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

AUTO-ANTHROPOLOGY

Is anthropology best seen as a universal attitude towards social life, an ethnomethodology in the construction of social relations?

Powerful anthropological voices continue to be raised against an anthropology ‘at home’ in the West, nevertheless, even one practised alongside that of more ‘exotic’ locales. This opposition is both epistemological and political. It is said that many Western-based academic disciplines shine their light upon Western society and culture, from the humanities through the social sciences to the natural sciences, but only anthropology has taken as its central plank the decentring of the West, and the appreciating of other ‘literatures’, ‘cultures’ and ‘sciences’ (cf. Bloch 1988). At a time of Western retrenchment, in terms of the financing of research and of charitable aid overseas, and of a certain smugness concerning ‘the end of history’ and the domination of a Western model of national-democratic polity, it is all the more important that anthropology remain as flag-bearer of non-Western interests, in all possible senses.

Coincident with this is an argument that only via the radical disjunction of culture-shock is it at all possible to gain perspective either on oneself or on others. Anthropology at home in one’s own culture is impossible because anthropological insight only derives from that ‘contact zone’ (Hastrup 1995b) which is set up when members of different cultures interact. As Ardener elaborates (1987), people’s heads are full of concepts and categories ‘generated by the social’, and they spend their lives projecting these latter ‘back upon the social’. But in ordinary circumstances, as ‘native’ actors, people do not perceive this, do not recognize this as representing their everyday experience and practice, because for them social space and the cultural worlds it contains are not objects of contemplation. Only the shock of the strange—the arrival of an anthropologist in an exotic community—breaks the quality of routine and automatism, both for the anthropologist and the locals, and makes what is normal unfamiliar; only then does one know whether one is ‘at home’ or not.

This makes ‘anthropology at home’ of only limited provenance and relevance, Strathern elaborates (1987). For all such reflexive or autoanthropology can mean is rendering people’s conception of themselves back to themselves. Anthropology is a folk discourse of the West (or, at least, an academically distilled and derived one), dealing with notions of ‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘class’, ‘socialization’, ‘roles’, ‘relationships’, ‘community’ and so on, because this is how a certain Western discourse has historically developed. Anthropology at home can only mean a

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recycling of these notions in a tautological fashion, and in no wise reaching an epistemological position from which they could be deconstructed (explained and critiqued). The only way beyond cultural discourses, concepts, categories, notions and genres, is via other such discourses: by setting up a contact zone as a tertium quid between radical differences.

In fact, this is what anthropology has done all along, and continues to do even when it claims to be working ‘at home’ in the West. Western anthropology is only possible because the anthropologist sets himself apart from his fellow ‘citizens’ and creates a discontinuity between his accounts of them and their accounts of themselves. And he is able to do this only by courtesy of the comparative ethnographic record: by his reading in other cultures and his drawing upon concepts and discourses which do not belong to the milieu under study.To this extent, inasmuch as such anthropological accounts set aside indigenous framings, accounts of the West are not so different from those of, say, Melanesia.

To recap, auto-anthropology is limited in its provenance on this view, not to say oxymoronic, because culture members cannot get a conceptual grasp of the conditions within which their lives are routinely lived except via radical cultural disjunctions. But such disjunctions rarely occur naturally To the extent that anthropology sets itself up as the comparative study of cultural membership, then, its project is a strange one (is one concerning strangers) which will always distance it from the discourse of natives. There must always be this differentiation and a distance between the anthropological investigator and investigated because the latter are at home with certain kinds of discursive premises about social life while the former is at home in always attempting to displace such premises in a continuous round of tricksterish playing the vis-à-vis: anthropology offers ‘an orgy of defamiliarization’ to those at home in any one cultural world (Boon 1982). Moreover, anthropology achieves its aims only via specific disciplinary practices, namely the culture-shock of fieldwork—a new bodily becoming via immersion in new habitual practices—followed by writing up the experience in a theoretical language which is neither here nor there but both at once. While these practices may differentiate them from natives, they serve to link anthropologists together in a ‘conversational community’ of shared meanings, ideas and morals to which all belong. Finally, such an ‘anthropological culture’ can constitute a ‘force field’ which offers a site of resistance against Western givens and draws attention to the silent, embodied and inarticulate, collective memories of other cultures (Hastrup 1995b).

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What is at issue here is the nature of culture and the place of reflexivity in everyday social life. For the above critics of reflexive or auto-anthropology, culture represents a discourse within which human life can but be lived, so that the anthropological employment of a concept of reflexivity neither brings the investigator closer to the investigated nor situates either in a cognitive space beyond or outwith cultural determinism. As Strathern comments (1987:31), it is merely ‘mystification’ to claim that auto-anthropology, understood as ‘techniques of self-knowledge’, constitutes a universal class of phenomena; reflexively elucidating culture or society is not part of the way in which most people experience their everyday lives. Hastrup concurs (1995b): cultures ground people in socially constraining holistic worlds; all human beings are thus natives in a particular cultural world of which they have experience but only tacit knowledge.

Strathern has little time, therefore, for bland claims, such as those of Giddens (1984:335), that all social actors are social theorists (‘scientists’, in Kelly’s appellation (1969:144)), able to reflect upon their sociocultural milieu in order to direct their purposive action within it. Techniques of knowledge-production and theorization are themselves culturally specific and mediated, and one only transcends such cultural situatedness by way of a diversity of other cultures’ situations.

