Excursions in Realist Anthropology: A Merological Approach 144386403X, 9781443864039

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Excursions in Realist Anthropology

Excursions in Realist Anthropology: A Merological Approach

By

David Zeitlyn and Roger Just

Excursions in Realist Anthropology: A Merological Approach, by David Zeitlyn and Roger Just This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by David Zeitlyn, Roger Just All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6403-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6403-9

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. —Louis MacNeice – Snow (January 1935)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Introduction: Anthropology and the Philosophers Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 13 Incompleteness and Partiality Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 35 Excursus One: Do Mambila Cockerels Lay Eggs? Reflections on Knowledge and Belief Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 41 Charity Begins at Home: Metaphors, Beliefs and Cultural Non-Translation Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 59 Excursus Two: Ethnography as Fiction, or the Lies We Tell One Another Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 63 In Defence of Rules: Pierre Bourdieu en Grèce Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 87 Excursus Three: Greek Exotika and Belief Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 99 Anthropological Translation Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 121 Concepts for Twenty- First Century Anthropology Works Cited ............................................................................................. 133 Index ........................................................................................................ 153

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Early versions of these chapters first appeared in the following places, and are used here with permission: Chapter Two: Partiality and Partial Views Zeitlyn, D. 2009. Understanding Anthropological Understanding: for a merological anthropology Anthropological Theory 9, 209-31. Chapter Three: Excursus One: Do Mambila Cockerels Lay eEgs? Reflections on Knowledge and Belief Zeitlyn, D. 1991. Do Mambila Cockerels lay eggs? Reflections on knowledge and belief. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 22, 64-9. Chapter Five: Ethnography as Fiction, or the Lies We Tell One Another Zeitlyn, D. 1993. Ethnography as Fiction - or the lies we tell one another. International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 8, 175-78. Chapter Six: In Defence of Rules: Pierre Bourdieu en Grèce Just, R. 2005. In defence of rules: Pierre Bourdieu en Grèce. Journal of Mediterranean Studies. (15)1: 1-24. Chapter Seven: Exotika Part of Just, Roger. 1996. ‘Anthropology Bedeviled’. Review of Charles Stewart Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture. Arion 4.2: 183-97. Chapter Eight: Anthropological Translation Part of Zeitlyn, D. 2005. Words and Processes in Mambila Kinship: The Theoretical Importance of the Complexity of Everyday Life. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield). The authors gratefully acknowledge the work of Anna Rayne for challenging us to be clear about what we really, really want to say, helping

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to create a common voice and catching some of our inconsistencies and solecisms. The remaining faults are ours.

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE PHILOSOPHERS

This book is a response by two anthropologists to the rhetorical advocacy of relativism in anthropology and related fields. We believe that our experience, both as fieldworking ethnographers and as humans in everyday social interactions, demands the adoption of some form of ‘middling realism’. We make frequent reference to philosophers and philosophically inspired anthropologists, but having considered the conceptual underpinning of anthropological research we keep returning to ethnographic concerns. Ultimately our concern is with anthropology itself, and if this book is taken as a plea for division of intellectual labour, leaving the philosophers to puzzle over the problems with realism, then so be it. In the end, the enterprise of anthropology is best understood and best practised from the basis of sophisticated realism. This provides sufficient support for anthropologists to fulfil their task: analysing and explaining how different social groups around the planet live and understand their lives. This is not a negligible task. Indeed, unlike philosophers of science and language, some anthropologists deal regularly with radical translation. Cross-cultural discussion and translation challenges any complacent acceptance of the apparent nature of the world. Yet our successes (however qualified) emphatically disprove claims that others live in worlds which cannot be comprehended: that is, claims of radical incommensurability. Our premise runs against the grain of much contemporary anthropological theorizing, although not against the grain of ethnographic practice, where realism of some sort remains the inevitable recourse for both ethnographers and those with whom they interact. Part of our impatience with philosophy stems from the inevitable realism involved in anthropological practice (ethnography) and our own theoretical acceptance of bootstrapping or deferment which acknowledges that adherence: we are prepared to pull ourselves up by our ontological bootstraps, perhaps abducing our way into a sense of acting on an external world that is common to our fellow beings. We trust knowledgeable others when they tell us things (that the

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world is round, that moving electrons are electric current and so on) and continue our work in the light of this confidence, as others work in the light of other confidences. Recognition that those confidences are various need not entail commitment to hard relativism. In writing thus against the grain, our views are bolstered by those of Michael Herzfeld, who in 1997 declared himself part of the ‘militant middle ground’ (165 ff). We are happy to count ourselves among his network of militants, although we are self-recruited and not necessarily marching to quite the same tune. Our aim is to counter the inadequate simplicity of extreme positions, especially those expressed as attacks on realism. Extreme relativism is as misguided as naive realism or positivism. 1 We believe that there is a large middle ground that can profitably be occupied by anthropologists. Further, we hold that the practice of anthropology (indeed the universal practice of social life) reveals that neither extreme position is tenable. To paraphrase Marx, our accounts are socially constructed but not in circumstances of our own making. Objects and people are recalcitrant (brick walls remain brick walls, impenetrable to humans; and babies cry, irrespective of our beliefs about them). This is sufficient to establish bridgeheads for everyday understandings of a common world, both physical and social. However, we do not claim that social construction is unimportant: as social anthropologists we insist on the importance of social construal. Yet we also insist that social anthropology and the experience of social life are such that social construction cannot explain everything about all concepts. Conversely, we do not claim that realism is straightforward, nor that it should be in any way reductive. Our point is that the opposite of positivism is not full-blown relativism, and equally that refuting relativism does not commit one to positivism. Hence our membership of Herzfeld’s militant tendency. As Brian Morris puts it: The alternative to positivistic science and objectivism is not a facile acceptance of a neo-romantic textualism or hermeneutics, that espouses an idealistic metaphysic and cultural relativism. Thus anthropology must continue to follow the tradition of the historical sociologists (Marx, 1

There are important differences between the terms realism, empiricism and positivism; these should not be used as synonyms. Briefly, realism holds that the world exists independently of people and their opinions or theories about it. Empiricism holds that we can learn about the world through observation and testing. Positivism is an extreme version of empiricism, that only observable phenomena exist. This is extremely schematic: we are very conscious that there is an enormous literature in philosophy and philosophy of science dedicated to the overlaps of and possible confusions between these ideas.

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Dilthey, Weber, Evans-Pritchard) and in combining hermeneutics (interpretive understanding) and empirical science (explanations) to repudiate both textualism and positivism. 1997: 336).

One of the six conditions for anthropology identified by Joao de PinaCabral is realism (2010:154-6). As he argues, these open ‘the door in the middle’. As fellow militants, our aim is to help open that door.

Realism Part of the militant middle ground position is that we can be realists without assuming a single definitive or synoptic overview (so we need not sign up to Marcel Griaule’s vision of the aerial photograph, or these days the GoogleEarth view). There is no secular version of a god’s-eye view to which our efforts can only approximate. Sandra Mitchell calls this a ‘pluralist-realist’ approach to ontology, ‘which suggests not that there are multiple worlds, but that there are multiple correct ways to parse our world, individuating a variety of objects and processes that reflect both causal structures and our interests. The view that there is only one true representation of the world exactly mapping onto its natural kinds is hubris’ (2009: 13, original emphasis; see also Pina-Cabral 2011). In keeping with this, we see the task of anthropology (although perhaps ‘essentially contested’ (Gallie 1956)) as rendering explicit the sorts of understandings that humans achieve when groups of people deal with each other: usually with those who are familiar, but also with those less so who may do things differently. Dealing with these issues is part of the human condition: anthropology has merely tried to explain how they are understood and dealt with. As Harry West, citing Roy Wagner’s The Invention of Culture (1975: 35) puts it: ‘because people – like the anthropologists who study them – construct rules, traditions and social facts in order to make sense of societies (in which they actually live), everyone is a fieldworker of sorts, everyone an anthropologist’ (2007: 81, original emphases). Such understanding of others’ understandings can only be accomplished if there is a common starting point: some bedrock (however small) from which we can launch our investigation. The independence of that bedrock from social construction by any one social group is why we consider ourselves realists. However, to reiterate, this does not imply that there is a single best overall account of everything. Our militancy works both ways: both against the hard line ‘everything is social construction’ associated

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with strong relativism and post-modernism, and against quasi-scientific neo-positivism.2 We have avoided providing definitions of realism and relativism (and faithfulness and aptness). This is because our thesis sprang from a shared sense of mismatch between our fieldwork experiences and our readings in philosophy. Threading ourselves between different philosophical positions, we have avoided upfront definitions in order to avoid committing ourselves to a single camp. We know this might alienate committed partisans at both extremes. An important part of our argument is that words such as ‘faithfulness’ point to the complexity and entanglement of humans and the world. It is less a case of humans knowing the world (simple realism) or constructing the world in which they live (strong relativism) but rather humans from particular cultural backgrounds and for particular purposes making sense of an often recalcitrant world. The questions raised by the ambiguities of words like faithfulness (or aptness as used below) push us in fruitful directions as we try to make sense of and understand the complexity of human social organization (see Reyna 1997: 328ff on science and objectivity). Notwithstanding, it would be unfair to our readers to abstain from giving any definition of realism, so we end this section with Andrew Sayer’s definition: 1 The world exists independently of our knowledge of it. 2 Our knowledge of that world is fallible arid theory-laden. Concepts of truth and falsity fail to provide a coherent view of the relationship between knowledge and its object. Nevertheless knowledge is not immune to empirical check, and its effectiveness in informing and explaining successful material practice is not mere accident. 3 Knowledge develops neither wholly continuously, as the steady accumulation of facts within a stable conceptual framework, nor wholly discontinuously, through simultaneous and universal changes in concepts. 4 There is necessity in the world; objects - whether natural or social necessarily have particular causal powers or ways of acting and particular susceptibilities. 5 The world is differentiated and stratified, consisting not only of events, but objects, including structures which have powers and liabilities capable of generating events. These structures may be present even where, as in the social world and much of the natural world, they do not generate regular patterns of events.

2 This positions us with authors such as Boghossian (2006 esp. p94 fn5) and Detmer (2003).

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6 Social phenomena such as actions, texts and institutions are conceptdependent. We therefore have not only to explain their production and material effects but to understand, read or interpret what they mean. Although they have to be interpreted by starting from the researcher's own frames of meaning, by and large they exist regardless of researchers’ interpretations of them. A qualified version of 1 therefore still applies to the social world. In view of 4-6 the methods of social science and natural science have both differences and similarities. 7 Science or the production of any other kind of knowledge is a social practice. For better or worse (not just worse) the conditions and social relations of the production of knowledge influence its content. Knowledge is also largely - though not exclusively - linguistic, and the nature of language and the way we communicate are not incidental to what is known and communicated. Awareness of these relationships is vital in evaluating knowledge. 8 Social science must be critical of its object. In order to be able to explain and understand social phenomena we have to evaluate them critically (1992: 5-6).

Sayer writes as a critical realist. We discuss this and other forms of realism in the conclusion.

Partiality and Partial views Our question is: what if the point of anthropology is not to produce a synoptic view of everything, as Griaule fantasized in 1937?3 Anthropological holism notwithstanding, what if we accept our limitations and start thinking seriously and positively about partial views and incompleteness?4 This produces a merological5 anthropology. At a stroke several concerns 3 In this context ‘everything’ is a weasel word. The argument we construct is couched in the language of epistemology: of the limitations of human knowledge of an independent world. If the ontology is somewhat different, so that rather than thinking of a complete world, independent of human thought, we think of a processual world in a continual state of becoming, then necessarily all human knowledge is, and always will be, incomplete, since the process never finishes. 4 This is Reyna’s approach (1997: 332-4 and 347): his agniological method seeks to identify (and then reduce) our ignorance, so he urges us to look for gaps and holes. This is likely to be humbling for practitioners. 5 The term mereology is used in philosophy as a term for the ‘formal study of the relations between parts and wholes’ (OED2). This is particularly relevant to Durkheimian questions about the relation between individuals and society, and those between persons, body parts and memories (see Chisholm 1979 and Ruben 1983). As we argue below, merological anthropology is partial and honest about its

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evaporate: most importantly, rival interpretations no longer directly compete; instead they (potentially) complement one another. Only where they overlap may they compete, but usually they do not. Consider Mark Hobart’s condemnation of the discipline in which his early career was made: ‘The fact that laughter, fear, indeed so much of what people actually do and say, are so successfully eliminated or trivialised in most anthropological writings is a pretty damning indictment of our pretensions to knowledge’ (1995: 66). We suggest that this is not an indictment but a humbling reminder that our knowledge is partial, and none the worse for it. This recognition of incompleteness is not, to our minds, an indictment. First, it is humbling in that we do not and cannot know everything. Secondly, it is a necessary consequence of a scientific orientation; as Hastrup puts it: ‘knowledge must be organized information; in the case of anthropology it concerns the organized information about ways of living in the world and modes of attending to the world. The organization implies that knowledge is both reductive and selective’ (2004: 456, original emphases). Thirdly, incompleteness leaves room for multiple other accounts, so it should reinforce anthropology's abstention from claims to exclusivity; it occupies a demarcated domain, whose boundaries are continually being challenged and shown to have been misunderstood. This is a healthy symptom of a progressive discipline. We do know more than we once did, which makes life for us considerably harder than it was for our illustrious predecessors. Moreover, different accounts (and tensions between them) may help explain some of the dynamics of social structure. Bateson’s original account of Naven (1980) exemplifies this: his subtitle is ‘a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view’. Each of these viewpoints illuminates different aspects of the Naven ritual and Iatmul society; each is incomplete in itself. Finally, the question of dynamics brings us to the temporal dimension (for all that Bateson’s account is synchronic). Although we write from an epistemological starting point (as if the problem were imperfect knowledge of a fully defined world), recognizing incompleteness also leaves room for other ontologies. In particular, it is consistent with a view of the world as processual, as continually becoming; we stress that this is a realist view of that complicated world. partialities. In another context Strathern (1992b: 72, 204) introduces the idea of merographics (partial analogies): ‘the issue is the way ideas write or describe one another; the very act of description makes what is being described a part of something else e.g. the description’ (1992b: 204); see also Franklin’s recent elaboration (2003). The philosopher John Dilworth also discusses incompleteness and partiality of representations (e.g. 2003: 221-2).

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The word partial is ambiguous, meaning both (1) incomplete and (2) biased. As explained below, both meanings are relevant to anthropology. First, consider the following three (invented) statements which are typical of much published academic work, anthropology included: The truth about Diana’s death is x. They said y happened, but what really happened was z. Dr W. gives a detailed and accurate account of social life among the Whomever. Even the most enthusiastic post-modernists cannot avoid implicit references to truth. The impossibility recalls the hypothetical examination question: ‘“There is no such thing as truth”: answer true or false?’ Furthermore, whatever their own views, relativists have no reason to complain of other peoples’ concerns about truthful accounts or accurate representations, and should eschew such complaints as misleading or imperialist. In other words, anthropologists have no basis for imposing their relativism on realist others unless they themselves are laying claim to truth or to some other form of implicit realism. The paradox is unavoidable. We suggest that anthropologists should aspire to produce faithful accounts, whose partiality is made explicit, having taken take steps to reduce it. The recognition that partiality cannot be eradicated does not exonerate us from attempting to minimize it. The inevitability of bias does not prevent an anthropologist from seeking to document partiality when it occurs. This applies both to our own partiality and to that of our informants. Hence, standard sociological research techniques remain helpful, providing warrants for our statements. Following these methods anthropologists are systematic. They do not believe everything they are told: they listen to everything everyone tells them and then try to make sense of the conflicts and contradictions between what different people say, and between what people say and what they do. So we attempt to be faithful to what we are told and to ourselves, to our professional identities as observers and as social analysts. Unattainable? Yes. Inevitably tainted? Certainly! But ‘orientation’ is different from ‘arrival’ or ‘achievement’. This connects with the idea of ‘Partial Views’ and the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 160) who describe scientific metaphors as

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being apt. 6 The notions of aptness and faithfulness provide ways of evaluating accounts in the light of the available evidence. Aptness is susceptible to empirical testing, but the attraction of such an approach is that it assumes that all explanation has a metaphorical component which will be culturally constrained: ‘the very notion of the aptness of a metaphorical concept requires an embodied realism. Aptness depends on basic-level experience and upon a realistic body-based understanding of our environment’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999: 72-3; see also 228-32). Yet despite these cultural constraints, aptness is also linked to empiricism: a metaphor may or may not be apt, and we can seek evidence to help us make that judgement. Ironically, the same point is made by Clifford, one of the most prominent anthropological post-modernists and hence usually assumed to be hostile to empiricism. But his talk of ‘representational tact’ (1986: 7) in the introduction to Writing Culture is wholly consistent with the idea of aptness or empirical responsibility.7 As Brian Morris notes: What knowledge as representation does, however, is to make explicit what in fact is being affirmed (truths about the world), and acknowledges that all truth is intersubjective and thus open to critical scrutiny and possible refutation by other scholars (unlike truths which are apparently disclosed through evocation or mystical ‘revelation’ and which we are told have no reference at all to any world outside the text). With regard to anthropology, this affirmation of truth as representation is particularly important, for ethnographic accounts and anthropological theory should be open to scrutiny by the people whose culture and social life is being described and explicated (1997: 324, original emphasis).

Anthropology in the streets: Bootstrapping ‘Part of the post-modernist critique of anthropology has been that its methodology has been based on the double illusion of the neutral observer and the observable social phenomenon’ (Banks and Morphy 1997: 13). As stated above, for all its illusory nature the ‘neutral observer’ is an ideal worth aspiring to, since it encourages good practice and results in work that is more accessible for others to use and criticize. As for the concern about the observability of social phenomena, this is a classic case of inferring, from an inability to run, the impossibility of walking. Leaving philosophical and metaphysical questions of the existence of the world 6 7

See footnote 1 on page 6 above for definitional issues. See Lakoff and Johnson (1999: 134) on ‘empirically responsible philosophy’.

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aside, at a very crude level events are observable, and patently these events constitute the social worlds we make. Actors observe each other and change their tactics and strategies accordingly. Mundane, everyday lives are full of observable events and interactions between people and objects. The objects are themselves the subjects of study. One of the ironies of late twentieth-century anthropology was that just when ‘objectifying’ people within the context of anthropological study was being portrayed as a ‘Bad Thing’ there was a simultaneous resurgence in the cultural study of objects themselves, now seen as having a social life (e.g. Appadurai (ed.) 1986) or as commodities (e.g. Miller (ed.) 1997). Thus objects emerged as legitimate subjects of study just when humans ceased to be so: an anthropology without anthropoi. The same fear of objectifying human social life has sometimes placed biological anthropology in a similar position. It is not, and cannot be, essentially racist to study biological aspects of human society, but to talk about different adaptations to local environments over millennia is to court instant rejection on the ground of political unsoundness. Safer by far never to consider any social question to which biology is relevant. When it comes to observing events and interactions between people and objects, however, there is an odd disjunction or rupture between what anthropologists are told to do (the methodological and ideological strictures handed down to students) and what they and those who have instructed them do in their everyday life. Descartes wanted to put the existence of the world on hold in order to prove the existence of God. In the same spirit of radical scepticism anthropologists are told to put social life on hold until it can be proved that it is possible to understand other people: philosophically, that proof is not easily attained. But what Husserl called the ‘natural attitude’ (or ‘lifeworld’) typifies the philosophical insensitivity of everyday life. By and large, we do not question the existence of our children, colleagues, spouses, our cars and bicycles and their mechanics. We also behave as if utterances had meaning which, if not always immediately clear, can be easily clarified. It appears that such rough and ready, albeit philosophically and methodologically naive, attitudes are pervasive around the planet. 8 Our mundane lives are not conducted in a post-modern world. We live in a modern one (or, following Latour 1993, an amodern one). To these prosaic (but in the light of contemporary theory, bizarrely radical) claims we add one further suggestion: that human actors in their 8

Hence the reference to bootstrapping in this section’s title: we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in ways reminiscent of Escher’s impossibly circular drawings.

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everyday life have anthropological understandings of the world they live in. In order to be a competent adult social actor a person must gain some fluency in one or more dialects of one or more languages. In so doing they acquire not just a grammar but a social grammar of how words are to be used and to whom. They must learn how to comport themselves, how to hold their body, which bits of it to display when and to whom. They must learn which parts can be altered by surgery (through the insertion of metal, plastic, silicon or ink) and to whom they should admit this (the list could be continued). The models of understanding that people have of their fellow actors are essentially anthropological understandings, albeit unformalized, often unstated and rarely comparative. If it works on the street, why not in academe? Our understanding of our fellow citizens is imperfect, incomplete (partial), and partial to our points of view, but it works (more or less). It is adequate for our everyday lives, and by achieving that adequacy it passed a kind of test, repeatedly. The challenge for twenty-first century anthropology is to abandon the requirements of completeness and certainty for what, after Strathern (1992a), we call merological anthropology. We should keep trying to make explicit the complexity and systematicity, the inconsistency, clarity and vagueness of everyday understandings. Our accounts should be merological in recognizing their own partialities; depending on the rhetoric used, such recognition could be described as either scientific or post-modern. Anthropological accounts are partial in both senses: they are incomplete as well as biased. In what follows we hope to substantiate the general points outlined above. We intersperse our ethnography with reflections on some theoretical questions for sophisticated realism which are raised by the ethnography. Our ethnographies stem from three geographically and culturally disparate regions: Cameroon, Greece and Australia. The questions addressed below relate to: knowledge and belief (on the part of both the anthropologists and the locals); possibilities of cultural translation and cross-cultural understanding (without which anthropology could not proceed); and the attempt faithfully, albeit partially, to capture the reality of other peoples’ lives. Some sections of the book are newly written for this volume; others have been published before in different forms (see Acknowledgements above). All have been modified for this book, which is not intended as a volume of collected essays. Rather, we have woven together material produced over a number of years into a continuous argument and a manifesto for a ‘realist’ anthropology, for the militants occupying the middle ground.

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In Chapter 2 we discuss incompleteness as a form of realist account, which allows for other overlapping and complementing accounts, variously situated. There may still be disputes about ‘the facts of the matter’ but this is all to the good. To show that realism can include most of the social constructivist programme we consider some arguments for it, especially those associated with ethnomethodology. We also examine how aspects of the real world constrain how humans live and make objects. Chapter 3 presents a fragment of ethnography from the Mambila in Cameroon. In some contexts people make empirical statements which are particularly challenging to their ethnographer. How to make sense of farmers who say that roosters lay eggs? Such statements are often invoked by those who hold that different cultural traditions ‘live in a different world’, an idea we criticize on several grounds in later chapters. Chapter 4 shifts to a very different context, the south coast of Victoria, Australia, but takes up a closely related theme. Fishermen in Apollo Bay talk about and treat their boats as if they were human and female. The problem here is to give full weight to this discourse as something more than decoratively ‘metaphorical’ without falling into the trap of implying some metaphysic whereby the fishermen actually believe their boats to be women. Chapter 5 presents some ethnographic vignettes in which the communicative processes at the heart of anthropological research could be characterized uncharitably as ‘telling lies’, but are better seen as the gross simplifications which start a process by which we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps to a more nuanced understanding. Chapter 6 takes up the work of Pierre Bourdieu in the context of a small Greek village. Bourdieu’s rejection of ‘rules’ in accounting for social action and his emphasis on ‘practice’ might seem to place him squarely within a realist camp, but we argue that his formulation of habitus in itself creates an untenable entity whose ontological status is anything but clear. Chapter 7 remains in Greece and examines the ethnography of Charles Stewart. Here the problem is almost the inverse of that presented in Chapter 3: it reprises the issue of seemingly untenable beliefs, but in this case it is Stewart’s informants who reject them or express extreme scepticism. Yet these beliefs still form part of the historical and cultural landscape of rural Greece. This points to the distinction between culture as a collective legacy and culture as the aggregate of ideas and beliefs to which people actually subscribe. Chapter 8 considers the issue of translation, raised in Chapter 4, in greater depth. We argue that anthropological translation is importantly

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different from literary translation since we are not constrained by any requirement to match length. Confronted by a concept which ‘defies translation’, in other words which cannot be easily translated into the metropolitan language in which the anthropologist is writing, the ultimate recourse is to write an entire monograph explaining the range of nuance associated with the idea at stake, granting the reader the breadth of understanding that the researcher has gained. Finally, in Chapter 9 we consider ways in which we can occupy a middle ground as realists who recognize the complexity of cultural construction within external constraints. This Chapter briefly discusses some forms of relativism and two different realisms: Roy Bhaskar’s ‘critical realism’ and Rom Harré’s ‘policy realism’. The ethnographic encounter makes us realists. Arguing for the middle ground makes us policy realists.

CHAPTER TWO INCOMPLETENESS AND PARTIALITY

We suggested in the Introduction that a modest form of anthropological account is possible which acknowledges itself to be necessarily incomplete (and hence partial in one sense of the word). Such recognition does not prevent us from aspiring to accuracy, from seeking accounts which are both apt and as accurate as possible, even though claims of accuracy may be contested. Indeed the very possibility of challenge on the ground of having misunderstood or misleadingly presented a society requires an underlying realist premise. This we accept without being in any way obliged to endorse positivism or hard empiricism. We are happy to include in our realist accounts many forms of social life which would trouble positivists.

Grand illusions: Meaning after the fact of speaking This section briefly explores some topics which are usually the concern of interpretive anthropologists and those sympathetic to relativistic arguments. This is partly to show that our form of realism is compatible with such interests, but also to show that more is publicly demonstrable than one may initially assume, and thus amenable to shared research and analysis. Empiricism and realism are not the same thing, but they are fellow travellers.1 One grand illusion that must be challenged is that people know what they are saying: that we, as actors have intentions that are meanings. We argue that intentions are different from meanings, that the meaning of an utterance is an interactional attribute that does not precede the utterance and its reception. Intentions (or goals) may be represented in many different ways, usually being inferred after the fact on the basis of actions (including the production of utterances). To take language as the main communicative channel by which 1 Bhaskar’s critical-realism is built on the distinction between an intransitive transcendental reality and our observations of it (e.g. 1998 esp. 26ff).

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meanings are transmitted between people is misleading. This misconception is a consequence of taking writing, rather than conversation, as the prime model for language. Writing is a technological innovation that has become widely distributed, especially in recent time; but we must remember that for most of human history it was not available. The danger with taking writing as the exemplar of the relation of intention to meaning is that when writing we actually do craft sentences to express our desired meanings. Analysts such as Ong, Goody and Eisenstein 2 have written extensively about the cognitive and social effects of literacy. Our point is different: simply that writing presents a misleading model for understanding in global (and evolutionary) terms how meaning is created in ordinary human interaction. Sociolinguistics and especially ethnomethodologists show how linguistic meaning is often best seen as an emergent property, arising from, rather than pre-existing, the conversational interaction. A parallel illusion in economic theory is that of the rational agent, the lonely maximizer. In a chilling article in the London Review of Books Donald Mackenzie (2002) reports how ordinary students behave normally (that is, not according to the norms of economics) except for those ‘polluted’ by economic theory who actually act according to its precepts, as ‘rational maximizers’. This has terrifying implications since economics graduates are recruited by agencies such as the World Bank and IMF, so although economic theory was wrong as a model of the activity of human agents it may become correct when those schooled in its theories become the active agents in the world economy and act as they have been taught is proper. The grand illusion shared by philosophy and anthropology is that of the author with a clear plan of what they want to write. The results may be problematic and in need of interpretation, but some are more needy than others. Examples abound, ranging from those beloved of speech act theorists (‘I bet you’), through jokes (‘A horse walked into a bar…’) to poetry (‘Should lanterns shine the holy face, caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light, would wither and any boy of love look twice before he fell from grace’: Dylan Thomas). It is deeply misleading to assume that textual creation is a good model for face-to-face human interaction. All utterances are not equally problematic: the young child whining for food does not pose as complex an interpretative challenge as, for example, the public relations agent acting for a television celebrity. So too, some social 2

See Ong (1988), Goody (1977, 1986, 1987) and Zeitlyn (2001) for an overview of the implications of literacy debate. Eisenstein (1979, 1997) recasts the argument, emphasizing the role of printing. Street (1983) and Finnegan (1988) provide corrections to the more overstated versions of the ‘great divide argument’.

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generalizations are much easier to make than others. We can be much more confident that we have identified, for example, the economic basis of a given society than we can be about their attitudes to life after death. A similar set of concerns can be raised about ‘the self’ which the Western tradition has historically treated as the essential core of and basis for personal identity. Against this, some authors have proposed ‘positioning theory’ as an alternative, in which the self is defined by its position in a social network and so is inherently relational. Much of the difference between positioning theory and its rivals lies in its abandonment of any attempt to essentialize the sense of self. So Linehan and McCarthy write: ‘we define ourselves with respect to communities of practice as identity is constructed through negotiation of the meanings of our experience of membership in communities’ (2000: 438). Selfhood on this account is not an individual attribute but a social accomplishment. Similarly, we propose that meaning lacks any essential core, that words really are, as Wittgenstein said, what we do with them. Such actions are not a matter for individuals in isolation: all actions are social actions (see Csordas 2004 and Das 1998). To look beyond, or to believe that is inadequate, is a literate illusion, foisted on the intellectual world by authors who mistake the written word for words spoken in conversation (de Certeau 1988). It is less the case that ‘in the beginning was the word’ than ‘in the beginning was the exchange of words’. Meaning is a social achievement, not an individual assertion. This has wider implications. Rather than Descartes’s cogito ergo sum we should have disputamus ergo summus. 3 In his reflections on the anthropology of religion, Clifford Geertz called this the ‘autonomy of meaning thesis’, which he summarized thus: Meaning is not a subjective matter, private, personal, ‘in the head’. It is a public and social one, something constructed in the flow of life. We traffic in signs en plein air, out in the world where the action is; and it is in that trafficking that meaning is made. We must [...] ‘mean what we say’, because it is only by ‘saying’ (or otherwise behaving, acting, proceeding, conducting ourselves, in an intelligible manner) that we can ‘mean’ at all (2005: 6).

In a similar vein, although making a different point, Sperber (1982) talks of semi-propositional representations, grammatical expressions that do not have the same propositional force as others. Any propositional 3 Similarly Gergen contends that ‘we may rightfully replace Descartes’s dictum with communicamus ergo sum’ (1994: viii).

