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

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big question is what does it mean to be social? If we define society as institutions of hierarchy and coercion, then it is clearly the case that many indigenous peoples do not have much of it, nor do they want it (e.g. Clastres 1977; Overing 1993b). They nevertheless are clearly social beings, and they also happen to have their own strong views about proper human sociality.

See also: Agent and Agency, Common Sense, Culture, Gender,

Humanism, Individuality, Kinship, The Unhomely

STEREOTYPES

Stereotypes and the practice of stereotyping—attributing to all members of a category or class identical features—have not traditionally been well-received within the social sciences. Of the three broad analytic approaches, the sociological, the psychodynamic and the cognitive, all concur in linking stereotypes with pejoration and perverse inter-group relations (Ashmore and Del Boca 1981). Defined as ‘relatively rigid and oversimplified conceptions of a group of people in which all individuals in the group are labelled with the group characteristics’ (Wrightsman 1977:672), and functioning as ‘chunks of attributed traits [which cause] an individual’s evaluations of others to come in packaged Gestalten’ (Pettigrew 1981:313–14), stereotypes are seen as deriving from hearsay and rumour rather than induction from proven fact, and from a simple projection of one’s own values and expectations onto the environing world (Allport 1954). It is said that stereotypes are the resort of those lacking cognitive complexity, the penchant of those frightened by ambiguity and unsubtle in how they categorize stimuli; or else those emotionally aroused or distracted and unable to attend fully to cognitive classification; or those fixated on deindividuating themselves, and thereafter visiting the same on others (Wilder 1981:235–40). Hence, stereotypes allow simplistic and fantastic claims to be made about a group’s manifold membership, claims which are all the more ambiguous and gross the higher the societal level to which the collective label is applied.

In short, stereotypes are seen to form a discursive and conceptual fortress in which groups can barricade themselves, universally convinced of the safety, rectitude and respectability of their own traditions while at the same time aroused into making prejudiced (but self-fulfilling) responses not towards real others but towards masquerades and

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phantasms (Basow 1980:3–12; also Glassman 1975:14–20).Thus it is that stereotypes come to be decried as sources of social pathology; they are a root cause of misconception, and thus of intractable and oppressive sexism, racism and classism (Elfenbein 1989:viii, 158), of misdirected and xenophobic aggression, warring and pogrom (O’Donnell 1977:23–4; also Lea 1978).

Traditional social-scientific appreciations of stereotypes

The origin of contemporary social-scientific interest in stereotypes is probably the work of Walter Lippmann, especially Public Opinion (1947 [1922]). Reality is too complex for human beings to apprehend directly, Lippmann theorized (1947:89ff.), therefore they form mental pseudoenvironments, a key part of which are stereotypes. Modern social life is hurried and multifarious, with little time or opportunity for intimate acquaintance; there is a need for economy, for seeing things as types and generalities. At the same time, there is a human love of absolutes and a dislike of constant qualification: an orderly world-view is one of clear demarcations. Hence, stereotypes represent schemata which simplify perception and cognition, and help to process information about the environment in a uniform and regular fashion. These schemata are not reached or maintained by individual testing, however. Rather they are learned as cultural practices; stereotypes come to form integral parts of individuals’ world-views and yet they represent the imposition of prerational characterizations and classifications on data deriving from a cultural habitus. Stereotypes therefore rationalize ‘prejudicial’, prejudgemental, cognitions and conclusions about the world.

The three main analytic approaches to stereotypes which have developed since Lippmann‘s day (the sociological, the psychodynamic and the cognitive) have all focused upon the factually incorrect, overgeneralized and prejudicially rigid nature of stereotypes.The sociological approach (cf. Chapman 1968; McDonald 1993) focuses on the sociocultural factors behind groups’ use of and belief in stereotypes. Stereotypes are treated as temporally and regionally consistent ideological matrices which are learnt by individual members through processes of socialization. Due to the cultural mismatch of classificatory systems by which different social groups construct the world, moreover, stereotyping can be understood as an autonomous discourse which predominates within the worlds of the representers quite independently of any ‘truth-value’, and irrespective of any connection to those ‘others’ it purports to depict. Part-and-parcel of a group’s ‘identity rhetoric’, stereotyping is a function of the social construction of group

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characteristics; by way of a normative treatment of others, a consensus surrounding stereotypes bolsters social solidarity and integration. Through partaking in processes of prejudicial othering, individuals can express common group membership and hope to gain the recognition of their fellows.

Psychodynamic approaches to stereotypes have centred on those instinctual and unconscious factors in the human make-up which might make for poor inter-group relations. Both the instinct for aggression per se, and the arising of certain personality types (authoritarian, for instance) from a dialectical interplay between particular instincts and particular agonistic social formations, are seen as motivating human beings towards prejudicial treatment of others (cf. Wrightsman 1977). Cognitive approaches, meanwhile, have tended to reject a focus upon both motive and ideology, and accepted a limited human capacity to process information and think rationally. Stereotypes here represent breakdowns in environmental perception such that experience is not cognized directly or wholly, and cognitions are not changed in the face of new data. These systematic perceptual biases are due to inevitable human fallibility. In endeavouring to reduce environmental complexity to a manageable size, when bombarded with environmental stimuli, untested cognitive short-cuts come to be employed which have a tendency to become self-fulfilling. As with ‘autistic thinking’ in general, stereotypes are insufficiently perspicacious to afford valid generalizations and any true relation to reality which they bear is merely by chance (cf. Klineberg 1951; Peabody 1985).

