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

INDIVIDUALISM

However, this abuse notwithstanding (and what discourse, finally, can protect itself from abuse?), humanism offers anthropology the best hope for describing both the universality and the universal particularities of human experience.

In particular, humanism offers anthropology an escape from imprisoning essentialisms such as ‘culture’, ‘gender’ and ‘race’. For these concepts have operated in anthropological discourse as means of making alterity: creating differences between people and enforcing separations which have come to imply inevitable hierarchy and inequality. Sameness within the category (‘culture’, ‘gender’, ‘race’), meanwhile, has come to imply inexorable homogeneity, coherence and determination.

To write ‘against culture’ and other such generalizing, fundamentalist—essentialist concepts is to produce humanistic ‘ethnographies of the particular’: narratives of particular individuals in particular times and places. For, human beings ‘all live in the particular’ (Abu-Lughod 1990b:157), and this is something they have in common over and against their so-called cultural (etc.) differences. Ethnographies of the particular will tell of the struggle to make meaning, of flux, movement and contradiction, of pain and success, of practices, strategies, contests, choices, improvisations and interests (cf. Langness and Frank 1981; Watson and Watson-Franke 1985). Paradoxically, these are individual experiences and activities that generalities cannot convey.

See also:Consciousness, Human Rights, Individuality, Literariness,

Post-Modernism

INDIVIDUALISM

Individualism should not be confused with individuality, difficult though it has been to separate their definition and implication in anthropologists’ work. To attempt this as a starting-point here, individualism pertains to a particular historico-cultural conceptualization of the person or self. Included within this conceptualization would be notions of the ultimate value and dignity of the human individual, his moral and intellectual autonomy, his rationality and self-knowledge, spirituality, right to privacy, self-sovereignty and self-development, and his voluntary contracting into a society, market and polity (cf. Lukes 1990). Individuality, by contrast, refers to the universal nature of human existence whereby it is individuals who possess agency. Moreover, since individuals engage with others by virtue of discrete sense-making

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apparatuses (nervous systems and brains)—discrete centres of consciousness in discrete bodies—their agency necessarily accords with distinct perspectives on the world. Not only is an individual’s being-in- the-world universally mediated by very particular interpretive prisms which distance him from it, then, but while intrinsically ‘of the world’, the individual also inexorably comes to know the world as ‘other’. Finally, this individuality of consciousness and agency is current whatever the acceptance of individualism as a cultural norm.

In much anthropological writing on individualism, however, a conflation is apparent. The study of the conceptualization of the person and his behaviour in a particular socio-cultural milieu spills over into a positing of the nature of the individual actor, also socio-culturally specified.The society or culture to which the individual actor belongs is looked to as the source of his agency, the origin of action and its interpretation; individuality, in short, is depicted as much prone to the vagaries of socio-cultural fashion as individualism.

The root of the confusion lies in the nineteenth-century tradition of social thought from which twentieth-century anthropology derives. In attempting social-scientifically to come to terms with what were felt to be the grand-societal changes wrought by the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution (to discover their origins, predict their evolutions, in mimicry of the science of natural organisms)—as well as guarding against the radical and individualistic ‘excesses’ which these changes were seen as portending—‘sociology’ was born as a popular explanatory paradigm. Grand changes could be seen to evidence grand forces and grand patterns. Hence, grand explanatory narratives were fashioned which turned on (and prescribed the naturalness of) the workings of such collective organisms as Society (generally in Europe) and Culture (generally in North America).

While Boas and American anthropology owed debts to the writings of Spencer and Morgan (and later, Weber), perhaps the key nineteenthcentury influence on the twentieth-century development of anthropological explanation—the key exponent of a collectivist narrative which subsumed the individual actor within grand-societal workings— was Emile Durkheim. It was from him that Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, Lowie and Kroeber adopted much of their theoretic programme and problematic, and it is from Durkheim’s French followers, especially Mauss and Dumont, that a narrative which conflates individualism with individuality has been propagated and elaborated. Let us trace this development.