From a somewhat different ontological perspective, however, cultural techniques, practices and discourses are merely the superficial clothing in which universal human capabilities and proclivities express themselves in different places. However different the cultural grounding, then, cognitive reflection on self and other is ubiquitous and its outcome possibly transcendent. How else would universal human communication, never mind global anthropological analyses, be possible? On this view, the person who leads an unexamined life (who cannot explain his own socio-cultural practices better than an anthropologist) does not exist and never has done (Shweder 1991a:14). Human beings have never been prisoners of linguistic, social or cultural worlds from which they are unable to detach themselves so as to turn their attention elsewhere and concern themselves with their own inwardness and selfhood (Ortega y Gasset 1956:166–7).

As Paul Rabinow sums up (1977:151–2):

This is the ground of anthropology: there is no…valid way to eliminate consciousness from our activity or those of others. …We can pretend that we are neutral scientists collecting unambiguous data and that the people we are studying are living amid various unconscious systems of

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determining forces of which they have no clue and to which only we have the key. But it is only pretence.

Is anthropology necessarily undertaken in certain existential states of mind?

Once reflexivity is allowed as a universal part of human consciousness, a means and a practice by which people everywhere come to look askance at the particular socio-cultural milieux and languages in which their self-expressions find overt form, then, as Rabinow puts it above (1977:151–2), auto-anthropology comes into its own. Here is not merely an instrument of political correctness, or a technique or location for better anthropological representation of otherness, but something fundamental to the potentiality of the anthropological enterprise as such.

Near the end of his professional life, Edmund Leach made a number of statements which were treated as almost scandalous in the preWriting Culture era of British anthropology; Leach himself provocatively described his revelations as ‘Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology’.What Leach suggested (1984:22) was that every anthropological observer can be expected to recognize in the field something which no other observer will see: a projection of his or her personality. Since this personality ‘distorts’ the interpretation and analysis of that fieldwork experience, what is to be discovered in published anthropological accounts is a record of their authors’ reactions to the situations in which they were acting; here are texts full of possible implications and layers of particular meaning, intended and otherwise, rather than items that give onto a pristine or objective, external world. As in a novel, Leach elaborated (1989:137–8): features of anthropological accounts ‘are derived from aspects of the personality of the author. How could it be otherwise? The only ego I know at first hand is my own. When Malinowski writes about Trobriand Islanders he is writing about himself; when Evans-Pritchard writes about the Nuer he is writing about himself In short, ‘cultural differences, though sometimes convenient, are temporary fictions’ (ibid.).

Since Leach’s death, and The Writing Culture Debate, such thinking has become more widespread, and its implications more followed through. If cultural integrity is a fiction behind which sits the individual personality, then this is as true for those investigated by the anthropologist as for the investigator himself.To understand otherness is therefore to attempt to gain access to other minds, for socio-cultural institutions cannot be understood except via the individuals who populate and create them (cf. Cohen and Rapport 1995); furthermore,

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‘the only way we have of understanding another man’s condition is through ourselves, our experience and emotions’ (Naipaul 1987:220). As Okely pithily phrases it, ‘the personal is theoretical’ (1992:9), and far from being relegated to the periphery of the anthropological enterprise, or pejoratively contrasted with impersonal, generalizable truth, the biography and autobiography of fieldwork selves must be written into an inclusive narrative of analysis and experience.

Cohen elaborates (1992a, 1994). Whether anthropologist or layperson, it is the self which is used to understand the other. Making sense of the world is an interpretive project which begins not with a tabula rasa but with all the specificity of sense-making apparatuses contained within discrete individual bodies; hence, every version of an ‘other’ is a construction of a self (cf. Rapport 1997a). As well as being a universal feature of human social life, this is also our most potent anthropological resource. ‘[E]thnography is an ethnographer-focused art’ (Cohen 1992a:225), and anthropology should now seriously begin to exploit the intrusive self as an ethnographic resource.

This means, first, that in contradistinction to a traditional anthropological view of the individual self as a socio-cultural construction and as inexorably other-directed, we recognize that the sense of personal identity has a certain absolute, self-driven quality to it which is not contingent or relative. Individuality is ubiquitous, and it is upon their consciousness of self that a person’s consciousness of things socio-cultural is built. Secondly, individuals are members of sociocultural milieux through their deployment of certain sets of collectively shared symbols. Nevertheless, these symbols are ever perceived and interpreted in discretely (and often discreetly) individual ways. Not only do individuals remain members of socio-cultural groupings as individuals, then, but there may remain great incongruencies between different individuals’ perceptions, and between how these symbols are publicly, conventionally, or hegemonically treated and how they are privately known: between self-knowledge and social knowledge (cf. Rapport 1993a).We know very well from personal experience the great discrepancies that can occur between the two, the fallacies with which others can construct the self, and we must use our knowledge of the complexity of our own selves to resist the temptation to generalize or simplify those of others.We should use our experience of our own selves to elicit and describe the thoughts and sentiments of others whom we otherwise risk glossing over in terms of the inadequate and crude generalizations we retrieve from conventional, collective social categories: ‘tribes’, ‘castes’, ‘cultures’, ‘ethnic groups’, and so on. In this way we can avoid privileging the social over the personal, and eliding

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