In sum, stereotypes are conventionally treated as over-generalized, overdetermined, second-hand and partial perceptions which confuse description and evaluation, which merely reflect ideological biases, instinctual motivations or cognitive limitations.

An alternative appreciation of stereotypes

This bad press can sometimes miss the mark, however. A better appreciation of the practice of stereotyping might begin by identifying just what stereotypes, as a discourse and a cognitive resort, can be said to offer.

First, then, stereotypes afford both opposition and exaggeration. From the former (from comparison and contrast), notions of being are to be gained: by continuously ‘playing the vis-à-vis’, as Boon phrases it (1982:231), distinctions between self and other are realized. From the latter (from hyperbole), as Douglas suggests (1966:4), clarity and definiteness are to be derived.Thus it is that in stereotypes distinct senses

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of identity may be seen to inhere; through the positing of stereotypical images of difference, individuals and groups can maintain their senses of belonging, while in stereotypical hyperbole differences between self and other can become ever more clear-cut. Rather than scourges of the alien, then, stereotypes may be seen as facing primarily inward: into the group and, even more, into the individual, furnishing him or her with comforting shibboleths of self.

Seen from ‘inside’ group boundaries, the stereotype can serve a further useful purpose; individuals can use stereotypes for cognitively mapping and then anchoring themselves within a conventional and secure social landscape. Here are cognitive ‘schemata’ (Neisser 1976:53–4), which direct an exploration of the unknown and potentially chaotic in terms of the personally orderly and known. That is, stereotypes are a stable and widespread discursive currency, and they provide significant points of initial reference.They afford bearings from which to anticipate interaction, plot social relations and initiate knowing—and from a safe distance, too—however far removed their biases become from the manifold elaborations of social relationship and being which eventuate. However diversely conceived and unpredictably shifting the social universe, still an individual need never be at a loss as to what to perceive and how to commence to act; indeed, the simpler and more ambiguous the stereotype the more situations in which it can be used. Perhaps the stereotype does derive from typifying the world ‘outside’ in exaggerated opposition, with others’ cultural traits being seen as alien and as butting against one’s own, but ‘inside’ the stereotype still provides the cognitive furniture of a secure belonging. If two geometric axes must intersect for the identifying of a point in a plane, then in the stereotype the individual finds one ready-made cognitive axis in relation to which to gauge his or her position (cf. Price 1992:58–9).

Moreover, stereotypes are never alone. At least one contrast is entailed and very often an entire set: ‘commonsensical English’ versus ‘stupid Irish’ versus ‘mean Scots’ versus ‘thieving Welsh’ versus ‘haughty French’ versus ‘mystical Indians’ versus ‘regimented Chinese’ versus ‘rough-and- ready Australians’, and so on. And if the stereotype is a cognitive anchor, then a set of them anchors the individual to a socio-cultural world replete with, and ready for, all manner of occurrence. Each stereotype alone may represent a corruption of an immense variety of practice, but as a set they provide a varied, rich and all-inclusive array; however fictitious and remote these labels may be from others’ actual attributes and penchants, together stereotypes constitute a coherent and expectable, wider milieu, common in form to all its members.

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In sum, the stereotype represents a shorthand. It is a source of consistent, expectable, broad and immediate ways of knowing of sociocultural worlds, a ready means by which to embody and express a multitude of complex emotions, and a short-cut to generalities, to future possible regularities and uniformities. Such a foundation is very necessary not only as a bulwark against indeterminacy and unpredictability, but also as an encouragement towards action—that vital movement which, if it were not for the bias of the stereotype and the blind spots of perception it incurs, might be replaced by the self-doubt and paralysis of trying to see an environment from every point of view (cf. Lippmann 1947:114; Rapport 1998).

The individuality of stereotypes

To stereotype is to partake of a socio-cultural discourse: to know of ‘French’ and ‘Indians’, of ‘haughty’ and ‘mystical’, and of how the words go together; also of how properly to enunciate the words, and combine them with actions, in conventional interaction.To stereotype, in short, is to evince enculturation into a set of regularly used and possibly widely shared practices.

However, an argument may be made, notwithstanding, that a discourse of stereotypes remains essentially exterior to the individual: something with which he juggles and enters into relationship. For, at the same time as the individual has recourse to stereotypes, the interpretation of experience which stereotyping affords is far from constricted. The individual can be seen adopting and yet adapting stereotypes, developing his own routine relations with them, posing one against another, personalizing what they purport in his own image. Stereotypes punctuate acts of interpretation, serving as a structure, a syntax, a cement for what is constructed, but they do not determine those constructions.

The externality of stereotypes as a discourse (and the ‘internality’ of their contextualization) speaks to a further feature of stereotypes: their inertia.There is wide acknowledgement of longevity of stereotypes, their persistency and consistency in the face of ‘objective’ contradictory claims. In this discursive stability, it might be argued, is to be found security and an assurance of one’s possessing interactional currency. But besides security, it is perhaps beneath such conventional discursive forms that life can be lived most eccentrically and creatively. The very formulaicism permits the freest flights of fancy to be privately construed with the least of public consequences. As Virginia Woolf poetically phrased it (1969:223):

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