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The Durkheimian individual

Durkheim conceived of human beings as homo duplex; on one side there was the biological and personal (comprising the individual body with its material senses and appetites) and on the other the mental and moral (the conceptual and conscientious). The individual thus led a double existence: one rooted in the physical organism and one (morally, intellectually, spiritually superior) in a social organism. And while the former was naturally egoistic and anti-social, the latter, accruing from society, effected by socialization, was able to be altruistic and impersonal. Between the two there was constant antagonism and tension, but through inculcation into a public language and culture, humankind was capable of rising above mean (animal) individuality and becoming part of a collective conscience in which the (sacred) traditions of a society were enshrined. Indeed, if individuals were conscious of themselves as individuals, then this too was a product of their socialization in a collective conscience.Thus, the Western centrality of the individual actor derived from the complexities of the collective division of labour in European societies, and could be traced back to the Christianity of the Enlightenment and to the rise of Protestantism. Individualism was a social product like all moralities and all religions.

Marcel Mauss (1985) took it upon himself to show in more detail how society exerted its force on the physiological individual: through collective representations and collectively determined habitual behaviours, submerged the individual within ‘a collective rhythm’. Nonetheless, Mauss’s account is confused. He begins with the unDurkheimian pronouncement that there has never been a human being who was not aware of his own body, also of his spiritual and physical individuality. However, conflating such universal individuality with cultural individualism, he then proceeds to outline an evolution in how people in different ages and societies have been differently aware of themselves as individual beings, and how these differences can be traced back to different forms of social structuration. First, then, comes the tribal stage of personnage. Here individuals are conceived of as ephemeral bearers of a fixed stock of names, roles and souls in clan possession. Each name-holder is the reincarnation of an original mythical holder, and each is the locus in daily life of different rights and duties. But these individual name-holders have no existence independently of the clan and they possess no inner conscience. Here is the individual solely as a structural fact. Next comes the Classical stage of persona. Here individuals are conceived of as free and responsible, independent and autonomous citizens of a state; they are legal persons with civic identities. But still

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they have no inner life and no individual conscience.Then, with the rise of Christianity, comes the stage of personne. Here is the individual conceived of as indivisible and rational, with a conscience, indeed, with a unique sacred soul, who serves as the foundation of all political, economic and legal institutions. Finally, accompanied by modern schools of psychology, there is the peculiar Western stage of moi: the individual as a ‘self with an increasing self-interestedness and self-knowledge.

Louis Dumont (1986) agrees with Mauss that the Western notion of the individual—an autonomous actor, bearing supreme moral value—is an exceptional stage in the evolution of civilizations. Traditionally it is society as a whole which is thus conceptualized.Through a comparison with the archetypal holism of Indian society, therefore, Dumont attempts more precisely to plot the origination and progress of this odd idea. Looking (as a Durkheimian would) to religion as the cardinal element, it is Hinduism which provides the first clue. For despite the constraining interdependence ubiquitously imposed by Indian society on its members, in the Hindu figure of the ‘world-renouncer’—he who seeks ultimate truth by forgoing the world in favour of his own independent, individual spiritual progress and destiny—one finds a Western-like individualist. For him, society is recognized as having lost its absolute reality. Instead, in throwing off society’s fetters and becoming selfsufficient he is said to have discovered his own self. The crucial difference between the Hindu world-renouncer and the modern individualist is that the former can continue to exist only outside the everyday social world.

Dumont’s second clue is that these same ‘outworldly individuals’ can be seen to be present at the birth and ensuing development of Christianity. For Christ’s teaching that man possesses a soul of infinite worth and eternal value which absolutely transcends the world of social institutions and powers, which is absolutely individual in relation to God and meets others’ only in Him, engenders a community of outworldly individuals who meet on earth but have their hearts in heaven. The history of Christianity over the ensuing centuries then represents a triumphant overcoming of the dualism between the Christian and the societal so that life-in-society becomes synonymous with that of the outworldly individual. Initially through the institution of the Catholic church (with the fourth-century conversion of Emperor Constantine and thereafter the Roman Empire), and ultimately through the Protestant Reformation, the outworldly Christian message comes to repossess the world. Here is society run wholly along individualist lines, with modern Christians being both individuals and ‘inworldly’.

