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

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supposed ignorance of the domestication of nature, are the category of people who sit on the very lowest step of societal development. The corollary of using a ‘simple’ technology of hunting, fishing and food gathering is a low capability for developing the wider network of social and political ties that are necessary to the development of society (e.g. Sahlins and Service 1960; Service 1962; Woodburn 1982). ‘Tribal societies’ are a rung up the ladder because they have learned the technology of horticulture. Since they can create a surplus of food and also store it, they are therefore able to create more ‘socio-centric’ statuses through which to relate economically, and therefore politically, to wider communities of people.The idea is that it is through economic exchange that the political structures of society are created, and its hierarchical societal integration achieved. In neo-evolutionist thought (e.g. Service 1962), ‘chieftainships’ achieve ‘higher’ levels of societal integration than ‘tribal’ peoples because of the grand redistributive networks of goods over which the chieftain leadership has control, while the ‘state’, because of the complex economic powers of its executive, achieves the highest level of all. Peoples are considered to have different degrees of society, a judgement made according to the evolutionary progress of their hierarchical structures.

The ‘domestic mode of production’, and society as hierarchical ordering

In anthropology the notion of society (to be equated with ‘social structure’, and indeed ‘the social’) is usually defined by (1) structures of separation and opposition, and (2) structures of inequality, or the institutional elaboration of relations of dominance and subordination. Egalitarian peoples are considered less social than those that favour their hierarchical institutions because they have less society (e.g. Bloch 1977). The anthropological gaze upon the egalitarian ways of doing things has predominantly been one of suspicion.

Sahlins (1972) provides one of the clearest arguments for equating society and the social with the achievement of politico-economic hierarchical structures. He maintains that ‘tribal’ peoples follow a ‘domestic mode of production’ that is typically based on egalitarian principles that are linked to values which must be overcome in order for the social to be attained. The problem stems from the fact that the household in the ‘domestic mode of production’ is given economic autonomy. In contrast to the capitalist system, ‘the domestic system’, he says, ‘entertains limited economic goals, qualitatively defined in the terms of a way of living rather than quantitatively as an abstract wealth’

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(ibid.: 86). Although he makes the case that this modality leads to an ‘affluent’ life, in that the individual has freedom and leisure, eats well, and does not overly toil, he also argues that its social defect is that the domestic mode only serves intimate and therefore ultimately selfish familial satisfactions, and not those of the wider whole. As a result, production in the domestic mode, Sahlins complains, ‘has all the organization of the so many potatoes in a certain famous sack of potatoes’ (ibid.: 96)—there is a small-time anarchy lurking beneath the surface of things; there is disarray in the background.

So far perhaps so good, but Sahlins further concludes that because of its stress upon quality of life and the intimate relationship, ‘the domestic mode of production’ is like the state of nature. In itself, it provides no mechanisms for holding a growing community together; that is, as an economic mode of operation it has few means for coercing people to work harder. Economically, ‘primitive’ society is therefore founded on anti-society (ibid.: 86, 97–8, our italics). Tribal life becomes social, and attains society, only insofar as the ‘economic defects’ of the domestic mode of production, with its values of autonomy, equality and leisure, are overcome through the political force and economic exploitation of the chief (ibid.: 134). For tribal societies, Sahlins is not only opposing domestic and public domains, but he also places the first—the intimate relations of family life—within the domain of nature. Only the public domain, within which the chief operates through means of political coercion, merits in this view the label of ‘social’. Collectivity, and the very possibility for its attainment, becomes by definition a matter of hierarchical structure and institutions of exchange and coercion. To be social is to engage in hierarchical relationships.

There are nuances here of ways of thinking that speak to our wellknown antinomy of individual and society, where society’s role is understood as a force that moves over and beyond all those egoistic and asocial individuals who make up its numbers (but see Sahlins 1999). Except here the unit of egoism is comprised of a set of domestic relationships. Those intimate relationships which Sahlins declares asocial are also those that are centred on the caring and raising of children. Even if we ignore the very questionable status of Sahlins‘s isolated household unit, which in fact for the majority of indigenous peoples sits firmly within the context of everyday multi-faceted relationships of community life (e.g. Overing 1993a), Sahlins’s assumptions about the domestic unit fit neatly with Western ideas about society that assume an opposition between the public domains of societal importance and the asocial private domain of family and kinship life which is considered to be on the side of nature. Within the context of such a narrative, if one should

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categorize the economic base of ‘tribal society’ as ‘domestic’ then it is a reasonable next step to conclude that the primary thrust of ‘tribal society’ is asocial—and like the ‘state of nature’. Such an argument would be a strong modernist formulation of primitivism.

It might, however, be wise to take a closer look at this Western dichotomy that is so denigrating of the domestic relationship. We might then understand better its tenacity within anthropological literature, as used, for instance, by Sahlins in his shaping of a ‘domestic mode of production’, and also the significance of the part it has played in obscuring indigenous thought and experience.

