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

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might set limits upon the methodological individualism which transactionalism would entertain since structure, content and form in socio-cultural relations are now seen as operating in an (emergent) domain of their own.

However, along with other, similar (periodic) attempts to bring together agency and structure (Giddens 1976; Bourdieu 1977)—such as is also represented by a flurry of recent work on risk (Beck 1992; Douglas 1992)—the positing of ‘emergence’ itself runs the risk of sliding down a slippery slope to reification and essentialism. One may well talk of structural and institutional arrangements in socio-cultural milieux without the need of erecting a conceptual boundary thereby to individual agents and agency, or claiming to enter a distinct sociological domain of independent and impersonal factors and forces (cf. Blumer 1972; Cohen 1975). Indeed, it is imperative that one does talk so: this is the problem that transactionalism still poses. In the words of one of transactionalism’s most famous forebears, Georg Simmel (1971 [1908]), the challenge is to describe and account for the extraordinary multitude and variety of routine interactions happening at the same time within a socio-cultural milieu, without giving ‘society’ or ‘culture’ the status of autonomous historical realities, and hypostatizing them.

The way forward Simmel believed in was to refrain from looking for a ghost in the machine; ‘society exists where a number of individuals enter into interaction’ (1971:23). The interactions are the socio-cultural milieu—not merely its cause or consequence—and there is nothing else. A socio-cultural milieu amounts to a fluctuating field of transactions, only grasped by an analysis of the creativity and experience of its component individuals—individuals who create more or less society and culture depending on the number and types of interactions they enter into. Hence, ‘any history or description of a social situation is an exercise of psychological knowledge’ (Simmel 1971:32).

See also: Agent and Agency, Interaction, Methodological

Individualism and Holism

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‘The unhomely’ is a Homi Bhabha turn of phrase (1994) which he employs to highlight the plight of ‘unhomeliness’ of all those people— refugees, migrants, the colonized, ex-slaves, women, gays—who have no home within ‘the system’. Today, most indigenous peoples of the world

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also belong to this category. As a construct it refers to the state of ‘hybridity’ (being neither here nor there), and as such is situated within post-colonial debate. In his writings on the unhomely, Homi Bhabha is offering some good advice. By demonstrating to the powerless the unhomely territory which is singularly their own, his aim is to suggest a way through which they could begin the process of self-empowerment. He calls for the development of a ‘literature of recognition’, through which these peoples could find the means to signify, negate and initiate their own historic desire. By discovering their own voices, their writings could have revisionary force toward the end of destabilizing traditional relations of cultural domination. Those who have been categorized by Western civilization as beyond the pale and thus its oppositional other, could do the job themselves of translating who they are, while at the same time expressing their nausea with the linear, progressivist, rationalist claims of establishment thought. There is much at stake with this new cultural discourse that is being called for from the marginals of the world (cf. de Certeau 1997).

Anthropology, alterity and the myth of primitivism

The place of anthropology within this discussion about types of cultural discourse is hardly simple. First of all the constructs of ‘the unhomely’ and ‘hybridity’ are part of a much larger set which include other related notions that mark a Western imagery of otherness that has proven to be exceedingly powerful in Western dealings with those marginal to our own way of life. Included would be such major concepts as ‘exoticism’, ‘primitivism’, ‘tribalism’, all highly relevant historically to the process of ‘doing anthropology’. Most of anthropology’s ‘technical language’ has denoted primitivism (see Overing 1987). If a people were labelled as having a ‘tribal’ level of development, it was understood that they were ‘pre-literate’, ‘pre-state’, ‘pre-technological’, ‘pre-industrial’, that is, weak, unevolved and underdeveloped in culture, politics and technology. While ‘the tribal’ may be said to have the digging stick, magic and religion, we have high-tech agronomy, philosophy, ontology, epistemology and fine art! It is very clear that those who have been labelled ‘tribal’ have been understood as ‘primitive’ or even ‘savage’ from a perspective that is purely Eurocentric.

There is a history to such eurocentrism. Alterity in the modern West has been framed by its history of expansion and conquest, one that inscribed the relations unfolding within it as between a powerful centre and a periphery that was lacking economically, politically, culturally. In large part, the West seems to have attained its official identity by defining

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itself against its own idiosyncratic version of other peoples (cf. Brett 1991:114) As Susan Hiller notes (1991b:11), Western policy in its assimilation of external others has always been to consume only what could be most easily digestible. It was anthropology, the science of alterity, that provided both the technical vocabulary and the objectified imagery through which those peoples who were conquered and colonized by the Western state could be digestibly incorporated into a European mental framework.

Primitivism, exoticism and the birth of modern art

While anthropology clearly has much to answer for, its appropriation of the European other was but one force among many others involved in similar pursuit. It is not coincidental or insignificant that the concepts of ‘primitivism’ in art and the human sciences have the same temporal beginnings in the nineteenth century (cf. Hiller 1991b). As Kenneth Coutts-Smith, the Danish artist and sociologist of art, explains (1991 [1976]), the expanding European military and economic imperialism was paralleled with the development of structures of both cultural and intellectual colonialism.The Napoleonic adventures in Egypt concluded with the appropriation of Egyptian cultural property—all those monuments and mummies—as spoils of war. As the awareness of extraEuropean cultures rapidly increased among the European elites, all ‘exotic’ cultures became grist for the artists palette as a myriad of new ‘outsider’ styles became ripe for the picking. Exotic cultures became a rich source for inventive Western imagery of what were considered to be signs of the raw, the truthful and the profoundly simple—or, from the Freudian point of view, the primitive monster child within.