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Nevertheless, Dumont concludes, the evolution need not end here. The individualistic and the holistic represent two diametrically different conceptualizations of society, and although the former Western ‘liberal’ model is enshrined in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (recognizing the inherent dignity and equality and the inalienable rights of all individuals), it is the latter holistic conceptualization which still represents the common type. Indeed, through movements as diverse as multi-culturalism, nationalism, fascism and Islamic fundamentalism, the cultural future of individualism is, to say the least, unpredictable.

Anthropological applications

Characterizing the above line of thought (from Durkheim through Mauss to Dumont), then, is the idea that the individual actor of Western society is the result of a recent, particular and exceptional historicocultural development. Nor is it surprising that, learned in this (or commensurate) thought, anthropologists have been prone to find a lack of individualism (and hence an absence of individuality) in their ethnographies of traditional societies (cf. Carrithers et al. 1985).

‘The African’, Roger Bastide pronounces, is someone who defines himself by his position: is conscious of himself only as member of a lineage, a genealogical tree, a general category (a race, people, family, corporation) (cited in Lienhardt 1985:144). The New Guinean ‘Gahuku-Gama tribesman’, Kenneth Read (1955) asserts, lacks a concept of the individual person; hence, there is no ‘friendship’ between unique individuals, only relationships between socially defined positions, and if personalities are recognized as distinct, then this is merely the issue of unique combinations of social relationships.

In short, ethnographic exploration proves how the individual is unique to Western thought, Jean La Fontaine (1985b) concludes. The concept and its moral and social significance is absent in other societies, with no a priori differentiation being made between individual and role, self and society.

The Non-Durkheimian individual

Nevertheless, there have been exceptions to the Durkheimian expectation and conclusion: ethnographies and analyses which would distinguish between individualism and individuality, which build on individual agency, which deny the priority (ontological, developmental, historical) of the societal.

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Notably, Alan Macfarlane (1978), tracing the ‘origins of English individualism’, spectacularly refutes those theorists (particularly Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Dumont) who would see individualism as a recent socio-cultural development, an issue (variously) of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of capitalism, the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, upon a previously holistic, collectivist, closestructured, traditional society. For, in England at least, historical records (local registers, legal text-books, court rolls, autobiographical journals) evidence an individualistic, open, egalitarian society with political and intellectual liberty, with private property rights, with legal rights of the person against the group, in existence since the 1200s if not long before. As Macfarlane summarizes: ‘the majority of ordinary people in England from at least the thirteenth century were rampant individualists, highly mobile both geographically and socially, economically “rational”, market-orientated and acquisitive, ego-centred in kinship and social life’ (1978:163). Here, at least, the traditional anthropological evolution towards individualism can be abandoned and the conventional anthropological eschewing of conscious individuality obviated, for one does not find a time when ‘an Englishman did not stand alone…in the centre of his world’ (1978:196). Contrariwise, it is the individual and his nuclear family which may be looked to for originating those sociocultural changes which traditionally have been taken to be causative.

Moreover, even focusing on non-Western areas of anthropological concern (as above), Godfrey Lienhardt (1985:143–50) observes how ‘African’ literature celebrates individual eccentricities, inner consciousnesses, which defy and subvert collective judgement and behaviour. Meanwhile, drawing on his fieldwork in New Guinea, Kenelm Burridge (1979) describes how most people are ‘individuals’ and ‘persons’ in different respects and at different times, where ‘persons’ may be understood as those who realize the given and embody the categories which are prescribed by tradition and the social order, while ‘individuals’ are those who use their intuition and perception to create anew. If persons are created by current intellectualizations and moralities, then individuals are creative of new ones (including new persons); if persons are products of socio-cultural conditions, then individuals exist in spite of them. Moreover, each ‘spatially bounded organism’ is able to switch between the two: leave their personhood behind and realize their individuality. This realizing may take a variety of ethnographic expressions, Burridge admits, and the Western recognition of individuality (conceptualized as ‘individualism’) may indeed originate with Christianity, but nevertheless, an expression is everywhere possible. Certainly, in ‘New Guinea’ there are individuals who seek in events a

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‘truth’ which goes beyond established moralities and which transcends material conditions. Indeed, Burridge concludes, such individuality would seem constitutive of our very human being, deriving from a universal imperative which pre-exists culture.

