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

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uniformity within a social group, in personalities sharing a homogeneous ‘cultural’ character, but rather in an organization of diversity. Individuals in any one society need not be found ‘threaded like beads on a string of common motives’; they can still interact in a stable and mutually rewarding fashion, and organize themselves culturally into orderly, expanding, changing societies in spite of their having radically different interests, habits, personalities, customs, and despite there being no one cognitive map that members share.

Indeed, the world-view or ‘mazeway’ of each individual—that mental map of values, plans, techniques, people and things; that organized totality of meanings which each maintains at a given time and which is regularly evoked by perceived or remembered stimuli—may be unique. Each individual may possess a complex cognitive system of interrelated objects which amount to a private world, and may rarely if ever achieve ‘cognitive communality’ or mutual identification with another. To this extent, all human societies are plural societies. Indeed,Wallace goes on to suggest that cognitive non-uniformity may be a ‘functional desideratum’ of social structure, a necessary condition of making social coordination possible, and that if all participants were to share a common knowledge of the social system, or indeed the burden of knowing their differences, then the system would not work.

Wallace’s image of the orderly relationships which constitute stable socio-cultural systems is of what he calls ‘equivalence structures’ or sets of equivalent behavioural expectancies: individuals regularly engaging in routine interactions with one another because they have developed a capacity for mutual prediction whereby the specific behaviour of one is highly likely to eventuate in the specific response of another, and so on. That is, individuals organize themselves, integrate their behaviours into reliable and joint systems, not by developing uniform cognitive maps or possessing equivalent motives but by learning that under certain circumstances others’ behaviour is predictable, and can be confidently interrelated with actions of their own. This system of organizing relations, Wallace suggests, fits interactions of different levels and types: between the American Indians and the Whites, for instance, trading and fighting for years without mutual comprehension; between different social classes, who may not share ideologies; and between bus drivers and passengers, whose interests in avoiding traffic jams may be very different and whose cognitive worlds, especially in large and complex societies, may be ‘uniquely private’.

Nonetheless, what the bus driver and passengers do share is something very precise. Their interests in keeping to timetables overlap, their motives in riding the bus are complementary, and they possess

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detailed, mutual behavioural expectancies. Moreover, the relations are standardized between any driver and any passenger within the urban or regional or national system. Wallace calls this a ‘contract’: something where the equivalent roles are specified and available for implementation to any parties whose motives make their adoption promising. At other times,Wallace also calls it a ‘meta-calculus’: something which is the sum of at least two parties’ particular ‘calculi’, or recipes of behaviour.And he goes on to say that a culture may be described as a ‘family of metacalculi’: a set of standardized models of contractual relationships: a system of interlinking equivalence structures.

In fact, culture becomes a consummate equivalence structure over the diverse whole: the sum of all the diverse world-views of a society’s particular sub-groupings and individuals. In this way, Wallace concludes, individuals can together produce a socio-cultural system which is beyond the comprehension of any single one of them. The contracts which they establish for the mutual facilitation of their separate strivings amount to a structured whole, however tacitly and gradually concocted, which is more complex than the cognitive map of any of its members: a world-view of world-views.

A critique of Wallace

Despite his insistence that his portrayal of a socio-cultural system as an organization of a diversity of individual world-views does not amount to the positing of a distinct, superorganic entity in the Durkheimian sense of something sui generis, Wallace still opens himself up to criticism in this vein. In allowing that individual contracts and group policies give onto a system at another and higher level of complexity and organization, a socio-cultural whole which functions beyond the comprehension of individual participants, we begin to slide towards Durkheimian notions of organicism, of the socio-cultural determining the psychical.

Wallace would probably object to this, saying that he sees culture and personality as constructs of different Russellian logical types— personality signifying cognitive diversity, and culture merely amounting to shared expectations—and that it would be using the wrong metaphors to talk of individuals ‘internalizing’ a culture, or a culture ‘moulding’ the personalities of its members; almost as if one were to talk of a circle moulding the individual points that constitute its circumference.And yet, Wallace’s model does take on this character, and must do so, in order to describe the circle of interactions, the holistic system of interlocking parts, to which individual behaviours come to amount.

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For the principle of socio-cultural organization in Wallace’s model is the institutionalized meta-calculus or macro equivalence structure, whereby almost any individuals, any assemblage of world-views, can work as interchangeable components of the system. And one must explain how this institutionalization comes about and how it is maintained. Wallace’s answer must be that culture is the driving force: cultural forms, standardized contracts, becoming autonomous and maintaining themselves by teaching members the mutually predictable behaviours necessary to their functioning on different occasions. More than this, culture would also appear to provide members with their diverse world-views: it teaches sets of equivalent meanings by which individuals can predictably define stimuli and, just as predictably, act before one another over wide situational parameters. Far from culture’s emerging from individual invention and continuing decisions about practice, then, it is culture which now acts, and in peremptory fashion, taking advantage of individual cognitive tendencies to make possible a maximal organization of motivational diversity.Thus, notwithstanding his initial renunciation of socio-cultural determinism, we come to find Wallace talking about diverse individual cognitions being articulated by a society into functional equivalence structures, and a culture as an organization which is responsible for coordinating its disparate elements and shaping them into relatively consistent patterns; it is very much to a separate societal domain that these elegant meta-calculi belong.