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force they may have depends, not on the attitude of the speaker, but on the reception of their words by their interlocutors. It is what others do with those words rather than our intentions in speaking them that is important. We may say that Just is a good farmer, or that Zeitlyn can transform into a hippopotamus. The status of these utterances is determined by whether Just is invited to work parties, whether people inspect Zeitlyn for wounds when a hippopotamus is sick or wounded and whether he is accused of trampling fields in hippopotamus form. So the status of these utterances is not determined by what the speaker intends or what by any one listener understands, but by what actions follow the utterance. This has profound implications: as a general rule the status cannot be safely established in advance except by induction from previous utterances and it is conditional on the conditions of utterance, the audience and circumstances in which the phrase is uttered. In short, the meaning is determined post hoc, after the event. This removes or avoids the philosophical issue of ‘the problem of meaning’ or ‘the’ problem of meaning (the difference in emphasis points to the possibility of different approaches, and to the possibility of a resolution of the problem). To apply such an ethnomethodological solution to the problem is to abandon the philosophers’ quest for certainty, the logicians’ quest for decidability, the computational linguists’ quest for an algorithm. Instead, in an alarmingly empirical fashion,4 it is to examine mundane behaviour and focus on the way in which utterances are taken to be meaningful in ordinary, everyday usage. Most of the time most of us succeed in getting our meaning across. If we accept this and take it as our object of study then we abandon the search for MEANING and examine instead the everyday adequacy of lay understanding. Of course, this is anathema to many philosophers and to some anthropologists. In everyday conversation utterances are satisfactory; they are sufficient to the day. Such ‘practical adequacy’ for the task at hand provides ample matter for the analyst. The results of this style of analysis are widely applicable, and particularly germane to the central topics of anthropology. The result is a practical, workable anthropology. Crucially, it is oriented to the phenomena which surround us in fieldwork. This holds true whatever the focus of field 4

Ethnomethodology’s empiricism is alarming in its refusal to consider factors not demonstrably present in the immediate interaction. For example, in classic conversation analysis only the factors to which the speakers demonstrably orient themselves are considered. Many social scientists feel this misleadingly discounts stable, recurring factors which the parties bring to the interaction: in short, social structure.

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research, be it beer, health problems, farming, sexual politics, tarot cards, in-vitro fertilization, virtual reality or whatever fashionable topic we choose. For what distinguishes anthropology 5 from other humanities, above all else, is the practice of fieldwork. Unlike the study of literature or history, anthropological research consists mainly of partial but incessant conversations, reflections on them in the light of both what we see happening and what happens next, as well as on theory gleaned from books (q.v. Gudeman and Rivera 1990). It is worth noting a further consequence: researcher and research-subject become inextricably connected along the way. What constitutes an ethnomethodological approach to meaning? It begins with an account of how the words at issue are used. Perhaps one witnesses an event and wishes to find out more. Or one may start with an elicitation frame and gather the vocabulary of a particular domain. Then, using the clues that this reveals, one can examine the situations in which those words or phrases are used. Of course, as anthropologists we may be sensitive to issues about who uses particular words and in what social context. To delve deeper we look for problems, disputes and communicational upsets and consider how they are resolved, the notion of repairs being central to the ethnomethodological programme (Schegloff 1977, 1992). By default, meaning is assumed, presumed, taken for granted. 6 We work on such assumptions until they are called into question (for example by a break in conversation) which causes us explicitly to address meaning and understanding. During conversational repairs meaning is publicly negotiated between co-conversants. Following the repairs, those involved have further grounds for their assumptions, which are then unlikely to be questioned in the next conversational round. Those grounds are practically adequate to the task at hand. Hence, meaning is emergent from the morass of social activity; in particular, it may be examined when problems occur. So anthropologists really are, or should be, looking for trouble. We are not only asking ‘what do you mean?’ but also concentrating on the points where disputes arise (about the correct conduct of a ritual, or who should 5

In Tim Ingold’s 2007 Radcliffe-Brown lecture he argued strongly for anthropology as a comparative discipline, comparing the results of individual ethnographies. The logic of his argument is that we should say ethnography (rather than anthropology) is distinguished by the practice of fieldwork. However, undertaking an ethnographic study remains a foundational qualification for anthropologists and this justifies the distinction as stated. 6 This also means it can be uncertain and lack definition until/unless challenged, which is why we stress its emergent qualities.

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inherit a field). Trouble spots are points at which meaning is contested. The resulting resolution of the problem is a (more or less temporary) consensus, even if it is only an agreement to disagree: it enables the disputants to move on. From this perspective meaning is an emergent phenomenon of social interaction. On this view it is located, not in our heads, but in socially constructed space, in the interactions of social actors, of people (Geertz 2005). More importantly, it serves to orient our research practice to troublesome but mundane interaction, but now we can see why it has been so productive. To take an example from the study of ritual, consider Gilbert Lewis’s (1986) transcript from a recording made during the construction of part of the Gnau Panu’et ritual in Papua New Guinea. The recording documents dissent about how the rite should be conducted. Through Lewis’s analysis the conflicting voices give substance to our understanding of the rite and its meaning. Another example, from northern England, concerns neighbouring farmers Sid and Doris, discussed by Nigel Rapport (1983). Rapport portrays them constructing their relationship as they go about their everyday business. On our view, the anthropologist is handicapped by having less evidence than the participants, but it is evidence of the same kind as that used by Sid and Doris in constructing their representations of each other. The anthropologist has neither analytic nor authorial priority, and the possibility of criticism is reintroduced if enough material is published (or made available e.g. in data archives). Much human interaction is unproblematic and not discussed. This can pose problems for analysts since it is never unambiguously clear what was meant or achieved.7 Hence, our concern with smaller or larger points of disagreement where conflicting voices may give substance to our understanding. Trouble spots (disputes and arguments) are places where ‘the everyday’ and ‘practical adequacy’ diverge. In mundane, unproblematic life these terms cover the same ground in which children are fed and raised, crops grown, livelihoods achieved. Arguments reveal discrepancies between the understandings of the different parties about what is going on. Resolution marks an agreement (often tacit, and temporary) of a common workable understanding. It must be workable to enable people to pursue their shared social lives.8 Disputes set limits for

7

On which not only much fiction but also psychoanalysis rest. This is not to assume that ‘the everyday’ is a stable universal category: it is locally defined by what requires no comment and explanation, the social equivalent of the unmarked case in linguistics. In an extreme case, in the Tibetan

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the possible interpretations of the case in point9 and demonstrate in public the evolution of the interpretation that was achieved. Life goes on, including the talk and arguments that are part of it. The interpretations in question are primarily local, and may never be stated in words. They may also be those of an anthropologist, striving to make explicit the range of options within which social actions occur. This is what makes anthropological descriptions ‘thick’ (in Ryle’s sense (1971) as adopted later by Geertz (1973)): not just the action but the way in which it is understood locally. All utterances have degrees of illocutionary force, but their power cannot be assessed in advance. This is most clearly seen in arguments in court, where each litigant tries to convince the court of their cause. Many statements are made, most of them never pursued and their truth status never established. Afterwards only the analyst cares about these ‘loose ends’. The social world generally is constituted by a mass of talk, most of which is somewhat vague. However, in the jargon of ethnomethodology it is ‘practically adequate to the task at hand’: sufficient for ordinary speakers. It should then also be sufficient for analysts, but this has not been the case, largely because analysts have been beguiled by written texts. These have very different properties from spoken conversation, particularly in that they are crafted or composed in advance of reception. Conversational utterances are both the ephemera of everyday life and its most basic constituents. Our base proposition is that any/every utterance is provisional, pending its reception, so at the time of utterance there can be no assumption of a fixed meaning, despite retrospective claims to the contrary. This has profound implications for both philosophy and anthropology. For example, the idea that the speaker enjoys privilege or priority, having unique access to what they really mean, is undermined. When such solipsistic pressure is removed a far more democratic and empirically robust anthropology and philosophy result. This provisionality is another form of the partiality or incompleteness that was discussed above as merological anthropology. We may be able to achieve confidence in our results, but speaking strictly, we can never be certain. Our knowledge even of the meaning of our own utterances is always incomplete, or partial. We seek in this book to render problematic some assumptions common in European/ North American cultural and philosophical traditions. We Buddhist monastery studied by Liberman (2004) debate and argument is part of the everyday! 9 As illustrated over the longue durée by Bloch’s examination of the history of the Merina circumcision ritual (1986).

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can then either re-examine and redo the old philosophy, or abandon it in favour of a new and different type of philosophy. Raising these questions makes human life (and anthropology) understandable by social analysts. If we want our analytic vocabulary at least to aspire to universality, then anything not consistent with partiality should be eschewed by our analytic terms of art. The universality of conversational structures has implications inconsistent with many philosophical positions. The ethnomethodological argument is that conversational structure makes meaning a post-hoc, shared achievement. Meaning is public and social: not interior, private, nor pre-existing utterance. As a consequence the main Western philosophical programme based on intentions (and actions following from them) is misguided (despite our schooled intuitions to the contrary). Why is this? Conversational success sifts meaning out of the wide range of possible outcomes. Meaning is achieved post hoc: the speaker discovers what they mean in tandem with their co-conversants. A similar argument can be made for goal-driven behaviour. Intentions, like meanings, are realized only after the fact. They cannot then be used to explain those actions. The way we examine goal-directed behaviour needs a new analytic language. On the conventional view intentions are language-like. One intention differs from another in the same way that one word differs from another: by virtue of its meaning, so the intentional objects are the meaning of words. For example, how do you know I am thirsty? Because I act, for example by saying ‘I am thirsty’ or ‘Mì né méh núá’ or simply by drinking a glass of water. I open my mouth and utter or I open my mouth and drink (sometimes one before the other). The argument about meaning and conversation applies ipso facto to intentions and actions. Actions are public and social and through them we (and others) learn what ‘our intentions’ are or were. So although we are familiar with the idea of goaldirected action we are not sure if the way we act is best characterized as a meaning-driven vocabulary of analysis. Consider Marilyn Strathern’s ideas of partial/ partible personhood (1992a). Following the account first given by Leenhardt (1979 [1947]) Strathern paints a picture of fragmentary persons in which social relationships constitute individuals (dividuals) and in which a person comes into being through a mesh of relationships (and changes as that mesh changes). Strathern questions the Western philosophical tradition of the individual and hence the Cartesian programme. You can be certain that you exist but not that you are the same person who existed yesterday, let

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alone years ago.10 As mortuary prohibitions make clear, as the generations change, so you are changed: in some Australian groups the spoken lexicon is or was radically changed for years following a death in order to avoid uttering syllables that formed part of the deceased kinsperson’s name. Strathern’s approach has other philosophical implications. If there is no constant persisting individual then there can be no goal-directed behaviour of the sort classically portrayed by philosophers in the Western tradition. It is one thing to say ‘I am thirsty’ or to fetch water. It is quite another to do the long-term planning that other goals imply. Yet that is exactly what Papua New Guinea Highlanders do when arranging their pig feasts and ceremonial exchanges. So despite the lack of persisting individuals (the holders of intentions) that Western philosophy assumes, and which Strathern calls into question, the planning occurs. The planning and strategizing by Ongka as he planned his big Moka (a pig exchange and feast, see Nairn 1976) is a very clear demonstration that goal-orientated behaviours occur. But this is now a new problem since the basic units (individuals), the holders of intentions and goals, have gone. What we need is a new analytic vocabulary and approach to intentionality. This parallels the problems, flagged above, of using an author’s premeditated text as a model for speakers and utterances. If both meaning and intention must be changed how can they be squared with our own experience as intentional beings? Space prohibits answering this here. We think the answer lies in recognizing different degrees of precision and vagueness. Ongka may initially intend to organize a big Moka. However, this does not imply that he commits himself to all the subsequent actions entailed by that intention. We may specify our goals in advance but only work out the details (the entailments) subsequently, while trying to obtain those goals. Partibility is not the same as partiality but they are related. If people are partible then our knowledge of others can only be partial: always and necessarily incomplete. We know only some parts of the people we deal with, even those we know best, so our knowledge of them is incomplete. We change as they change, so our memories of their early years are, on Strathern’s account, those of different composite persons, not identical with us now. Our memories of other people as babies or children are partial, not only because of the frailties of memory, but also because they and the memory holder, the rememberer, have changed.

10

The point has been discussed by the philosopher Galen Strawson (2007).

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Accounts, warrants and interests: epistemologies for anthropology A stereotype of our time pits (male) scientific realism against (female) post-modern interpretation. We side with the dour empiricists, despite the problems entailed. The arguments used against realism ultimately endorse it. This is both at the level of basic ontology11 and as an important social myth which serves as an orienting impulse for anthropology as well as a guide to a mode of life. Anthropologists should recognize the importance of these things, both in the social system under description and for our own practice as anthropologists dealing with ethnographic reports from around the world. In short, without an attempt at accurate description there is no point in continuing, there is nothing to debate. However, accurate description is not straightforward. This is not only the problem but also what makes it so interesting. It also explains why versions of this debate will not go away. As work undertaken in the social studies of knowledge, technology and science (STS) has shown, even hard science is, at least in part, a social construct with its own patterns and forms of politics, ideology and policing. Recognizing this does not commit us to profound relativism. We note that relativism is only worth arguing about if it is profound: methodological relativism and symmetrical accounts of success and failure as pioneered by STS are old hat in anthropology (see e.g. Latour 1996). This was encapsulated in Rorty’s 11

While this chapter was being drafted an ontological breakthrough was announced (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007). The authors argue for a different approach to objects and anthropology which they characterize as ontological, contrasting with the epistemological stance of traditional approaches. However, the distinction between the object of knowledge and what is known remains; the issue of representation is inescapable. They evade the problem by denying the distinction: they seek to conceive of new worlds. They invite us to consider new thought-objects in which things straightforwardly are meanings, rather than possessing meanings, so that there are no objects to be represented in thought since their meanings simply exist as part of their being. This is provocative and intriguing but, in our opinion, fails to convince. Their solution takes us from one set of problems to another: their approach reinstates incommensurable world views (ontologies) without any way of moving between them, like Leibnitzian monads without God to correlate them. There is no way of deciding how many ontologies there are or can be: does a society contain just one ontology or are there different ones for males, females, old, young, initiates and non-initiates? This descends rapidly into solipsism. Without comparison and discussion between worlds we cannot gain the insights necessary to move between them. So having detoured to ontologies we return again to epistemological problems: representation again.

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claim that ‘there are no interesting differences between the aims and procedures of scientists and those of politicians’ (1991:172). We disagree. We think that the resistances and recalcitrance of the world (however construed) 12 are important and interesting. Any account of the world which writes out the efficacy of antibiotics as purely ideological is less interesting, less worthy of debate, than one which looks at the way the efficacy of antibiotics has been played out by all the interested parties (commercial copyright owners and scientists among them). Less controversially, let us return to what Rom Harré calls Lenin’s rule: ‘the best explanation of empirical success is the truth’. De Regt quotes Ian Hacking making a similar point: There are surely innumerable entities and processes that humans will never know about [...] The best kinds of evidence for the reality of a postulated or inferred entity is that we can begin to measure it or otherwise understand its causal powers. The best evidence, in turn, that we have this kind of understanding is that we can set out, from scratch, to build machines that will work fairly reliably, taking advantage of this or that causal nexus (Hacking 1983: 274 quoted in De Regt 1994: 12).

This also evokes Marx (18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte): yes, we are free in that we make history, but we are also constrained: we make history in circumstances not of our own choosing. 13 The problem for relativist deconstructivists is the connection between accounts and action, which elsewhere they celebrate (e.g. Potter 1996). This makes causation a central issue, as explored in both physics and social science and especially when the two combine, when physical causality is embroiled in human actions, as it almost always is. An example is the relationship of atomic physics to commonplace massproduced objects such as fluorescent lightbulbs, and in particular the processes of their manufacture. On the basis of nineteenth-century physics we can calculate the average distance between gas molecules at different temperatures and pressures. By adding some early twentieth-century physics about energy states and radiation we can calculate the distance that an electron must travel if it is to excite the atoms it collides with, emitting energy in the form of UV light. The result of all this old-fashioned school physics is to explain both why the gases in fluorescent tubes are at low pressure and why they have fluorescent coatings (to convert the UV 12

As acknowledged even by such stalwarts of STS as Knorr-Cetina (1995: 148) and sophisticated relativists such as Smith (1991: 151). 13 See West (2007: 68/9) for discussion of this using examples from Mozambique.

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radiation emitted to visible light). The point of this excursion is to point to the industrial/ manufacturing implications of some physics. The undoubted interestedness of the accounts may affect whether factories get built (or not built if the technologies are suppressed, as parodied in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1951 film The Man in the White Suit) but not the processes involved. There are resistances beyond our control, such as the problems of breathing underwater or the jumping from windows rhetoric examined by Edwards, Ashmore and Potter (1995). That this is an interested, rhetorical point does not rob it of all its force or persuasiveness. If we lose sight of the resistances (from the world out there) then our accounts become disoriented, uncritical and not themselves capable of critical scrutiny. As Gilbert Lewis puts it: ‘sceptical theories of knowledge and philosophies of pervasive doubt, unqualified as to domain, or limit, or degree, seem designed to offer the strong relativist or the deconstructivist grounds for doing nothing, for detached contemplation’ (2000: 14). What is missing is any room for causation and intention, however hard these are to discern; however imperfect and tentative our understanding of them may be. Humans have intentions and act in a world not (entirely) of their making. At issue is the recalcitrant world and how we inhabit it. If we stress the interestedness of all accounts, as do those working in STS, we risk losing sight of the central, causal nexus which we are trying to comprehend, and if sometimes the causality is unclear then that should not distract us from the easy cases. Causality can explain Stump’s (1996) defence of experimentation (as partially disconnected from particular theories) and answer Rorty’s charge. In other words, the interesting epistemological difference between ‘the aims and procedures of scientists and those of politicians’ is the kind of causality at issue. The Titanic may have sunk because of commercial interests that led to the skimping of safety features during construction, the overselling of safety in the marketing, the under-crewing and over-speeding granted the course and time of year. However, to accept all of these is not to reduce to zero the role of the iceberg. Michael M.J. Fischer, usually seen as an anthropological post-modernist, expresses a similar sentiment when discussing the autobiographies of scientists: ‘the temptation of turning all accounts of science into the status of mere storytelling must be resisted: the chemical effects of drugs, or the geometry of the earth, or the physics of the atmosphere are not just stories’ (Fischer 2003: 213, our emphasis). At the end of his book (1996) Jonathan Potter refrains from giving a conclusion. He sees this as empowering and leaving the reader with the problems of representation that realism will not resolve. We see it as an abdication of responsibility. The ‘Social Construction of Facts’ does not

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oblige us to be relativists, nor does it make realism impossible, just harder. For anthropology this is scarcely news. We have been worrying about the terms of our representations for generations, and we know that a term applied in one context may be inappropriate in another (consider the term ‘family’). Facts like icebergs are unpopular. They are constructed yet can be obstinate or recalcitrant. All in all, better done without. That way elegant theorizing can proceed unabated, it may even be poetic. If advocating facts is seen as dinosaur-like it may be worth recalling that not all dinosaurs suffered extinction: several existing zoological families are direct descendants of dinosaurs. We are trying to trace evolutionary patterns from which a sophisticated, empirically responsible realism can emerge for twenty-first century anthropology. The results of STS and other epistemological concerns imply that there are problems with empiricism. Observation does not provide a simple warrant for knowledge, for generalization. This is why many relativists are sceptical about empiricism. It is not easy or straightforward to know how the world is or to reach a position to make statements about it. Some may conclude that if the world exists then it is essentially unknowable; we are essentially monadic, without the help that Leibniz could take from God to correlate our perceptions with the world. This way solipsism and quietism lie: there is no world to act on, so no actions to undertake. Countering these pessimistic but consistent conclusions, we would start with intersubjectivity and different people giving different accounts. People and interaction are prior (primitive in the logical sense), meaning secondary. This raises the question of why we would give any one account more credence than another. Some say their statement should be trusted because it is underwritten by a deity. Others say their statement is underwritten by other deities. Others again say their account is common sense, and obvious to all right thinking folk. Among yet other explanations are (a) explanation by interests (‘They would say that wouldn’t they?’) either of an individual or social class/ gender/ institution etc., or (b) warranted by experience. A sub-type of this may be labelled science (with a small s) where active attempts are made to find out more about what is going on (versions of empiricism). None of these is exclusive. Rather, they are cumulative. When an interested account also has empirical warrants it is importantly different from an account whose warrants are only interested. In a similar fashion, Lakoff and Johnson see ‘convergent evidence’ as providing the possibility of realism without denying the social determination of individual results (1999: 81-90 contra Hastrup 2004: 450-60). The position we are describing

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comes close to what Roy Bhaskar called ‘critical realism’. 14 Interested accounts are, of course, partial accounts, so this species of realism forms the basis for merological anthropology. Alison Wylie, discussing the philosophical foundations of archaeology, reaches similar conclusions. She uses Peirce’s metaphorical distinction between cables (ropes) and chains. Cables are different from chains in that they are not as weak as their weakest link but gain strength from individually weak component strands (2002: 162). She also talks about tacking, using a sailing metaphor: moving backwards and forwards between different types of evidence. She misses another metaphorical base for using tacking, which in sewing is the initial attaching, a provisional arranging together of different pieces of cloth (evidence). As she has it: Although there are certainly no such things as factual ‘givens’ or wholly neutral evidence that could stand as a foundational ‘grid’ - data stands as evidence, relevant to the evaluation of knowledge claims, only under context- and theory-specific interpretation - it is also not the case that data are entirely plastic, that they are so theory-permeated that facts can be constituted at will in whatever form a contextually appealing theory requires (Wylie 1989: 16).

Which follows her saying that: questions about the applicability of a given interpretive hypothesis are settled when a number of independently constituted lines of evidence converge either in supporting or refuting the proposal that particular interpretive concepts - near or distant - are instantiated in particular past practices. In all cases, however, interpretive conclusions depend on various lines of argument developed on vertical and horizontal tacks in both source 14

See Bhaskar (1989) and Lewis (2000). Porter (1993) and Steinmetz (1998) discuss applications of the idea in the social sciences, as does Archer in Critical Realism Essential Readings (1998a). Brereton (2010) applies the approach to an ethnographic case study. Highmore (2007) argues for a different form of middle ground between realism and relativism based on the work of Michel de Certeau, leading him to agree with Donna Haraway: ‘The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. The ‘equality’ of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical enquiry. Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective; both make it impossible to see well’ (1991: 191 quoted in Highmore (2007:17)).

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and subject contexts. And, in this, their strength derives not just from the diversity of their support but, more specifically, from the fact that the constituent strands draw on different ranges of background knowledge in the interpretation of different dimensions of the archaeological record; they are compelling taken together because it is highly implausible that they could all incorporate compensatory errors (1989: 15).

Wylie’s pragmatic realism is constructive, and anything but naive. Rather than argue for realism across the board she advocates considering individual theories and research programmes. Not all may turn out to have secure foundations, and in those cases an antirealist position is correct, but some (many?) will turn out to be secure (for the time being) and for these, as she argues, a realist interpretation seems the most appropriate (2002: 103-4). She cites Miller (1987: 364 quoted in Wylie 268 n 21) in support of a piecemeal scientific realism: ‘realism is the view that we are often in a position to make certain existence claims, not that we always are. So it does not exclude isolated indeterminacies.’ Miller argues (365-7) for a limited pluralism of descriptions (which is different from ontological pluralism) in the foundations of some sciences. A different pair of metaphors which Gauntlett (2007: 51) takes from Nancy Cartwright (1999) is that of a ‘dappled world’ where ‘the laws that describe this world are a patchwork not a pyramid’ (p. 52). Cartwright also discusses developing ‘methodologies for life in the messy world which we invariably inhabit’ (1999: 18). Returning to anthropology, another related approach is provided by Webb Keane who discusses connections between sincerity and modernism. His article concludes: ‘If the idea of representational economy has any promise, it may be in offering a more realistic alternative’ (2002: 84). Keane, discussing the field of religion, considers alternatives to the dual reductivisms, of the material to the ideal and vice versa. We think his arguments are more widely applicable.

Traps for thought We now present some reflections on four traps for thought, and how they can be turned to advantage, to illuminate the ideas which created them. 1) The Anthropic Principle: constraints on possibility In astrophysics the anthropic principle is used to establish constraints on boundary conditions, setting the range of possible values of important physical constants. The fact of our existence allows us to infer something

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about how the universe is structured. This is at least a starting point, which can be made with confidence (and granted the difficulties with astrophysics it is no small achievement to be able to exclude from further consideration unstable universes: that we are here means that the universe has a degree of stability). Importantly, we can eliminate many possible values for boundary conditions, discounting for example all models for the universe that lack stable stars so that planets with atmospheres cannot form. There are sociological and anthropological versions of this: for example, the truism that highly unstable societies do not survive. Most anthropologists study societies which are sufficiently stable to maintain languages over generations. Despite the demonstrable acceleration of change throughout the twentieth century, important sociological continuities endured, even in the USA, Japan and northern Europe. Another set of boundary conditions relates to our physical selves. The human animal must feed and reproduce. From this perspective, the domains of physical, biological and genetic anthropology set the scene for, and hence constrain, the domains of social and cultural anthropology (and, through complex feedback cycles, vice versa). No social system incapable of sustaining human life will persist. Famously, the original Shakers did not reproduce, believing sex to be sinful. We cannot study a Shaker community today because there are none. However, we can study other groups with unsustainable beliefs, just not over the long term. 2) Causation and probability It is difficult to come to terms with the problem of probability and the lack of determination in sub-atomic physics, co-existing as it does with our lived experience of a world of hard realities in which actions have clear consequences. A cloud of electrons behaves in a precise, predictable fashion, but we cannot predict what any single electron will do. However, because we are human-sized we consciously interact with objects sized from millimetres to metres, and not usually with those much bigger or smaller. At these scales quantum indeterminacy does not apply: we deal only with clouds of atoms, molecules and so forth, never with single ones. Yet there are parallels with quantum indeterminacy in everyday life: why some people won the lottery and others did not; why only one of two people exposed to a virus fell ill; why some people missed a plane that subsequently crashed. To say that this is chance may be unsatisfactory but it is the only explanation we have. The Zande people have a more satisfying explanation for such occurrences: the second spear is the ultimate cause of an event (achieved through witchcraft). As EvansPritchard explains (1937) for the Zande there are no chance occurrences.

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The writer Stanislaw Lem, combining the genres of science fiction and detective story, summarized the problem in his novella The Chain of Chance (1981). Now in trying to determine the a priori probability of such a coincidence, we find it impossible to offer a rational, that is to say, mathematically valid explanation. [...] When it comes to unique and statistically unclassifiable events, the theory of probability is inapplicable (1981: 297).

In this story a detective investigates a set of mysterious deaths with little in common apart from the victims’ bizarre behaviour in the hours before their death in a southern Italian seaside resort. Accidentally the investigator reconstructs the circumstances and almost dies in the process but thereby solves the case. According to the author the detective suffered from ‘the classic dilemma of every investigation into the unknown. Before its limits can be defined the agent of causality must be identified, but before the agent of causality can be identified one must first of all define the subject under investigation’ (1981: 278). When considering a past event the probabilities are irrelevant: this happened, however unlikely it once seemed. We live in a single world between our known past and our uncertain future (see Zeitlyn 2012). Multiple parallel universes may be a good model for the overall picture of how quantum indeterminacy produces determined outcomes at scales we experience, but even this is not sufficient to explain the causal universe of experience. Perhaps this is why focusing on negotiation and construction seems unhelpful: we live in a world in which things happen, and in which one thing leads to another. We can argue about what these things are, but such arguments do not usually affect the outcomes. We are objects more than we are subjects. This a humbling conclusion for practitioners and should lead to a more modest (partial in both senses) anthropology. 3) The life of things At the risk of appearing perverse let us now consider Der Lauf der Dingen (Fischli and Weiss 1987) and the role of causality in it. (This is an interesting version of the banging on tables argument (Edwards et al. 1995)). Der Lauf der Dingen is a film showing an elaborate causal chain of events, constructed by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, in a disused factory. (In 2003 a television advertisement featured a similar chain of events using Honda car parts.) Fischli and Weiss invested ordinary domestic artefacts with apparent lives of their own, each object setting in motion the next. The film shows a literal chain reaction. For example, a

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flame is lit that heats a kettle until it boils; the steam from its spout propels it down a railway track until it meets the next object and sets it moving. It is all about causality, but to stress the materiality and the causality is to ignore the most important thing about it: Der Lauf der Dingen is art! Learning this, we approach it differently. Contrasting this video with their other works raises questions about art which affect our response to the images: to focus on how a boiling kettle pushes itself along railway tracks becomes woefully obscurantist. Depending on which school of criticism we subscribe to, Fischli and Weiss’s views loom more or less large. In his review of this film, Don Cameron wrote: In Fischli/Weiss’ work we gape at the ordinary while waiting for the extraordinary to occur, because the authors are convinced as we are that the extraordinary is ultimately what happens in art. [...] Fischli/Weiss’ work is uncannily at home in the parts of daily life that we do not spend contemplating beauty (1992: 69).

We draw two lessons from this. The first is the importance of the descriptive or analytic frame for understanding the case at hand. The second is that individual descriptive frames are often not mutually exclusive. One can describe Der Lauf der Dingen purely in terms of physics. Art critics might legitimately object that this misses ‘the point’ of the installation. The physicist’s account is partial (incomplete) but it is not wrong. This invites a parallel with the idea of bridgeheads which enable radical translation. To paraphrase Malinowski’s example from ‘Coral Gardens and their Magic’, when we see someone scattering seeds we may think we understand what they are doing. That they are also muttering incantations is somehow irrelevant. A relativist might ask ‘Irrelevant for whom? Secondary on what criteria?’ Of course, they have a point, and there is a danger of concentrating on the boiling kettle to the point not only of misunderstanding but of denying that there is anything else there to miss (the intention to make art, the need for the spirits’ blessing to make the seeds germinate). That danger is a factor which anthropological fieldwork seeks to explore. The results published in ethnographies, from Malinowski onwards, suggest that anthropologists are able to gain understanding, not only of the physics of kettles and the practicalities of farming, but also of the local reasons for doing things, whether it be making art or praying ancestors in aid to grow crops successfully. 4) Hindsight and the equal treatment of possibilities In his study of a failed public transport project (Aramis) Bruno Latour provides a salutary warning about the dangers of the ‘sociology of hindsight’:

Incompleteness and Partiality

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No one can study a technological project without maintaining the symmetry of explanations. If we say that a successful project existed from the beginning because it was well conceived and that a failed project went aground because it was badly conceived, we are saying nothing. We are only repeating the words ‘success’ and ‘failure,’ while placing the cause of both at the beginning of the project, at its conception (1996: 78).