Burridge’s ethnographic summation is also commensurate with Edmund Leach’s general theoretic stance (developing a somewhat submerged Malinowskian recognition of individual ‘needs’) wherein the essence of humanity is a ubiquitous individual proclivity to break with normative social structures, reinterpret cultural conventions and create afresh (1977:19–21). Here it is the individual actor and not the social system which should be looked to as source and guarantor of cultural vitality and social process.

Leach’s insights have been perhaps most famously developed in the work of his student Fredrik Barth (e.g. 1959) and the school of transactionalism with which his name came to be associated (along with Fred Bailey’s, Robert Paine’s and others’). However, an emphasis on the individual actor—an interest in individualism; an appreciation of individuality—also found expression in early anthropological theorists of consciousness and personality (such as Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wallace and Ward Goodenough), in the work of network analysts (such as John Barnes, Clyde Mitchell and Jeremy Boissevain), and more recently in the flowering of studies within symbolic anthropology which focus on the constructions and interpretations of symbolic realities as made by particular individuals (Edward Bruner, Anthony Cohen, Michael Jackson).

Imbuing all of these approaches, perhaps, is an insistence that, in Macfarlane’s formulation, ‘individuals and their attitudes, their assumptions and mental life’ should not lose out to macro-social (statistical, material, collectivist) ‘facts’ (1970:3).

Current approaches

In much mainstream debate, sensitivity to the individualistic is still denigrated as ‘methodological individualism’: as erroneously couching explanation in terms of characteristics of individuals, their behaviours and interests, and so procuring insufficient purchase on the broader and deeper conditions of socio-cultural ‘realities’. The centre-ground of anthropology, in other words, continues to be a preserve of ‘methodological collectivism’—positing social phenomena as determined by factors which bypass individual rationality, and hence envisaging cultural development quite independently of individual consciousness. Here is a continuing insistence that the distinction

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between the individual and the societal is specific to the West and must be collapsed in favour of the latter—or at least of ‘social relations’ (cf. Strathern 1990b)—for anthropology persuasively to encounter cultural others.

On the other hand, there is a continuing insistence that it is a peculiar ethnocentrism for anthropologists to fail to ‘extend to the “others” we study a recognition of the personal complexity which we perceive in ourselves’ (Cohen 1989:12).We are individuals and persons, role-players and rebels, conventional and creative. We may be self-contradictory, personally paradoxical, socio-culturally situated, but we are always interpretively (helplessly, proudly) autonomous and agential, inevitably and inexorably ourselves (cf. Rapport 1993a). It is not good enough simply to say that only Western culture valorizes the concept of the individual (‘individualism’) and therefore only in Western society do individuals act distinctively (‘individuality’). For, whether it is socioculturally confirmed or not, the individual is the crucial actor in every social situation and individual consciousness the crucial factor in the interpretation of any cultural artefact.

See also: Agent and Agency, Individuality, Methodological

Individualism and Holism

INDIVIDUALITY

Individuality is tied inextricably to individual consciousness, to that unique awareness, and awareness of awareness, which is the mark of human embodiment.The body, and in particular the brain (‘a supremely well connected system of processors [an individual arrangement of neurons and synapses] capable of more distinct states, by several orders of magnitude, than any system ever known’ (Flanagan 1992:60)), gives rise to knowledge of the world, to a perspective upon the world, which is inevitably individual. Human beings come to know themselves within the world by way of cognitions and perceptions, thoughts, feelings and imaginings, which are unique to them.

