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

WORLD-MAKING

perception and a finished, ready-made universe; rather, ‘truth’ derives from a correspondence between perception and a humanly made system of conception. Hence: perceiving is producing, recognizing is imposing, discovering is drafting, is finding a fit. ‘Truth’, indeed, becomes the name for the perfect fit, the perfect tailoring and fabricating of the universe, the perfect designing of its laws and patterns.

But if there is nothing absolutely solid underneath us then there is nothing stolid either: worlds are continuously made from other worlds and in such a way that any one is radically different from any other and irreducible to it. What is striking is how worlds abound, how a vast variety of versions and visions, of symbolic realities, of cultural worlds, are in existence at one time, each advocated by a different science or scientist, or painter or school of art, or politician, or political interest, or ethnic group, or religious denomination, or poet or farmer or man-in- the-street. These different world-versions (concerning both the stuff which the world is made of and the things it contains) are inherently irreducible; at best, they can be transformed into one another only with great difficulty and corruption. What this speaks of, to repeat, is the prevalence of individual creativity reworking collective forms: refiguring the funds of forms to which cultures amount, and refashioning the social interaction to which the routine exchange of such forms gives rise.

Imagination of worlds

The quality necessary for an individual to conceive of such refiguring and refashioning is imagination.This is a quality different from ‘knowing how’ or ‘knowing what’, what Edward Ions refers to as ‘a third way of knowing’ (1977:152–3), pertaining not to hypothetico-deduction but to intuition. What is essential is the forming of mental concepts, schemata, projects, for what is not present. Imagination deals not with extant observable systems but with the unseen; it is the quality of thinking, feeling, knowing oneself and one’s world as other, the intentional stepping away from the extant.

Individuals may dwell within certain epistemological frameworks, habitually embodying themselves and becoming embodied in terms of paradigms, pre-understandings, which are conventional and collective. Nevertheless, through their imagination individuals also have the capability of questioning the present and opening out their horizons (cf. Gadamer 1975:238). The relationship between the imagined and the present is thus metaphoric rather than metonymic, entailing the potentiality of an epistemological leap rather than simple reflection or extension.

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Complementary to Goodman‘s account of the various processes of creative world-making is Preston’s attempt (however seemingly oxymoronic), then, to describe the inventive qualities of the imagination (1991). The imagination commonly transforms the world along four dimensions, Preston suggests: the spatial, the temporal, the morphological and the comprehensive.Within each of these dimensions, there then exists a variety of possible processes of transformation, which can occur singly or together. For example, ‘spatially’ an existing world might be imaginatively transformed through ‘magnification’ and ‘miniaturization’, through ‘condensation’ (as in a shorthand), or through ‘translocation’ (of the viewing eye). ‘Temporally’, a world might be imaginatively transformed through ‘montage’ (as discrete events are made kaleidoscopic), through ‘simultaneity’ (as different events are juxtaposed), and through ‘progression’ and ‘retrogression’ (with the inclusion of wholly new events in future and past).Again, a world might be ‘morphologically’ transformed through ‘transmutation’ of its shapes and structures, through ‘animation’ and ‘materialization’ of its being, or through ‘complementarization’ of its relationships (the changing of its symmetries and asymmetries).And finally, a world might be ‘comprehensively’ transformed in terms of its overall ‘chromatics’ (its colouration and light), in terms of one’s ‘focal depth’ (one’s particular concentration), one’s ‘distortions’ (and various enhancements), or one’s decisions on overall ‘composition’ (the balancing of all of the above means of construction).

Preston’s attempt is inevitably inconclusive; what surpasses the present cannot adequately be described. Nevertheless, his account emphasizes the perspectival nature of socio-cultural reality, and the transformatory quality of individual imagination. His conclusion neatly sums up the discussion: imagination is the capacity to give reality to culture, and to keep inventing social worlds anew.

See also: Agent and Agency, Interpretation, World-View

WORLD-VIEW

‘World-view’ is the common English translation of the German word Weltanschauung, meaning overarching philosophy or outlook, or conception of the world.The original loan status of ‘world-view’ has led to a conceptual usage which is particularly broad.

In an early anthropological usage, Robert Redfield (1952, 1960) argued for the importance of accessing ‘the peasant world-view’ if the

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anthropologist was to be able to appreciate responses to change in traditional little communities’ on the road to modernization and urbanization. Without an understanding of peasant notions of ‘limited good’ (Foster 1965) and the ‘amoral familism’ which comes to characterize peasant social interaction (Banfield 1958), the anthropologist would be able neither to make sense of, nor predict, behaviour in a community under study and its relations to the outside world.

In this usage, ‘world-view’ is employed to point up diacritical features of cognition and perception which then give onto certain behaviours. ‘World-view’ represents fundamental conceptions of the world, conceptions which ramify into all other thoughts and feelings about the world, and conceptions which directly influence how people behave in the world. Furthermore, ‘world-view’ is used to point up critical differences between groups of people: here, between peasants and moderns (urbanites and cosmopolitans), based on how they view the world.

Clearly, there are overlaps between ‘world-view’, as used here, and at least two other common anthropological concepts: cosmology and ideology. Treated in ‘vertical’ orientation, as it were, ‘world-view’ (like ‘cosmology’) covers those relations between group, world and cosmos. Treated in more ‘horizontal’ orientation, ‘world-view’ (like ‘ideology’) covers that outlook on the world which guides behaviour within a particular social group, perhaps obscuring or imperfectly mediating a ‘true’ or more beneficial version of relations between that group and others. Indeed, if understood broadly as ‘a particular system of values, beliefs and attitudes held by a specific group (based on locality, age, class, status, ethnicity, nationality or religion)’, there is little to choose between ‘world-view’ as a concept and traditional anthropological conceptions of ‘culture’ or ‘sub-culture’.