In short, a diversity of individual world-views becomes, for Wallace, a cultural task, a social tool. Sometimes this diversity is culturally forbidden, he explains, and uniformity is socialized into individual members and rewarded. On other occasions it is ‘in the interests of the survival of the culture’ to encourage randomness and not to organize individuals at all. But most ‘solutions’, Wallace concludes, fall between the two: in one or more of four universal mechanisms (‘Inclusive Structures’—where a subordinate interactional partner bows to the calculus, the plan, of a superordinate—‘End-Linkage’—where a precise articulation of the calculi of equals in different domains of expertise, a division of labour, occurs—‘Ad Hoc Communication’—where a warding-off of centrifugal calculi and societal dissolution takes place through constant casual intercourse—and ‘Administration’—where a group of experts undertakes to check the large numbers of the above three types of contract in operation, adjusting individual members’ calculi as necessary), diversity comes to be socio-culturally organized and used.

In sum, with his image of a circle in whose circumference individual points of difference join and submerge,Wallace himself comes full circle:

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to a Durkheimian picture of individual diversity as a form of (organic) socio-cultural integration. Individual world-views have ceased to have any real relevance and are succeeded by a picture of socio-cultural harmony: a system with a structure of interdependent parts, maintained by standardized behaviours, ensuring at least some degree of social stability and cultural unity.

Wallace‘s work deserves its recognition because of his appreciation of psychic diversity within socio-cultural commonality and his efforts to keep the two analytically in relationship. He shows how individuals might meet in interaction while at the same time executing moves, achieving positions, proclaiming successes, and so on, in private and possibly very different game-plans; so that individual views of social worlds may have tangential connections, colliding and co-evolving without amounting to a single or even compatible world of meaning. He recognizes, in short, that social systems can exist without consisting of replications of uniformity and that cultures need not represent standards, norms, practices, rules, views or beliefs which are shared alike by all members.

What is less sympathetic in Wallace’s portrayal is the way in which individual agency comes to be replaced by that of a cultural force which is seen as accountable for order and responsible for behavioural predictability. The diversity of behavioural contracts between people comes to amount to one, neatly integrated, social system, and a multitude of individual requirements and interests comes to translate into those of socio-cultural organization. We seem to trade (psychical) world-views for (socio-cultural) World-view.

And yet, behavioural complementarity need not entail organizational hierarchy; individual behaviours can be complementary without being integrated together or otherwise subsumed within a structure which is more complex than each. Muddle, moreover, can be a more appropriate keynote than organization.

World-views and context

This is certainly the conclusion of an ethnographic study of worldviews in the English village of Wanet (Rapport 1993a). Here, a multitude and diversity of world-views, both within and between individual psyches, could be seen to give onto no overarching or singular socio-cultural system. Rather, the expression and realization of a diversity of worldviews, in an aggregation of behavioural contracts, amounted to a chaotic array. Here is life in a socio-cultural milieu very much portrayed as a momentary muddling-through.

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To elaborate, briefly, at one point in his discussion of the individuation of language, the way in which each speaker possesses an ‘idiolect’ of finally irreducible personal meanings, George Steiner speaks of the unique ‘association-net’ of individual consciousness (1975:173). It is in the way that different individuals associate words with one another that the key to the uniqueness of individual meanings and memory is to be found. Focusing on the everyday expression of a few close informants, it was the phenomenon of idiolect or association-net (a verbal form of Wallace’s ‘mazeway’ or Schwartz’s ‘ideoverse’) that Rapport’s work in Wanet arrived at as outward expression of an individual’s world-view.

The daily utterances or ‘speech-acts’ (Searle 1973) of different individuals Rapport found to consist of certain sets of phrases, routinely repeated. Each individual speaker possessed a number of verbal loops, of words and phrases which they habitually associated together, and which they regularly expressed. In different moments of interaction, greater or lesser lengths of different strings or loops of an individual’s habitually associated words and phrases would be enunciated.

But it was not simply a matter of words. For Rapport noted that each verbal loop also entailed a particular mood, humour or outlook, a particular identity or persona, which the individual speaker appeared to assume for the length of the particular verbal expression. It was as if the verbal phrasing and the tenor of its expression were part-and-parcel of one phenomenon: a particular outlook on the world which the individual adopted, and a particular identity which accompanied that outlook.

Finding himself able to piece together the habitually linked phrases of his informants, the verbal building blocks of their utterances, into longer and longer strings, so that aggregated words became great chains, Rapport determined to call these association-nets of words, feelings and outlook, ‘world-views’. For, in its entirety (a form actually unlikely to be expressed in any one speech-act), each association-net traversed an amassment of opinion, detailed and rich: a seemingly whole world around which its owner might cognitively travel. The strings of verbal associations, that is, translated into assemblages of ideas, identities and behaviours which found their owners experientially located in distinct, self-contained worlds of people, events, values, norms and constraints.

Moreover, different sets of linked words and phrases (whether of the same or different individual speakers) resulted in an outlook on the world, a world-view, possibly very different from that constructed from another set. Even though the same individual words cropped up in different world-views, when related and contrasted to other words, to

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