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

QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE METHODOLOGIES

social—experiential environment, and one by which the anthropologist is able to access the individual in the act of managing his self-defined transactions with reality. While social science has tended to come to grips with experience by robbing it of its unique richness and fluidity, privileging models, quantities and the experimental testing of hypotheses, and translating experience into static and essential abstractions (‘culture’, ‘social structure’, ‘habitus’, etc.), a narrative of personal documents gives onto that subjective consciousness through which the individual articulates his world. In sum, through a personal documentation the anthropologist can do justice to ‘the flow of subjective experience’, others’ and his own, to a phenomenal consciousness as the individual himself experiences it (Watson and Watson-Franke 1985:97; also cf. Lieblich and Josselson 1994).

For others, such as Weiner (1995), the value of personal narratives in anthropology remains low and their use is to be disparaged. For a focus on personal documents prescribes an unnecessarily narrow understanding of culture, and a reduction of social life to text. Whereas society and culture are significantly more than the stories individuals tell of them: to wit, there is the contrast between what is told and what is done, between ‘what language avers and what behaviour reveals’ (Weiner 1995:5). Moreover, social practices and cultural knowledges are unevenly and restrictedly distributed, and an isolating of any one person’s account will thus represent a partial understanding of the total socio-cultural repertoire of what is known. At best, Weiner concludes, ‘narrated memoirs’ serve to distinguish the rather feeble methodology of the oral historian from that of the social scientist; unlike the oral historian (but more like the psychoanalyst), the anthropologist should socially situate the individual narrator so as to reveal influences and constraints upon his personal documentation (whether in speech or in action) of which he himself may be unaware.

One might question whether Weiner’s view of the objectivity of science and culture, and the anthropology that might emanate from their study, is outmoded. Certainly, it is arguable that it is not ‘a culture’ which possesses a total repertoire of things known, in the way that Weiner would portray, but rather individuals who create and possess an ongoing multitude of diverse and discrepant knowledges which they put to use in the animation of socio-cultural forms. And while it is true that there is more to observe than ‘stories about social life’, it is not true that these other things (from theories to sensations) are any less personal or any more objectively accessible. They are also personal documents, no less interpreted and hence narrated by the individual, and no more properly or hegemonically determinable by

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another. In short, what lies beyond an individuals narrations are other narrations—by the same individual and by others. The anthropologist can collect and juxtapose these in his description-analysis—as may the oral historian—but one narrative does not necessarily ‘situate’ another, does not give onto a superior awareness.

Literary anthropology

Because of the novelist’s command of the personal life of the individual, and the formers desire to connect the externally observable with the internally responsible, Forster (1984) concluded that literature was ‘truer’ than social science.While each person knew from experience that there was much beyond the ‘outer’ evidence of observation, and while the social scientist claimed to be equally concerned to record human character, the latter appeared content to restrict himself to what could be known of its existence from scouring ‘the exterior surface’ of social life only, and to what could approximately be deduced from people’s actions, words and gestures. Only the novelist appeared determined to accrue a fuller knowledge, and seek out ‘the hidden life at its [individual] source’ (Forster 1984:55–6).

It is increasingly true that the distinction Forster would make no longer stands. In a ‘biographical anthropology’ of and as personal documentation, the impersonalizing impulses of an earlier social science are eschewed. It is admitted that novelists have often in the past dealt better than social scientists with ‘the subtleties, inflections and varieties of individual consciousness which are concealed by the categorical masks [of membership in social and cultural groups]’ (Cohen 1994:180), and there are attempts in growing numbers to remedy the practice (cf. Rapport 1994a). Here we find the (qualitative) particularities of individual lived experience no longer necessarily eclipsed by (quantitative) generalization, or otherwise reduced, abstracted, typified or overdetermined according to the axioms of a seeming-scientific regularity, stability, order or control. Moreover, this is nothing other than that which Robert Redfield, for one, long ago urged (1960:59):

As soon as our attention turns from a community as a body of houses and tools and institutions to the states of mind of particular people, we are turning to the exploration of something immensely complex and difficult to know. But it is humanity, in its inner and more private form….While we talk in terms of productivity, or of roles and statuses, we are …moving among an apparatus already removed, by our own

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act of mind, from the complicated thinking and feeling of the men and women who achieve the productivity, or define and occupy the roles. But it is the thinking that is the real and ultimate raw material; it is there that events really happen. And the choice of a human biographic form for describing the whole turns us to it.

See also: Humanism, Literariness, Narrative, Post-Modernism

READING

An anthropological interest in reading is relatively recent, another effect, perhaps, of that shift of concern (‘the literary turn’) which brought into focus those practices of inscription by which anthropology as a discipline comes to produce data and reproduce itself. An anthropology of reading explores the diversity of reading traditions in the world, treats these as historically, culturally and socially situated practices, and examines the consequences of their use. Here is ‘reading’ as an intrinsically social exchange, historically informed, culturally specific, often collectively practised.