Questioning the histories written by victors is one way in which we have progressed beyond functionalism. Latour explored how, after the failure of this engineering project, everyone admitted to having private doubts about the public statements of confidence which were made to justify the project. So engineers told managers that the practical problems were solvable, the managers told the politicians it could be done within budget, and in reply the politicians told them that they wanted it done: yet all subsequently denied speaking sincerely. Yet this is how consensus was reached, and similar processes were presumably followed in other projects which did come to fruition, allowing the private doubts to be forgotten. Latour also presents an exhilarating examination of the financial and political environments within which Aramis was developed. But this is not a context-explains-all account: The work of contextualising makes the connection between a context and a project completely unforeseeable. […] Hence the idiocy of the notion of ‘pre-established context.’ The people are missing; the work of contextualisation is missing. The context is not the spirit of the times which would penetrate all things equally. Every context is composed of individuals who do or do not decide to connect the fate of a project with the fate of the small or large ambitions they represent. [...] No indeed, nothing happens by accident; but nothing happens by context either (1996: 137-8).

For Latour it is the actors who do the sociology, not the analysts. Each actor has to understand the social (and physical) world they inhabit. So each player in the project can give accounts of all the other players. Different ‘social physics’ are invoked to explain why so and so (an individual or a company, or a thing, a vital component of the machine) was pushed or pulled into a certain behaviour. Latour encourages us to relish the ambiguity of ‘it wouldn’t work’ (could not, or did not want to). We regularly attribute intentionality to non-intentional entities, ranging from companies (when we describe a machine that wouldn’t work this may be a step towards suing the manufacturer) through nation states to objects.

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The actors make sense of this morass of different, partial and partisan story tellings. They have to. Latour’s sociological analysis is not an attempt to make sense of the project but merely follows the understandings of the actors themselves. They have to construct enduring entities to which they can orientate themselves and their actions. Entities such as the desires of the government funding agency, what the Paris underground authority really wants, and the state of the computer system running the automated cars. ‘The interpretations offered by the relativist actors are performatives. They prove themselves by transforming the world in conformity with their perspective on the world. By stabilizing their interpretation, the actors end up creating a world-for-others that strongly resembles an absolute world with fixed reference points’ (1996: 194-5). However, the difference must be insisted upon, and it is within that difference that social negotiation as an everyday continuing process occurs. The anthropological account follows after the fact: it attempts to square the circle by being fair to all sides, including those who contradict one another or themselves. To do this we must be modest: not attempting to have the final word, and accepting the incompleteness of our knowledge. As Becker (1974: 15) puts it, to say that something is true of Y does not imply that only this is true of Y. Our commitment to being faithful to Y is a commitment to understanding Y in both Y’s terms and our own comparative and analytic terms. However, this commitment differs from full-blown relativism. It does mean that if the anthropological account of Y is different from how adherents of Y explain it then more work is needed (an example is Lewis’s analysis of Gnau female puberty rituals (1980) discussing Gnau denials that the rituals relate to the onset of menstruation). This places anthropologists in positions of bad faith, but we suggest that this is an aspect of the human condition. To suggest that the giver of any account is not in bad faith is as naive as suggesting there is a wholly neutral ‘god’seye view’. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel says, ‘it should not surprise us if objectivity is essentially incomplete’ (1980: 84). Yet this incompleteness is also our strength. ‘The major contribution of anthropology results from the experience of trying on a multiplicity of cultural spectacles: the illusion of total truth is amended by the revealed discrepancies’ (Ardener 2007: 173). Elsewhere, Ardener talks of the provisionality of anthropological results. Herzfeld calls this ‘an admirable provisionality’ (2007: xi) but cautions that it does not imply relativism: the discussions which may lead to the revision of ideas are empirical and nonrelativistic (1985: 60). Another approach to this relates to description. In order to describe one

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must understand (to some degree).15 ‘Do we begin with description or do we end with it? Because one might take description as the primary activity, the initial laying out of what you think you are describing. But if in fact you take description as the end result, which subsumes analysis, interpretation, theory, you make it an explicit activity’ (Strathern 2008: 20). Description need not imply that one understands everything one is describing: particularly, one may not understand how the object described came to be in its current state. Moreover descriptions are often incomplete, and one description does not exclude the possibility of others. ‘Any representation is at best partial, idealized, and abstract […] These are features that make representations usable, yet they are also features that limit our claims about the completeness of any single representation’ (Mitchell 2009: 13).

Conclusions Rather than aiming at universal scope, at completeness, our more modest aspiration is to work with theories that are explicitly incomplete, leaving the joins visible as signposts to the work that remains to be done (hence the label ‘merological’). Although incomplete, such theories, like the everyday understandings that underlie our everyday competences, are adequate for the task at hand, the problems at issue. A more cautious view is that the theories are more or less adequate for the task at hand, a style of approach that avoids the binary poles of True or False in favour of a continuum ranging from the woefully inadequate to the helpfully adequate. Hastrup might describe the latter as having ‘got it right’ (2004). However, Hastrup confuses empiricism with positivism (2004: 468-9) and although she is implicitly critical of radical post-modernism she also sees it as freeing us from the shackles of ‘positivist thinking’. Yet without empiricism the idea of ‘narrative responsibility’ becomes vacuous or prone to endless ideological redefinition. Of course, we have no knowledge of the world independent of our observation and interaction, but the world is recalcitrant, and not entirely of our making: this point is acknowledged 15

Wittgenstein in ‘Philosophical Investigations’ seems to think that pure description is possible: ‘We must do away with all explanation and only allow description in its place’ (1953: 109). Elsewhere, however, he gives a different account: ‘This perspicuous representation makes possible that understanding which consists just in the fact that we “see the connections”. Hence the importance of finding intermediate links’ (1979: 8-9). For Clack (1999: 54) such perspicuous representation does not provide an explanation: he stresses that understanding how something ‘fits together’ is not the same as explaining why it does.

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even by those in the social studies of science such as Knorr-Cetina (1995: 148) and points to our difference from Hastrup: our account seeks to comprehend an obdurate or recalcitrant world in which people live their lives as best they can, constrained (not determined) by the world and their understanding of it. Our comprehension is always partial, and uncertain, but it can be discussed and improved. We can assemble collages of views, collating the different parts (despite the lack of a perfect or complete view) and discuss different ways of summarizing them, even if they contain inconsistencies. There is a final irony: despite the profound philosophical difference between Hastrup and us, our practice as field anthropologists may not differ greatly from hers.

CHAPTER THREE EXCURSUS ONE: DO MAMBILA COCKERELS LAY EGGS? REFLECTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF

One of the comparative arguments for realism is that, outside academe, most if not all different cultural traditions appear strongly realist. (Contentiously, Buddhist theology may be a counter-example). There are arguments about how the world is (e.g. ‘this is my goat’) or about whether someone has correctly understood what is going on. Claims that someone has a false belief frequently spark argument in many traditions. Even for our middling realism this is important. As stated above, although accounts may be incomplete and partial they may nonetheless compete, and there may be socially permitted contexts in which the contradictions can be explored through experiment, discussion and argument. We use the term belief here as a convenient shorthand, 1 begging a more sophisticated exploration of Mambila linguistic philosophy which we hope that Mambila colleagues will provide in due course. Many beliefs are labile, or peripheral, invoked but never explored, let alone examined systematically. The besetting sin of anthropology is to misplace concretism (Bateson 1980: 263) and this is a particular danger when dealing with beliefs. Our very practice tends to make things precise and delimited, because we write them down and then tease our writings to ‘make sense’ of them. The real challenge of anthropology is to record things in a way that remains faithful to the volatility of what we are describing. In Cameroon, the Mambila (with whom Zeitlyn works) talk of a snake (c ) which lives in rivers and pools, the sight of which brings death. This snake is said to ‘blow the rainbow’, a statement for which he could elicit no further explanation. The nearby Tikar (according to their ethnographer, David Price (p.c.)) say that rainbows are the reflections of snakes. Mambila 1

Notwithstanding Needham’s well argued concerns about belief as a comparative universal analytic category (1972); see further discussion in Chapter 8 below.

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also maintain that in caves, behind waterfalls and at the bottom of ravines live tanyi, goat-like animals which can metamorphose themselves (like witches) usually in order to ensnare unwary lone travellers. Both the c snake and the tanyi figure are characters in stories told at beer drinks. For example, a man told of his journey to Nigeria one dry season during which he went into a cave. He said that a tanyi lived in that cave during the rainy season. No one asked how he established this fact. A further example is the Mambila belief that cockerels lay eggs. Zeitlyn never suspected them of holding such a belief, and he would still be blissfully untroubled had David Price not prompted him to ask an explicit question when he returned to the field in 1990. Price’s fieldwork was carried out in Ngambe among the neighbouring Tikar people. Among another neighbouring group, the Kwanja, some men made the same claim, but neither Price nor Zeitlyn have explored the Tikar or Kwanja elaborations. Mambila, Tikar and Kwanja share a propositional belief which happens to be false. As such, it is on a par with claims about the existence of phlogiston, unicorns or the philosopher’s stone. What is curious is that it seems to be open to empirical refutation, although Lewis (1980) points to ways in which this may be harder than first appears. Our stumbling block is our image of the scientific tradition. Mundane beliefs seem to concern ‘facts’ which could be scientifically tested. This is not an exclusively West African phenomenon: as described below, in Papua New Guinea the Gnau do not sit in hides watching birds to see whether they die natural deaths. Similarly, the Mambila do not watch their chickens to see which birds lay eggs, nor do they dissect cockerels to establish whether they are capable of such a feat. Moreover, our beliefs about rare and unfamiliar objects are no different from the Mambila belief in tanyi. When Zeitlyn tells Mambila friends that a hundred years ago there were manatee in the River Mbam (possibly) or in the River Sanaga (certainly) the basis for his confidence is, on reflection, extremely slender. When Zeitlyn asked an explicit question about poultry, being longwinded to ensure he was properly understood, the answers he received were of the following form: DZ: ‘Chickens are of two sorts, female and male. These are hens, and cockerels which crow in the mornings. Hens lay eggs, that I know, but I do not know if cockerels too can lay eggs.’ Answer: ‘Oh yes, cockerels lay eggs, but small ones. You can eat them if you like but what you should do is to weave a small basket, put the egg in it and then hang the basket at a crossroads. Then your chickens will grow well and fat and not die and they will lay many eggs.’

Excursus One: Do Mambila Cockerels Lay Eggs?

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Most people expressed uncertainty about birds in the wild. Zeitlyn talked about this to two brothers (both then in their twenties) one of whom keeps pigeons. They agreed that male pigeons do not lay eggs. The younger brother then said that neither do cockerels. Before Zeitlyn could say anything, his elder brother corrected him: ‘small eggs are cockerels’ eggs’. Eggs laid without shells are described with the terms used for miscarriages: both are before term and ‘unripe’. However, cockerel’s eggs are different: although small they are perfectly formed. To the best of Zeitlyn’s knowledge it is physically impossible for male birds of any species to lay eggs (although he confesses that a doubt was raised in his mind which led him to consult friends in the Oxford zoology faculty). Granted this, two explanations are possible: (1) there are no such eggs and no one has ever seen them nor put them in baskets as described above; (2) some aberrant hens’ eggs are regarded as ‘cockerels’ eggs’ by Mambila, whether or not they are treated as described. Mambila hens range freely, are preyed upon by kites, sparrowhawks and eagles, and are prone to diseases which can reach epidemic proportions. Eggs are taken by snakes and small rodents. There is also a wide variety of ritual uses for chicks and chickens apart from domestic consumption. In sum, a chicken’s life is fraught with uncertainty. We are far from the farmyard inductive certainties described by Bertrand Russell.2 The source of any individual egg is also far from clear. Hence cockerels could be the source of abnormally small eggs. On one hand there are mythical creatures: the dwarfs, hobgoblins, extra-terrestrials and hobbits of folklore. Beliefs in such beings, like the dragon described by Sperber, may be consigned to a category of travellers’ tales, or ‘semi-propositional representations’ (in Sperber’s terms (1982)). This means that they occur in talk (or other actions, for one can hunt for golden-hearted dragons, or golden fleeces). They are propositional in form, but they stand for a range of propositions rather than implying a single proposition. It suffices here to note that the way in which these beliefs are used resembles the use of religious concepts. They are alike at least insofar as both are protected from immediate empirical testing. The protection is achieved, less in the manner described by Evans-Pritchard for Zande divination (1937: 475-8) but rather by the conversational context: you don’t argue with a story (with apologies to Maurice Bloch (1974)). Hard questioning of such stories only occurs when an ethnographer is 2

‘The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken’ 1967 (1912): 35.

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present. Otherwise scepticism expresses unfriendliness and a disinclination to continue the conversation. Any scepticism that is expressed is not taken up and disseminated. The existence of mythical creatures is more newsworthy than their non-existence. Thus for mythical beings. On the other hand, a few authors (such as those cited below) have discussed problems arising from the examination of more mundane beliefs. These are generally of the form ‘the Y people believe that X’. The problems are similar to those concerning the analysis of religion, but may be seen more clearly when separated from some of the different and similarly complex problems besetting the discussion of religion per se. Religious beliefs are doubly questionable. There is uncertainty about how we should best seek to understand religion, as well as the problems with belief itself. A good example of the analysis of a mundane belief is Lewis’s discussion of the belief held by the Gnau in Papua New Guinea that birds do not die natural deaths. This is, of course, identical in kind to the widely held belief that all human death is caused by witchcraft, such that in the absence of malevolent human action no one would die. More prosaic is the proposition (implicit in the Gnau view) that the life of birds has no natural limit. Lewis described his reactions on discovering that Gnau hold that birds do not die ‘natural’ deaths: I treasure the feeling of discovery I had then for three reasons. Firstly, I had presumed that something was as obvious to them as it was to me and I was wrong. Yet I had lived with them more than two years without finding out so great a difference in the answers we would give to that question. Secondly, had you asked me before whether I thought a particular people might have no fixed or sure answer to the question, I would have supposed it most unlikely. ‘Do birds and animals die?’ does not seem a question that would be left unsettled in the general knowledge provided in some culture. Two years passed until chance revealed it to me. Thirdly, the contrast between plants and animals which some people stressed led me to make clearer a distinction I was half aware of... Gnau men and women see some wild creature, it moves, is gone, and who can tell the next time whether it is the same one or another like it? Some say those creatures all must die, some say not, others are not sure (1980: 137-8).

Any dead birds which are found are said to have been killed. Death has external causes and is adventitious. Clearly, how people understand their surroundings is strongly influenced by cultural factors. Gell (1975) mentions that shadows in the forest may be seen as spirits (he thought he saw a knight in armour). Sperber (1982) considers the existence of dragons with golden hearts.

Excursus One: Do Mambila Cockerels Lay Eggs?

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Liam Hudson (1972) reminds us that if we accept the existence of the rhinoceros it is hard to be complaisant in denying the existence of the unicorn. We read in New Scientist that strange new creatures have been found in the depths of the Atlantic. By accepting these reports we incorporate these creatures as part of our knowledge, accepting it as knowledge by authority. 3 Anthropologists have had a long-standing fascination with beliefs which they deem peculiar or irrational. The very notion of belief has been discussed from a variety of different standpoints. Philosophers make two useful distinctions when considering this subject: first, the difference between the objects of belief and ‘what [native speakers] mean by the word that the [anthropologist] translates as “belief”’ (Quine 1990: 116); secondly, the distinction between believing in something, and believing that something (Price 1969). 4 These two distinctions are particularly germane to the literature discussing the perplexities of religion. Abstract and abstruse notions have been exhaustively examined. These concern such arcane matters as the putative identity of twins and birds among the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1956) and the numerologically satisfying and mythically complete account of the origin of the world and its contents as given by some Dogon people (Griaule 1965). The question is: how we should analyse beliefs which seem to us to be empirically false? Despite the caveats raised by Needham 1972, we continue for the time being to use the term ‘belief’. Intentionality cannot be removed by taking a leaf from Wittgenstein’s book and demonstrating the lack of clear definition for the English word ‘belief’. As an analytical term it may not be perfect: psychologists and philosophers often talk of ‘intentional states’ and ‘representations’ (which may be little better than ‘belief’ except that they are less likely to be confused with English folk concepts). Yet other cultures may have concepts that are well translated by ‘belief’. Like all translations, particularly those made by anthropologists, hedges and qualifiers will be added. ‘Belief’ remains possible as a term used in translation (see discussion of translation below). In particular, we must beware of two stereotypes which have distorted the anthropological study 3

Russell used this phrase to contrast with knowledge by acquaintance, which results from our own experience. Anthropologists may wonder if such a distinction underestimates the extent to which people learn (within a culture) to understand their own experiences. We share this unease but believe that at a crude level the distinction can be helpful. 4 Although this may seem clear, the distinction is finer than may first appear (as Price illustrates). To believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God is little different from believing in him.

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of belief and belief systems. They are the Christian Creed and scientific theories based on experiments. Both are supreme creations of idiosyncratic literate traditions which are historically specific and not generalizable without detailed argument. The latter is too often lacking. The Creed is an explicit statement of the beliefs that constitute a particular variety of Christianity. It gives the misleading impression that the contents of belief of other religions can also be specified. Similarly, the products of science, such as may be found in any textbook, give a misleading idea of certainty and of the possibility of precise, justifiable description. It is still worth recalling Horton’s point (1967) that we all use ‘traditional’ thought or ‘traditional beliefs’ in our everyday life. It is hard to work as an empirical scientist, and our best practitioners manage it for a very small part of their lives. We believe and we recount what we have been told is true and usually make no attempt to verify that information, even if the means to do so are readily at hand. Accepting the assurances of colleagues in the zoology department that cockerels cannot lay eggs, Zeitlyn now tends to explain that what Mambila call cockerels’ eggs are aberrantly small hens’ eggs. The basis of this prosaic explanation is that the first egg laid by a hen is occasionally abnormally small. Also a cockerel may lead a hen to lay in a nest, sometimes settling in first, as if to show the way. The combination of these two observations seems sufficient to explain a belief that cockerels lay eggs.

CHAPTER FOUR CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME: METAPHORS, BELIEFS AND CULTURAL NON-TRANSLATION

We can, in our conception, join the head of a man to the body of a horse; but it is not in our power to believe that such an animal has ever really existed. It follows, therefore, that the difference between fiction and belief lies in some sentiment or feeling, which is annexed to the latter, not to the former, and which depends not on the will, nor can be commanded at pleasure. It must be excited by nature, like all other sentiments; and must arise from the particular situation, in which the mind is placed at any particular juncture. —David Hume 1966 [1777]: 4

Introduction ‘Cultural translation’, the attempt to represent one culture in terms comprehensible to another, was a central plank of the anthropological enterprise long before the phrase gained popularity in the 1970s 1 and, whatever name it now goes by, we believe the attempt remains central. One way or another we are still in the business of trying to comprehend and convey the diversity of humanly created human experience, which, notably, includes the expression of that experience (cf. Tonkin 1982). The central problem, of course, and the very condition that gives rise to the notion of cultural translation, is that, despite a nice try by Levi-Strauss in

1

The phrase ‘cultural translation’ may have been coined by Evans-Pritchard, or it may simply have gained general currency in the 1960s and 1970s. As an indication of the date of its popularity, however, note the title of the collection of essays edited by Beidelman and presented to Evans-Pritchard in 1971: The Translation of Culture.

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the 1950s,2 there is no tertium quid, no Archimedian point, from which one culture can be ‘objectively’ described by another; no language in which one culture’s actions and representations can be re-represented except in terms that another has set. To that extent, anthropology is irredeemably relativistic. We are still trying to convey the meanings of other cultures, but by means of a language that is as culturally bound as those which it seeks to decipher. Having raised the spectre of ‘cultural relativism’, however, let us quickly add that in our opinion the problem remains representational, rather than epistemological. The notion that the absence of an ‘objective’ means of representation and communication implies that we are locked into incommensurate ‘worldviews’ is jejune, not only because anthropology would thereby be rendered impossible, but more importantly, because it belies both the fact that people do communicate ‘cross-culturally’ and the plausible assumption that learning to comprehend some new view of the world occurs as routinely within what we call ‘a culture’ as it does between what we designate as separate ‘cultures’. 3 In principle, crosscultural inter-subjectivity is no more open to epistemological uncertainty than is intra-cultural inter-subjectivity, and the fact that we cannot escape into some tertium quid does not mean that we cannot parley between our vernaculars. However, it may mean that our understanding of what members of another culture do and say is temporarily blocked. This is essentially where anthropology and cultural translation kick in: as Ardener put it, the anthropological experience starts where there is a critical lack of fit between one world view and another (1989: 7). That usually occurs when we encounter a statement of belief, or, importantly, action that seems to entail a belief, which appears counterfactual, nonsensical or absurd (cf. Sperber 1982). Here the standard rule of thumb is ‘when in doubt, contextualize’.

2

Structuralism claimed to do just that by appealing to unconscious and universal structures. That tactic permeates all of Levi-Strauss’s work, but take, for example, the following passage from Structural Anthropology: ‘If, as we believe to be the case, the unconscious activity of the mind consists in imposing forms upon content, and if these forms are fundamentally the same for all minds [. . .] it is necessary and sufficient to grasp the unconscious structure underlying each institution and each custom, in order to obtain a principle of interpretation valid for other institutions and customs’ (1972: 21). 3 For an excellent account of the philosophical and anthropological debate between relativists and non-relativists, see Tambiah (1990) ch 6. For a robust argument against cognitive relativism, see Sperber (1982).

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In the course of a characteristically pugnacious article, however, Ernest Gellner admonished his colleagues for what he saw as a tendency towards excessive ‘charity’ in regard to this practice (1973). Anthropologists, he suggests, are predisposed to assume that what their informants say ‘makes sense’. Therefore, when they encounter statements that appear not to make sense (the famous Nuer ‘twins are birds’ is his paradigmatic example (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 128)) they seek to find some way of rendering, of ‘translating’, those statements in such a way that they do make sense. Thus further information, further social context, is adduced until what previously sounded absurd can be shown to be reasonable, what seemed senseless is proved sensible.4 The problem, as Gellner saw it, is that there are few checks on such a tactic. Since, by definition, the anthropologist’s interpretation of the meaning of what is said exceeds what is actually said, how much ‘context’ can legitimately be adduced in order to render the meaning of what is said sensible? Gellner claims that there are no rules for this, because anthropologists work backwards from the assumption that what their informants say makes sense and contextualize and reinterpret it until it does make sense. Gellner allows that some beliefs simply do not make sense even in their native context; that they are illogical or at least ambiguous and inconsistent. However, if Gellner seems excessively uncharitable, two points should be emphasized. First, he does not reject the tactic of contextualization itself. Secondly, he has no desire to resuscitate any Levy-Bruhlian notion of ‘primitive mentality’. Although he is concerned primarily with the question of translating or interpreting alien or ‘exotic’ beliefs (uttered in alien or exotic languages) he goes out of his way to stress that our own concepts and beliefs are so embedded in use and practice that there is no difference between ‘us’ and anyone else, and therefore no warrant to exercise excessive charity in our case either. In short, he argues for a level playing field. The trouble is that the playing field is rarely level. This point is elaborated by Talal Asad in his rejoinder to Gellner’s article (1986). We believe it also has important bearings on ‘anthropology at home’. What happens when there is no requirement for translation because what is said immediately makes sense, or at least appears to make sense, because it 4

Bateson’s opening remarks in Naven are a striking example of this stance: ‘If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as it is stressed in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture’ (1980: 1).

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accords with our own linguistic, mental and social habits; when we are natives talking about natives to natives? It might be the case, as Rapport suggests, that ‘an anthropologist thoroughly at home in linguistic denotation is more able to appreciate the connotative: to pick up on those niceties of interaction and ambivalences and ambiguities of exchange where the most intricate (and interesting) aspects of socio-cultural worlds are constructed, negotiated, contested and disseminated’ (2002: 7). On the other hand, it might be the case that analogues of ‘twins are birds’ simply pass by us unnoticed or un-remarked. A very excessive form of charity might be the automatic consequence of our own cultural knowledge that immediately supplies a total context for whatever is said. We therefore turn next to a little piece of anthropology at home, ‘home’ in this case being a country town on the south coast of Victoria, Australia, about a hundred miles from where Just grew up.

Fishers and boats In 1989, at the age of 78, Gladys Henriksen published a book of reminiscences entitled Paradise by the Sea: Memories of Apollo Bay. 5 They were fond reminiscences, dedicated to her late husband, Norman Henriksen, a farmer and one of Apollo Bay’s first fishermen, and Glad (as she was universally known) starts them appropriately enough with her marriage to Norm in 1931 and her introduction to his house and farm. Here, she states, ‘As well as myself, Norman took on my rival - whose name was Aggie, and about whom you shall read more later’ (1989: 1). In fact Glad returns to Aggie within a few pages: . . . besides taking a wife, he [Norman] also took on Aggie, a nineteen foot four inches fishing boat [...] On odd occasions I was accused of being jealous of Aggie. This, when I wanted her master to accompany me to some function on which I had set my heart to attend; and he had chosen the company of Aggie. She was the only ‘female’ about whom I had to answer the charge of being jealous! (Henriksen 1989: 3, original emphasis).

At first sight, Glad’s personification and emphatic feminization of her husband’s boat, together with Aggie’s inclusion within the Henriksen household, appear to be the sort of literary flourishes one expects of the genre: a way of telling the tale. And so, we think, they are. However, after a couple of months’ intermittent fieldwork in Apollo Bay, Just began to 5

Paradise is the name of an area just outside Apollo Bay.

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think that they might also be the sort of flourishes that embroider a particular form of life, and not just its literary account. One of his first interviews was with Mick, a middle-aged fisherman and a great raconteur. Just had been asking him about Apollo Bay’s older fishing families, and Mick began to deluge him with information: names, relationships, anecdotes, character sketches. Just could not keep up. In the end, frustrated by Just’s inability to grasp what he considered to be the most elementary information, Mick said, ‘Here, gimme that’, and taking Just’s notepad and biro he drew three genealogies, one of which is reproduced below.

Figure 1. The original genealogy modified (for obvious reasons) only by the deletion of the family surnames

That evening Just made a fair copy, carefully adding two ‘equals’ signs to denote the marriages between Tony and Lindy, and Russel and KarleneMarie. At the time he knew none of the people concerned. It was only some days later that the penny dropped: Lindy and Karlene-Marie were not Tony’s and Russel’s respective wives. They were their boats.

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Figure 2. The F Family genealogy extracted from Figure 1

Now, Apollo Bay fishers are deeply involved with boats. That may seem unsurprising: they are, after all, fishers – although it might be thought that fishers would be preoccupied with fish. Certainly the Apollo Bay fishers know a lot about fish, and they do talk about good catches and bad. However, fish themselves appear to hold little romance for them, unlike boats. We use the word ‘romance’ advisedly, for most Apollo Bay fishers are owner-skippers, and most of them are fishers, not only because it is a form of employment that provides them with a reasonable living, but because what they love doing is being at sea in their boats. They are besotted by them, and Mrs Henriksen probably had reason to be a touch jealous of Aggie. ‘I was on King Island driving a [bull]dozer,’ said one fisherman, ‘and I could look down and see all the boats in the harbour. That’s when I fell in love. That’s what made me a fisherman.’ In fact Apollo Bay fishermen talk about boats all the time. Sometimes the talk is technical, but more often it is aesthetic. The appearance of boats, the lines of boats, the beauty of boats, are continually discussed and appraised: - ‘People laughed at that one when she was first built. She’s too low down in the bow. Funny looking boat. Bit ugly.’ - ‘Ah, gee, she was a beautiful little boat. I really liked her. I only got rid of her because she was too small. But she was a beautiful boat.’ And the boats are kept beautiful. Most are taken up onto the slipway once a year, sanded down, repainted and carefully repaired. Obviously

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there is practical reason for this, but in Apollo Bay the care lavished on boats seems to exceed all practical requirements. Having your boat look good is a matter of pride. Harry repainted his boat a rather unpleasant orangey-yellow, for which he was mercilessly teased by his mates. He defensively muttered that it wasn’t his fault, it was the paint shop that had put in the wrong tint. Nor is the passion for boats limited to one’s own. Just spent several afternoons on all fours on the living room carpets of fishers’ houses (whose walls are adorned with framed photographs of boats) pouring through ‘family photo’ albums that contained precious few people but photograph after photograph of boats: their own boats, their friends’ boats, and boats they had just happened to see and admire while on holiday. Indeed, holidays had their direction. Mick (and a good few other Apollo Bay fishers) had been overseas. Mick, George and George’s partner, Claire, went together to a boat exhibition in Oslo. They also went to a fishing port in Scotland, and straight down to look at the boats, some of which Mick knew of in advance having subscribed for twenty years to an international boat magazine, just to gaze at boats. George, too, tracks the buying and selling of boats through newspapers and magazines, although he admits that this is partly to do with competition: he wants to keep up with his rivals in Tasmania and elsewhere. But after a long and pleasant interview with George and Claire when Just was taking his leave, George asked him what day of the week it was (not fishing, he had lost track of time): ‘Saturday,’ Just said. ‘Oh, good,’ George replied. ‘Why?’ asked Claire. ‘Oh well,’ said George, ‘there’s a boat-show on in Geelong. It’s only 12.30. We could just make it.’

If Apollo Bay fishers are obsessed by boats in general, what should also be noted are the specific relationships that exist between particular families and the boats they own or have owned, relationships that seem to find a place in every account of family history. There is, perhaps, special reason for this, for a number of Apollo Bay’s fishers are or were boatbuilders. The late Norm Henrikson did not build Aggie, but fishers of his generation commonly did build their own boats, and continued to do so until the early 1980s. Ron, for example, whose grandfather was a noted boatbuilder (and whose father also built some boats) had built at least four for himself as well as helping to construct more for other fishers. The destinies of such boats are carefully tracked. After all they represent a large investment of

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time and labour: but also, it seems, of sentiment. Ron’s first boat, the Little Hunter, was built in the 1960s when Ron was a teenager. He sold her to someone in Geelong when he built himself a bigger boat, and lost track of her for some time, but twenty years later when he was driving through Port Maquarie he saw her moored by the jetty and rushed down to greet her. She had been considerably remodelled, but he still recognized her lines. Now, to his delight, she is exhibited in a park in Port Macquarie as an exemplar of a particular style of boat, with a plaque beneath saying when, where and by whom she was built. The Little Hunter may be a special case in having received such public recognition, but Apollo Bay fishers maintain a personal interest in the fates of all boats they have owned, almost as if they were family members who had left the fold: a supposition reinforced by the ways in which boats are named. The fishing fleet at Apollo Bay has massively contracted over the last twenty years, and there are now 6 only about fifteen boats fishing professionally, but if boats that have been owned in Apollo Bay over the last fifty years are included, they yield a corpus of about 80 names. Of those, two-thirds are named after family members of their original owner and/or builder (usually wife, mother or children). Some are straightforwardly named after an individual family member: thus the Lindy and the Nereda are both named after the daughters of their original owners. More commonly, boat names are compounds or amalgamations of the names of several family members. Thus the Johanna-Cheri bears the name of its owner’s mother, Johanna, and his wife, Cheri, while the Pamlorie amalgamates the names of its owner’s two daughters, Pamela and Loraine, and the Janmar combines the names of its owner’s daughter, Janice, and his wife, Mary. The bias is overwhelmingly towards female kin, although males are sometimes included. Thus the Melandra D is named after its owner’s mother and wife, Melissa and Sandra, but also his son, Derrick. Whether the names derive from males or females, the naming pattern results in an intertwining of a family’s set of personal names and the names of its boats - an intertwining that can be quite confusing to an outsider.7 To revert to the ‘genealogy’ supplied by Mick in which Just mistook (inter alia) the name of Tony’s boat, the Lindy, for the name of his wife; Just encountered Tony at the quay a few weeks later, and armed with his

6

The ‘ethnographic present’ is in this case 2000; in recent years the fleet has continued to contract as a result of Australian fisheries management policies. 7 For an overview and analysis of Australian boat-name patterns, see Dwyer, Just and Minnegal (2003).

