is doubly true: anthropology as a study of travellers as well as by travellers.

See also: Cybernetics, Home and Homelessness, Narrative,

Non-Places, Tourism

MYTH

Since the birth of the anthropological endeavour, myth has been, together with magic and religion, among the most assiduously explored of its subjects, which is probably more a sign of the troublesome nature of these concepts than of a disciplinary success story of problems well solved. Inherent in such a long-standing and attentive regard is the deep discomfort that anthropology still experiences about the problem of how

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best to treat what is, for us, other people’s strange and ‘exotic’ statements about reality. The question that has yet to be answered is, which (and whose) reality is it that myth speaks to?

This predicament of the relationship of myth to reality is the key issue, for the anthropological focus upon myth (and also magic and religion) became one of the most potent means through which an exoticized ‘anthropological other’ has been created. The sharp disputes over what myth is, and the reality to which it relates, take us to the heart of broader controversies within the discipline, which in turn must be contextualized within the wider world of academic judgements over the worth of the humanities and social sciences vis-à-vis the natural sciences. The debates often centre on impossibly large questions, such as the relation between language and the world (of reality), and the relation of language to myth. If myth is a language of poetry, then what is the relation of poetry to reality? The most telling question of all is that of what is the relation of speaking (purportedly) wrongly (i.e. mythically) about reality to reality itself? What is the relation of mythopoetics to rationality and the ‘progress’ of reason? In the end, the issue with the real sting revolves around the question of what as bottom line any of us are willing to accept as reason or reality?

What is myth? The debate in ancient Greece

Vernant reminds us (1996:203) that we have inherited our concept of myth from the Greeks, and also their rationalist distinction between mythos and logos. Early in Greek history, the poetic discourse of mythos was highly valued. Within both community life and learned society, the opposition between mythos and logos was not yet made.Through mythic narrative the speaker could captivate and charm an audience by relating the ‘fantastical’ adventures and misadventures of supernatural beings belonging to a different time and mode of living than ordinary people. While mythic narrative had its capacity to scandalize reason, it was also through the narration of these dramatic antics of the gods that fundamental truths of existence could be explored. According to Vernant (ibid.: 206–7, 220), one fundamental characteristic of the telling of myths in early Greek times was its ability to give pleasure and involve an audience emotionally. Good myths have entertainment value, for both the magic of their poetry and the power of their narrative delight the listener (cf. Overing 1985c on Amazonian narration of myths). The Greeks considered the affective, performative aspect of myth important to its power. Its dramatic appeal worked not only to enrapture an audience but to convince it.

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Later in Greek history, ‘myth’ came to be viewed as a category of fictitious discourse. Within Greek philosophy as it developed between the eighth and fourth centuries BC, mythos became understood as a form of speech opposed to the reasoned discourse of logos. In time, myth became defined as a discourse contrary to truth (myth is fiction) and the rational (myth is absurd). Logos, as the arbiter of both truth and reason, served as a potent political tool in the battle to constrain the verbal freedom of wayward myth narration. Thus Thucydides, the historian, Plato, and Aristotle, devalued mythos, the fabulous discourse, in relation to the scientific discourse of, respectively, ‘factual’ history, ‘truthful’ speech and ostensive demonstration (see Vernant 1996:208–9 discussion of Thucydides, and ibid.: 210–11 of Aristotle).

Vernant argues (ibid.: 207–8) that the privileging of logos over mythos was directly associated with the increasing prominence given to the written text over the tradition of oral poetry, a trend connected in Greek politics to a political process of democratizing speech. Discourse became ‘common’, no longer the exclusive privilege of those who possessed the gift of eloquence. All members of the community were now judged to possess equally the right to speech, and it was the rational language of logos that was thought to best fulfil this purpose. Thus logos was brought into the encounters of the public square.The reasoning used in defence of logos was that each man, through the faculty of reason, could fight on equal terms through discussion and counter-argument. The rules for discourse were no longer to do with overcoming an opponent through the pleasure-giving, idiosyncratic, spell-binding performance. Rather, the purpose of logos was to establish the truth on the basis of the ‘laws of thought’, and thus through logical, critical and detached intelligence alone. Everything earlier attributed to speech as the power to impress and convince was reduced to mythos, ‘the stuff of the fabulous, the marvellous’ (Vernant ibid.).

The battle of Greek intellectuals to destroy the respectability of mythos in order to privilege the rationality of logos in both intellectual and public discussion is a local history—and a political one. The battle was never entirely straightforward. Plato, for instance, did not entirely deny the potency of mythology, and at times used myths to elaborate his own philosophical theories (such as with the myth of Prometheus in Protagoras). For Plato those who were looking for the ‘real truth’, ‘the really real’, were merely naive.

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The repeat of a history: the modern West’s claim to a superior rationality and knowledge

It is significant that ‘myth’ as a word came late into the English lexicon, appearing only in the early nineteenth century (Williams 1983a [1976]). Its entry into the language carried with it the tradition inherited from the rationalist intellectuals of Classical Greece, and their debate on the rational and the irrational in their endeavours to discover truth. The growth of the popularity of the word in the European context is most likely associated with the process of secularization, and especially the battle of the sciences for ascendancy over the church and other powers in their ‘truth-claims’ about reality. Thus we find that the terms ‘myth’ and ‘mythic’ have usually been used in the modern European context in a derogatory sense with regard to other people, to refer to a fabulous, or untrustworthy, non-rational, and even deceptive set of ideas, story, or discourse—to be found within the domain of religion, or held by a given class of society. Myth seems related to the notion of ideology, when the latter is used to mean false consciousness, and ideas that are mistaken, wrong-headed, deceptive. We find this use of the term in, for instance, Roland Barthes’s fascinating study (1973) of the ‘mythologies’ of the French petite bourgeoisie. The other can be disdained within, and not just without.

Because the word ‘myth’ is used in both political and academic contexts, it is not an easy one to define. All kinds of discourse, speech, text, sets of ideas, can be deemed ‘mythic’, and thus its meaning depends upon the contrast frame in which it is set. Is it being contrasted with the lineal, fact-based writings of our historians? Or, the conclusions about reality proposed by our scientists? Or, the views of an opposing political voice? In each case ‘mythic’ almost always carries with it a connotation of irrationality, and is therefore more a judgemental than definitional or propositional procedure. Its attribution is attached to a judgement embedded in modern Western standards of truth and reality, which declare the superiority of the West with regard to rationality and knowledge. It is a judgement joined to Western metaphysical understandings of why things are as they are.

The modern West’s claim to both superior knowledge and rationality can be understood only in relation to its origins in the project of the Enlightenment. As suggested, there are strong political undercurrents to this story, as there were with the ancient Greek distinction between mythos and logos. This narrative begins with the Enlightenment aim, as part of its scientific strategy, to establish civilized Europe in its role as arbiter of truth, reason and knowledge.As a central prop to this powerful

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