A diversity of reading traditions

In The Ethnography of Reading, edited by Jonathan Boyarin (1993), two themes predominate: the variety and the universality of reading.To study reading anthropologically is to become aware of how simplistic are such binary distinctions as literacy versus orality or individual versus collective when applied in an evolutionary or an otherwise classificatory fashion to types of societies and the reading practices to be expected within them. There never is or was an oral pastoral, for instance, while there always is a complex, multidirectional and political interplay of different forms of human communication, of which reading is frequently one. In an anthropology of reading what can be expected is a focus less on a particular technology of data-processing than a range of social acts and a specific cultural tool—of domination as well as liberation, of sociality as well as isolation, of longevity as well as recentness. Reading comes to be approached, in Boyarin‘s words, as a ‘living textuality’.

In particular, the Boyarin volume explores the diversity of reading practices surrounding the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, ancient and contemporary; the Christian reading culture adopted by Jesus and his

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early followers; reading as culturally constructed in Anglo-Saxon England; the manipulation of Chinese orthography by pre-modern Japanese scribes and story-tellers; the incorporation of oral and written in the ritual and political practice of highland Colombia; the recitative reading of the Koran in Arabic (albeit incomprehensible) in village Indonesia; reading groups as sites of collective action in urban Texas; and the challenge of reading traditional (mythological) Kashaya stories in an Amerindian reservation classroom.

A reading of what these case-studies together show might conclude as follows: ‘reading’ in the Hebrew Bible translates as a speech act which occupies the public spaces of forum, synagogue, House of Study and court; it almost always means ‘to read aloud to someone’ and has immediate public consequences. Reading is here a proclamation, a declaration, a summons. Similarly, reading has a conversational character in traditional Islamic societies, where mastery of the sciences of life begins with memorization of the Koran. In the Christian West too, reading at one time had an ascetic quality and a behavioural orientation—as is yet evidenced by coenobitic monasticism: communities bound together by the oral delivery and counselling exposition of common texts.

However, by Late Antiquity reading had also become a silent and private practice of the Western study and bedroom: a meditative transaction between reader and book, and a vehicle of innerworldliness. Now we come to have a combination of textual practices, oral and literate, collective and solitary, such as we still see replicated around us today, from Indonesia to Colombia, from the anthropologist in the academy to the ‘other’ in the field. What is of note is less an evolution between reading practices than a dynamic tension. Indeed, to privilege one practice over another is to truncate our understanding of this tension. For, behind the private reading is always the public infrastructure which sustains literacy and legitimates solitariness, while behind the collective group of readers is the individual’s reflective voice.

In short, just as there is no essential separation between the oral and the literate, so, individual and collective readings, a tradition and its performance, must also be seen in ongoing relationship. Furthermore, talking, writing and reading are significantly implicated in one another; reading is a ‘kinetic art’, in Stanley Fish’s phrasing (1972:401), and it is only in understanding the ways in which people move between communication in terms of talking, writing and reading that an appreciation of the significance of each in any particular historical, social and cultural situation is to be gained.

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The agency of reading

But it is not only in its pertaining to conventions of talking and writing that the practice of reading concerns kinesis; and it is not only in terms of historico-socio-cultural milieux that reading attains to particularity. For reading is also individual and agential, and there is a vital balance to be struck between objectified reading traditions-cum-artefacts and active subjects. Reading is a kinetic art inasmuch as it concerns an individual author’s textualizing and an individual reader’s actualizing, and for an imaginative meeting between the two (cf. Rapport 1994a).

As living textuality, that is, the process of the origination of meaning is not restricted to the writer: it also extends to the reader. Reading is creative; it entails personalizing words, imbuing them with significance, with relevance, with life, in a particular way and at a particular time so as to make them possibly uniquely meaningful. Far from static entities, read texts represent lived works: activities which individuals perform, actively using them as instruments in their imaginative moulding of the world. This is why the written can continue to be enacted while being wholly separated from its author—‘emancipated’, ‘distantiated’, ‘decontextualized’ from the psycho-sociological conditions of its production (cf. Ricoeur 1981:91): because the reader engages in a process (comparable to the author) of imparting order and meaning to language‘s common symbolic forms.To read a text, in short, is to impart personality to language: to personalize verbal forms and express a personal construction of the world.

An elucidation of this point has perhaps been most clearly made by Fish (1972, 1979, 1988; also cf. Iser 1978, 1988).To begin, Fish criticizes any approach which treats the text as a self-sufficient system of signification and attempts to locate meaning in its formal features; as if meaning were something which all readers simply extracted from this repository by the same general procedures. Treating the text as a complete and stationary object in this way, as a thing-in-itself, is dangerously misleading, Fish argues, however suggestive might be the physical autonomy of printed verbal forms. For meaning must always be located in the intention of the author and thereafter in the response of the reader.The text itself is indeterminate, and meaning is re-constituted by a reader’s interpretation and ‘narration’: making and revising assumptions, specifying causes, asking questions, solving puzzles, giving and withdrawing approval, rendering and regretting judgements, coming to and abandoning conclusions. The connectedness of the text is not so much of the text itself as the product of the reader’s consciousness, outlook, past experience and expectations being brought to bear upon

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