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new-found expertise on boat names, hazarded that ‘Lindy’ was the name of both his wife and his boat. ‘Nah,’ Tony said, ‘Lindy’s me sister.’ What Just had not known was that the Lindy had been built by Tony’s father, who named it after his daughter, before it was inherited by his son. A good deal of family history is recorded in this way. As mentioned above, Ron’s first boat was the Little Hunter – not, it might be noted, a family-derived name. Later, when he married and had children, he built the Seanalisa, named after his first-born son, Sean Anthony, and his daughter, Lisa. That boat too was eventually sold, and Ron built the Glenn-Robert, which was given his second son’s two Christian names, Glenn and Robert. Between the Little Hunter and the Seanalisa, Ron had built another boat, the Emily-Gray: ‘And who was she named after?’ Just asked, as he sat on the carpet with Ron and his wife. ‘Oh, you would ask that!’ said Ron, pulling a face. Then he and his wife burst into laughter and told Just that Emily Gray had been Ron’s long-term girlfriend before his marriage. (Whether her sale had been forced, Just dared not inquire.) However, since boats are bought and sold, to know a boat’s name is not necessarily to know anything about her current owner’s family. Some boats, like the Lindy, pass down from father to son. Others do not. Having disappeared from immediate view, the exiled Emily-Gray turned up in Lakes Entrance where Just’s colleagues were working, but with a partial name-change to Dorothy-Gray. Normally, however, boat names are not altered on change of ownership, or at any other stage. Thus the Janmar, mentioned above, was sold many years ago to another Apollo Bay fisher. His boat thus records not his family’s personal names, but those of his neighbour and work-mate. Likewise, having (sorrowfully) sold Glenn-Robert, Ron bought (rather than built) his latest and biggest boat, the Neptune Warrior, from Hobart, Tasmania. ‘Hobart’ was painted out and replaced by ‘Apollo Bay’, but the name Neptune Warrior (which says nothing about Ron’s, or anyone’s, family) remains. If boats can be bought and sold, and if on rare occasions their names can be changed, one might argue against the suggestion (ours or Mrs Henriksen’s) that boats, like people, are family members. But a case can still be made. In fact the resistance to changing a boat’s name is something that Glad Henriksen dwells on in her book:

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Perhaps Mrs Henriksen would simply have preferred a name that didn’t so explicitly personify her rival; but the explanation generally given in Apollo Bay for not renaming boats is that it is ‘bad luck’. Black Witch I was formerly S.S. Cheopis – and sank. Black Witch II, its replacement, was formerly H.M.A.S. Cerebrus – it too sank. On the other hand, as Ron pointed out, the man who bought the Saunalisa from him changed its name (despite its new owner’s aged father begging him not to), took it to South Australia and made a fortune. On the whole, however, the prohibition prevails. But as with many folk prohibitions, ‘bad luck’ sounds more like the consequence of breaking a rule than the explanation for it. Perhaps unwittingly, Mrs Henriksen may supply the truer reason. She did not like Aggie’s name. Neither did she like her own name. But she could no more change (or get Norm to change) Aggie’s name to Ocean Maid than she could get her own name changed to Esmeralda (or whatever she might have fancied). And she could not do it because, as in most European societies, a person and his/her given name are intimately linked. Names denote individuals, and Aggie, we suggest (as does Gladys Henriksen) was in some sense an individual. The transfer of boats may therefore entail (as ‘the transfer of women’ does in some anthropological literature) not the alienation of a piece of property (to be renamed at will) but the linkage, or ‘alliance’, of two existing groups. Lest this seem fanciful, consider the genealogy that Mick supplied in order to emphasize a particular detail. Mick drew what looks like a descent line from Neville F to Karlene-Marie, which then connects Russel G to the rest of the family tree. In fact there is no genealogical connection between Russel G and the rest of the people shown: at least, not in human terms. The only connection between Russel and everyone else shown in the genealogy is through Karlene Marie, and Karlene Marie is a boat, built by Neville F and named after his wife, Karlene Donna Marie, but sold to Russel G some years earlier. We believe that is how Mick thought of it: that Russel G deserved inclusion in the F family tree because, like Norman Henriksen, he had taken on a boat, thus creating a relationship between himself and the F family that looks suspiciously like affinity.

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Metaphor? We suggest, then, that boats in Apollo Bay are personified, feminized and the objects of desire; that they are incorporated into families and take on those families’ names; that they are to an extent ‘inalienable possessions’ and the possible means by which families are linked: in short, they are like people or, more specifically, like women. That suggestion could be further substantiated by a fuller ethnographic account. But how plausible is it? And, importantly, how plausible to whom? We suspect that most people would feel some resistance to the interpretation we have just given because it offends our commonsense understanding of ‘reality’. To be frank, it offends ours, which is why we started our account by suggesting that when Gladys Henriksen wrote of Aggie as a ‘female’ and as her rival she was merely engaging in a conventional literary flourish. However odd it may be, boats are routinely referred to in the feminine by most speakers of English (and not just in Apollo Bay). Glad may simply have been using a standard linguistic quirk as a springboard into full-blown metaphor. In fact Just never had the courage to asked the fishers at Apollo Bay whether they ‘really’ considered boats to be females and family members and links between households, because, as a ‘native’ himself, he was pretty sure that would be the sort of question that gets academics a bad name. But to dismiss the whole issue as merely metaphor, or at least as merely a trope, a façon de parler, is too easy, for several reasons. First, the personification, feminization and family incorporation of boats in Apollo Bay was not just a way of talking, it was also a way of acting. Indeed, our interpretation rests as much on what people did as on what they said. A second objection, closely related to the first, is that metaphor itself is no longer seen as existing only within the domain of literary embellishment or consciously figurative language. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999), Fernandez (1991) and others within and without anthropology have argued, metaphor is increasingly seen not as a special use of language but as fundamentally constitutive of language, and not only of language but also of thought and practice. For the moment, however, we stick to the conventional view of metaphor as trope, and resort to what used to be schoolbook classifications. Similes are simple creatures. They announce themselves. When we say that X is like Y, the comparison is explicit. Aggie, for example, is like a female (and thus by implication not a female). However, similes are routinely overtaken by metaphors: not X is like Y, but X is Y. Nothing announces the metaphor as metaphor, and formally the statement ‘Aggie is a female’ is identical with the statement ‘Aggie is a boat’. Yet we all fancy

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we know a metaphor when we hear one, or at least we fancy we recognize a metaphor as linguistic trope. And we fancy we know a metaphor when we hear one for one simple, but peculiarly opaque, reason: because the contents of the statement ‘Aggie is a female’ do not correspond with our commonsense intuitions about what reality is ‘really like’. We automatically assume we share such intuitions with our co-conversants (hence Just’s reluctance to ask the Apollo Bay fishers bluntly whether boats were women). We all know that Aggie is a boat, and we all know that boats are not women, ergo ‘Aggie is a female’ must be metaphorical, and to suggest otherwise is to misconstrue the speaker’s intentions. However, we are not afforded the same luxury of insight in cases such as the Nuer ‘twins are birds’, because we do not know whether the Nuer commonsense understanding of what reality is ‘really like’ corresponds with our own. Some anthropologists have a strong bias towards believing that we do not know, since discovering the ‘world views’ of others is what much of anthropology has been about. That bias is reinforced, if not engendered, precisely by our encounters with such radically unfamiliar statements as ‘twins are birds’. Under such circumstances telling a metaphorical statement from a literal statement becomes problematic, to say the least, because we cannot fall back on the easy assumption that, since twins are not birds, the assertion that they are must therefore be metaphorical. At this juncture there seem to be three possible paths, of which recourse to a conventional understanding of metaphor is one. The first is to adopt an uncompromisingly ‘no-nonsense’ point of view: twins are twins and birds are birds and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded. Such a view ex hypothesi privileges our own understanding of reality as the only correct understanding of reality, and thereby consigns the Nuer to some sort of Levi-Bruhlian confusion, a move which Evans-Pritchard would not tolerate and even Gellner would not accept. As Evans-Pritchard emphasizes, the Nuer have no difficulty in telling twins from birds and certainly do not believe that twins have beaks and feathers (1956: 131). The second, in many respects equally no-nonsense, point of view is again to privilege our own understanding of reality as the only valid one, but this time to decide that it is shared by the Nuer. It follows that they do not think that twins are birds, they merely say that birds are twins. This entails the conventional view of metaphor whereby the Nuer are talking in the same way as I have tentatively suggested Gladys Henriksen and the Apollo Bay fishers might be. This is a more attractive proposition, if only because it does not elevate one people’s understanding of the world above another’s, and it was pursued by Keesing in his critique of ‘interpretative anthropology’ (1987; 1989) in which he accused his colleagues in the

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Pacific of ‘exoticizing’ other cultures by conflating metaphorical statements with literal statements because their grasp of native languages was insufficient tell the difference: to the considerable chagrin of some of those colleagues (1989). But that option, too, has its difficulties. First, if Evans-Pritchard’s account is to be believed, the Nuer gave little indication that they were talking figuratively. ‘It seems odd, if not absurd, to a European when he is told that a twin is a bird as though it were an obvious fact, for Nuer are not saying that a twin is like a bird but that he is a bird’ (1956: 131, our emphasis). Secondly, the twins/birds equation was not purely verbal; in certain contexts twins were treated differently because they were birds. All the indications are that, from a Nuer perspective, ‘twins are birds’ was something more than a mere figure of speech. The equation was conceptual, not verbal, and did indeed relate to the Nuer understanding of the nature of reality. To that extent, at least, it was literal. The third path (which Evans-Pritchard follows) is to reconstruct and ‘translate’ the Nuer understanding of reality in which the statement ‘birds are twins’ makes sense, a reality that includes a transcendent Spirit or God (kwoth) whose location is ‘above’ and conceived of chiefly as in the sky. Of course, this is the sort of contextualization Gellner discusses. At all events, Evans-Pritchard claims that for the Nuer twins are birds (and birds are twins) not because of some metaphorical connection between twins and birds, but because of the triadic relationship between twins, birds and God that exists within their system of religious thought. The connection is ontological rather than metaphorical. Both are ‘people of the above’ and ‘children of god’: birds by virtue of their being in the air, and twins by virtue of the manner of their conception and birth (1956: 131; cf. Turner 1991:146). That twins are birds thus ‘appears quite sensible, and even true, to one who presents the idea to himself in the Nuer language and within their system of religious thought’ (1956: 131). However, our purpose in mentioning ‘twins are birds’ is not to add to either Evans-Pritchard’s account or subsequent discussions of it (Gellner 1973; Asad 1986; Turner 1991). Rather, it is to provide a foil for the interpretation of our piece of ‘ethnography at home’, because the sort of cultural translation that Evans-Pritchard employs (like many other anthropologists of the period) is remarkably consistent with current understandings of metaphor, not as verbal trope, but as an intrinsic feature of thought and language & Johnson1980: 6). On the face of it, the statement ‘Aggie is a female’ and the ways in which boats are talked about and treated in Apollo Bay are no less ‘absurd’ than the statement ‘twins are birds’ and the ways in which twins are talked about and treated among the Nuer. The difference (if there is a difference) lies in the processes by

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which ‘we’ go about ‘making sense’ of them on our far-from-level playing field. In the Nuer case a form of cultural translation is required before we can appreciate the Nuer statement as ‘quite sensible’; in the Apollo Bay case, no such contextualization and translation seem required because the anthropomorphization and feminization of boats, although perhaps extreme in Apollo Bay, is readily recognizable to most native speakers of English. It is, precisely, ‘conventional’, so we are not inclined to puzzle about how and why boats and women become assimilated. We accept it. However – and we think this is a crucial difference – we do not accept it at face value, or at least not quite, and not routinely. We admit that of course boats are not ‘really’ women. We fall back on our conventional understanding of metaphor as merely a form of figurative speech (and action) – on precisely what Evans-Pritchard disallows in the Nuer case. But we question how legitimate it is so blithely to dismiss what (to paraphrase Evans-Pritchard) would seem ‘odd, if not absurd, to a Nuer when he is told that a boat is a woman as though it were an obvious fact, for the English-speakers are not saying that a boat is like a woman but that she is a woman’. In the Nuer case, twins are birds, even though the Nuer can tell the difference between them; in our case, boats are not women, precisely because we can tell the difference between them. It seems that what is at issue in this asymmetry is not language or perception, but the context of belief within which such statements are made. The Nuer are credited with an overarching belief system in whose terms twins are birds, whereas we would deny holding any belief system in whose terms boats are women. But how true is that? Consider the following: in 2002 Lloyd’s List, Britain’s oldest newspaper which has published shipping news since 1734, took: the simple yet significant decision to change our style from the start of next month and start referring to ships as neuter rather than female. It brings this paper into line with most other reputable international business titles (Lloyd’s List, 20 March 2002).

However, as The Times subsequently reported: Naval and merchant seafarers were united in their objections. The Ministry of Defence said: ‘Lloyd’s List can do what it wants. The Royal Navy will continue to call ships “she” as we have always done. It is historic and traditional.’ Britain’s two major fleet owners, P&O and Cunard Line, were similarly adamant that their vessels would remain thoroughly female. ‘Ships have personalities and souls; we call them “she” instinctively,’ a

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spokesperson for Cunard Line said (The Times, 21 March 2002, our emphases).

Where does this lead us? The editors of Lloyd’s List are not a problem. They do not think ships are female: hence their ‘simple’ but ‘significant’ decision to abandon a metaphor that for them had become outmodishly quaint. The Royal Navy is mildly problematic. It will continue to refer to ships as ‘she’, but out of respect for history and tradition. It is Cunard Line’s spokesperson who creates the stumbling block: ‘Ships have personalities and souls; we call them “she” instinctively’. Is this spokesperson being figurative? It does not appear so, because the entire point of his or her comment is to defend the reality of something that other people are, wrongly, taking as a mere figure of speech. So is he or she simply lying, claiming, perhaps humorously, to believe something incredible because ‘really’ ships cannot have personalities or souls and cannot be female? If so, we might at least be struck by the sheer perversity of people’s endorsement of what they do not believe, and we have little doubt that if similar statements were made by informants from one of anthropology’s more traditional areas of operation, then, due note being taken of disagreement and contestation, we would nevertheless be very unlikely to say they were lying or just kidding. 8 In any case, anthropologists have usually been wary about claiming access to the insides of other people’s heads. As Geertz argued long ago, the claim to be studying a culture is a claim about studying something constituted in the public domain, not in individuals’ interior states, and what we have to go on as anthropologists is simply what is out there (Geertz 1973: 12). In the cases of Apollo Bay and the Cunard Line, this does include people explicitly (if occasionally) talking about boats as persons, females and family members. However, it also includes all sorts of other bits and pieces of behaviour and speech: displays of emotion, the way people refer to something, what they spend their time looking at, what they include in a family photograph album, how they draw a diagram, how they name a thing, and what they are reluctant to rename. All that seems to us to constitute a ‘belief system’, albeit one that could under appropriate (or inappropriate) circumstances be denied (in the presence, let us say, of an overly enthusiastic anthropologist). For even a single individual’s beliefs do not constitute a singular system, nor need they be mutually consistent. Frankly, they are not very ‘systematic’, and 8

In fact there is a considerable anthropological literature on the animate or spiritual qualities of boats (and houses) in, for example, Indonesia. See Southon (1995: 93-127) and Barraud (1985).

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we do entertain a host of beliefs that are contradictory. We do not expect boats to get pregnant even if in some circumstances we treat them as female, just as the Nuer do not expect twins to fly. However, if the statement ‘twins are birds’ is not metaphorical but instead constitutes a perfectly sensible statement in terms of Nuer beliefs, then Cunard Lines’ statement that ships have personalities and souls, and Gladys Henriksen’s jealousy of Aggie, are equally ‘non-metaphorical’ and sensible in terms of the feelings, sentiments and understandings of the world that they express and the actions which they accompany. On the other hand, if all this is metaphor, then it is not metaphor in the sense of a decorative literary trope but, as Lakoff and Johnson argue, it is ‘metaphor we live by’, thoroughly dispersed throughout social life. To discount it in favour of some ruthless stock-take of our ‘true beliefs’ (as opposed to the beliefs we do not really hold, or only occasionally believe) would confront us with serious problems: by what criteria could such a stock-take be effected? If it could be effected, would we not thereby be stripping away a large part of that body of communicative significances that are generally accepted to constitute culture and on whose existence those niceties of interaction, and ambivalences and ambiguities of exchange of which Rapport speaks, depend? The result might appeal to an anthropological avatar of Freddy Ayer (1971) but it would also rule out a large part of social life. So why do we feel the need to include the disclaimer that most people (by which we mean most of ‘us’) would feel resistant to the sort of interpretation we have given of Apollo Bay and boats, and our admission that it also offends our commonsense understanding of the world? In fact the problem is not a conflation of the metaphorical and the literal, for the two can never be disentwined. The problem lies in the interpretative re-assembly of those chance remarks, displays of emotion, preferences and avoidances, and bits and pieces of behaviour and speech (including the occasional seemingly categorical statement such as ‘Aggie is a female’) into a coherent whole that forges connections (connections, say, between the near impossibility of changing a personal name, a strong resistance to changing the name of a boat, a tendency to talk about boats as if they were people, and the intertwining of the names of people and boats) that are seldom explicitly made by social actors themselves. As Bourdieu has consistently argued, anthropology’s mistake (we prefer to say its dilemma) is that it exposes what is in practice embedded, it assembles what is in practice dispersed, it systematizes what is in practice disconnected and then it assumes that the resultant coherent ensemble represents actors’

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understandings of the world.9 But constructed in this fashion, ethnographic accounts are always unlikely to win the full endorsement of those whose socio-cultural worlds they purport to describe, not because they are contrary to those social actors’ ‘common sense’ (they actually incorporate and account for people’s common sense) but because their systematized closure does not replicate the way people experience the world, and because they artificially commit people to a singular and consistent belief system certain entailments of which they would then have to reject (twins cannot fly; boats cannot get pregnant). As Bloch commented: ‘A problem which lurks uneasily in the prefaces of most anthropological monographs and worries, or should worry, all fieldworking anthropologists is that the way anthropologists conceptualize the societies they have studied in their ethnographic accounts almost always seems alien, bizarre, or impossibly complicated to the people of those societies’ (Bloch, 1998: 22). When and where anthropology was not ‘at home’, this was perhaps of little consequence: not necessarily because of an imbalance of power and authority between those who wrote and those who were written about, but because it was simply impossible simultaneously to understand, for example, witchcraft as Evans-Pritchard wrote about it and witchcraft as the Azande experienced it. For Evans-Pritchard’s readers, no disjuncture was apparent, for his was the only account (or rather, the only type of account) that could ever ‘make sense’. The choice of understanding it as an Azande was not on cognitive offer. Despite all the flirtations in the 1980s with co-authored and poly-vocalic texts, thus it has ever been. With anthropology at home, by contrast, we might seem to have a cognitive (and a corresponding representational) choice, but this also involves a dilemma. We can present, as above, an account that (more or less successfully) attempts to lay bare certain connections, structures and assumptions entailed in everyday practice and discourse, but we do so at the price of suspending our very familiarity with that practice and discourse and, by an uncommon act of will, rendering them strange. We arrive, paradoxically, for the first time at a tertium quid, but a very odd sort of tertium quid: not a culture-free ‘objective’ representation, but a representation that fails fully to coincide with either our or the natives’ understanding of the world, since we are attempting to ‘translate’ ourselves. Alternatively, we could seize on all the advantages which Rapport discusses, and engage with our own socio-cultural world on its own terms: terms which we already know by heart. However, our success 9

These admonitions run through the corpus of Bourdieu’s work, but for a reasonably concise presentation of them see Chapter 5 of The Logic of Practice (1992).

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at this point, our ability to appreciate those ‘niceties of interaction and ambivalences and ambiguities of exchange’, now relies on our own (and our audience’s) refusal to suspend our encompassment by the cultural idioms on whose efficacy our social communication depends, and instead to exploit them. This is what novelists have always done. But whether novelists are satisfactory anthropologists (and, to be fair, whether anthropologists are capable of writing novels) is debatable. Our own choice as anthropologists, and in the interests of a level playing field, would be for the difficult, clumsy (and certainly non-literary) task of selfinduced alienation: the sort of thing that, unfortunately, does sometimes give academics a bad name.

CHAPTER FIVE EXCURSUS TWO: ETHNOGRAPHY AS FICTION, OR THE LIES WE TELL ONE ANOTHER

Social anthropology is based on fieldwork. Fieldwork is more than a method of uncovering sociological ‘facts’ by means of participant observation. It is the initiation ritual that turns a student into a ‘real’ social anthropologist and it is part of the way in which we distinguish ourselves from our colleagues the sociologists, who tend to work on a larger scale. Strangely, the stereotype of fieldwork remains that of the colonial era, although much fieldwork now takes place at home, down the road, in communities familiar to most readers of anthropological journals or monographs. The stereotype is of participant observation by a single foreigner in a small remote location, isolated from their home state, preferably in an area where little such research has taken place, working in a language which has scarcely been documented. Stereotypically, every doctoral student aims to replicate the experiences of Malinowski and his pupils. However, in reality we have now learnt to distrust some of their assumptions. We know that only at our peril can we ignore history and the wider perspectives of nation, empire and the forces of world markets. Whether in North London or North Borneo many of the dilemmas for the fieldworker are the same. There are issues of confidentiality, trust and the problems of interpretation: of what they say (as noted in the preceding chapter). Other problems are posed by the long-term relationships engendered over an extended period of fieldwork. Some critics, influenced by post-modernist literary theory, have begun to examine the papers and monographs written by social anthropologists. We produce texts which must seem authoritative in order to persuade. Anthropology can be criticized and deconstructed as an exercise in the production of a particular genre of texts. (The more pressure from funding agencies to maintain a high rate of publications, the greater the element of truth in this suggestion.) Such an approach tends to portray the importance

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of fieldwork as a mythic element manipulated so as to establish authority for what one wants to say: ‘I was there, I saw it, therefore I must be correct’. The practice of fieldwork is much more complex than this. Zeitlyn is an old-fashioned anthropologist. He has been working in a relatively remote village in rural Cameroon since starting his doctoral research in 1985. He returns as frequently as he can, and he first drafted this section when he was there in 1992. When doing fieldwork in Somié Zeitlyn drinks with people he has known on and off for 27 years. They sit, drink and chat. He asks them about their village, they ask him about his. He has found himself describing Guy Fawkes night as a village celebration during which people dance round a fire and shoot guns in the air (discussed below in the context of cultural translation). Often he has to explain why he wears an earring. It is hard to know what the correct explanation should be. He could tell the story of a birthday party which left him hungover in Birmingham sharing a pair of ear piercings with his ‘wife’. (Wife or ‘wife’? They weren’t married then and they are now. But they were already living together at that point. Is the difference important, or is it irrelevant not only to this story but in general to the villagers in Cameroon?) The shop offered a pair for £5: Zeitlyn had one, she had the other. The hangover is important because previously he had wanted to do it but was scared, to the point of turning away at the door. In Cameroon people repeatedly notice the earring and say ‘Wò né ma veh wa?’ in Mambila, or ‘Vous êtes une femme?’ in francophone cities. Zeitlyn now responds by saying that in his country men pierce one ear, women two. For a long time Zeitlyn had to repeat this whenever he travelled in Cameroon and from time to time in the village where he works. Such is the force of global fashion that the question is now posed less often. There are even young men from the village with pierced ears (whom Zeitlyn has gleefully asked ‘Wò né ma vΩ̗ eh wa?’). Zeitlyn is unhappy about his explanation as an account. It leaves out all the associations with sailors, Gypsies and the gay community, with punk and dissident youth. To pierce or not to pierce? There is a vast ethnography of European body adornment which would form the context for a good answer. In its absence Zeitlyn simplifies to the point of lying. He invents ‘traditions’ which do not, we believe, exist. When Zeitlyn is asked about his earring in Somié he is unsure whether the questioner wants to know his personal biography or the general way of things where he comes from. The questions he asks often have a similar ambiguity. His inability to answer their questions is surely equalled by their inability to answer his. The people he talks to invent or simplify

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themselves for the inquisitive stranger. If he succeeds in overcoming such misleading simplifications it is more through persistence and endurance than through any formal methodology. He has learnt through both repeated questioning and seeing the same events repeated several times. Usually there are far more important things at stake than confusing or misleading the anthropologist. Zeitlyn has understood what he does understand by letting people get on with their lives as much as by direct questioning. Zeitlyn sits drinking beer and chatting. When people are talking, honesty is only one of many factors which affect what they say. People are polite; or they aggrandize their actions and belittle those of their rivals, competing for approbation; at one literalistic level everyone is telling lies. Zeitlyn is privileged: he can find out their lies more easily than they can unpack his. When this section was first drafted (1992) only one person from Somié had had a university training outside Africa: he studied in America and then worked in the regional capital. He could identify some of Zeitlyn’s lies immediately. Theirs, everyone in the village can detect, including Zeitlyn. A story is constructed which includes inconsistencies and repairs where none are needed. Or, conversely, it is all too fluent. Explanations are elaborated too freely, too completely. Zeitlyn finds this attractive and helpful: possible worlds are as interesting as the actual one. What Mambila people think of as a conceivable way of organizing their life illuminates the way they do organize it. Zeitlyn’s lies are simplifications or translations which distort their subject to the point of ridicule.1 They tell lies to entertain and to test Zeitlyn. One can tell the difference: sometimes Zeitlyn asks the same question five times in one day. Conspiracy theories may be attractive but most of Zeitlyn’s interests remain what they have always been: trivial and unimportant to the everyday concerns of the people he works with. It is conceivable that people conspire to deceive or to hide facts, such as murder or specialist ritual knowledge. However, the amount of organization required for consistent stories to be told about growing beards makes this extremely unlikely. One morning Zeitlyn was told off by an elder for having a beard because he was then a young man. Lebon said ‘when you hold a grandchild in your arms, only then may you grow a beard. Even then you must give a chicken to an elder sibling.’ 1

Ridicule can work both ways: Nigel Barley’s fiction of ethnography includes an account of the Dowayos’ absolute disbelief of his claim that trains ran underground in London.

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Later that day during a beer drink he ‘bearded’ Zeitlyn again. Only then could Zeitlyn tell from other people’s reactions that this was a tease. (Unsuspecting, he had solemnly inscribed Lebon’s injunction in his field notebook: how unedited field notes may mislead!) Not only were the reactions of the other drinkers instructive, but among them was someone of about his age who also had a beard and knew nothing of any restrictions. Post-modernist criticism has focused on the construction of ethnographic texts. It has concentrated on the fictions of writing rather than of talking. We suspect that like many anglophones our feet remain fixed in the dust and we are sceptical about the tenor of the criticisms. The jiggers that eat Zeitlyn’s toes are sufficient to remind him of the crude level of his interests. When he writes does he construct a fable, an anthropological myth of Mambila as misleading as any fiction? Not so, the jiggers tell him. From Habermas through Thompson (1984) we have gained the picture of a conversation between equals in which relations of power, authority and social distance do not obtrude. While no actual conversation may ever be like this, the ideal serves as a yardstick enabling us to assess actual conversations. We view ethnographies in the same light. Ethnographies stand as reports of conversations and reflections upon them. The reflections may be provoked by observations and actions: having said this they did that, and they justified the discrepancy by arguing as follows… The conversations occur between anthropologists and those with whom they work: both the people in the field (the ‘subjects’) and the people in the seminar rooms or libraries (the ‘colleagues’).2 The ideal of conversation between equals may also orientate the way we both read and write ethnographies. The arguments in the field and in the seminar need to be grounded, because they only make sense if we have something to argue about, which takes us back to our ineluctable reliance on some form of realism about a shared intersubjective world.

2

In practice the two groups may coincide.

CHAPTER SIX IN DEFENCE OF RULES: PIERRE BOURDIEU EN GRÈCE

Background: Bourdieu and rules in theory If anything could be said to characterize the trajectory of mainstream anthropology over the last thirty years, then perhaps it has been a general dissuasion from two closely related but non-identical ideas once considered foundational, namely: (1) that human behaviour (or at least human social behaviour) is rule-governed, and (2) that human behaviour (or at least human social behaviour) can be described in terms of rules. The difference between the two is important, although they are easily conflated. The first relates to the genesis of social reality; the second to its representation. Only if the first were true would it be legitimate to treat the second as a mere entailment. In fact it is possible to argue for the validity (or better, the usefulness) of the second quite independently of the truth of the first, for much depends on what one means by a ‘rule’. As Sidnell (2003) (following Wittgenstein 1953: para. 82) reminds us, both rules themselves and the uses we make of them are diverse: We use the notion of a rule to talk about law (as, for example, in ‘a ruling’, ‘the rule of law’), games (‘the rules of tennis’), statistical regularities (‘as a rule . . .’), social arrangements (‘people under the rule of a king’), psychology and human behaviour (he is ruled by his passions’), and language (‘rules of grammar’, ‘rules of pronunciation’) (Sidnell 2003: 430).

‘Rules’ can be taken either as constitutive of the phenomena we are studying, or merely as precepts arrived at in the process of describing those phenomena. But whichever is the case, it is a long time since anthropologists routinely talked, as Levi-Strauss (1969) and Needham (1962) did, of rules that determined social behaviour, and a long time since we talked with any confidence, as many more people did, of social rules that comprehensively summarized our observations of human behaviour.