The concept of individuality also bespeaks a host of ambiguities.The physical matter of the human body is in ongoing process of birth and decay (so that the assemblage of cells has changed completely in some seven years), while the individual’s sense and sensing of identity is continuous.The senses of the human body operate in terms of repeated, momentary apperceptions (‘moments of being’) which are singular and

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diverse, and from which the individual builds up a variety of different knowledges and perspectives, or world-views; and yet, one feels oneself to be consistent and coherent at any one time, and that one’s views develop logically over time. Being born and coming to consciousness very much within the world—thrown into the middle of a mêlée of ongoing processes of life, organic and inorganic, human and non-human, natural and socio-cultural, personally focused and ambient (family life, politico-economic conditions)—the individual nevertheless looks out upon this environment from a point of view which is both originary and original; each individual’s knowledge of the world is particular and discrete, and subject to its own perceptual mechanisms (or ‘subjective’).

In anthropology, recognition of these ambiguities takes a characteristic form. As Wallace has put it (1961:131):

The paradox [is] that cultures do exist, and societies do survive, despite the diversity of the interests and motivations of their members, the practical impossibility of complete interpersonal understanding and communication, and the unavoidable residuum of loneliness that dwells in every man.

While leading lives of unique experiences and interpretations of the world, individuals yet partake of routine interactions with others, and succeed in maintaining relationships (intellectual and emotional, human and animal, socio-cultural and environmental) which are symbiotic and (at different possible levels) communicational. It does seem possible, at some level, to overcome individual discreteness and exchange knowledge and perspectives which are commonly held; to what extent, therefore, is it possible to treat habitual interactions in socio-cultural milieux as objective? While human individuals are irreducibly distinct, is it legitimate to make generalizations concerning the relations and behaviour of individuals who regularly come together as members of communities, associations or partnerships? Even though it is individuals who originally create and ongoingly utilize and maintain the institutions and practices which come to characterize a socio-cultural milieu (common language, politico-legal arrangements, systems of marriage, socialization and health care, and so on), to what extent is it possible to treat these latter as things-in-themselves, as accruing an identity and a weight which makes them, in time, sui generis?

However much such questions are debated in anthropology (cf. Ingold 1997), it should not detract, as it has a tendency to do, from an appreciation of the concreteness of individuality.This latter is the human a priori, the physical—psychical basis on which all knowledge of the

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world and all human creativity within the world rests. Human consciousness is unavoidably and irreducibly individual, and all human constructs (including socio-cultural milieux and their socio-cultural anthropology) are shaped by and imbued with this truth (cf. Cohen 1994; Rapport 1997a).

Existential anthropology

The anthropology which has sought most deliberately to keep this truth in view has been termed ‘existential’ or ‘phenomenological’ (cf. Jackson 1989, 1996; also Douglas and Johnson 1977; Kotarba and Fontana 1984; Csordas 1994; Stoller 1997), after the philosophical traditions associated with such writers as Kierkegaard, Emerson, Nietzsche, Husserl, Jaspers and Heidegger. As adumbrated by Sartre (1997:44–6):

Our point of departure is…the subjectivity of the individual …not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teaching upon the truth…. And at the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I think, therefore I am, which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. Every theory which begins with man, outside of this moment of self-attainment, is a theory which thereby suppresses the truth, for outside of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable…. [T]here is [an absolute] truth which is simple, easily attained and within the reach of everybody; it consists in one’s immediate sense of self.

In the second place, this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of man, it is the only one which does not make man into an object…—that is, as a set of predetermined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone….

Furthermore,…[there is] a human universality of condition …, all the limitations which a priori define man’s fundamental situation in the universe. His historical situations are variable …[b]ut what never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labour and to die there. These limitations are [at once] [o]bjective, because we meet with them everywhere and they are everywhere recognizable: and subjective because they are lived and are nothing if man does not live them—if, that is to say, he does not freely determine himself and his existence in relation to them. And, diverse

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