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

SOCIETY

environment(s) which an individual inhabits before, during and after situations of interaction with others. These may come to be shared in long-term relationships but it is just as likely (if not more so) that they will remain individual and private.Thus, the same cognitive context may be inhabited by an individual in any number of different situations of interaction, while the seemingly ‘same’ interactional exchange can be cognitively contextualized in any number of different ways.

An awareness of situation and context in anthropology developed out of a reaction against those traditions which sought to reify society and culture (après Durkheim, Marx, Lévi-Strauss), and spoke of structure (also convention, norm, rule, role, system and class) as if possessed of its own life and momentum, and as if objective, coercive, impersonal, coherent and steady-state. An emphasis on situation and context translates as one upon those moments in which socio-cultural reality (realities, better) is ongoingly reconstituted courtesy of the decisions of individuals in interaction, acting often in concert with others but always in the context of their own interpretations and agendas.

Finally, an appreciation of situation and context gives onto a picture of social life as far from neat, settled or singular. For between moments of interaction, and between individuals in the same interactions, the meanings which are construed, and the actions consequent upon those interpretations, may be diverse. Only by a micro-social analysis of situation and context can an understanding emerge of what sociocultural realities are being inhabited when, and by whom (cf. Scheff 1990; Briggs 1992; Rapport 1993a).

See also: Cognition, Conversation, Interaction, Moments of Being

SOCIETY

Throughout the modernist period, a concept of society has underpinned the construction of all social theory, whatever its hue or denomination. If the concept of culture has played the role of queen to all analytic categories of the human sciences, the notion of society has been king. It is the master trope of high modern social thought.As such, it is nowadays considered to be a treacherous friend, a term to be used at one’s risk. As Ingold (1994c:738) has commented, the word now belongs so much to a language of argument that its use signals one contentious claim or the other about the world. We must nevertheless continue to take the term ‘society’ seriously, along with all the other major categories of Western

333

SOCIETY

sociological thought, such as ‘culture’, ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’, ‘the individual’, ‘hierarchy’ and ‘egalitarianism’.This is because our own ‘ordinary’ ways of cutting up the world of the social will continue to be essential to the ethnographic process for the obvious reason that these categories remain a hidden lens through which we at first see and perhaps later judge the social lives of other peoples. The important transition for the ethnographer to make is to learn to place his or her representations of society on the same level as the ethnographic facts that we claim for other peoples. ‘Society’ and ‘culture’ are categories local to the West which other peoples may or, more than likely, may not share. Good ethnography moves back and forth between the two—ours and their view of the social—through a dialogical process that has as its reward a further unveiling of both. The aim of the dialogue is naturally to deepen our understanding of each. For instance an Amazonian notion of egalitarianism is hardly a mirror image of our own, but we are only able to see this discrepancy by juxtaposing the two. We come to comprehend better our categories of sociality in the process of unravelling theirs. All anthropology includes, with a greater or lesser degree of candour, an ethnography of the West.

The reason for the present-day errant status of the term ‘society’ is that it shares many of the same problems as its sister trope, ‘culture’. It objectifies social life, with the emphasis being upon the systemic aspects of social units and the shared and distinct nature of their institutions and culture.This idea of society as a singular, self-contained, normative, bounded whole that transcends the individual is the notion that is most often cited in contemporary anthropological literature as highly suspect (cf. Strathern 1988; Fardon 1992; Ingold 1994c;Viveiros de Castro 1996; Rapport 1997a). Particularly pernicious for contemporary sensibilities is the abstract notion of society, forthcoming from Durkheimian theory, as the weighty collectivity that imposes on, opposes and constrains all those extra-social individuals who compose it. A prevalent trend in modernist thought does hold to the idea that individuals, like nature, must be mastered, developed and tamed by the greater whole in order for a progressive social order to be reached.The great debate throughout the history of the modern West has been over what this ‘greater whole’ should be, and who should be the object of its taming, but whatever the solution the argument has nearly always been framed in terms of the master trope, ‘society’.

A very brief history of the term’s use

At stake is a theory of human nature and its specific capacities for social life.This narrative of ‘society’ has a historical context, for it was not until

334

SOCIETY

the eighteenth century that the term began to be used in the modernist, general abstract sense to denote particular ‘social orders’. Raymond Williams notes (1983b:293) that this transformation of use came in the wake of the rise of the nation-state, at which time one prevailing notion of society came to denote the state’s hierarchical and hegemonic institutions of control. The political turmoil of the eighteenth century played its part, for it was through thinking through the questions for a new (bourgeois) political order that the idea of society was constructed in its most general and abstract meaning (ibid.). This sense (e)merged with the notion of ‘civil society’ and the development of contract theories of the state.

In contrast to society as an abstraction, or the idea of society as that to which we all belong in an impersonal, general sense, the earlier meaning pertained to face-to-face relationships within a community, and denoted sociability, companionship, fellowship, or a mode of living (Williams 1983b:291–2). It is this earlier meaning that many anthropologists are now saying is closer to an acceptable view. Thus instead of the term ‘society’, which carries still the modernist meaning of a weighty unified collectivity, many anthropologists today prefer the term ‘sociality’ (e.g. Strathern 1988; Ingold 1994c; Fardon 1995b), one idea being that the social requires individual agency and thus the two partake of one another.