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As Just has suggested elsewhere (2004), parallel with this rejection of rules, and perhaps integral to it, has been a shift away from considering the collective (whether designated as ‘social structure’ or as ‘culture’) to be the proper object of anthropological enquiry, in favour of a foregrounding the individual, now conceived of (and regularly described as) an ‘agent’ actively engaged in ‘contesting’, ‘disputing’, ‘negotiating’, if not indeed ‘creating’, the social or cultural rules to which he or she is subject only insofar as such rules might be incorporated into the strategic pursuit of his or her own aims. As with most general shifts, the move away from the specification of social rules and the concomitant prioritization of the individual have been (as we used to say) ‘over-determined’. In fact a tension in explanatory paradigms between the role of the collective and the role of the individual, between (as we would now say) ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, was there from the start, foreshadowed by Durkheim (1964 [1895]), worried about by Firth (1964 [1954]) and elaborated by Barth (1966), to mention only a few. By the mid-1980s, however, new considerations, partly political, partly epistemological, and grouped under the accommodating banner of ‘post-modernism’, swung the balance: the attempt to account for alien forms of life in terms of all-encompassing rules (the objectification of the Other) was seen as indicative of an inequality of discursive power between observer and observed, while the belated (or simply naive) realization that ethnographic reportage (writing) was not the same thing as the existential immediacy of reality itself, meant that ‘truth’ resided only in individual experience, all else being imposed narrative (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988). In short, by the late 1980s rules were out and individuals were in. This shift was, as we have suggested, over-determined, but Pierre Bourdieu, whose writings gained prominence in the anglophone world during the late 1970s and early 1980s, whose legacy is still very much with us, and who provided us with what was probably the most reasoned available anthropological critique of ‘objectivism’, was a major influence. He, more than anyone else, popularized within anthropology the language of ‘strategies’ and ‘agency’, and poured scorn on the notion of rules. However, Bourdieu never indulged in the sort of tell-it-like-it-is ‘subjectivism’ apologized for by one strand of 1980s Anglo-American post-modernism. He was decisively not a post-modernist, even if he did set considerable store by the political (or moral) implications of his own break with classical objectivism. 1 The lesson he recites is not a 1

See for example Bourdieu’s Huxley Memorial Lecture, ‘Participant Objectification’, delivered not long before his death, in which he refers to ‘certain narcissistic confessions of the apostles of postmodern reflexivity’ (2003: 287). By

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denunciation of objectivism per se. It is, rather, a warning (albeit a prolonged and vociferous one) about ‘the objective limits of objectivism’ (1977: 1-71). In short, he preaches the reasonable proposition that it would be a mistake to think that the forms in which anthropology has represented and accounted for cultural practices (and Levi-Straussian structuralism was what he mostly had in mind) actually reduplicate the processes by which those practices are generated. It is important to note, then, that Bourdieu’s attack is directed, not against the idea that human behaviour could be described in terms of rules (at least if by ‘rules’ we mean e.g. statements about statistical regularities etc.) but rather against the idea that human behaviour is itself rulegoverned (i.e. that it is actually generated by rules). His own ethnographic practice relies heavily and unapologetically on the tools of objectivism (statistics, social surveys, questionnaires, structuralist diagrams) in order to reveal regularities of social behaviour. In this respect his concern (although it is an over-riding concern) is only to ensure that we are not persuaded to assume the possibility of explaining social behaviour in terms of rules because of the existence of those regularities - or, equally perniciously, to slide unthinkingly from rule-description to ruleexplanation. Bourdieu’s problem (much like that of Firth and of Barth) is therefore to discover something that accounts for the regularities of human social behaviour without resorting to the idea that it is actually rulegoverned (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 121-2; cf. Farnell 2000: 401-2) and which could bridge the gap between subjectivism and objectivism (Jenkins 1992: 66). For Bourdieu, that something is of course habitus, a notion he borrows from Hegel, Husserl, Weber and Durkheim (Bourdieu 1990a: 12) but perhaps most relevantly from Mauss (1979 [1935]; see Farnell 2000: 399401) although the philosophical usage of the term to refer to a form of knowledge practically acquired through habituation goes back to Aristotle, 2 whose mediaeval translators employed the Latin habitus to

contrast, Bourdieu’s version of reflexivity and his notion of ‘participant objectification’ involves applying to the knowing subject ‘the most brutally objectivist tools that anthropology and sociology provide’ in order to include ‘the point of view of the objectivizer and the interests he may have in objectification [...] [and] the historical unconscious that he inevitably engages in his work’ (2003: 282-3). It is through this rigorous, and in our opinion laudable, undertaking that Bourdieu claims we can appreciate, paradoxically, our common humanity. 2 Nichomachean Ethics 1179b-31.

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render the Greek term hexis (Gerrans 2005: 55-6).3 However, Bourdieu’s own elaboration of the habitus is suspect. Relevant here are the twin issues first raised by Acciaioli (1981)4 and now definitively settled by Gerrans (2005), both of whom we follow closely: namely, the theoretical validity of Bourdieu’s version of the habitus as a solution to the problems it is designed to address, and equally importantly, its practical usefulness for anthropology (and the social sciences) in lieu of a more conventional language of rules. We suggest that, despite Bourdieu’s commitment to an anthropology of ‘practice’, his formulation of habitus actually introduces an entity that cannot in realist terms be substantiated (although we remain open to the possibility that other abstract entities may be sustainable in realist terms).

Rules and inheritance in Meganisi and Béarn The rules governing the devolution of property in Spartokhori, one of three villages on the tiny Ionian Greek island of Meganisi, followed a pattern common to much of rural Greece.5 Sons inherited their natal family’s land and house (significantly referred to as the patriko spiti, the ‘paternal house’) by equal division on the death of their father or earlier if he was willing effectively to retire. Daughters received their share of family wealth in the form of dowry, usually monetary, at the time of marriage. The means of production of an erstwhile peasant community (houses and land) were thus reserved for those on whom, ideologically, the reproduction and continuity of the community depended: men. However, if a family had daughters but no sons, then the daughters became klironomi (‘heiresses’) and inherited the family’s land and house by equal division (Just 2000: 191). In broad outline, this system of inheritance is common throughout much of Europe, and in an early article (1976 [1972]) Bourdieu discusses 3

Bourdieu’s own writings make some distinction between habitus and hexis, the latter referring to bodily comportment (1977: 87). Since the one term is the translation of the other, one wonders whether this is the normalien’s little joke. 4 Acciaioli’s early paper remains one of the most perceptive critiques of Bourdieu’s work, but we believe that, since it was published in an Australian journal, it has not received the recognition it deserves. We also draw substantially on critiques of Bourdieu by Jenkins (1992) and Farnell (2000). Just’s contribution here is merely to synthesize parts of their respective arguments in relation to a particular ethnographic context. 5 For a review of the variety of forms of inheritance and dowry in Greece, see Loizos and Papataxiarchis (1991), Couroucli (1987) and Papataxiarchis (1998).

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the case of his natal region of Béarn in the French Pyrenees. The inheritance system in Béarn was different in one significant and farreaching respect: inheritance was not by equal division between sons, but went to a single heir, from which followed the possibility, and indeed the ambition, of consolidating and augmenting over the generations an undivided patrimony that might become the basis (largely through strategic marriages) of a ‘great family’. Nevertheless, as in Spartokhori, occasions arose when the (single) heir turned out to be female. According to Bourdieu, French ethnologists had therefore formulated a rule in terms of ‘“the integral right of the eldest”, likely to favour an eldest daughter as well as an eldest son’ (1976: 119). Bourdieu vehemently disputes this account on ethnographic grounds. Inheritance by a daughter, he states: can only be produced by a single, extraordinary circumstance, namely, the absence of any male descendant. For we know that the status of heir does not fall to the first-born child, but to the first-born son, even if he is last in the order of birth (1976: 119).

Well and good. The French ethnological tradition had got it wrong, and a daughter inherited land only if she had no brothers. Otherwise she simply received dowry. Monogeniture notwithstanding, the rule in Béarn now seems to accord with the rule in Spartokhori. But Bourdieu is not content with pointing out that the French ethnological tradition had misconstrued the rule by stating that it was the eldest child rather than the eldest son who inherited. He seizes the opportunity to launch a frontal attack on the very notion of rules. The strategies by which the peasants of Béarn [...] tended to ensure the reproduction of their lineage and their rights to the means of production appear with marked statistical regularity [note here Bourdieu’s objectivism]. But one must be very careful not to see this regularity as the result of obedience to fixed rules. Indeed, we must break away from the legalistic kind of thinking which, to this day, haunts the entire anthropological tradition and tends to treat every practice as an act of execution (1976: 117, original emphases).

What Bourdieu substitutes for rules is the habitus, elaborated in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977 [1972]), in The Logic of Practice (1990b [1980]), and in Distinction (1984 [1979]), but here described as ‘a system of schemes structuring every decision without ever becoming completely and systematically explicit’ (1976: 119) and which results in ‘a whole system of predispositions’ that constitute ‘the generating and unifying principles of practices’. What looks like obedience to a rule is in fact:

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For the moment let Bourdieu’s objections to rules stand, for we admit that Just’s own reasons for using a language of rules with respect to Spartokhori were quite conventional. First, Just was told by all Spartokhoriots with whom he discussed the matter that this arrangement, this sistima, ‘system,’ was kanoniko, ‘canonical’, i.e. it was ‘the rule’ - in, of course, a quite prescriptive sense. Secondly, it also seemed to account for the overwhelming bulk of inheritances that Just was able to trace (‘as a rule’ in a statistical sense). However, there were exceptions. In some cases women inherited a house or a division of a house despite having brothers. This was because they had married men who owned no property (in one case, an immigrant labourer from another island) 6 and so their fathers and/or brothers had provided them with a division of the paternal house usually reserved for sons to avoid the daughters being left entirely without. Alternatively, their brother or brothers had married an heiress and, having acquired a house through her, renounced their claims to their patriko spiti in favour of their sister or sisters. Moreover, the very reason that people (usually elderly men) assured Just that equal division of house and land between sons to the exclusion of daughters was ‘the rule’ was because it did not coincide with the law: the Greek Civil Code provided (prima facie) for the equal division of property between all children, regardless of sex. The matter was being discussed because it was contentious: the ownership of a number of houses was in dispute because daughters (or, in the androcentric view of the Spartokhoriots, ‘foreign’, i.e. non-Spartokhoriot, sons-in-law) were laying claim to them. The rule was therefore broken. However, it seemed to be broken by strategies in accordance with what Just is happy to call a ‘strongly interiorized principle’: namely, ensuring that all one’s children (whether male or female) had a roof over their head. Equally, when challenged, the rule was asserted in defence of what could be seen as another ‘strongly interiorized principle’ (which the rule itself enshrined): namely, the superior rights of men over women. This is much the way that Bourdieu would construe the situation: the ‘rule’ of inheritance in Spartokhori, like 6

The rule of equal inheritance gave young men with many brothers a strong incentive to seek their fortune through emigration and/or strategic marriage to an heiress. It is notable that in the case of one family of five brotherless daughters, each married an immigrant.

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the ‘rule’ of inheritance in Béarn, is a legalistic fiction, a scholarly reconstruction that merely accounts for typical solutions which in practice are produced ‘in a manner more subconscious than conscious’ by strategies which promote the interiorized principles of a particular tradition. Of course, the fact that the Spartokhoriots explicitly described the rule to Just as a ‘rule’, that they themselves in this instance spoke the language of rules, is no impediment for Bourdieu (1977: 16-22). People, just like anthropologists, and especially in the company of anthropologists (1977: 18) are capable of self-consciously reflecting on their own practice and of formulating rules that account for it post factum. However, such formulations are not only post factum: they are also always partial and incomplete (see Chapter 2 above) and, since they are generally prescriptive, they represent the vested interests of those who have the power and authority (somewhat dubiously, the old men, in Just’s case) to articulate them and thereby to put themselves in the right. Such indigenous recourse to rules is thus itself merely a ‘second-order’ strategy (1977: 22). If an indigenous language of rules is unproblematic for Bourdieu’s account, other things perhaps are not. In the same article on Béarn in which he rails against an ethnological tradition that ‘speaks the language of the rule rather than the language of the strategy’ (1976: 117-18, n.1, original emphases) he goes on to employ an intriguing metaphor: Let us imagine that [...] the marriage of every one of its children represented the equivalent of a round in a card game for a family. In this way we can see that the value of this round (measured according to the criteria of the system) depended on the quality of the game in its double sense, that is, on the nature of the hand the family had been dealt, whose strength was defined by the rules of the game, and on the greater or lesser degree of skill with which this hand was played (1976: 122, our emphasis).

One could plead that this reference to rules occurs in an argument merely by analogy, and should therefore not be taken too literally, although as Jenkins notes, ‘one of the things that all games have is rules’ (1992: 71). Alternatively, it could be suggested that what Bourdieu refers to as ‘the rules of the game’ is actually the habitus itself: ‘the whole system of predispositions inculcated by the material circumstance of life and family upbringing’ (1976: 118). Either way, rules do seem to have sneaked back in, and even if this passage is only a momentary slip, whenever it comes to accounting for specific ethnographic cases, Bourdieu’s habitus does take on remarkably rule-like qualities. As Acciaioli notes, Bourdieu’s account of the Kabyle:

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Much the same can be said of Bourdieu’s treatment of inheritance and marriage in Béarn: [O]nly the absolute necessity of keeping the patrimony in the lineage can bring about the desperate solution of entrusting a woman with the task of transmitting the patrimony, which is the very basis for the continuity of the lineage (1976: 119, original emphasis).

Thus although the villagers of Béarn do not have rules in accordance with which they act, it seems they do have absolute necessities in accordance with which they act. Descriptively, at least, there seems little difference between a statement about the ‘necessity’ of a form of social conduct and one about a ‘rule’ of social conduct. One might also question what the difference is between people acting in accordance with an ‘ideal rule’, which Bourdieu rejects, and their acting in accordance with a ‘strongly interiorized principle’ (for example, ‘the primacy of men over women, or the primacy of the eldest over younger siblings’ (1976: 128)) which Bourdieu endorses. For ‘rules’, should we simply read ‘principles’ (cf. Farnell 2000: 402)? Perhaps not quite, and that is a question to which we return, but for the moment we revert to Spartokhori and a situation that might appear more obviously conducive to Bourdieuian analysis if only because it involves an explicit denial by villagers of any rule (where the anthropologist might be sorely tempted to provide one). Here Just must reiterate (in the manner of Bourdieu himself) something that first troubled him over thirty years ago (Just 1980).

Fathers and sons When Just first arrived in Spartokhori he set about collecting genealogies, or at least he set about finding out who was related to whom and how. The task was not as easy as he had been educated to assume. First, politeness imposes in a Greek village roughly the same constraints on inquisitiveness as it does in most societies. One cannot expect to sit down with people and immediately demand to know the number of their siblings, the age of their spouse, the extent of their cousinhood. Secondly, although Just says ‘roughly’ the same constraints, in fact they are greater in rural Greece,

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where villagers collect information all the time, but seldom innocently. Consequently, as soon as enquiries touch on personal details (however innocuous) evasion is an automatic reflex.7 Finally, although people were generally less than enthralled at the prospect of recounting all their numerous cousins, nephews and nieces, and although they were less than enthusiastic about revealing details concerning their immediate family, nonetheless in some cases, and with reference to some categories of relative (notably fathers and married brothers) responses were so dismissive as to suggest that what Just was encountering was a particular avoidance of certain topics rather than a generalized suspicion of all enquiries. In the light of these difficulties Just began to supplement increasingly indirect questions with direct observation, simply noting who regularly associated with whom, and then checking on a presumed relationship when some conveniently casual opportunity arose. In the process Just encountered what seemed a curious phenomenon. The one exception to the general reluctance to talk spontaneously about family matters concerned direct descendants. People were always ready to talk about their children, or rather about their sons. Old men continually regaled Just with accounts of their offspring’s virtues and their worldly success (the two were not unrelated) yet Just realized that no amount of observation of public behaviour alone would ever have led him to suspect the existence of most father/son relationships. Just would be told by a fond father that his son, Yeorgos, a sailor, was shortly to return to the village; that he was an incomparable boy; and that certainly Just should make his acquaintance. Days would pass. The old man would still be sitting in the coffee-shop with his old cronies, or, more significantly, with younger men: but without Yeorgos. ‘Is your son back yet?’ Just would enquire. ‘Yes, days ago,’ would say the old man. And then, very quietly, ‘That’s him over there,’ discreetly indicating someone on the other side of the room, ‘why don’t you go and talk to him?’ But no effort was ever made actually to introduce him, and father and son seemed to maintain a studied distance. This sort of situation occurred so frequently that eventually Just was led to ask a number of his old friends why they never associated with their sons, of whom obviously they were so proud. Interestingly, his assertion that they did not associate with them was flatly denied. On some occasions Just persisted, adducing enough evidence to provoke a more elaborate reply. Generally this took one of two forms: inasmuch as they admitted that they did not publicly associate with their sons (make a parea, a ‘company’, with them) this was because (a) they saw enough of their sons 7

See, for example, du Boulay (1976); Hart (1991:179); Just (2000: 163-6).

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at home anyway, or (b) no doubt their sons preferred to form a parea with friends of their own age, all of which sounded perfectly reasonable, but was not quite the case. First, although unmarried sons who were still living with their parents no doubt did see a lot of their father at home, on marriage most sons set up neolocal residences, and so far as Just could observe, many then saw little of their fathers even in the privacy of their respective households. Secondly, although it was true that older men had their older friends and younger men their younger friends, there was no radical generational split in Spartokhori. What split there was existed between unmarried and married men, rather than between young and old on a purely age basis. Married men of thirty and married men of seventy would happily drink together. Indeed, when a group of younger married men decided really to celebrate and piled the tables high with bottled beer (which they frequently did) then very often there was an older man with them who appeared in every sense to be ‘one of the boys’ and who laughed with them, joked with them, drank with them, danced with them and seemed to be their very intimate. Almost invariably that older man was the father-in-law of one of the company. Fathers, if they were there at all, would be at other tables. At the most they looked on indulgently; but they were never part of the proceedings. However, there was no ‘rule’ that fathers and sons should not associate in public, or at least no rule in the sense of any explicit enunciation of a prohibition. On the contrary, when Just did formulate the avoidance as a ‘rule’ it was specifically denied. Rather, there were regularities of behaviour that singularly failed to congeal into a set of explicitly codified practices or ideological statements but which were nevertheless perfectly observable. So how to account for this situation? Here Bourdieu (or rather, Bourdieu’s choice of language) may seem helpful, for one could postulate that there were indeed ‘strongly interiorized principles’ at work in Spartokhori: principles that, as it happens, were contradictory and whose reconciliation resulted in a number of strategies of which avoidance between father and son was one. Those same principles also resulted in a denial of that very strategy, a denial which could itself be termed a strategy. To grasp those principles it is necessary to broaden the context. Despite the much vaunted (and well attested) closeness of the household, the spiti, as the basic social, economic and moral unit of rural Greek society, 8 the public exhibition of that solidarity is minimal. On 8 See e.g. Campbell (1964: 190-3); Peristiany (1965); du Boulay (1974: 17 and 1976).

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leaving the house, family unity is replaced by other orderings and groupings: the more public the context, the greater the degree of dispersal. The division is largely by gender. Women visit each other, congregate on each other’s doorsteps, sit preparing food, spinning wool, crocheting lacework and talking (the men would say ‘gossiping’). Men, by contrast, congregate in the coffee-shops, move from one to another, buy each other drinks, and wander around the village smoking cigarettes. Their role is not only a public one: it is to be in public. Any man who stays at home within the confines of his family is deemed to be sick or (much the same thing) inadequate, for men are not just ‘passing the time’ in the coffee-shops and streets: they are busy demonstrating their respect for their peers and, more importantly, acknowledging their peers’ respect for them. Hence the endless greetings (‘How’s it going?’, ‘What news?’, ‘What’s up?’), formulaic to the point of inanity, but obligatory (unless offence is intended) in a community of equals in which the spirit of egalitarianism is predicated on the assumption, not that no one is your inferior, but that no one is your better. Hence too the strict etiquette of coffee-shop behaviour, for when a man enters a shop, only one of three things can happen: those seated together drinking as a ‘company’ may shout ‘Katse na pioume!’ (‘Sit down and have a drink’); if no invitation is forthcoming but there is an empty table, then the man may sit down; but if there is no invitation and no empty table, then the man has no choice but to leave. Not that this creates an obvious social impasse. Since men are always wandering in, wandering out, standing in doorways, rocking on their heels and walking in small circles as the day slowly passes, it is always possible to remember some business elsewhere. On no account can one sit down with others uninvited, a particularly noteworthy fact in a community of only a couple of hundred adult males, all known to each other from birth and seen daily for perhaps fifty years. This sometimes leads to the peculiar sight of a coffee-shop occupied by a dozen men, each sitting alone at a table. While no embarrassment is betrayed, the degree to which one is greeted or not greeted, invited or not invited, does enter into the never-ending computation of social standing. A man hovers in the doorway for a minute or two, then turns to leave; Just’s old companion leans across and whispers ‘Then ekhi aksia, aftos’ (‘That fellow has no worth’). ‘Competitive egalitarianism’, then, was one strongly interiorized principle: the constant masculine struggle (played out in a host of trivial ways) to maintain one’s standing, one’s worth, one’s ‘honour’ within a community of equals who were simultaneously one’s competitors and one’s judges. That meant being beholden to no one, being no man’s man. Equality and autonomy were consubstantial. Therein also lay the problem

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for fathers and sons, for that principle of competitive egalitarianism ran up against another principle, equally assumed in public, but deemed to operate within the private and domestic sphere of the household: that of hierarchy and the authority of the household’s head. Indeed, whatever the practical power of women within the closed world of the spiti (and there is every reason to think that it was considerable)9 the assumption was that wives were subordinate to their husbands. And so were sons to their fathers. Ideally (that is to say, in public discourse) the relationship of son to father entailed ‘respect’, sevasmos. In practice, it ranged from deep affection to resentment and hostility. Whichever the case, the relationship was assumed to be hierarchical, and that hierarchy was reinforced (just as in Béarn) by the rules of inheritance and by what had once been the prevailing mode of production. Sons inherited house and land jointly and equally on the death of their father, or at such stage as he was willing to retire. That stage could be late indeed, and sons could find themselves economically dependent on aged fathers (still confident of their abilities) well into the time when, as grown men, the need to assert their autonomy was overwhelming. Popular mythology had it that ‘in the old days’ sons brought their brides into the patriko spiti, the ‘paternal household’, where everyone lived happily together as part of a large extended family. This probably did happen for short periods within the domestic cycle of individual families, but demographic records do not bear it out as a long-standing arrangement.10 Rather, marriages were delayed, and tensions built. In fact the rules of inheritance and the authority of the father held together by force what otherwise would fragment, and did fragment as soon as the constraints were removed. By the time of Just’s fieldwork the situation was changing precisely because Spartokhori was no longer an agriculturally based community. The bulk of the younger generation had become sailors and were in receipt of high wages. This, however, did little to improve the relationship between fathers and sons, because sons, freed from the necessity of obtaining their inheritance in order to take their place as independent members of the village community, also escaped the authority of their fathers and built neolocal residences for themselves and their brides at such time as they pleased. Parents were resentful, and many fathers fought back by withholding their land (which was still a valuable asset) and in extreme cases even threatening to bequeath it to their daughters and sons-in-law (thus again breaking the ‘rules’). 9

See the essays in Dubisch (ed.) (1986) on women’s actual power. See Just (2000:199-202) on household composition in the nineteenth century.

10

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It is notable that all Just’s informants initially denied that they did not keep company with their sons: whatever the notion of filial ‘respect’ and the rules of residence and inheritance created, it was not a set of ritualized rule-governed codes of social practice. Rather, they created a set of tensions and predispositions that found concrete expression within the possibilities allowed by the norms of social etiquette. This being the case, the old men were not necessarily lying to Just. There was no rule that forbade fathers and sons from sitting together or drinking together or associating in public together. Rather, Just thinks fathers and sons (whatever the quality of their individual relationship) simply felt unease in each other’s presence, due to their dual public roles, which placed them simultaneously in both a hierarchical and an equal relationship: hierarchical as father and son; equal as adult males of the village. A sensitivity to that situation, which (like a sensitivity to language) exceeded the comprehension of its underlying structure or grammar, simply drove them to adopt a stance (or a chair) whose isolation was already sanctioned by the daily practices of social intercourse. Moreover, there was another reason for fathers to deny not keeping company with their sons (to ‘misrecognize’ the situation, as Bourdieu would say) in that, whatever the actual quality of the individual relationship, to admit avoidance or the possibility of estrangement would have been tantamount to implying that their now free and autonomous sons no longer ‘respected’ them.

Wittgenstein and rules The above account may seem more to endorse Bourdieu than to take issue with him. Indeed, at a purely descriptive level, in many (but not all) instances we think that a language of predispositions, habituations, sentiments and strategies is more appropriate for the observed regularities of social behaviour than a language of rules. As in many parts of Greece, young men in Spartokhori, even within the house, did not smoke (a sign of adult masculine, and therefore independent, status) in front of their fathers: this could be, and once was, explicitly stated as a ‘rule’. However, by the time of Just’s fieldwork many young men did smoke, while asserting that they ‘respected’ their fathers and that it was precisely the closeness of their relationship with their father and his confidence in their respect that allowed them to do so. In such a relationship we approach a morality which, like any morality, manifests itself in regularities of behaviour; but we do not necessarily encounter a series of rules that categorically determine the precise forms of behaviour. Nowadays the smoking rule has disappeared, but if a father is offended by his son’s smoking in his

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presence then a good son will not do so; if he is not, then smoking is permitted. What remains basic is the question of respect; and that is inherent, not in the precise form of behaviour itself, but in the sentiment, the attitude, the predisposition which gives rise to that behaviour. This would be sufficient for us to endorse a Bourdieuian ethnographic account of social behaviour. Alas, it is not really what exercises Bourdieu. For him, appropriate descriptive language is the minor issue; what Bourdieu wants to do is to explain the regularities of human behaviour, without resorting to the idea that it is rule-governed, and (as he accuses his colleagues of doing) without slipping into that idea by default (which is why appropriate descriptive language remains an issue). Yet to bridge the explanatory gulf between the regularities of human behaviour and individual human agency is a much more ambitious project than choosing an appropriate form of common-language description for those regularities, and we contend that Bourdieu is much less successful in this project. However, on philosophical grounds, or on Wittgensteinian grounds (Bourdieu frequently cites Wittgenstein) Bourdieu does seem safe in his negative claim that human behaviour and action, ‘practice’ as he calls it, cannot consist in the execution of a set of rules. The eminent philosopher, Charles Taylor, in an article specifically supporting Bourdieu (1993), offers a summary of Wittgenstein’s account of rule-following and the basic objection to the notion that human conduct could consist in following rules. In brief, since a rule can always be misunderstood (or since it is always possible to interpret a stretch of behaviour in accordance with some understanding of a rule) then to follow a rule would require us to become involved in an infinite regression: we would need rules to explain how we correctly interpreted the rule, and then further rules to allow us correctly to interpret the rules that allowed us correctly to interpret the rule, and so forth. As an account of how we actually get anything done, this will not wash, and for Taylor it points towards a substantial failure of what he terms the ‘intellectualist epistemological tradition’ (from Descartes and Locke onwards) that posits a first-person-singular self, call it the ‘mind’, which deals only with representations and is disengaged from embodied agency and social embedding, the consequences of which, he suggests, are particularly pernicious for the social sciences (1993: 54). On these grounds Taylor enthusiastically embraces Bourdieu’s habitus, a form of embodied understanding and transposable dispositions that bypasses intellectualist understanding. ‘If Wittgenstein has helped us to break with the philosophical thrall of intellectualism,’ he concludes, ‘Bourdieu has begun

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to explore how social science could be remade, once freed from its distorting grip’ (1993: 59). Heady words! Taylor’s enthusiasm may, however, be misplaced. As Gerrans points out, although Wittgenstein is an ally for Bourdieu’s negative argument that ‘the rules for a practice cannot be codified and [...] meaningful activity cannot be explained in terms of explicitly represented intentions, conscious or unconscious’ (2005: 60) nevertheless ‘Wittgenstein is very careful not to identify knowledge of rules with agreement in disposition between similarly acculturated subjects’ (2005: 60). The problem is that the same arguments that can be marshalled against the codification of rules, and the explicit representation of conscious or unconscious intentions apply equally to dispositions. In order for a regularity of human action to be meaningful, there must be ‘something that counts as doing it right’ (2005: 60). Some element of understanding and of interpretation is essential, otherwise we are dealing with merely robotic behaviour. This is as important for Bourdieu as it is for Wittgenstein, for without the possibility of ‘doing it wrong’ there can be no individual human agency, and agency is high on Bourdieu’s agenda. Now, as we have seen above, agents cannot be ‘doing it right’ (thus allowing the possibility of their doing it wrong) by virtue of following a rule, since: any item can be said to accord with not just one semantic rule but an indefinite number. A stretch of behaviour, set of signs or mental images, can always represent (be interpreted) in an indefinite number of ways (Gerrans 2005: 61).

Bourdieu appears to think that he has solved this problem by substituting dispositions for rules, and by suggesting that agents acquire ‘a feel for the game’ that allows them to judge when they (or others) are ‘doing it right’ or ‘doing it wrong’. As Gerrans notes, ‘all Bourdieu’s explications of the notion of habitus reduce to identifying significance with concordance in mutually acquired and reinforced dispositions’ (2005: 63). Yet how would either an outside observer or the members of a community know that their dispositions were concordant? How would they know that their ‘practice’ thus generated constituted a legitimate move in whatever game they were playing? Certainly not by appealing to the observable stretches of behaviour, to the ‘practice’ that they produced in common, since that behaviour could have been produced by any number of dispositions (cf. Farnell 2000: 412) just as it could have been produced any number of ‘rules’. However, if people do not ‘know’ and cannot judge whether their dispositions are concordant and their strategies all part of the same game, then agency is out of the window and we are back to robotics, or as

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Bourdieu puts it, a mere ‘epiphenomenon of structure’ (Bourdieu 1990b: 62, cited in Gerrans 2005: 62). All of this may seem philosophically abstruse, but since Bourdieu does invoke Wittgenstein, it is worth pointing out that at an a priori level Wittgenstein does not really solve the problem Bourdieu confronts; nor, for that matter, does Bourdieu find a solution to the question that Wittgenstein poses (cf. Farnell 2000: 403). So if Wittgenstein does not solve Bourdieu’s problem, what does Bourdieu’s solution, the habitus, get us into; and what practical advances does it make for the social sciences?

