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

NON-PLACES

model’s driving force), network analysis can in this way provide subtle and humanistic interpretations of the workings and interconnections between socio-cultural institutions.

See also Gossip, Interaction, Transaction

NON-PLACES

Marc Augé (1995) has suggested the notion of ‘non-places’ as a corrective to certain conventional conceptualizations of social milieux which are no longer persuasive. For Auge, the Durkheim—Mauss orthodoxy of ‘societies’ identified with geographical locations, in which are to be found representative role-players or ‘persons’, who belong to behavioural ‘cultures’ conceived of as complete wholes, can now be seen to represent an ideological conceit which had led anthropology up a blind alley. To construe a consistency and transparency between culture, society and the individual fails to provide a convincing account of the processes of identity and otherness.

No anthropologist could ever have been unaware of the contingency of socio-cultural ‘places’; the image of a closed and self-sufficient world (of relations, identity and history) was never more than an instrumental semi-fantasy, a provisional myth, even for those who worked (whether inside the academy or without) towards its collective materialization. However, the organization of space etc. upon which the ideology rests is one which the world today comprehensively and irrevocably refutes. For, the measure of modern life is of movement, networks, and situations of interaction, taking place on a global stage and much in terms of ‘nonplaces’; here are a proliferation of transit points and temporary abodes where individuals engage, without essential ‘cultural’ mediation, with global processes. In waiting-rooms, wastelands, building sites, refugee camps, stations, hostels and hotels, malls, thousands of individual itineraries momentarily converge as travellers break step. In these spaces individuals are at once alone and one of many; non-places are ‘palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten’ (Auge 1995:79).

Of course, ‘non-places’, too, can be construed as an ideology, no less partisan than traditional ‘places’; while fixity, social relations and cultural routine (groups, gods and economies) can be seen to continue to reconstitute themselves in the world. But non-places serves the purpose of exploding the normative singularity of place; so that place and non-

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place represent contrastive modalities, the first never wholly constituted, the second never completely arrived at. The possibility and experience of non-place is never absent from any place, with the result that no place is completely itself and separate, and no place is completely other.

See also: Home and Homelessness, Movement, Network,

Situation and Context

POST-MODERNISM

‘[T]he will to a system is a lack of integrity’, Nietzsche once aphorized (1979:25), and there is a sense in which anthropology has always agreed. Anthropology has often felt ‘uncomfortable’ as a ‘discipline’ of study, desirous of being ‘non-specialist’ (Bateson 1959) in order to tackle the complexities of experience in socio-cultural milieux. In its representing of socio-cultural realities, furthermore, anthropology has pursued the polemical end of ever abnormalizing its discourse so that new possibilities can be constituted for thinking about human experience: ‘constantly [building] up the conditions from which the world can be apprehended anew’ (Strathern 1990a:19). To this extent, anthropology has long practised as a ‘virtual anti-discipline’ (Hart 1990:10).

In another sense, however, anthropology has seldom agreed with Nietzsche’s counsel. For in any number of its paradigmatic manifestations—functionalism, structural-functionalism, structuralism, Marxism, ecologism, cognitivism, interpretivism—achieving a holistic analysis of a phenomenon conceived of as a whole—a society of institutions, a culture of representations, an environment of symbioses, a mind of schemata—has been anthropology’s founding, abiding and guiding ideal.

Much ‘post-modern’ thinking represents a fantasia on Nietzschean themes—‘the bread and wine of modern philosophy’. (The origin of the term ‘post-modern’—or one of the origins, at least—is said to be Charles Jencks’s (1977) characterization of a style of contemporary architecture which offered a juxtaposition of different styles without attempting an overarching integration.) And in the same way that the relationship between anthropological practice and the above Nietzschean aphorism is an ambivalent one, anthropology’s relationship to post-modernism is ambivalent too. Beginning with the writings of three of post-modernism’s noted figures, this will become clear.

What should also become apparent is the difficulty of assigning ‘a particular shape’ to the relationship between anthropology and post-

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modernism at all—and again, the very post-modern nature of that ambivalence and that uncertainty. For thinking that takes as its cue the notion that ‘a will to a system is a lack of integrity’ is immediately caught up in a possible reductio ad absurdum. One seeks to avoid systematizing, because to will a system is to delimit and lack—to lack integrity (moral and ontological)—and yet to go about eschewing systems is itself systematic. So for post-modernism to have ‘a nature’ is for it to stop being post-modern.All that is left is its reactive character: post-modernism is not a thing but a reaction to things and thingness. In particular, postmodernism is a reaction to the propositions of thingness set out by ‘modernism’: of Western, Enlightenment conceptions of reason and rationality, objectivity and truth, scientific method and the progress of history and knowledge, individuality and liberal-democratic advance.