The royal quartet, and the transformation of the normative into the universal

There are many reasons for anthropologists to question fiercely the imagery of society portrayed within the history of the field’s grand narratives of social order. As the above section suggests, our own notion of society, and the elements of which it is comprised, is a product of local historical forces in the West, namely the rise of the nation-state, capitalism, imperialism and the colonialist endeavour. The image of society that came to be favoured in modernist social theory was one that mirrored the major shifts that had occurred in Western social life through these forces of change. Most of our analytic terms that are used for the study of ‘society’ reflect these historically specific transformations and revolutions that occurred in the industrial West, where over time economic life became separated from politics, political life became free of the church, and the domestic unit became detached from them all. Once these areas of life were distinguished as separate domains, it came to be seen as natural that ‘society’ should comprise these four aspects or institutions. In social theory, to understand the order of a society required the study of its distinct systems of economics, politics, religion and

335

SOCIETY

kinship. What had become normative to the West acquired the status of a universal.

Just think of all those classic monographs in anthropology, and their chapters on kinship, followed by those on economics, and then politics, and finally religion. In Schneider’s critique (1984) of this royal quartet as used in anthropology, he says that each ‘is conceived to be a natural, universal, vital component of society…. It is taken as self-evident that…[kinship]…is distinct from the other institutions, yet also related to them since they all constitute major building blocks out of which all social systems are constructed’ (Schneider 1984:187–8). Anthropologists have argued that among the peoples they most study (the ‘primitives’ of the world) that it is the institution of kinship that is prioritized in their societal ordering, as opposed to politics or economics in our own. It is kinship which serves as the salient idiom for their economic, political and religious life. Nevertheless, the very notion of a ‘kinship-based society’ depends analytically on distinctions that hold between each of the quartet—or, the spheres of society that European culture distinguishes. Basically Schneider is arguing that these four categories of society are local postulates of Western culture, and as such they have little analytical value when applied cross-culturally.

The evolutionary agenda of the anthropological use of the royal quartet

It is important to note the hidden political agenda to retaining our Western categories of societal ordering as universals in the task of understanding the sociality of other peoples. When treated not as local social facts, but as universals, the royal quartet can only serve to reflect distinctions of worth that separate the West from all the rest, and the incisive question can no longer be ‘what is the character of their sociality?’, but only ‘to what degree does their social life approach or depart from our modern Western State?’ The question, even if the overt agenda is functionalist, remains strongly coloured by evolutionism, because it asks: ‘how far has a “society” progressed in its socio-cultural complexity in approximating our own’? Both description and judgement are then structured through the Western standards of normalcy. It was in the West that these spheres of life first detached from one other so that each gained independence from the authority of the next. Such detachment between institutions is understood to be one of the essential keys to progress, and to the development of the complex institutional structures of modern civilization.The category of ‘primitive societies’ means just that: these are societies that are simple. The hidden

336

SOCIETY

clause, that it is our standards and valuations that deem them primitive, is omitted, and thus by categorical statement they are classified as primitive. They have not developed; they do not have the institutional complexity—and therefore the development of reason—found in the modern West. Their political and economic spheres of life are still embedded in their kinship system. They are consequently primitive by ‘scientific’ standards (which in this case have their origin, it is to be remembered, in the received knowledge of Western folk). The only conclusion that can be forthcoming from using the royal quartet as a gauge for standards, scientific or otherwise, can be that ‘primitives’ are on the low rung of ‘society’. However, complexity is a complex matter, its judgement being dependent upon the eyes of the beholder.

This hidden agenda of primitivism comes in a variety of colours. From its beginnings, anthropological theory has been rife with greatdivide dichotomies to distinguish the primitive society from the civilized. There are the mechanical versus organic solidarities of Durkheim (1964); the cold vs. hot societies of Lévi-Strauss (1966); the pre-technological vs. technological of Gell (1992); the pre-literate/ literate of Goody (1977); the holistic (collectivist) vs. individualistic of Dumont (1977); and the pre-capitalist/capitalist of Marx (1965 [1857– 58]). Such generalizing classifications of difference are often more self- evaluative than enlightening of the practices of the other. Thus, in classifying other people through them, either positively or negatively, one is not only saying, for example, that ‘they have no freedom because they have community’, but also that ‘we shall have no freedom if we value community’, or ‘we can have more freedom if we have productive progress’, or ‘if we had no productive progress we would be immature and uncreative’. Each such dichotomizing tactic is in accordance with the specific Western distinctions of worth that are being evaluatively weighted to create this great divide.

It was complexity in the economic side of life, specifically its technological aspects, that until recently has been a favoured strategy used to unveil the primitive. It is not at all certain that anthropology has totally freed itself from Marx’s assumption that ‘simple technology’ equates with ‘simple minds’ (Marx 1965). The grand evolutionary schemes in anthropology have principally centred attention on technology, the assumption being that technological development has causal weight in the development of the rest of society (even literacy is understood in this capacity as a ‘technology of the intellect’ (Goody 1977)). Thus all hunters and gatherers of the world have been lumped together as sharing a very low level of ‘socio-political’ progress because they only forage for food. Hunters and gatherers, because of their

337