The ontological status of the habitus From the point of view of an observer, marked statistical regularities remain marked statistical regularities, whether they are seen in terms of obedience to a rule or as the outcome of interiorized principles. What distinguishes the two formulations is the implied mechanism, the nature of the internal states of individuals, that enables those regularities to be collectively generated: although we submit that it is perfectly possible to remain resolutely silent on that question, and to take the rules of social behaviour as being merely descriptive of those regularities. Bourdieu, however, is anything but silent on the question. The regularities are not generated by agents consciously following a rule; they are generated by agents utilizing strategies that are unconsciously in accordance with and generated by their . . . habitus. It follows that the objectified rules of social behaviour which constitute our understandings of other societies cannot, and must not, be taken to be the same as the forms of knowledge that allow members of another society to produce the regularities that we formulate in terms of rules. Whether many anthropologists ever thought that they were seems doubtful. Classically, most anthropologists tended to be agnostic on the point, or rather, having doffed their cap in the general direction of some nebulous concept of ‘socialization’, they relegated the question to the once forbidden territory of ‘psychology’. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s point is valid. The trouble is that it is also a dead end. Bourdieu’s work amounts to a continually reiterated cautionary tale to the effect that the way we know and understand the world of others does not reduplicate the way they know it and the way they are able to act within it and reproduce it. The habitus itself, however, remains a ‘black box’ (Connell 1983: 151, cited in Jenkins 1992: 95-6) an intellectual no-go area whose realization within the individual cannot by definition be articulated without betraying the nonarticulate nature of the predispositions and embodied forms of knowledge

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to which it gives rise (see Bourdieu 1977: 94). And when, in any particular ethnographic context (that of the Kabyle or the peasants of Béarn) Bourdieu does try to specify the particularities of a given habitus, then of course he is forced to betray the non-articulate nature of the predispositions and embodied forms of knowledge of which he speaks simply by speaking them (Acciaioli 1981: 45). Hence what seems like the transparent substitution of ‘principles’ and ‘necessities’ for ‘rules’: ‘principles’ and ‘necessities’ that nevertheless have all the characteristics of rules because otherwise he would have no way of specifying how one habitus differed from another, or of supplying any basis to account for why he groups particular strategies together as strategies for achieving a particular objective (Acciaioli 1981: 34). As Acciaioli comments, ‘in the very endeavour to render natives’ actions intelligible, Bourdieu appears doomed to re-enact the analytical sins of his accursed forefathers’ (1981: 36). None of which, by the way, is to say that Bourdieu is wrong; but it does suggest that his invocation of the habitus does not advance matters much. If anthropologists as a whole can be accused of taking interpretative liberties in formulating ‘rules’ to account for regularities, Bourdieu takes an equal liberty in stating the ‘principles’ from which those regularities derive. Pace Bourdieu’s self-congratulation on the point, the charge of omniscience is merely denied, not avoided (cf. Jenkins 1992: 73; Farnell 2000: 402). What then would advance matters? It may seem perverse to call Bourdieu’s theorizing ‘psychological’ since what he builds into the habitus always includes ‘the material circumstances of life’ (1976: 118; cf. Bourdieu 1984: 101; Jenkins 1992: 79). Yet however grounded Bourdieu’s work is in empirical observation, his argument remains essentially psychological since his departure from conventional sociology boils down to the contention that ‘practice’ (what people do) is generated by a system of durable, transposable dispositions (Bourdieu 1990b: 53). This is only of interest if one is concerned, not just with the description of the regularities of human social behaviour, or with the investigation of the social and material conditions, both historical and actual, which (one might speculate) determine or encourage or constrain those regularities (such, after all, has always been the stuff of sociology and anthropology) but also with the actual processes, the mechanism, by which individual humans are able to produce such regularities of conduct: i.e. with some sort of mental process or some form of internal state. As Farnell suggests (2000: 403 and 408), what Bourdieu has done is to shift the explanatory burden of social behaviour away from what Durkheim termed ‘social facts’, relocating it in the realm of interiorized predispositions.

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In one sense the shift is scarcely radical, since it merely transposes holus bolus everything conventionally adduced in the explanation of social behaviour to a new site: the individual social agent compelled to reproduce through his or her strategies everything that went into creating the predispositions in terms of which he or she strategized in the first place. Take the ‘deeply internalized principles’, the ‘dispositions’, alluded to in Just’s ethnographic accounts of Spartokhori: ensuring that all one’s children had a roof over their head; maintaining the superior rights of males over females; the masculine desire for independence; the hierarchical internal organization of the household. Although these are internalized principles equivalent to those that Bourdieu asserts for Béarn, it must be admitted that Just picked them arbitrarily. Descriptively, they are simply inductively-arrived-at, rule-like generalizations about some sets of ‘regularities’ among very many others; but if one were to privilege them as ‘dispositions’ or ‘principles’ integral to the habitus and constructed by ‘homogeneous conditions of existence’, then yes, one would have to investigate as ‘homogeneous conditions of existence’, inter alia: the bilateral structure of the Greek family that makes one daughter’s children as much one’s grandchildren as one’s son’s children, which in turn requires providing for one’s daughter as well as one’s son; that sons nevertheless carry ‘the [family] name’, whereas daughters do not; that a long Christian tradition, and particularly an Orthodox tradition, has treated woman as vulnerable and ‘the weaker vessel’; that at least two hundred years of economic and political history have resulted in a class of smallscale independent land-owners, for whom being subject to others, whether family or strangers, is ideologically intolerable; that the household nevertheless constitutes a single unit of production and consumption under the authority of its head, the father; that a traditionally late age of marriage for men, itself largely predicated on the vulnerability of women (sisters), prolongs the economic dependency of sons; and so forth. Connecting all these social factors in the best (not the ‘right’, for we are talking about interpretation) expositional or narrative order has always been the art of ethnography (and social history). And so it is for Bourdieu writing about Béarn: the primacy of men over women, implied that, even though claims to the property could sometimes be transmitted through the female line, and even though the family (or ‘house’), a monopolistic group defined by the ownership of a specific set of assets, could be identified with all those who had claims to these assets, regardless of their sex, the status of heiress could fall to a woman only in the last resort […] And this is only logical, once we understand that the status of ‘master of the house’ (capmaysouè),

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repository and guarantor of the name, the reputation, and the interests of the group, gave him not only rights to the property, but also quasi-political right to exercise authority within the group (1976: 128-9, our emphasis).

The sole difference that Bourdieu’s theory makes is that all of the above now become condensed into a single privileged ‘implicit principle’: that of ‘the primacy of men over women’, which the individual ingests, thus providing the connections between all observed regularities in terms of some form of mental architecture. On the other hand, the shift could be vital if, but only if, some account could be given of how the individual effects that trick, and if, but only if, that mental architecture could be specified. On this Bourdieu is strangely silent, or at most conventionally vague. We have suggested that anthropologists were classically agnostic about how the rules of social behaviour they formulated were internalized by the individuals who perpetuated them. At best a nod in the direction of ‘socialization’ was given (a concept that conveniently explained everything and therefore nothing11). Does Bourdieu do any better? He is certainly critical of his forebears: To slip from regularity, i.e. from what occurs with a certain statistically measurable frequency and from the formula which describes it, to a consciously laid down and consciously respected ruling, or to unconscious regulating by a mysterious cerebral or social mechanism, are the two commonest ways of sliding from the model of reality to the reality of the model (1990b: 39, our emphasis).

We concede (as stated above) the point about ‘a consciously laid down and consciously respected ruling’. We suspect the bulk of human social behaviour cannot be explained in terms of people consciously following a rule. However, we can think of nothing closer to ‘an unconscious regulating by a mysterious cerebral or social mechanism’ than Bourdieu’s account of the habitus. Nor can we think of a better case of a model of reality sliding into the reality of a model (cf. Farnell 2000: 404). This is one of his more extensive definitions of the habitus: The conditioning associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a 11

It did, however, result in an entire ASA conference and volume (Mayer 1970).

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The habitus may not be ‘cerebral’, i.e. a process of ratiocination, but it is certainly mental (cf. Jenkins 1992: 75): a system of durable, transposable dispositions located (amongst other places) in the individual, generating and organizing our practices and representations. It is thus a ‘structuring structure’. But it is also a ‘structured structure’, since this system of durable transposable dispositions has been given particular form, and indeed been produced by ‘a particular class of conditions of existence’, that is to say, by society, by history, by culture, by family, by socioeconomic position, by class, by demography, by material surroundings, by sex, by gender, by age: in short by everything that a human being encounters and which constitutes his or her particular conditions of existence. The habitus thus seems to account for how human beings individual human agents - become social beings and create and participate in forms of collective life whose regularities persist through time. It seems to be the very interface, the transformative juncture, between the individual and the social, continually channelling the social into the individual, and channelling the practices of the individual back into the recreation of the social (cf. Jenkins 1992: 75). To put it simply (which Bourdieu does not always do) there is a feedback loop (Jenkins 1992: 82). We act without thinking, or rather our ‘thinking’ is simultaneous with and embodied in our acting (our practice) and this ‘thought-in-action’ (or ‘logic of practice’) then feeds back into the collective creation of the interiorized principles that govern our thought-in-action. All very neat, and of course wonderfully circular: this is not necessarily a fault. The trouble is that no account is given of how the habitus achieves all this (Jenkins 1992: 95). The habitus remains a problem disguised as a solution (cf. Farnell 2000: 412; Gerrans 2005: 67) and a series of important questions - important if we really want to understand the wellsprings of human action - go unanswered and barely even raised (cf. Farnell 2000: 402). How, precisely, do dispositions structure practice? If a disposition is a tendency or an inclination to act in a particular way, then this part of the definition of habitus is vacuous: an inclination or tendency to act in a particular way results in people acting in a particular way. Then, how, precisely, are these dispositions themselves produced? How do people interiorize their particular conditions of existence: their society, history, culture, family, socio-economic position, class, demography, material surroundings, sex, gender, age etc.? Bourdieu’s answer to this question is as vague and elliptical as that given by generations of anthropologists who never seriously thought it was their business to

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answer it: it is just a matter of ‘conditioning’, of ‘inculcation’, of ‘family upbringing’, in short of growing up in a particular time in a particular place in a particular way. The whole gamut of external social and historical and cultural conditions becomes by some mysterious, or at least unspecified, ‘cerebral or social mechanism’ a series of internalized dispositions. Not just internalized: also ‘structured’. Structured in what ways? Layered? Hierarchized? Bourdieu gives no indication of how, as a mental process, as a mechanism, as a faculty of mind, the habitus works, nor even of what sort of a thing the habitus really is, for the elasticity of its definition(s), the indeterminacy of its locus, and the functions with which it is credited allow it to be construed as both a heuristic sociological device (like ‘social forces’) and a psychic reality (Acciaioli 1981: 45; Jenkins 1992: 79 and 93; Farnell 2000: 412).

Coda: Gerrans’ modest alternatives The above account may seem unfair. Bourdieu was, after all, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a social theorist and possibly a philosopher, not a psychologist, neurologist or cognitive scientist. Nor (unlike some anthropologists) did he ever pretend to be any of these. Moreover he does map out a genuine area of theoretical and methodological perplexity, albeit an old one: the relationship between individual agency and social regularity. Our argument is with Bourdieu’s whole rejection of rules and the fact that his trenchant criticism of ‘objectivist’ anthropology and sociology rests on a concept whose only major innovation seems to be the relocation and reconstitution of the social as some sort of psychological entity, about which, in the end, he can say almost nothing, and which, with the exception of the negative (and probably well accepted) corollary that most of social life does not consist in people consciously following rules, leaves everything just as it was before. A serious attempt to tackle the question of how individual agents take on and perpetuate the regularities of their collective social worlds (a question that necessarily bridges the social and the psychological) ought surely to entail an account of the process by which that is achieved. To assert that they do so is merely to state the evident. We expect that if a satisfactory answer to that question is ever put forward, then it will come from the cognitive or brain sciences, and not from sociology and social anthropology as we presently know them. However, as ethnographers (modest observers of social life) we can get by without such an answer even if we are conscious of its lack, and so, argues Gerrans, can social science. First, it could settle for being ‘an enterprise

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that merely catalogues coincident individual histories and describes the resultant regularities without theoretical unification’ (Gerrans 2005: 64). As Gerrans notes, that still gives it predictive power, but we suspect it is too minimalist a project to be appealing, and certainly too minimalist a project to be rigorously adhered to. Secondly, it could treat its explanations as psychologically unrestrained interpretations of regularities, i.e. as useful unifying generalizations about regularities, which suggest further enquiries about the psychologies of the agents involved or the ways in which other regularities and material conditions correlate with the interpreted regularities (2005: 64). Finally, it could ‘explain the production of regularities in terms of the agents’ consciously held beliefs’ but see those regularities as their unintended consequences, thus obviating the need to invoke forms of tacit knowledge consistent with those regularities (2005: 67). These approaches (which are not, as Gerrans points out, mutually exclusive) have long been followed in anthropology. They are also (metatheoretical excursus on the habitus notwithstanding) what Bourdieu practises. However, they settle for a level of explanatory adequacy that is not anchored in putative psycho-social entities, although they do (see above, approach 2) inevitably impute psychological motivations. In short, they move interpretatively between observations of social regularities, they look for patterns (James 2003: 3) and they explain social regularities by reference to social regularities: a method preached by Durkheim long ago. With due care and attention to the nuances of our ethnographically descriptive language and to distinguishing between what is explicitly enunciated by (some) agents as a ‘rule’ and what we construe as a rule through our observations of a regularity (and agents themselves vary in their capabilities of transforming the latter into the former) a language of ‘rules’ still seems, for the moment at least, less hazardous than sliding into acquiescence with the reality of the model that Bourdieu proposes. We also have another (less well founded) ground for irritation, referred to at the beginning of this book. No one who has read Bourdieu could ever accuse him of neglecting the achievements of objectivism: he repackages these as both the source and the product of his habitus. Nor could anyone suspect him of sympathizing with many of the forms of subjectivism which are currently rife. Nevertheless, at a time when such monolithic concepts as ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are (rightly) being challenged, and when consequently (but not so rightly) the unfettered individual is being foregrounded, ironically Bourdieu’s talk (or perhaps talk of Bourdieu’s talk) of strategies as opposed to rules, of predispositions as opposed to reasons, of embodied knowledge as opposed to intellectualist knowledge

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and of the limits of (our) objectivism faithfully to render the experiences of ‘others’, often appeals to an audience all too ready to construe strategies as free inventions, predispositions as whatever people are feeling on the day, embodied knowledge as ‘natural’ knowledge, and the limits of objectivism as the end of science. None of this is Bourdieu’s fault, but his name does lend a certain cachet to the misconceptions.

CHAPTER SEVEN EXCURSUS THREE: GREEK EXOTIKA AND BELIEF

In 1991 Charles Stewart published one of the most interesting, and certainly one of the more original, ethnographies of rural Greece, Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture. However, the beginnings of his research were not auspicious, for Stewart wanted to investigate exotika: malevolent demons, elves or spirits that dwell in the countryside on the fringes of human habitation. As he relates: I never imagined it would be easy to enter villages on Naxos, ask people to tell me about exotika, and then expect to be recounted everything down to the most recent, frightening experiences (1991: 3).

In fact the difficulties Stewart encountered were considerable. The first was more or less practical. People in the village of Apeiranthos on Naxos just did not talk much about exotika. Stewart played a waiting game, but nothing happened. In the end he had to broach the topic himself. Now reticence is no index of importance. Not all people (not all cultures) pour out their inmost concerns even to the most patient listener. Sometimes quite the opposite. The fact that the Naxiots did not appear to spend their time talking about exotika is to that extent neither here nor there. Much more problematic was that when Stewart finally did raise the question of exotika with a group of young men sitting in the coffee-shop, their response was ‘kolokithakia’ (‘courgettes’, i.e. stuff and nonsense). It was a group of older men who called Stewart aside and, while still expressing deep scepticism, told him a few details about exotika. They took him to meet Kyria Sophia, who certainly did believe in exotika (as did her son): many years earlier Sophia’s husband, a shepherd, had been seduced by a neraidia, a nymph-like creature, and died as a result. Stewart goes on to provide a detailed account first of Naxos, then of the village of Apeiranthos, and finally of Greek cosmology and morality in their local setting. Stewart deals with Naxiot history, demography and economy; with education, emigration and local politics; with kinship,

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gender, marriage and naming. All are carefully interwoven into a portrait and an analysis of Naxiot life at the time. The persistent theme of community and identity is conceived and expressed in terms of a symbolism and a morality inextricable from the traditions and metaphysics of Orthodox Christianity. There is thus a lot about the Church and churches on Naxos; there is a lot about saints and icons and even miracles. What there is not a lot about (at least in terms of local informants’ stated encounters or detailed knowledge) is the subject of Stewart’s book: exotika. Some people, like Kyria Sophia, believed in them, and Stewart was able to collect some stories about them. However, as he says: Frequently the information that I did manage to collect was accompanied by disclaimers: ‘Some people say ...’; ‘I don’t know how much of this is true, but since you’re interested ...’ (1991: 108).

For the most part those who believed, or did not disbelieve, were among the oldest generation. Stewart makes no attempt to disguise the rarity of contemporary Naxiot beliefs in exotika: the last section of his third chapter is headed ‘The Eclipse of the Exotika’, and Stewart himself raises what might well be in the mind of many readers: At this point the question may be asked, ‘If the exotika are no longer actively believed in, nor even seriously discussed or entertained, what status could they possibly have as indicators of the contemporary Greek worldview?’ (1991: 113).

Stewart’s answer to this question (which is to be found not just in the immediately following paragraphs, but throughout the remainder of the book, and which has been carefully prepared for by his ethnography) hinges on his notion of a ‘worldview’. Indeed, the success of his book as a whole hinges on the acceptability of his notion of that term. This requires some explanation. In a discipline that has spawned and adopted more ‘isms’ and ‘theories’ than decently befits its immaturity, making broad claims about major divisions within anthropology is a foolhardy business. Nevertheless, whatever the current theoretical fashions, two strains within anthropology, or rather, within ethnography, are detectable. Their difference relates to what is held (at least implicitly) to be the nature and status of the ethnographic object. Most anthropologists would say (glibly, and nowadays with increasing misgivings about what might be meant by the terms) that what we study are ‘societies’ and/or ‘cultures’. In our ethnographic practice what we

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study (whom we can observe, whom we can talk to, whom we can interact with) is a finite, and usually small, group of individuals. What allows us to say that, nevertheless, we study societies and/or cultures is the reasonably justified assumption that a very large part of what our small and finite number of people do, say and (by inference) think and believe is not a product of their individual invention but is shared by others of their kind whose (ill-defined) collectivity we take to constitute a ‘culture’ or ‘society’ which extends, spatially and temporally, beyond those individuals whom we have actually observed, listened to and interacted with. Beyond this, however, things get a little more tricky, for none of the above denies the fact that individuals also do what they do, say what they say, think what they think and believe what they believe in their own right. Trying to explain, interpret or account for their actions, statements, thoughts and beliefs (as ethnographers usually do) raises questions about how far that collective realm extends beyond the observable, how it is constituted, and how it is to be brought into relation with observable actions, statements, and (inferred) thoughts and beliefs: especially if what is called in from the collective realm is unacknowledged by, or at variance with, the views of the very people whom we are studying; when, for example, exotika are posited as part of the world view of people who actually know little about them or deny their existence. In fact anthropological interpretation routinely involves a curious methodological zigzagging from the part to the whole and back again, from the individual to the collective and vice versa, since for the most part we construct the collective from the individual but then refer the individual back to the collective. We use the term ‘call in’ the collective because the dimensions of the collective we construct always exceed what we ethnographers are able empirically to observe: our group of individuals. Here is where strategies of interpretation tend to diverge. For many anthropologists, especially British social anthropologists, the tendency used to be to minimize the gap between observable conduct (the immediate flux of events) and whatever was taken to be ‘society’ or ‘culture’. The latter were merely abstractions or generalizations from the former.1 The advantage of such a formulation is that whatever zigzagging went on was then a self-reinforcing and self-validating short-circuit: most X whom the anthropologist has encountered do or say or believe Y; Y is therefore posited by the anthropologist as part of the social practice or culture of the X; the X whom the anthropologist has encountered then do 1

Goddard, discussing British structural-functionalism, comments: ‘Structure is [...] a simple and not a complex notion because it relates directly and virtually without mediation to the empirical reality of social life’ (1972: 63).

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or say or believe Y because they are members of the X society and/or culture. By default there is an almost complete congruence between observable behaviour and what is posited as society or culture. Whatever happens to lie outside the anthropologist’s immediate observation is then simply taken to be more of the same, and to explain observable behaviour in terms of ‘society’ or ‘culture’ thus becomes a convenient tautology; however, the realm of observable behaviour is thus transgressed only by its hypothetical magnification, and a shoddy form of empiricism is maintained.2 The alternative strategy is to adhere to a much more elevated view of society or culture: to assume that they are not merely abstractions, generalizations and hypothetical extensions of ethnographically observable behaviour, but have an existence that is in some sense independent of immediately observable behaviour for which they might then afford nontautological explanations, and to which they cannot be reduced. Alarm bells immediately ring here, of course, for an obvious version (or versions) of such an independent existence would entail their metaphysical hypostasization. 3 That need not be the case; history provides a more palatable recourse, which of course is that routinely resorted to by social and cultural historians, and now by many anthropologists, notably Sahlins (1985). History constitutes a realm of collective behaviour and events that could explain what people currently do, say, believe and think. However, in the parochial world of the ethnographer some intellectual tinnitus should persist, for now we may be claiming that people (our bunch of empirically observable individuals) might ‘know not what they do’; or rather, that what they do has a historico-social genesis of which they may be substantially unaware (or entirely misconstrue). The correlate of this is that the anthropologist (or cultural historian, or theologian) might claim to know what people are up to better than they do themselves. And they might know better if, especially in the case of societies with a long history of literacy and indigenous scholarship, they have privileged access to 2

Thus Radcliffe-Brown (1977) distinguishes between structure ‘as an actually existing concrete reality to be directly observed’ and ‘structural form’ which he argues is what the fieldworker describes. Whereas the former is constantly changing as individuals are born, die and form new sets of interrelationships between themselves, the latter (an abstraction from existing concrete reality) retains a relatively high degree of stability. 3 Durkheim’s definition of a social fact as having an existence of its own independent of its individual manifestations is open to such a charge; as early as 1895 Tarde claimed that Durkheim’s social realism was counterfactual, mystical and metaphysical (Lukes 1973: 306).

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historical and comparative data which reveal the origins and formation of practices, institutions, symbols, beliefs etc. that present themselves to our bunch of people as no more (but no less) than the givens of their world, even when those givens are sometimes consciously rejected. In that sense, Greek exotika exist, in the particular shape and form that they do, for historical reasons that bypass individuals’ belief in them or detailed knowledge about them. Exotika are part of Greek ‘culture’. Kyria Sophia believed in them, and the sceptical young men in the coffee-shop did not: but what the young men were rejecting was not of Kyria Sophia’s own making, and they all lived in a world where exotika were present, whether treated as a dangerous reality or dismissed as an outmoded superstition. This, then, is Stewart’s tactic. Part Two of his book, ‘The Composition of the Exotika’, explores wider Greek history and society in the longue durée. As he explains: The study of meaning at the local level will always be of interest – no matter how unlikely some indigenous assertions sometimes seem. It is often the case, however, that local customs also yield evidence for other interpretations when set in relation to a broader range of ideas and symbols that the anthropologist is able to assemble through comparativism. It is precisely in addressing the level of ideology, the reservoir of expressed and unexpressed notions as to how the world is ordered, that advances may be made in treating Greece as a whole [...] What follows here, then, is foremost a study of the exotika in the context of Orthodox conceptions of good and evil, proper and improper conduct (1991: 138-9).

Stewart provides an account of Greek Orthodox conceptions of the Devil and of devils, and of parallel, but strictly speaking unorthodox or ‘folk’, conceptions of the demonic. It deals with saints as officially recognized intermediaries between God and humanity, and the exotika as similarly intermediate, but officially unrecognized, figures between Satan and humanity. Broader issues are also taken into account, notably those of space and time and of morality and aesthetics. An ideological or conceptual map of the village is produced (not necessarily of Apareinthos, but of ‘the generic Greek village’) with the church at its centre, then, under its protection and within the confines of the village, the house (with its attendant exotika: the vrakhnas, a sort of greedy child; the kallikantzaroi, ugly goblins; the mora, who attack unbaptized children) and finally, beyond the village precincts, the wilderness, caves, streams, wells, ocean, air, mills, fields, threshing floors, graveyards, crossroads, mountains and bridges that are home to a bewildering variety of hobgoblins and foul fiends. However, as Stewart argues, their variety is not really so bewildering; nor are their features arbitrary constructions. Whatever the

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exotika are, and however they appear, their attributes can be reduced to a number of oppositions to the ideals of Hellenism and to the teachings of the Church.4 As Stewart summarizes in his final paragraph: Why do the exotika appear as animal-limbed creatures stalking the area outside the village at odd hours? Is there a means of understanding the diverse forms assumed by these demons, or are they just to be regarded as arbitrary, horrific constructions? [...] The features involved in their composition systematically contradict those characteristics most prized by Greek society. The exotika are ‘not us’. As their name suggests, they are ‘things outside’, things beyond the confines, indeed beyond the pale of human society. Their very images, although startling at times, enable comprehension of untoward events. They poetically align misfortune with the mis-shapen. The antithetical imagery of the exotika makes perfect sense once it is considered that health, successful marriage, good fortune, indeed life itself, come from God. In daily life these values are protected by the Christian holy figures, themselves representations of human ideals (1991: 249).

Stewart’s argument is eloquent and close to convincing, especially where it concerns the occasions and the morphology of the demonic. One question nags, however, and we think it nags Stewart too. Is what Stewart describes really still part of the Greek world view? We are back to the question of the relationship between ‘culture’ as a superordinate historical construct, and ‘culture’ as the aggregate of the expressed views and observable actions of contemporary individuals. Now the zigzagging is not just between a number of observable individuals and a collectivity that is more or less their generalized abstraction, but between a number of observed individuals and an entire historical and scholarly tradition. How does one locate or formulate their points of contact or areas of congruence? Stewart cites, for example, a passage from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in support of his claim that the values of Christianity are contested in daily life by the forces of the Devil as part of a cosmic struggle. He continues: Admittedly, these are concisely expressed theological ideas. The world is not always and only perceived animistically as swarming with good and evil spirits engaged in combat. Consciously most Naxiots would disavow and attempt to disassociate themselves from any such view on the grounds that it is too religious and too incompatible with certain common-sense natural science ideas. These New Testament formulations do, nonetheless, 4 A much more extensive account of the demonic in rural Greek belief is now supplied by du Boulay (2009).

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inform – if only semiconsciously – the villagers’ understanding of the world (1991: 102).

As Stewart realizes, it is one thing to trace historically the ideological formation of such entities as exotika, and quite another to ascribe, or even connect, that historical tradition to the consciousness of contemporary individuals: to credit it as part of their ‘world view’. The safer but weaker claim is that it informs the villagers’ understanding of the world ‘semiconsciously’, in a form of words which reminds us of Sperber’s semi-propositional representations (1982). This is not an unreasonable claim, and we suspect that ‘semiconscious’ beliefs, or rather beliefs that may be denied but which nevertheless appear to surface at particular moments and in particular contexts, are anything but a rarity (as we suggested in the case of the identification of boats as women in Chapter 4). Many years ago when Just was sitting up late writing his doctoral dissertation in Oxford he decided at about midnight to clear his head by going for a walk across Port Meadow to the little AngloSaxon church of St Frideswide. He never made it. A full moon gleamed between scudding dark clouds; the bare branches of trees along the path bent and moaned in the wind; and ahead in the distance the little church with its graveyard stood pallid against the lowering sky. Three-quarters of the way there, Just turned round and started back. He did not exactly run, but certainly hastened his pace, thinking that this was ridiculous, for he holds himself to be a firm atheist without a superstitious bone in his body. The trouble is that Just can also recognize a B-grade movie set when he sees one, and this one was a perfect set-up for vampires, zombies, witches, werewolves and every other creature that has, willy nilly, taken residence in his mind since, as a twelve-year old, he read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), later saw George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and has ever since been entertained on late-night television and at the cinema by their numerous spin-offs. Forget exotika: Anglo-American popular culture is replete with the monstrous, the misshapen and the evil (particularly at the moment) and although we may not ‘believe’ in such entities, we certainly know and recognize them so that, once conjured up, they both thrill and genuinely terrify us (why else does the market continue to supply them to us?) They are part of our ‘world view’. However, the problem with ‘world views’ and their relationship to observable ethnographic data is not whether or not they incorporate all sorts of things that the people we are studying (or we ourselves) might ‘consciously’ reject; there is little doubt that they do include them. The problem is rather how much of, or what further parts of, that world view (whether it contains exotika or vampires or, for that matter, Father

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Christmas or the Tooth Fairy) can be pulled-in and credited to the consciousness or even semi-consciousness of the individuals whom we actually study when it comes to ‘explaining’ or interpreting or making sense of what they do, say, think or believe. This applies even when we are dealing with entities in which people certainly do believe, or practices that unambiguously constitute part of everyday life. Let us take a case in point that is not far removed from Stewart’s own interests. The rules of consanguinity and affinity laid down by the Orthodox Church are extensive: marriage is prohibited, not only between all consanguineous kin up to and including second (and possibly third) cousins, 5 but also between an array of individuals who are affinally related. To put it simply, marriage between two individuals can suddenly prevent the possibility of subsequent marriages between a number of their respective consanguineous kin. The paradigm case is that a pair of siblings (whether same-sex or cross-sex) may not marry a pair of siblings. Such marriages would categorically be considered to constitute emomixia, ‘incest’, despite the fact that the Greek word ‘emomixia’ literally means ‘blood-mixing’, while the two individuals hypothetically involved in this incestuous union would not, of course, be blood relatives. The prohibition is well known, and to the best of Just’s knowledge completely adhered to in Greece: it certainly was in the village of Spartokhori where he did his fieldwork. This sets the Greek Orthodox Church’s prohibitions apart from those of the other major Catholic and Protestant European Christian sects. Although the villagers accepted it, they were nevertheless intrigued by the logical oddity of the prohibition, or rather, they were intrigued by the possibility of logically circumventing it (something which would be poniro, ‘clever/cunning’: a traditional Greek virtue/vice). Just was told of such a ruse (also recounted to him in many other parts of Greece): it would be possible for one pair of siblings to marry another if the two couples wedded at precisely the same moment, because none of the four would then be affinally related to any of the others at the time of their respective marriages. Despite the widespread references to this subterfuge, Just has never encountered any instance of its practice, and the Church would probably not countenance it; but it does indicate a degree of popular reflection on (and amusement about) the Orthodox rules of consanguinity 5

The rules of consanguinity and affinity are set out in the Pidhalion (1976: 73962). The Church forbids marriage between collateral kin down to and including ‘the seventh degree’. This means that a person may not marry the child of his/her second cousin, but may marry his/her third cousin. In some areas of Greece, however, marriage between third cousins is also prohibited (see Just 2000: 11519).