Lyotard

In The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1986), JeanFrançois Lyotard describes the superficiality, the fragmentariness and the multiplicity of contemporary socio-cultural life and practice.We live in a world where there is a proliferation, even an excess, of ways and forms of knowing, speaking and gaining ‘truth’, Lyotard begins: from science to religion to consumerism to popular culture to multi-culturalism. Each makes its own claims, posits its own values, but we are at a loss to know how to judge between them so as to grant one a superior legitimacy. Hence we arrive at no single, overarching truth, no definitive answers to our questions: is there a God? is there scientific certainty? is there artistic transcendence? is there an escape from unequal relations of power? is there an end to colonialism? In a world of excessive claims and information, we have lost faith in singularities. Not any longer knowing how to hierarchize different claims to knowledge and privilege one above others, we instead possess a ‘flat’ collection of types of knowledge all of which compete for our attention and among which we network, sample and drift. Each type of knowledge represents an island of determinism, its own irreducible world of order (or disorder), its own brand of (knowledge-)product, and we are travellers, shoppers, consumers amongst them. We use types of knowledges in a piecemeal and parallel fashion, trying them on for size in different situations, appreciating their usefulness for particular purposes, but not adhering exclusively to any one or believing in its overarching validity.This gives our lives a certain fragmented character.We live in episodes of particular ways of knowing but these do not last. Moreover, between our different episodes of knowing particular things in particular ways there is no

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necessary sequentiality, no real consequentiality. ‘Things’, as the (Yeatsian) title of Chinua Achebe’s famous novel has it, ‘fall apart’, and we lead lives of contingency, chance and overriding uncertainty.

This lack of a single guiding telos to our lives, a grand or ‘metanarrative’ of knowledge, identity and aspiration, Lyotard sees as an archetypically twentieth-century problem. It did not, for example, trouble Marx (Lyotard is a lapsed Marxian), for whom a distinction between truth and ideology or false consciousness was clear. After Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, however, we now recognize how all truth is discursive: a matter of conventionally normative fit between elements in a language-game. Furthermore, it is not something that particularly worries us; ‘problem’ is perhaps the wrong word. For we have no great nostalgia for meta-narratives or overriding truths, and probably would not recognize one as such a creature at all. We do not feel alienated by our loss (even if this was the abiding sentiment during late modernism), and are not shocked by a rule-less and directionless world which lacks a foundational moral sense. As post-moderns we simply live with our senses, and we do not attempt to make sense once and for all. The keyword is ‘eclecticism’: ‘eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter of TV games’ (Lyotard 1986:76).

Baudrillard

According to Jean Baudrillard (1989), modern culture has entered a Western-spawned age of consumerism and consumption (as opposed to the Marxian, modernist one of production). Furthermore, instead of the useor production-value which commodities might possess in being able potentially to satisfy our basic needs, the value of commodities now derives from what they symbolize, from the images they conjure up. Commodities become encoded objects in a system of potential symbolic exchange, whose ownership we imagine as affording the possibility of being party to any number of communications and being identified with all manner of effects.

As in an age of production, however, this continues to be a wholly alienating situation. Delivered and developed by mass media with which it is impossible to engage or negotiate, the images of commodities contaminate and corrupt our lives in a number of ways. First, the images alienate us from reality and from any hope of accessing reality; so predominant and dominating is the world of images that we lose the

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ability to gain a perspective on our representations of reality as mere representations and to see beyond them. Instead, the images become our reality, and we lead lives of simulation surrounded by simulacra which never touch real referents. Images produce our world—absorbing any ulterior reality to themselves, appropriating reality to their ends—so that, for instance, television soap-operas become our social arenas. Our selves become merely terminals in multiple networks of moving images. Secondly, the world of images is alienating because mass media now so dominate their functions that the ‘message’ disappears; images become examples of pure form without any content at all. The form of the image becomes its meaning, and the world of images is a ‘hyper-real’ one which lacks all depth.

If we have lost control of our consumption of meaningless images, lost the distance and perspective necessary to make real meaning, or see real causes, or partake in a real history, then perhaps the only escape is into (image-less) meaninglessness. If all consumption of images is ideological, then the only route beyond the alienation of a false consciousness lies in the dissolving of Western culture and its systems of signs per se. And Baudrillard borrows from ‘ethnography’ to suggest how such escapes might seem. For instance, there is a ‘beyond’ Western culture, to be found in ecstatic seduction and sex, in unpredictable challenges and adventures, in meaningless catastrophes and disasters, in transcendent poetry, and in death, and there is a ‘before’ Western culture to be found in heterogeneous primitive systems of exchange. What is liberating about these latter is that as ‘total prestations’ (Mauss 1954), the items of consumption and exchange are non-monetary and non-liquid; so that a relational value between the participants (in the kula, in the potlatch) is uppermost. If such otherness can be preserved, then there might yet be an escape from Western imagism.

Foucault

Because we live our lives in terms of an exchange of images, symbols and signs which are themselves commodities of anonymous signifying systems (linguistic tokens), the real is ever epistemologically bracketed off from humanity, Michel Foucault claims (1991). We can never access reality directly, only through codes, ways of speaking and thinking, ‘discourses’, specific to cultural epochs. These codes or discourses, moreover, are less transparent media which provide windows onto underlying reality than creators and guarantors of specific realities. And such is the power of the unconscious workings of discourses upon the minds and bodies of those who are taught to employ them that such

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