A feminist critique

It is from a feminist point of view that Marilyn Strathern provides (1988), through her studies of the peoples of Melanesia, a major critique of the construct of society as it has been prevalently used in anthropology.The feminist critique in general has played a crucial role in de-centring the construct of society as it sits within modernist social theory. In large part its success has been due to its focus upon the male bias that is embedded within the Western opposition of the domestic and the public, which, as it is argued, implicitly links women and men evaluatively to their respective places within another powerful dichotomy salient to Western thought, i.e. nature and culture. Strathern argues that the indigenous peoples of New Guinea, and in particular the Hagen with whom she worked, do not have the non-ambiguous misogynist perceptions of sociality that are characteristic of Western classifications of social order. The Hagen have no counterpart to our notion of society, with all those metaphysical problems attached to this concept, such as the idea that men complete culturally and socially what women begin naturally through childbirth. As Strathern notes, ‘however useful the concept of society may be to analysis, we are not going to justify its use by appealing to indigenous counterparts’ (Strathern 1988:3).

She explains that in Western ideas of social order, the power of society is often judged by its control of extra-social individuals, who are conceived of as so much biological raw material for society to domesticate. Society’s socialization of individuals becomes synonymous with the notion of its subordination of nature. There is moreover a symbolism of gender relations, and an evaluation of the respective genders, that lie at the heart of this particular model of society, for the relationship between part and whole (the biological individual with society) is envisaged as that between female and male (ibid.: 94). The

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larger whole, or the controlling collective force of society, coincides with the public domain of men, while the subordinated, individuating, familial domain of the domestic pertains to women—and their biologically based activities. Indeed, in this Western formulation of society, it is the very separation that holds between the dominant public domain and its subordinated private spheres of life that is thought to allow for the creation of society (ibid.: 94–5). And this is the crunch. Without the regulation and control of the wayward, non—collective and biologically based domestic domain of woman by the collectivity of men, society could not be created nor culture made (ibid.: 94, 318).

In this specific myth about the creation of society, ‘primitives’ and women hold the same symbolic position. Women, who typically relate through the individuating bonds of domestic kinship, and ‘primitives’, who also hold dear the domestic relations of kinship, are both metaphorically assimilated to the domain of nature. In other words, their capabilities for creating culture and society are minimal. Both are on the low end of sociality. As is true for any vision of the social, this narrative of society has its history and its own political justifications and agenda.

It is hardly surprising that Strathern, as feminist, critiques anthropological perceptions of sociality when they coincide with the above story of society. In it society is seen as a domain that is metaphorically categorized as male. Society is understood as a wider regulating sociality; it is equated with the public domain of men, who form together a collectivity of men responsible for society. This is to be contrasted to women’s individuating, domestic activities which are viewed as ‘the problem’ for men, and thus for society at large, in that they threaten and impinge upon the solidarity of the collectivity of males (cf. Pateman (1989:641) who observes that the Rousseau-esque social contract is for men only, with women being seen not just as excluded from it but a continual danger to society’s orderly running). Strathern, as anthropologist, is most concerned to set the record straight with regard to indigenous views of sociality.

She notes that many portrayals of Melanesian sociality have followed the Western tale of society which assumes that it is the collective action of men that forms society, with male bonds of solidarity providing for its necessary cohesion. In the anthropological literature, since Malinowski’s publications on the Trobrianders (1922), Melanesian peoples have been famous for their great networks of ceremonial exchange, which linked otherwise autonomous communities into greater societal structures through which big leaders could gain power and prestige. Such structures of male ceremonial exchange were analysed by anthropologists as responsible for social control, the integration of groups, and the

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promotion of sociability. It was the political force of ceremonial exchange that provided the unity necessary for the creation of society, which otherwise would have been impossible because of the individuating, centrifugal inclinations of individual desire. Anthropologists assumed that social structure was concerned with groups of males, and that society was a matter of male solidarity (Strathern op. cit.: 52). It is this popular anthropological myth about the hegemonic relation of men’s collective ritual and exchange to the building of the social relations of society that Strathern wished to shatter

(ibid.: 67–9).

According to Strathern, the indigenous view of their own sociality followed a very different sort of narrative. Among indigenous peoples of Melanesia, she says, there was no image of men ideologically promoting their own male values as those of society at large. Men did not regard female values as a mere counterpoint to their own activities. There was no simple dualistic split between the stereotypes of men and women. Male collective life did not entail a heightened sociality that served a set of male hegemonic social values, over and against those of females. Rather, both men and women were directed toward the same goal. Most of men’s endeavours were ‘directed towards the same production of domestic kinship, growth, and fertility as concern women’ (ibid.: 318; cf. Overing 1999, on Amazonia). The goals of ‘the collective’ and ‘the domestic’ merged, and it is for this reason that Strathern argues that ‘the forms of Melanesian collective life are not adequately described through the Western model of a society, and that however men are depicted it cannot be as authors of such an entity’ (Strathern op. cit.: 319). Rather, collective actions in Melanesia are one type of sociality—they co-exist with the sociality of domestic relations; they alternate but cannot be dominant to them. Nor are men considered ‘more social’ than the women. In contrast to our Western image of society, the Melanesian view does not visualize sociality as a superstructural elaboration of forces, and thus the collective life of men is not understood to have a privileged vantage-point of sanctioning commentary on the ‘rest’ of society (Strathern op. cit.). In short, we must resist the anthropological tendency to conflate ‘their collectivity’ and ‘our society’, for Melanesian people do not have society as we know it. What they do have is sociality.

Basically, anthropologists, in objectifying the notion of society, have transformed modern Western distinctions of worth and judgement into the analytic constructs through which to gaze upon other types of socialities, and in so doing they have often been asking questions that serve to obscure rather than shed light upon indigenous experience.The

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