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and affinity. What it does not indicate is an explanation for their existence in the first place, which is what he wanted to understand. Just had a copy of the Pidhalion, the Greek Orthodox Church’s guide to canon law for priests. The prohibition (and others similar to it) is based on interpretation by the early Greek Fathers (Pidhalion 1976: 743 n.1) of a particular passage from St Matthew, chapter 19: ‘ From Matthew’s statement that a married couple are ‘of one flesh’ it follows that their respective siblings are placed in a brother/sister relationship, and marriage between them would therefore be incestuous. Just asked the village priest about this. He certainly knew of the prohibition (as did every villager) and he certainly knew the proscribed degrees of kinship, both consanguineous and affinal, that were impediments to marriage (he was, after all, the celebrant for most village marriages). He also knew that a married couple were ‘one flesh’. However, he did not know the doctrinal origin of the prohibitions. Now the village priest was a village man, without much education. When Just mentioned the Pidhalion to him he resentfully stated, in best village fashion, that he had never read it and did not possess a copy because i megali, ‘the big people’ (variously and vaguely the rich, the powerful, and in this case his ecclesiastical superiors) ‘don’t give us [one]’. As far as he was concerned, incest was incest. He suggested that if Just wanted to know more he should ask the bishop in Lefkadha. Just could indeed have asked the bishop, and all the theological hierarchy to Athens or even Constantinople/Istanbul. Or Just could simply have asked a younger and more educated village priest. The point, though, is that, at least in relation to the priest and the other villagers of Spartokhori, Just was in possession of information that ‘explained’ an aspect of their takenfor-granted social practice and ‘culture’ that they did not possess: as was Stewart when delineating the morphology and etiology of the exotika. Again, such a situation is anything but rare in anthropology. It is precisely what provoked, particularly for Latin America and South Asia, the notion of the ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions (Redfield 1956; Marriott 1955), a body of literate and erudite doctrine on one hand, versus ‘folk practice’ on the other. Unfortunately that distinction does not pass muster, partly because, at least for the case just cited, the ‘folk tradition’ did not depart in practice from its erudite justification: it simply failed to include or encompass that justification; and partly because, over time, the ‘great tradition’ itself has been created by a continual absorption, selection and codification of local folk practices (see for example Gudeman 1971). At any particular moment they may be distinct, or at least separable, but over time they both become part of the same process of invention, interaction

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and modification. Where there is no ‘guardian’ institution or body, nothing that lays claim to codifying a great tradition, the same historical process that removes explanatory origins from contemporary everyday practices, beliefs or indeed imaginary (and deniable) cultural entities remains in play. As we have suggested, we can summon up (or have summoned up for us) vampires or Father Christmas from our repertoire of popular culture. That Bram Stoker created most (though not all) of the now commonplace features of vampires in 1897, or that the Coca-Cola company created the red-suited white-bearded figure now definitional of commercial Christmas in 1931, is not necessarily known by those who now watch True-Blood or Vampire Diaries or who hang up their children’s stockings the night before Christmas. Of course, such creations were not ex nihilo (they never are) but their current forms had historically definitional moments. Those moments ‘explain’ current forms but, importantly, knowledge about them is not necessary for those forms to exist as part of our cultural repertoire. At this stage, then, rather than falling back on the notion of great and little traditions, it is simpler to claim that ‘culture’, or rather cultural knowledge, is not evenly distributed. That idea has been entertained for a long time: Turner’s ritual expert Muchona could explain Ndembu symbolism in a way that most Ndembu could not (1967). In our immediate cases, Kyria Sophia knew more about exotika than the young men; the bishop or a younger priest probably knew more about the basis of the Orthodox rules of consanguinity and affinity than Just’s village priest; and there are plenty of people who have read Bram Stoker, and pub quiz players who know the role of Coca-Cola in our current cultural iconography. That situation is brilliantly portrayed in Robert Altman’s 1978 film, A Wedding, in which a professional wedding adviser takes the participants through the rehearsal for a lavish family wedding, explaining to them at each point the significance of what it is they will be doing. They required professional assistance for an explanation of their own actions. At an academic level the same disjuncture between knowledge of cultural practice and perplexity about its meaning and significance is brilliantly dealt with by Simon Charsley’s analysis of interpretations of the wedding cake in Scotland (1987). Again, participants were reasonably conversant with the current conventions (even if they sometimes disagreed with or refused to follow them). However, their ‘explanations’ for those conventions were mostly informed guesses: reflections on what the wedding cake and its accompanying rituals might mean or have meant, or what they meant for the participants personally. As Charsley states: ‘Indigenous exegesis should not be treated as a guide to any “true

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meaning”, singular or plural, at which the perspicacious anthropologist may, with or without such indigenous help, eventually arrive’ (1987: 94). Charsley takes this argument an important step further. The anthropologist may contribute some ‘expert’ knowledge relating to the interpretation of such phenomena as the wedding cake, for example historical or comparative data that informants themselves have not researched (such as Just adduced in the case of Greek marriage prohibitions). He or she is also in a position to collate and review the various interpretations proffered by informants. But in the end, as Charsley stresses, anthropologists in such circumstances are playing the same game as their informants: seeking plausible interpretations. Indigenous exegesis does not lead to any ‘true meaning’; but neither do the anthropologist’s investigations. Charsley’s point is that what we should be seeking are not definitive meanings but ways in which elements of practice are capable of being ‘read’ within the culture, since this is the way they appear to actors and observers alike. However, it is not just the indeterminacy of meaning that is at issue here. The ontological status of what we purport to study, of the ethnographic object, of ‘culture’, is also called into question. If behaviour, ‘elements of practice’, are to be (possibly quite variously) ‘read’ within the culture by both actors and anthropologists alike, what is the status of this ‘culture’ within which they are read? The minimalist zigzag between the actions, statements and (by inference) thoughts and beliefs of the finite group of individuals with whom we interact, and ‘culture’ as some collective realm that is no more than the generalization and hypothetical expansion of those actions, statements and (by inference) thoughts and beliefs, clearly will not do, or else there would be no indeterminacy. Culture must be seen as something only ever partially instantiated by the behaviour of individuals, but, importantly, at the same time it must not be seen as some hypostasized entity whose elusive reality could ever be fully instantiated. It too is indeterminant: as ethnographers we can neither study nor reconstruct ‘Culture’ writ large. Nevertheless, along with our informants, we can do participate in it, discuss it, and thereby reach a partial, incomplete but justifiable understanding of culture writ small.

CHAPTER EIGHT ANTHROPOLOGICAL TRANSLATION

Such zigzags are part and parcel of anthropological analysis, whether one’s field is ‘at home’ or abroad. This raises the issue of translation, both in its literal meaning and metaphorically when anthropology is viewed as a form of cultural translation. The problem with many of the arguments for relativism or for multiple ontologies is that they are too strong: if they were correct there would be no way of understanding other people (even in our own culture). We can understand others, therefore some form of translation is possible. Edmund Leach is characteristically direct when he says that the anthropological problem of coping with cultural difference is essentially one of translation: We started by emphasizing how different are ‘the others’ and made them not only different but remote and inferior. Sentimentally we then took the opposite track and argued that all human beings are alike [...] but that didn’t work either, ‘the others’ remained obstinately other. But now we have come to see that the essential problem is one of translation. The linguists have shown us that all translation is difficult, and that perfect translation is usually impossible. And yet we know that for practical purposes a tolerably satisfactory translation is always possible even when the original ‘text’ is highly abstruse. Languages are different but not as different as all that. Looked at in this way social anthropologists are engaged in establishing a methodology for the translation of cultural language. In a shrunken world of communication satellites and supersonic airliners this is an important and worthwhile task but unromantic (Leach 1973: 772).

In this Chapter we argue that Leach’s position is substantially correct. Anthropologists are faced with problems similar to translation yet much of the literature on the topic is strangely unhelpful, being dominated (for understandable reasons) by the varying tasks of literary translation. For anthropologists a specific task of translation is primarily a didactic or heuristic exercise. The job at hand is not primarily to produce a parallel text which ‘does the same job’ as the original. Rather our aim is to unpack

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and explore the original in ways which are comprehensible to our audiences.

Theories of Translation Anthropologists strive to understand people in their own situation in the world. This includes both how ‘they’ see it, and how it is from ‘our’ point of view. Both these objectives are fraught with difficulty, but to abandon them is to render the discipline pointless. This starting point creates some distance from the emerging field of ‘translation studies’ as documented by textbooks such as that of Gentzler ([1993] 2001) and collections such as that of Venuti (2000b). Venuti himself recognizes (2000a) that ‘translation studies’ is a heterogeneous field but that its principle concern is with texts rather than with people. Spivak ([1992] 2000) stresses the political implications of the exercise of translation,1 and she is among those who see the hermeneutic exercise of interpreting other people’s actions as being a form of translation (Gentzler (2001: 146-7, 164) discussing Derrida). Anthropologists’ prime concern is to examine how people understand the world in which they live. Immediately this raises the reflexive problem of how we can understand other peoples’ understandings. At its most abstract this relates to the philosophical conundrum of how we can know that ‘other minds’ exist and what might be in them (see Jones 2003). Those who take the pessimistic and subversive line that its very situation and contextuality make anthropology impossible2 can be proved wrong by the fact of our existence as social beings. To argue an abstruse philosophical point with a friend in the pub, and then to change the way we argue the same point with a senior professor in a seminar room, we implicitly employ the very sorts of interpretations which anthropology makes explicit. So radical translation starts at home (Povinelli 2001: 323 ff; see below). The acknowledgment of such skills and their systematic deployment are sufficient to establish the possibility of anthropology (and justify our refusal to throw away the Wittgenstein.3

1

See also Niranjana (1992) and Yengoyan (2003 esp. 41). This seems to be the lesson drawn from Bourdieu, or from Wittgenstein via Winch in the UK. 3 Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus about discarding a ladder after having climbed it (1981: 6.54). At that point he believed language was inadequate and the point of philosophy was to appreciate this and then refrain from further mistakes (including using language). However, he had to use language in order to explain 2

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When considering the particular problem of how to understand and explain an ethnographic example, there seems to be increasing pessimism. This is based on versions of Quine’s ‘radical translation problem’ which is also used to undermine the general validity or even the possibility of anthropology. This is closely related to the problem raised in the preceding paragraph. As noted in Chapter 6 above, Bourdieu has presented a sociological version of Quine’s ‘radical translation problem’ (see below). This gives rise to: ‘the perennial problem of how to translate from one culture to another. [There is] a growing conviction that “the only way to write sensitive interpretations of other cultures is to write in the style of the people we study”’ (Hendry 1986). However, this is not a realistic injunction, especially when the written ‘sensitive interpretation’ is of an oral tradition. We write books to be read by others who have learned to read critically. In that respect we are ineluctably distanced and ‘other’ from the people with whom we work, be they in Africa, Asia or Elmdon. (An exception may be the scientists studied by Garfinkel et al. (1981) but the lack of interest among scientists in what non-scientists have to say about them amounts almost to dismissal; see Diana Forsythe (2001) for other examples.)

Beyond the Radical Translation Problem Quine (1960) started the debate about the ‘radical translation problem’. His argument is that there is no single best possible translation: that two or more conflicting interpretations of a foreign language may be equally valid. Moreover, each ‘translation manual’ may be wholly adequate and able to cope with all possible utterances. Thus, there is no empirical method of deciding which alternative translation is better. With the possibility of a ‘best’ translation we must also reject the notion of synonymy since a synonym is a translation from and into the same language. The argument has been further extended within the philosophy of science to encompass the under-determination of theory by data (most notoriously by Feyerabend 1975). We believe that in order for anthropology to proceed Quine’s extremism needs to be addressed since, if his argument is true, then other people cannot be understood: this condemns us to solipsism, or at the very least to living in Spinozan monads, miraculously coordinated.

this, so it served as a ladder which could be later discarded. Fortunately he later changed his mind about this.

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Hallen and Sodipo (1986) give a detailed account of Quine’s arguments, which they criticize, but their most effective criticism is in their practice: their success in analysing the Yoruba concepts of knowledge (mò and gbàgbó) itself belies the force of Quine’s argument. Indeed, despite Hallen and Sodipo’s critique of Evans-Pritchard (1937), Mair (1969) and Parrinder (1970), anthropological accounts are the result of the very ‘collaborative analysis’ between ethnographer and local informant(s) which Hallen and Sodipo’s work promotes. Kirk (1969) claims that the possibility of ‘back translation’ (a routine check practised by working translators 4 ) reveals a contradiction at the heart of Quine’s argument since, hypothetically, the back translation will reveal divergences in the source language depending on which translation scheme is used, enabling a choice to be made (although another philosopher (Hyslop 1972) disagrees). Despite our sympathy with Kirk there is a stronger response to the radical translation problem. We explain this below, but we also provide arguments based on some of the techniques of ethnomethodology which justify anthropological endeavour, independent of argument in the purely philosophical domain. Quine’s position may be summarized as follows: a) All understanding involves acts of interpretation equivalent to translation, even in a monolingual situation.5 b) Interpretation is an essential part of action. This is a tenet of phenomenology: consider the interpretative act needed, for example, to distinguish irony from sincerity. The actor must interpret the world in order to decide how to act appropriately, in this example whether to laugh or fall for the joke trap. c) The radical translation problem implies that a choice of best translation is impossible, ergo d) all action is impossible: because we cannot arrive at a definitive interpretation/translation, we cannot decide how to act.6 This is clearly absurd and renders suspect the radical translation problem. Quine presents the problem, not to attack anthropology, but in order to question the correctness of a denominative theory of meaning. The radical 4

See, for example, Nida and Taber (1969). See Quine (1960), Steiner (1979), Heritage (1984 ch. 3), Jones (2003), Herzfeld (2003: 144), Gentzler (2001: 164, discussing Derrida) and Povinelli (2001: 323). 6 The philosopher Donald Davidson agrees, but see criticism in Forster (1998: 148). Archer (1998b: 518-23) discusses the problem from the perspective of critical realism. 5

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translation problem assumes that meaning is denominative: that is, the meaning of words or phrases is modelled on the meaning of proper names. Change this account of meaning and the radical translation problem vanishes as Quine wished. Another respondse to Quine is that the radical translation problem is not as normally described since, prima facie, everyone can perform interpretative acts which are tantamount to translation (a point to which Shanker (2001) returned). In a short piece on Quine arguing that he establishes only a ‘moderate fallibilism’ and not the pernicious universal scepticism he is often invoked to justify, Hjort seeks to establish a ‘prudent fallibilism’ in which the recognition ‘that conventional practices are fallible does not mean that they always fail’ (1990: 44). Using David Lewis’s account of social conventions as providing solutions to coordination problems which avoid infinite regress she presents a robust response to pernicious or imprudent scepticism. Such scepticism is summarized as: ‘1. I cannot prove with apodictic certainty that I am not a brain in a vat and 2. therefore I am a brain in a vat’ (40). In a move to which many anthropologists would be sympathetic, Hjort prefers to concentrate on the normal cases in which particular translations achieve pragmatic success, rather than the ‘impossible’ theoretically perfect translation. However, the difficult cases are lures for anthropological analysis and explication. In a similar fashion Agar (2011) distinguishes between foreignizing or domesticating translation strategies, each with both advantages and a cost. We must note that the hegemony of international academe implies that foreignizing into global academese is the norm. So we — the English-speaking readers — get a rough idea of where the translation of an Ifaluk term is located, but also a sense of why our available terms are different. Then we learn what the term does mean as she shows us case after case of Ifaluk using the term in different contexts until we ‘get’ it. This is a classic ethnographic way of ‘foreignizing’ the target language community which in this case means an assumed languaculture of American English speakers, probably with anthropological colleagues mostly in mind. It is a classic ethnographic strategy (Agar 2011: 41).

Recall Zeitlyn’s real life problem of how to translate the British English names ‘Bonfire Night’ or ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ into Mambila (referred to above). The back translation of what he ended up saying was: ‘"Bonfire Night" is a traditional festival where I come from, when people dance around a fire and shoot guns into the air’. This is clearly inadequate and approximate. However, it was only his first schematic attempt, and he

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hopes to do better: next time he is there on 5 November he will try again, and will slowly iterate towards a better explanation as quasi-translation.7 Within anthropology, Keesing (1985) uses the ‘problematic’ of translation (as he terms it) to urge caution in the search for ‘metaphysics’. He suggests that anthropologists are apt to mistake ‘conventional metaphor’ (which implies no metaphysical commitment) for metaphysical assertion. However, he does not doubt the possibility of translation but simply advocates caution and sensitivity. Robert Feleppa has discussed this issue (1982; 1986; 1988) latterly as part of the ‘emic/etic’ debate (1990). Feleppa argues that translation should not be seen as producing a set of descriptive hypotheses, hence that it is not susceptible to Quine’s argument for underdetermination by evidence. Instead Feleppa argues that translations have more in common with rules, especially in the way that both are ‘violable’ without being refutable. Thus Feleppa is able to agree with Quine that translations lack truth values, while maintaining that ‘they still have an empirically legitimate role, akin to that of technical definitions and rules of inference’ (1986: 249). Translation establishes (or codifies) the framework within which facts are expressed. It is thus a necessary and important step in any ethnographic description, but is not susceptible to the same sorts of criticisms levelled at ‘the facts’ (1986: 248-9). It is notable that Feleppa’s articles cite no phenomenologists, ethnomethodologists or sociolinguists. In a short reply to Feleppa, Scheff tellingly comments: ‘[Steiner’s] argument about translation is empirical in the sense that there is a community of bilinguals to whom we can appeal’ (1987: 365). This leads us straight back to Kirk’s argument about ‘back translation’. Feleppa and Quine are both guilty of the ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983). The anthropological subject is seen as ‘other’ and no dialogue is possible. People who are bilingual can and do discuss the adequacy of translations, and thereby confute the radical translation problem. Indeed Quine allows for this possibility, but describes it as a ‘costly’ solution: ‘We can see a way, though costly, in which he can still accomplish radical translation of [nonobservational occasion] sentences. He can settle down and learn the language directly as an infant might. Having thus become bilingual, he can translate the nonobservational occasion sentences by introspected stimulus synonymy’ (1960: 47). 7

Zeitlyn’s explanation left out religious terrorism and the consequent ‘phobic persecution’ which continued for centuries. The actual historic events were sufficiently long ago for their commemoration now to seem quaint; most participants in UK are not anti-Catholic; nor do they see Guy Fawkes Night as being in any way connected to religion. This is evidence of how secular the contemporary UK has become and the effects of the passage of time.

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Dummett (1981: 615) calls this the ‘anthropological solution’ and that is exactly what it is. He also says: ‘If there is communication between human beings at all, it must be possible for them to adopt some determinate scheme of inter-translation’ (1981: 376-7). Such a scheme is next outlined. An alternative approach to Quine which does not involve such implicit assumptions of ‘otherness’ is ethnomethodology’s ‘social life solution’. This suggests that we adopt a working assumption to avoid the implications of the radical translation problem unless and until forced to confront it. It transpires that we rarely, if ever, find ourselves in such a position. The working assumption is adequate for any situation except conversations with certain philosophers. The success of this implicit positivism enables us to leave those philosophers to agonize over their position while we get on with the work at hand. The multilingualism that predominates in most of the world leaves no alternative for the inhabitants and those who want to understand them. Wierzbicka notes that no advocate of the radical translation problem has actually produced an alternate translation manual for an individual case: the problem remains purely hypothetical. Translation, especially translation-as-interpretation, poses no problem in everyday life. The philosophical problems are assumed not to bite. Shown a rabbit and given a term for it (pace Quine8) there is evidence that ‘basic level objects’ do exist (Rosch et al. 1976; Rosch 1977a) so there is justification for linking the term to the rabbit, rather than to a ‘rabbit-part’, although such justification is rarely if ever called for. Moreover, translation usually occurs between people with a high degree of cultural similarity, or at least a long history of cultural contact. (For example, between most Europeans, although Just’s fieldwork in Greece included surprises for him, despite Greece’s long history of contact with the rest of the world. Cameroonian examples include the polyglot environments in the Northwest Region and on the Tikar Plain.) The philosophical problems are therefore not an issue. In a polyglot environment the strategy of assuming the possibility of translation is repeatedly tested. People act with confidence that translation is possible and find their confidence well founded. Zeitlyn asked Mambila people to discuss (in Fulfulde) with speakers of the Tikar, Kwanja, and Yamba languages9 whether those respective ethnic groups have equivalents 8 In Quine’s example a linguist and an informant see a rabbit. The informant says the word ‘gavagi’ but the linguist cannot determine whether this refers to the rabbit or just some part or ‘stage’ of it (1960: 29-57). 9 Note that these languages are not closely related to one another (except Mambila and Kwanja), but their speakers live close to one another and there have been well

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of what the Mambila call suàgà, either as oath-taking or as masquerade (see Zeitlyn (1994a) for extended discussion of suàgà and Zeitlyn (1994b) for a summary). All those participating saw these as reasonable and meaningful questions. Even stronger corroboration was provided when he was told that the Yamba have no equivalent oath, but do have a masquerade with a similar name. Tymoczko (2005) points out that multilingualism has long been part of the human condition, and that other intellectual traditions have also considered the ‘problem’ of translation (he considers both Arabic and Chinese concepts). In recent years translation theory has developed considerably, and the discussion is now much more sophisticated than mere abstraction from Quine’s theorizing. Authors consider actual cases, contrasting source and target texts. Yallop (2001) discusses an example, comparing Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with the Pitjantjatjara (an Australian Aborigine language) text Alitjinya Ngura Tjukurtjarangka: Alitji in the Dreamtime.10 Within anthropology Rubel and Rosman’s (2003) collection provides mainly theoretical discussion of the topic (e.g. their introduction and Yengoyan’s contribution). Juliane House provided a typology as a structural device to help assess translation quality (2001). She also acknowledges the importance of ethnography in helping to describe the different cultural contexts of the two texts concerned (the source and its translation). House mentions the problems caused by the move from the oral to the written medium. Transcription is a ‘translation of medium’ that may be more significant than any subsequent translation from one language to another. Silverstein (2003) establishes a continuum between strict ‘translation’ or narrow glossing, through ‘transduction’, to ‘transformation’ in which source and target belong to different genres. Nothing can be more transforming than transcribing the spoken word. Bal and Morra (2007: 7) call the move across media (sound to writing, visual to linguistic) ‘intermedial translation’ (see also Sturge 1997: 22; Cronin 2002: 49; Apter 2007). ‘Descriptive Translation Studies’, pioneered by Gideon Toury, address literary translation and the work of professional interpreters. Toury emphasizes the target language and culture. We assume that an anthropological readership wants to trace back along the translation chain documented cultural borrowings between the different groups, the Mambila use of the Tikar institution of chiefship and the associated term mgbè being among the most prominent. 10 Another case which would bear further examination is a translation of Homer’s Odyssey into the Ghanaian language Twi: see below.

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from English to the source langua-culture and that they are more interested in (for example) Mambila culture than English. In Eco’s terms (1994) anthropology prefers source-oriented translations to target-oriented ones. From a more literary perspective, what we produce (for example, in order to facilitate the understanding of the anthropological source context) is a halfway stage. Rather than a polished translation as a part of English academic culture it is something more in the spirit of Harris’ bi-text11 or Amélie Rorty’s ‘good enough’ translation (1989: 421). Quine features in anthropological discussion because the practice of many anthropologists puts us in a situation closer to radical translation than, for example, someone trying to translate Shakespeare into German or Goethe into English. On the other hand this makes it unsurprising that Toury can write a major work based on the detailed study of actual cases of translation without referring to Quine at all.

Treachery or Incompleteness? The Italian saying ‘tradutore, traditore’, ‘a translator is a traitor’, is mischievous and misleading. It is either trivial, or wrong, or both. It might be the case that, when giving an account of society Y in terms comprehensible to those from society X, we have to say things which strain at the edges of what is accepted in society Y. We do not accept that this is to traduce our sources, as authors such as Michel Callon would have us believe (1986: 218-19 and 223-5; see also Behar 1993: 339 and Liu 1995: 16. Readers should note that we have only read Callon in what he must hold to be an unreliable translation since his argument holds for all translations). Callon’s view is that translation is highly political, an expression of power: I can speak of you and your society as part of my control over you. (This parallels Spivak on representation and translation as acts of power.) Hence it relates to a long-standing debate in Marxist anthropology and political philosophy about whether a misleading understanding (an ideology) is helpful for those in power in the same way as it helps them that the subjugated masses misunderstand the way their society works. Space does not allow us to enter into this here, so having noted the relevance of power to the topic we regretfully leave it for debate elsewhere.

11

Harris defines this (1988: 8-9) as a ‘bilingual text stored in such a way that each retrievable segment consists of a segment in one language linked to a segment in the other language which has the same meaning’ (see Toury 1995: 96-7).

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Needham discusses Levy-Bruhl on the issues of primitive mentality: whether others can/do think differently in a deep profound sense, rather than thinking in the same ways but using different premises (1972: 16970). For Needham this comes down to issues concerning translation: can we understand another way of thinking (1972: 170)? If yes then translation is possible but contentious (also for Needham if the answer is yes then the mode of thought must be the same). If we cannot understand another way of thinking then we can neither explain nor translate it. But how can we tell that we cannot understand? It is always the case that if we work harder, do better ethnography, then the light might dawn. Needham talks of teasing out and feeling one’s way into the understanding of foreign concepts (1972: 170). This is similar to Umberto Eco’s description of translation as resembling a bargaining session (as it were between languages, and we would add between cultural traditions): The job of translation is a trial and error process, very similar to what happens in an Oriental bazaar when you are buying a carpet. The merchant asks 100, you offer 10 and after an hour of bargaining you agree on 50. Naturally, in order to believe that the negotiation has been a success you must have fairly precise ideas about this basically imprecise phenomenon called translation. In theory, different languages are impossible to hold to one standard; it cannot be said that the English ‘house’ is truly and completely the synonym of the French ‘maison’. But in theory no form of perfect communication exists. And yet, for better or worse, ever since the advent of Homo sapiens, we have managed to communicate (Eco 1994).

In a statement of faith in the foreword to a new (2011) online journal, Hau, its editors remark: Geoffrey Lloyd once noticed that no anthropologist has ever returned from the field announcing that he or she could understand nothing (2004: 4).12 Or as Umberto Eco (2004) notes, one should not only be preoccupied by the ontological constraints but also with the licenses of dire quasi la stessa cosa – of – almost –saying the same thing when translating—and accepting that linguistic incommensurability does not entail incomparability but a comparability in becoming. And most of us probably agree that 95% of what we learn in the field (whether Tibet, Madagascar or upper-class London) quickly comes to make intuitive sense to us. As for the remaining 5%, it is not so much incomprehensible, utterly alien, as excessive—at least in terms of the efforts required for its conceptualization. (da Col and Graeber 2011: viii).

12

A point also made by Archer (1998b: 521).

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Holbraad (2009: 83) makes a similar point: discussing Cuban Ifá divination he distinguishes between ordinary data and ordinary truths, such as whether the so-and-so are horticulturalists, from data which ‘resist collection’, such as how Ifá works, or whether that proposition is true. He then discusses universalist versus relativist positions on the problematic data in terms of belief (84-5). He could have taken a leaf out of Needham’s work and eschewed belief as an analytic term. Holbraad’s ontographic (his neologism) solution seems to be a straightforward application of speech act theory: diviners make worlds for their clients to inhabit by speaking, i.e. by relaying the pronouncements of Ifá. So if a client accepts (through their actions) that they are bewitched, then Ifá has spoken truly and the client now acts in a world in which they are bewitched. Yet this leaves open the possibility that the clients could exhibit more agency than Holbraad (and perhaps the babalawos he has been talking with) wants to allow: some clients might reject the results, arguing with their feet by shopping around and consulting another babalawo or another sort of practitioner altogether. The clients often construct the terms of their understanding of the world in collaboration with practitioners, and sometimes in collaboration with anthropologists. We agree with Holbraad, da Col and Graeber that some aspects of human life are a lot easier to comprehend than others, and that the challenge of anthropology lies in the struggle to come to terms with or otherwise understand some few radically different ways of seeing and dealing with the world. Hence, we see the process of preparing translations and the conversations (across and between languages) that accompany them as a productive model for anthropology.

The Making of Translations When preparing a corpus of texts in their original language together with translations, two obvious sources of guidance are available. One is the corpus of published texts represented by series such as The Oxford Library of African Literature and its francophone equivalent, Classiques Africaines. However, these include little or no explanation of their own production. There is no discussion of the problems inherent in making translations of African texts which are comprehensible to foreign readers while remaining faithful to their original form. Indeed, in the Oxford Library series Finnegan (1970) scarcely mentions translation, and certainly does not discuss it as an issue. Exceptions include, in addition to the authors quoted below, Jackson (1982: 67) and Meillassoux et al. (1967: 8) but none affords the subject the consideration it deserves. This is partly

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because the works concentrate on ‘literature’: stories, sagas, myths and performances quite different from the transcriptions and translations of naturally occurring conversation at issue here. This difference also renders much of the literary discussion, for example of the translation of poetry, less applicable to anthropology. One of the few to give the matter any consideration is Jack Goody (1972: 60): ‘My aim is the effacement of the translator, though I cannot hope to attain that goal’. And ‘One’s first task is to present a faithful text and a literal translation, as a base for the discussion of codes, meanings, and thoughts. For the great difficulty in the communicating or understanding of the thought of nonliterate peoples is the lack of adequate texts. Everything is mediated by a literate interpreter, the extent of whose contribution is rarely clear. For this reason one can rely upon little of the basic data for the study of la pensée sauvage and the reader has to be doubly careful of the analyses based upon them’ (p. 61). Goody has presented both translation and original text, as has Zeitlyn elsewhere (1994, 2005). Yet the Bagre texts Goody discusses are described as fixed texts: they are taught formally and efforts are made to commit them to memory (pp. 57-60). As such they resemble parts of the Ifa texts presented and analysed by Abimbola (1976), Akinnaso (1983; 1992; 1995) and Bascom (1969). The texts Zeitlyn has translated are not of this type, being freely composed by the speakers (in the court discussions considered, only the oath-taking refrains are formulaic (Zeitlyn 1994a)). The types of analysis practised by Brown and Levinson and other conversational analysts are useful for anthropologists, despite their goals being different from those of sociolinguists. The works of Meillassoux (1979) and Lydall and Strecker (1979a, vol. 1; 1979b, vol. 2) together comprise one of the most comprehensive 13 attempts to publish ‘indigenous ethnography’ while remaining truthful and frank about their relationship as ethnographers to the data they present. Translation is discussed briefly in ‘Baldambe explains’ (Lydall and Strecker 1979b: viii-ix). They attempt to keep their English as close as possible to the Hamar in order to reproduce the ‘poetry and expression of [Baldambe’s] descriptions [. ] and the rhythm of his speech [...] the fast passages and interludes, the accelerations, the lingering of his voice’. The hope was to preserve in the translation something of ‘the quality of the original speech’ (1979b: vi, quoting from vol. 1). Zeitlyn’s choice, unlike Strecker and Lydall, has been to publish the original transcripts together 13

Caplan (1997) presents a more recent example of indigenous ethnography and the relationship between ethnographer and informant, but she does not discuss translation.