To begin to narrow the matter down, one can say that ‘world-view’ focuses on thought and feeling in distinction from behaviour, also in a sense as prior to behaviour. There is a theorization of causation and sequence implied by the concept such that behaviour is not seen as automatic or as meaningless, as sui generis or as a priori; behaviour is what world-view gives onto if the latter is translated into action. Kearney (1984) adds a qualification to this understanding, and would define ‘world-view’ as tacit knowledge about their worlds as distinct from those thoughts and feelings which people are willing or able to make explicit (cf. Sperber 1975:x–xi).

Geertz (1973), meanwhile, adapts an earlier usage of Bateson’s (1936) and differentiates ‘world-view’ from ‘ethos’, this being tantamount to a distinction between thought and feeling. For Geertz, ‘world-view’ refers to an intellectual understanding of the world, a way of thinking about

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the world and its workings, which is common amongst a particular group, while ‘ethos’ refers to an emotional appreciation, a way of feeling about and evaluating the world. It is the work of religious rituals, Geertz concludes, to assure that world-view and ethos have a mutually supportive relationship (and hence that the culture remains integrated): what is thought remains emotionally acceptable and what is felt remains intellectually reasonable.

Psychic unities

Perhaps the most common matter that ‘world-view’ has been called upon anthropologically to signal has been the relationship between psyche and society or culture, and questions of psychic unity. To what extent, in short, are cognition and perception socially or culturally determined, and to what extent are social or cultural groups psychically homogeneous, consensual or harmonious?

Four positions obviously suggest themselves (cf. Hunt 1967). In the first, the realms of society and culture on the one hand and individual psyche on the other are separate and distinct, and must be analytically treated as such. One can recall in this connection Durkheim (1966), and his insistence upon a distantiation of sociology from psychology since the ‘social fact’ of the conscience collective made psychic variables irrelevant. The second position is perhaps a derivative of this, as expounded by Boas and his descendants. This sees the socio-cultural as determinant of the psychical: the psyche is culture writ small (Benedict 1934), as effected, for example, by a culture’s linguistic grammar and lexicon (Whorf 1956), or other ‘primary institutions’ such as type of subsistence, household pattern and methods of child-training (Kardiner and Linton 1939). As summed up by Sacks (1974:218): ‘the fine power of a culture [is such that it] does not, so to speak, merely fill brains in roughly the same way, it fills them so that they are alike in fine detail’.

The third position concerning the relationship between the sociocultural and the psychical reverses the relation of determinacy and sees the latter as causative of the former: culture is psyche writ large. In some of Malinowski’s notions regarding the route from individually felt anxiety to collective rites of religious assuagement one finds this conclusion (1939; also cf. Homans 1941). As with the second position, there is a positing of psychic unity, not now eventuating from some standardized conditioning but responsible for joint socio-cultural procedures. Finally, the fourth position, as advocated by the likes of Bateson, Wallace (1961) and Schwartz (1978a), argues that the sociocultural and the psychical are distinct but interdependent and mutually

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influencing realms. To the extent that one can analytically identify a particular ethos (emotional tone) or eidos (cognitive style) in a particular society or culture, one must also recognize the individual as a distinct ‘energy source’ whose metabolic processes give rise to the constant possibility of perceiving and cognizing random, new objects and relations in the external world (Bateson 1972:126).

This fourth position adds a creative tension or dialectic to the picture which the others lack. It presumes neither psychic unity nor difference, and generalizes on the basis neither of determinism nor irrelevancy; rather, it allows for an analytical appreciation of the relationship between the individual and the socio-cultural which is subtle and variable. As Schwartz puts it (1975:128), the relationship is dynamic and unresolved; or again (1978a:430–2), culture is no more a shared totality than psychical contents are confined or unique to different individuals. Rather, think of individual psyches or ‘ideoverses’ (1978a:429) as different versions or portions of a culture. Individuals will have different cognitive, affective and evaluative mappings of the world, in terms both of the structure of events and their classification; here are cultural constructs as experientially discovered and individually transformed. What becomes significant for anthropological analysis is the way different individuals’ ‘personal constructs’ (Kelly 1969) variously intersect and play around structures of commonality by which degrees of inter-personal communicability and coordination are maintained.

In this ‘distributive’ picture, then, world-view does not amount to something either essentially uniform or necessarily shared but to a sum of diversities. The focus has also shifted, from an assumption that ‘cultures’ or ‘societies’ eventuate in common world-views to an exploration of how a diversity of world-views can co-exist within ‘single’ socio-cultural settings.

‘The organization of diversity’

These ideas have found their fullest elaboration in the theorizing of Anthony Wallace (1961, 1962, 1964). Certainly, it is his work which is most frequently referred to in connection with attempts to come to terms with a dynamic relationship between the psychical and the sociocultural (cf. Goodenough 1963; Szwed 1966; Paine 1974; Schwartz 1978b).

Wallace’s opening premise is that the cultural does not form a closed system; it is always engaged with non-cultural factors such as the psychological. Moreover, the dialectical relations between the cultural and the psychological eventuate not in a replication of psychological

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