In the early nineteenth century, the romantic movement in art concentrated upon an exoticism of the mind, a subjectivist focus through which there was an attempt, according to Coutts-Smith (1991:24), ‘to appropriate the whole twilight territory of the mind, the landscapes of dreams and fantasies, the preserves of psychology and psychopathology, the primitivism of childhood, the bizarre territories of superstition, magic, folklore, and the absurd’. However, such subjectivist concerns in art were quickly overtaken by an objectivist turn where style, not content, became paramount. As in the work of Delacroix, who captured the people of North Africa as if still-lifes of a guitar (Coutts-Smith (1991:25), modernity in art followed the road of abstract objectivism, the powerful transformation that occurred as well in the human sciences where a potent distancing from fellow human beings became de rigueur. Human objects, in art as well as in anthropology, became increasingly

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read in ahistorical, formalist terms. There is much akin in Picasso’s African masks and the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss.

The search for authenticity

The irony is that for many anthropologists and also artists their own respective ‘appropriations’ of the exotic was understood as critical strategies to protest and work against the militarist, colonialist and capitalist values of establishment views and action. Anthropologists researching in colonial Africa saw their work with ‘tribals’ as an ameliorating force undermining of the worst damages of colonial government. As but one example of the use of primitivism in the artistic world, the German expressionist, Emil Norde (see Lloyd 1991), began in the second decade of the twentieth century to use tribal artefacts and themes from folk art as visual models to combat the materialism and fragmentation of modernity. For Norde and many other artists the incorporating of the art styles of non-European peoples into their own work provided the means through which they could achieve an authenticity that had been lost, they felt, in the art and lifestyle of their own times (see Lloyd 1991:96 ff.). The desire was to penetrate into the ‘essential’ by capturing the primal vitality of primitive hand-made production and the spontaneity and intuitive force of child, folk and native arts. Tribal, folk and child creations alike were considered to be objects that were authentic, and also unalienated (see Lloyd 1991), unsullied by the Industrial Revolution.

The goal of such primitivists was clearly political. During the first half of the twentieth century, the overt aim of the artists like Norde was to shift—through their use of primitivist styles instead of the ‘sophisticated’ ones they had been taught—the historicist, evolutionist categories that had become so prevalent in European thought. A similar path was followed by anthropologists who created the new ahistoricist methodologies of functionalism and structural functionalism in order to undermine prevailing evolutionist models within their own discipline. Anthropologist and artist alike, both made the political thrust of their new, anti-evolutionist styles and methods clear.

From today’s point of view, it is easy to say that all these primitivist notions of ‘primal vitality’, ‘life in the most elemental forms’, all these concepts that conjoined the folk, the native and the child, so important to early-twentieth-century primitivism are just Eurocentric myths.They are a European version of things, providing yet more ammunition to the salient myth that tells of Europe’s unique attainment of adulthood in contrast to the achievements of all other cultures in the history of the

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world. The artists, despite their politics, were nevertheless objectifying peoples of other lands through their elevation of style to an absolute principle, and their neglect of context and content. Likewise anthropologists were freezing ‘the native’ in time and space, distancing them from nowadays time through their structuralist and ahistorical methods (also see Fabian 1983; Ardener 1985).We can therefore also say that the myths of primitivism had their danger, for the desired ‘primitive’ state of authenticity pertained equally to a fantasized, savage and monstrous colonized ‘other’ (cf. Mason 1990; Corbey 1991).

In other hands than those of the ‘right-minded’ artist or anthropologist—for example the colonial administrators or other agents of nation-states—the idea of the ‘simple’ and the ‘natural’ signified as well ‘the undeveloped’, ‘the marginal’, ‘the illiterate’, an essential aspect of an evolutionist mentality that rationalized political domination over all those conquered territories of the Americas, Asia and Africa. Primitivism fed into a major theme of modernist ideology, one that proclaimed it to be the right of Western civilization to conduct what Bauman (1995:166) has labelled a merciless war on the ‘dead hand’ of tradition. This was a war against cultural particularism which demanded the training, civilizing, educating, cultivating of the colonized, undeveloped other. The gigantic aim was to disqualify and uproot all those particularizing authorities (the shaman, priest, chief and king) standing in the way of an ideal order where human homogeneity could be achieved—through the subjection of all those local lifeways to the dictates of reason.

Authenticity and ‘the unhomely’

By definition, ‘unhomely’ peoples are ‘hybrids’, that is, people who are no longer authentic. The very idea of authenticity—even when thought to be used for very positive ends—had the consequence of freezing other peoples into a mythic past, where to remain authentic and thus appreciated they could not leave. Until very recently there has been a strong code in anthropology that a real anthropologist did not study people who were so tainted as to wear Western clothes—men in trousers, women in skirts, rather than loincloths of beaten bark or selfspun cotton. The notion of authenticity, with all its primitivist baggage, prevailed to such an extent that the received wisdom was that only the culturally very ‘pure’ were worthy of anthropological attention. If a person wore Western clothes, could speak a Western language, or worked for Western masters than he or she could not be an authentic ‘native’.We could study only real Yanomami, Dinka, or Hagen, and not any Guahibo, Ashanti, or Quechua who had become ‘townies’ or engaged in wage

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