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with a ‘free’ translation. The fact that the originals are available on the Internet14 was a stimulant to accuracy while freeing him to pay attention to the interests of immediate comprehension by the reader. ‘Conversations in Dambaiti’ (Strecker 1979) and ‘Universals in Human Thought’ (Brown and Levinson 1978) together constitute a landmark both in the quality of the data used (in the former) and in the approaches to types of theorizing about that data (in the latter). Yet time and again when reading ‘Conversations in Dambaiti’ we wanted to refer to the original transcript, or at least to have more detail about the overlaps and pauses. We wondered if, after reading Brown and Levinson, Strecker would publish the material in a more detailed form. However, in his subsequent work Strecker used the previously published material (1988: 59), thus emphasizing the independence of his work from that of Brown and Levinson. It is to be hoped that he will soon complement this theoretical work with the publication of full transcripts, allowing more detailed analysis. The second source of guidance is the now extensive literature in both philosophy and anthropology concerning ‘the radical translation problem’ (see above) or the ‘hermeneutic circle’ (see Kepnes 1986 for citations of Ricoeur). That discussion is illuminating and occasionally entertaining but it has surprisingly little application to the actual task of translating a conversation, a particular recording. The fact that translation is hard and problematic should not lead one to conclude that it is impossible. Ways must be found of reducing the difficulties, of easing constructively around the problems, avoiding the extreme claims either that the problems are insurmountable or that they do not exist. Ethnomethodology occupies an interesting position here since on one hand it is devoid of theory or at least sociologically naive (Gellner 1975) but on the other it has led to some of the most interesting linguistic work, both theoretically and empirically (Heritage 1984; Atkinson 1984; Garfinkel et al. 1981; Brown and Levinson 1978). Conversational analysis is modest in some of its ambitions 15 but by its meticulous attention to detail it provides a salutary lesson to anthropologists who can avail themselves of its method at the very least, no matter to what end. Some

14

The texts analysed in Zeitlyn (2005) are available in the Talkbank archive: http://talkbank.org/browser/index.php?url=Exploration/Mambila/ [accessed 6 July 2014]. 15 It is ambitious in attempting to establish secure foundations for sociology, but modest in its relationship to the higher-level theorizing undertaken by most sociologists and anthropologists.

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have already done so, Jack Bilmes (1996), Alessandro Duranti (1994) and Michael Moerman (1988) being prominent among them. John Wallace (1979) discusses one of the closest approximations to an actual case of radical translation: the decipherment of Linear B. In a pragmatic discipline such as archaeology the effort to generate a translation manual ceased as soon as a single working one had been developed. The work of translating the tablets has proceeded untroubled by theoretical concerns that the translation produced may not be the best one possible: to have one at all has been sufficient to date. Although this may be sufficient for archaeologists is not theoretically satisfying for philosophers. Another worked example of radical translation is Ofosu-Appiah’s rendering of Homer’s Odyssey into the Ghanaian language, Twi (1957). Its translator has discussed (1960) some of the problems he found in dealing with Greek similes and epithets. The result was, he says, comprehensible to Twi readers, although one of the features he had to abandon was metre and close parallel in word length for some phrases.

Problems of Context A long debated problem concerning both monolingual comprehension and translation is that of ‘context’ (see Cook 1990; Duranti and Goodwin 1992). If a phrase or utterance is only fully comprehensible in its context, how can we stop the context from expanding infinitely to encompass all the intersubjective knowledge of the speakers? Clearly this does not occur, or else rapid and intelligible speech would be impossible. Herb Clark has presented an account and a formalism for dealing with this problem (1996). In conversation the structure of ‘adjacency pairs’ underlying turntaking allows shared meaning (and hence context) to be swiftly negotiated, often without explicit mention. The way that, for example, pauses are used to offer a change of turn, or are taken to reveal uncertainty, gives scope for just such negotiation of meaning under the guise of clarification. The ethnomethodological solution, borrowed from phenomenology, is that speakers make bootstrapping assumptions not to extend context infinitely. If speakers assume that other speakers mean just what they themselves mean, ‘that they are all talking about the same thing’, then they can continue to talk or act, and only worry about meaning/context if there is a breakdown in the action/talk. When the smooth flow of turn-taking breaks down, when one person’s actions challenge another person’s expectations of what will be said or done at a particular moment, we see acted out in public questions of what is meant by social action. The

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conversation which follows such a breakdown shows how speakers renegotiate their understanding of each other. The breakdown must be repaired in order for the conversation to continue (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977; Schegloff 1992). Violations of the structure of adjacency pairs are marked and often remarked upon; the ruptures in the flow of smooth polished speech are therefore excellent subjects for anthropological study, as events when intersubjective meanings are discussed (albeit fleetingly in most instances). That said, it should be recognized that public accessibility does not of itself guarantee public interpretability: Marga Kreckel (1981) analysed the early fly-on-the-wall television documentary series ‘The Family’ and the problems that outside observers have in understanding what the actors subsequently say was going on in any particular conversation. Such discrepancies may arise even where several outside observers agree among themselves. One way of allowing for such problems is to work by stages, starting from a set of relatively crude unambiguous factors and progressing to some of the fine detail. Coding schemes such as that used by Zeitlyn (2005) have been explicitly designed to gloss over the fine detail in order to achieve greater reliability. In the terms used above they are explicitly incomplete or partial. The parallel in translation is to distinguish the more straightforward passages from those which are obscure or uncertain. This, coupled with access to the source texts/recordings, enables readers to assess and question the translation in detail, and to make graduated judgments, instead of simply deciding whether any single translation is good or bad (see House 2001 for further discussion). Another examination of the problem lies at the heart of Sperber and Wilson’s ‘Relevance’ (1986). They take the relevance of an utterance to be assumed and then choose a context to justify that relevance (p. 144). By introducing the notion of ‘contextual effect’ they prevent the infinite extension of context, since if a widened context allows no further deductions to be made (that is, if it has no contextual effect) then there is no point in widening the context. The fear of an infinitely expandable context can be seen to be founded partly on introspection and a sense that subjective, associational meaning is limitless. However, conversation/ communication/human interaction (whichever label is preferred) continues independent of this argument, else it could not occur at all (see Levinson’s (1989b) review of Sperber and Wilson; and Clark 1996 for an alternative solution). Ethnographic enquiry proceeds as a series of conversations in which understanding (partial and fragmentary) is negotiated between anthropologists and the people with whom they work. The conversations

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may be occasioned by non-verbal observations but it is through discussion that understanding is achieved. Writing up, we tease at our memories of these conversations, both helped and hindered by our field notes, photographs, tapes and memories. All Grice's maxims for linguistic cooperation and communicative implicature (1975) are invoked as we strive to identify the context of, and hence what might have been meant by, an utterance overheard one afternoon at a beer-drink, during a hearing at the Chief’s Palace in a small village in Cameroon or in a coffee-shop on a Greek island.

Incommensurability, incomprehensibility and untranslatability Incommensurability. In the philosophy of science this term is associated with Kuhn (1962) and Feyerabend (1975) and cited by those such as de Castro 1988 talking about ontologies. de Castro and his followers take seriously (and literally) Feyerabend and Kuhn’s talk of the followers of different scientific theories as ‘living in different worlds’: we think they are mistaken in this. In the extremely limited field of scientific research it makes sense to talk about different theories being incommensurable in a strict or literal sense. They talk of different entities with different (measurable) properties so the qualities that can be measured are different and not comparable. (As Oberheim and Hoyningen-Huene (2010) explain, even self-professed anarchists such as Feyerabend recognized in less polemic moments that well constructed experiments could have a bearing on rival theories.) Incomprehensibility. This term is never used in anthropology, where the unspoken assumption is that the ways in which different people understand, act in and talk about the world are comprehensible (although what this means is not explained). In their editorial quoted above, da Col and Graeber cite Geoffrey Lloyd’s 2010 article on ‘Cross-cultural Universals and Cultural Relativities’ in which he gives a delicate account of the complexity of interdisciplinary generalization and the search for universals (not that complexity is an excuse to stop trying). All too often this results in universalists and relativists talking past one another rather than actually engaging in dialogue. Salmond and Salmond, responding to Lloyd, say: the point is not so much to ask whether certain ontologies are incommensurable or not; at certain moments at the very least [...] they

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clearly are. The more interesting question is how people work to overcome such incommensurabilities, crafting intelligibility between their own and others’ ways of being (2010: 6).16

Our view is that incommensurabilities that can be overcome are not really incommensurable, so Salmond and Salmond are using the word in a far weaker sense than Lloydand the philosophers they cite. We agree that there are radically divergent ways of understanding the world, but we believe we can gain some (if incomplete) understanding of them. So we do not oppose the idea of de Castrian ontologies per se but we do oppose both their implication that people are prisoners of ontologies and that different ontologies are incommensurable, or more strictly incomprehensible. Humans have long moved between them (the Salmonds themselves cite the case of the Maori intellectual artist and scholar Tupaia). Although the Salmonds cite Forster as supporting them, we believe his analysis of ‘the very idea of denying the existence of radically different conceptual schemes’ is neutral in this argument. As he puts it: ‘it is not at all clear that acknowledging the existence of radical differences in concepts and beliefs must lead to skepticism or relativism - that denying their existence is the only way of avoiding skepticism and relativism (or even the best way)’ (Forster 1998: 165). Untranslatability. That a term or concept is untranslatable does not mean that it cannot be glossed or explained. It only means that there is no simple, short direct equivalence between target and source languages. This is a problem for literary translators but not for anthropologists: reading the discussions about Nuer concepts of twins one gains a sense of how the Nuer see connections between twins and birds, perhaps gaining a sense of the conceptual space. This does not help writers in English (for example) trying to write succinctly about those Nuer concepts, but that is not the point at issue (Povinelli 2001 makes a similar argument). The ultimate 16

In a footnote they make a parallel with imperialism: anthropologists impose one understanding on another. But understanding is only imposed metaphorically. Anthropologists may have been hand-dogs of imperialism and for a variety of reasons have been more powerful than the ‘subjects of colonialization’ and are thus able (uniquely) to disseminate their understandings widely. However, their understandings were not imposed on their subjects in the way that colonial rule was. Zeitlyn’s Mambila colleagues know the limits of his understandings, whether or not they are able to publish these in academic fora. Muñoz had already anticipated this move: ‘Anthropologists often retain relativism as the ultimate bastion against Western imperialism: a noble but erroneous position, for it shifts the argument from power to cognition’ (1986: 217).

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anthropological translation of a single word or phrase may be a monograph: a whole book may be needed to explain the range of nuances and variant meanings that a single word evokes in a particular cultural setting.

Anthropological Translation In an earlier work Zeitlyn presented both transcripts and their translations in order to clarify the processes involved, and to present more of the evidence on which his larger, generalized statements concerning ‘Mambila religion’ were based (1994b). The footnotes to the transcripts grounded a better justification for the wider assertions than that they were ‘based on fieldwork experience’. To make assertions about a metaphor or idiomatic phrase is very different from making general statements about Mambila cosmology or kinship structures. The philosophical problems discussed above do not arise during ‘anthropological translation’. By ‘anthropological translation’ we mean first the preparation and presentation of texts as part of an anthropological analysis, and secondly, by extension, the whole anthropological enterprise, as suggested by Leach (1973). Many ‘anthropological translations’ in the first sense have been published since Malinowski’s The Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935). The two theoretical chapters in that work raise problems in translation which have largely been overcome, both by the development of pragmatics as a branch of linguistics, and by some of the more widely accepted results of structural linguistics. What remains relevant to the current debate is Malinowski’s stress on contextualization, which is now a central and inescapable part of any ‘anthropological translation’. The texts presented by Malinowksi remain paradigm examples, despite both the subsequent advances in technology (texts are now usually based on audio recordings) and questions about his linguistic skills (Berry 1965: xiii). Those who translate the Bible aim to communicate ‘the’ message attributed to the writers of the Gospels. The intention is that the translation should be ‘transparent’. The translated text should read as though it were written by a native speaker, as though the Apostle had lived next door to the reader, rather than in Galilee, although the first priority of an accurate translation is to preserve ‘the message’ (Nida and Taber 1969). Conversely, an ‘anthropological translation’ must be open to critical scrutiny in a way not necessary for Bible translations. It must make clear the divergences between the language of the speakers being reported and that of the analyst. The best result for anthropologists is not a good

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translation in terms of the standards applied to the Bible, a work of literature or professional translators. A better model may be found in Venuti’s ideas of ‘foreignizing translation’ which resists the lures of fluency in the target language and ‘abusive fidelity’ (1995: 182-3) which creates dissonance in the target language in order to be faithful to and to illuminate the source. Ideally, anthropological translation should produce an intelligible translation which illuminates the content of what was said, the reason for speech, and the linguistic devices used to express it. In a given piece of translation, reference should also be made to the wider social structural account which is being demonstrated or illustrated. This is extremely close to Malinowski’s position: the ethnography is more important than exact linguistic equivalence. As he put it: [foreign conceptions absent from English] can only be translated into English, not by giving their imaginary equivalent—a real one obviously cannot be found—but by explaining the meaning of each of them through an exact Ethnographic account of the sociology, culture and tradition of that native community (1923: 300 quoted in Rosman and Rubel 2003: 273).

Good examples are: Goldman’s analysis of Huli disputes (1983), Sherzer’s work on the Kuna (1983), the work of the Tedlocks (B. 1982 and D. 1983), Moerman’s work on Thai conversation and social structure (1988), the analysis of politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson 1978) and Duranti on Samoan village politics (1994). The research of Jack Bilmes (1996: 172-3) follows in a broadly similar direction. He discusses translation and acknowledges the problems of authority and the inevitable distancing from the original when the source language is unknown to the reader. His compromise (like Zeitlyn’s) is to attempt to stick close to the sources and to use these to ground his conclusions. In one of the few discussions explicitly dedicated to translation in ethnography, Sturge (1997) criticizes some easy targets, such as the power inequalities between anthropologists and those they talk with, and those between author and reader. She cites two examples of which she approves: the work of Karin Barber (1991) and an edition of nineteenth-century sources produced for a contemporary Lakota readership (Walker et al. 1991). The latter is praised for having a good index, naming informants, and having ‘a four-page discussion of translation procedures and a careful attitude to culture-bound terms’ (1997: 33). We can think of no

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anthropologist who would dispute the need for such scholarly supporting material. Fabian discusses mistakes, confusions and misunderstandings (1995). He acknowledges the influence of the ethnography of speaking, but stresses the autobiographical basis of ethnographic knowledge. He says: ‘As a matter of elementary logic, it is impossible to determine the significance of a negative proposition with any degree of exactitude. To establish that something was misunderstood tells us nothing about how it should be understood’ (pp. 47-8). Later on the same page he implies that even approximation is too ambitious an ideal. However, in describing the mistakes he made during his research he sketches the bounds of possibility, the limits of misunderstanding. In Swahili, a Bantu language, the word muzungu has a range of possible meanings. He picked the wrong meaning, but not an entirely aberrant one. For example, he did not confuse it with another word altogether, so his mistake is a comprehensible one, from which we can learn. He deems it worthy of inclusion in the article published in American Anthropologist. He does not recount tales from the distant days when he was first learning Swahili, when we assume he made foolish mistakes like any novice. (Zeitlyn’s Mambila friends still amuse themselves with his mistakes, some of them now recounted at second hand by adults who were children when he first arrived in Somié.) So we think Fabian discounts the importance for ethnographers of comprehending (often through their mistakes) the range of possible misunderstandings. That is, in part, why the ethnography of speaking has been so important. It has pointed researchers at conversational ruptures where the range of meanings is discursively displayed for all the participants (possibly including ethnographers) as the understanding of a participant is corrected. This leaves uncertain the tentative understandings that we have gathered but which have not been so tested. However, by virtue of passing that implicit test, they should be granted some approximate validity. As the ethnomethodologists would say, they are adequate for the purpose at hand; but they are still revisable for all that. Ingold and Pálsson, introducing and closing a collection edited by Pálsson (1993), try new metaphors to assist us to think of the problem differently. Ingold stresses the grounding of praxis in a continuous landscape on which one gazes from wherever one is located. Pálsson, heavily influenced by post-modernism (although he tries to distance himself from it) talks of ‘living discourse’. We suggest that the latter notion could be made into something substantive and, moreover, into a method that satisfies Ingold, by heeding some of the precepts of ethnomethodology. Specifically, the move away from the search for ‘truth’

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to weaker notions of ‘practical adequacy’ or being sufficient unto the day. This coupled with Ingold’s concern with practical action has far-reaching implications: in our everyday lives we know nothing with certainty, but if we get away with something (such as a hypothesized interpretation of another person’s utterances) then we continue to act on the basis that it is ‘about right’. If the concern is to produce interpretations (translations) that pass muster then many of the criticisms touched on above simply do not engage. We can return from philosophy to more purely anthropological concerns. It is by being open, rather than transparent, that anthropological translation can constitute good evidence upon which to base arguments. A text is a peg upon which ethnography can be hung, as well as constituting that ethnography (Bilmes 1996: 185 fn. 10). Hence, in preparing translations as anthropologists, our aim has been, not to produce ‘transparent’ texts which could have been produced by native English speakers, but rather to produce intelligible texts which are anthropologically perspicuous. This corresponds to the distinction made by Werner (1994: 61 ff.) between ‘Front Stage’ and ‘Background’ translations. The latter include ‘extensive, encyclopaedic translator’s notes’ (1994: 61) including the ethnography, which is our main goal. They are intended to help readers unfamiliar with the society in question to understand some of the concepts under discussion, and to make available some of the evidence upon which the anthropologist’s conclusions are based.17 So, in several different senses, one can view human society as being based upon translation, and the process of translation as one in which meaning is negotiated between bilinguals. From this it follows that there are real ways in which the process can be studied, since negotiation is intersubjective: it is a public phenomenon, not locked inaccessibly in the heads of the individuals concerned.

17 In different ways both Hermans (2002) and Povinelli (2001) come to similar conclusions.

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Realisms and relativisms Discussions of realism and relativism are not helped by jumping between different types of either realism or relativism. Arguments for one are misleadingly taken as arguments for others. Conversely, criticisms of one form of relativism do not necessarily affect other types (see Buchowski 1997 for extended discussion). The main forms of relativism considered here are epistemic, ontological and methodological. Although this book is an argument for realism (so against epistemic and ontological relativisms) as fieldworking anthropologists we are methodological relativists, despite the problems that this engenders. Being realist methodological relativists, we subscribe to what Olivier de Sardan calls ‘the realist pact’ 1 (1999: 15-16) which underlies the ethnographic pact: the pact is that ethnographers have done what they say they have done and are not presenting a fiction or spoof as caricatured in Parkin’s comic novel ‘Krippendorf’s tribe’ (1985). This leaves open the question of what sort of realism we subscribe to. In the following pages more space is given to varieties of relativism than to corresponding varieties of realism. This is because of our commitment to the middle ground: as committed realists we feel a greater need to engage with relativists than with our fellow travellers, other realists. Our goal is to persuade our readers that relativism does not work for anthropology, rather than that they should subscribe to any particular form of realism.

1

This explicitly parallels Lejeune’s autobiographical pact.

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Epistemic Relativism The simplest claim of epistemological relativism is that there are many ways of knowing. This is quite independent of the ontological claims considered below. To clarify, epistemological relativism consists of claims such as ‘there is only one world but many ways of learning about it, many different types of knowledge about it’. Along with claims that there are different types of knowledge go suggestions that there are different types of evidence. This often shades into phenomenology: the most important type of evidence is experience, so if you and I ‘see things’ differently then we know the world differently too. Such different ‘ways of knowing’ are fine as long as one is not trying to be systematic, let alone comparative. In Wittgensteinian terms: as analysts, as academics, we are playing different games from the people we work with, the people whose lives we are trying to describe. This puts anthropologists in difficult positions, so pace Fabian it is we who are the ‘other’. Our practice others us, especially when we try and consider comparative views. This means that we are resolutely intersubjective, which in turn renders claims that experience is the ultimate arbiter problematic. As Brian Morris put it in the context of a discussion of truth: What knowledge as representation does, however, is to make explicit what in fact is being affirmed (truths about the world), and acknowledges that all truth is intersubjective and thus open to critical scrutiny and possible refutation by other scholars (unlike truths which are apparently disclosed through evocation or mystical ‘revelation’ and which we are told have no reference at all to any world outside the text). With regard to anthropology, this affirmation of truth as representation is particularly important, for ethnographic accounts and anthropological theory should be open to scrutiny by the people whose culture and social life is being described and explicated (1997: 324).

Empirical relativism is caustic: it robs us of anything to discuss and debate. If we end up with positions summarized by ‘I understand in one way, you in another’ then each of us has our own evidence which cannot be debated, compared or improved, because for a relativist they are all equally valid. If we are serious about anthropology as an academic discipline (and of course many people are not) then different sets of results must be debated and compared. These may include reports of personal experience, but experience is not the final arbiter. The test of experience is alluring, but the danger is that so-called relativists are non-relativistic about experience. For example, why should the possession experience of one person resemble that of another,

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especially if they have had different life careers, perhaps being raised on different continents with different social and cultural traditions, let alone speaking different languages, and so on?

Ontological relativism Ontological relativism comes down to the question of whether there is one world or many.2 Note that this is separable from the question of how we might know this (a point to which we return below). There are several versions of ontological relativism. First is the radical claim that there are many worlds, and that we move between them. Such ideas have been explored in literature such as Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy. Our problem with this is that if movement and hence interaction between ‘worlds’ is possible then they cannot really be different worlds. Rather we should be talking about one world with relatively isolated parts (which we could call continents) which allow only a little communication between them. However little, movement or interaction between the parts implies connection. Truly ‘other’ worlds are by definition entirely disconnected and this raises questions about how one can know about them other than by conjecture. Any claim to know by experience (e.g. by travelling to a spiritual world as shamans do) is also an admission that these worlds are not really ‘other’, just parts of our world which are difficult to access. A different form of ontological relativism holds that there is only one world among many possible worlds. On this account, our world is traced by the ‘thin red line’ of actuality. We all live in this world, no matter how variously we may construe it, but there are other worlds in parallel with our own. However, almost by definition, we cannot encounter, interact with or know about them. Yet another type of ontological relativism is that many worlds exist but few people notice or are aware of this. In the terms of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books it is tempting to recast this as the suggestion that we are muggles, locked in a humdrum world not knowing, and never to know, 2

This question is confused, and endlessly reopened by spurious analogies taken from quantum physics. Our concern is with the experiential world of humans, whose physics seems broadly Newtonian. Interaction collapses the wave packet, so quantum entanglement does not obtrude on human consciousness without going to extraordinarily tortuous experimental lengths. An example is de Castro’s confusion between Bohr’s principle of complementarity (between wave and particle) and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (which sets limits to the simultaneous measurements of e.g. momentum or location) (2011: 139-40).

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about the extraordinary other world(s) outside our ken. It is tempting to accept this (although countering that the muggletonian 3 world is plenty complicated enough) and say that as anthropologists we just study muggles. We will leave some Hogwarts graduate to undertake the anthropology of Rowling’s wizard’s world. Sadly it seems that we will never be able to read such an ethnography. If there are many worlds how can we know? And if we can know about them then they are not different worlds in a profound, ontological sense (see e.g. Gell 1992: 54-60). This returns us to the epistemological questions with which we started. Some authors identify a form of ontological relativism in ActorNetwork Theory (ANT) and the work of the Science and Technology Studies tradition stemming from Latour and Woolgar (1979). For example, Dent writes that ‘an ANT analysis [...] inverts the conventional wisdom by adopting an empirical realism coupled with ontological relativism. This position distinguishes it from both “modern” and “postmodern” research’ (2003: 122). Dent’s own account rests firmly on the earlier manifesto of Lee and Hassard, for whom: ANT is empirically realist, in the sense that it leaves the task of challenging its empirical base to the research and user communities it addresses, and ontologically relativist in that it typically embarks on research with a clear picture of what sort of entities it will discover through interaction (1999: 393-4).

However, we do not see this as a valid argument for relativism. As we see it, an ontological relativist will not commit to the repeatability of their research: another researcher could, for an ontological relativist, come to entirely different conclusions on the basis of studying the same material/phenomenon/case. This parallels Quine’s account of radical translation: the ontological relativist sees other worlds where Quine identifies the possibility of other translations. Rather, their argument is about emergence and process (organizational forms are not entities preexisting and waiting to be discovered (Dent 1999: 398 ff)) so what they call ontological relativism is really a call for ontological expansion beyond simple entities (and to be flexible in the light of empirical results). This is entirely consistent with the sorts of complicated realism we find useful as anthropologists.

3 In Rowling’s sense; not to be confused with the original Muggletonians, the seventeenth-century English Christian sect.

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Methodological Relativism Irrespective of one’s stance on the above, in principle one could adopt a position of methodological relativism. Anthropologists hold that some form of relativism is required when undertaking fieldwork. Pace Fabian, we go to the field, not to argue with people, but to try to understand their understandings of the world. Sometimes this is helped by confrontation and argument, but most of the time it is not. We are not missionaries trying to convince, nor are we candidates for conversion (to the exclusion of our previous positions). This is an uncomfortable and perilous middle ground where we are continually open to accusations of bad faith (at the very least). Discomfort, awareness of bad faith and uncertainty are part of the anthropological condition. Discussing some of these issues, de Castro suggests that bad faith is the alternative to anthropologists naively confusing ‘taking seriously’ with ‘taking literally’ (2011: 135). Candea’s response was that taking someone seriously does not imply sharing their beliefs, leaving open the possibility of debate and discussion which de Castro seems to foreclose (2011: 137). Making a similar point, Margery Wolf writes that ‘in our desire to avoid objectifying our informants, we run the risk of patronizing them’ (1992: 135).

A final ethnographic vignette: initiation and bad faith In late 2000 and early 2001 Zeitlyn went through the initiation ceremonies for two Mambila healing rites or ‘medicines’. Whenever possible he videoed the events. After completing the initiation for Mbi (both an illness affecting the kidneys and the treatment for it) he wrote the following: Bad Faith 10/1/01 So I have ended up ‘owning’, ‘possessing’ or ‘buying’ (all such words translate directly from the Mambila) Mbi and feel terrible into the bargain. Why? Because at the end, after a day and a half of intense ritual activity I was not prepared to be cut with a razor blade and rub ash into the wound, nor was I prepared to so treat anyone else. They shrugged their shoulders and got on with it, and in the end I was told that it was ok to treat myself so I took the blade I was offered and scratched very lightly over my breast bone and then rubbed the ash collected on my forefinger after I had licked it. No one asked why, no one had asked me to believe in anything. This is, I am sure, my problem, but I end up feeling that I have the medicine in bad faith. At the very end a sort of divination by sortilege is practised and mine came up ‘bad’ several times in a row - thus inflating the purchase price, which seems only fair. It hardly surprised me. What would Paul Stoller have done? I’m sure I know what he would say he had done, but he did his research then and I am doing it now, in times of HIV.

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Chapter Nine To video the process of HIV transmission is a weird and terrible thing. Of course I’m not sure that’s what I have done, but it is possible. Although I was impressed/reassured by the way they said everyone must have their own piece of razor blade, I’m sure there were more people present than fragments of razor. Perhaps this is the end of my road. Where participation stops, period, full stop, the end. It was made harder rather than easier by the way it has confirmed what I knew before - the absolute difference from ‘Paul Stoller land’, the absolute divorce from mental, emotional state or perception. It is not about seeing with clear and open eyes (as the rhetoric for divination has it - which raises more questions about my previous initiation into divination - which I must pursue). It is open to anyone to undergo the initiation - as the sons of Lebon did, profiting by my chickens and goat (for mine, read the ESRC’s - but how can I reclaim them?) The sons of Lebon had little notice and are not very old (one is his grandson to be exact who has just been initiated at the same time as his father). That is prophylactic - just as I and many others were ‘cured’ of syphilis in 1986 to give future protection from the associated illness, so too have they been ‘given’ mbi and protection from it. Final note on Bad Faith - is it irony or just academic hubris to use the term without having read Sartre? Or does it confirm what I have understood Sartre to have said?

Harry West, discussing his research with Mueda in Mozambique, also describes avoiding vaccination and the implications of this, pointing to the limits of participation (2007: 91-3). The point here is that, in the field, anthropologists have to do more than suspend belief (or disbelief). We sit (sometimes extremely uncomfortably) between poles, between ways of living, reflecting and accounting for actions. Accepting the discomfort is to accept elements of bad faith, but it does not require relativism. One way of building a middle ground is to take seriously the talk of bootstrapping and to establish it by fiat. At different points in the discussions of extreme cases there are gestures towards the other side. So there may be more sympathy for one another than printed polemics imply. We can take heart, for example, from the observation that Jeffrey Stout (2002) and Richard Rorty (2002) both cite Robert Brandom and take his inferential philosophy of meaning to warrant their contrasting accounts of religion. Perhaps the question is less interesting than it seems, especially if one’s position does not seem to make much difference in the practice of ethnographic fieldwork. Some post-modern ethnographies tell us little of the society they are ostensibly ‘about’, thus pre-empting the possibility of re-analysis. That in a nutshell is our quarrel with post-modernism, not relativism. How can one tell a good ethnography from a poor one? Mariane Ferme’s The Underneath Of Things (2001) is an ethnography

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which stands up with the best of them. However, also in the post-modern tradition, Pool 1994 (2003) tells us less about the people in Cameroon than e.g. Warnier’s The Pot King or Goheen’s Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops. Our concerns are less with the theoretical apparatus used, and more with the results, the understanding we gain of how some other people live their lives (and the understandings of the world that are part and parcel of that).

Varieties of Realism Having explored some different types of relativism, and what a realist can salvage from them, we turn next to positions with which we broadly agree. As stated above, as advocates for the middle ground we are arguing for a general orientation rather than a single committed position, which is why we give less space here to realism than relativism, ironic though that may be.

Critical Realism Following the early work of Roy Bhaskar (1975) critical realism has been developed by many researchers including those working in the philosophy of science and in social science (see Archer et al. (eds.) 1998 reader) although it has not been much discussed in anthropology. The definition of realism with which we started is from Andrew Sayer, a sociologist who has further developed critical realist approaches as a practical basis for social science research (1992, 2000). Bhaskar’s realism starts with the distinction between transitivity and intransitivity: the obdurate reality of the perduring world is intransitive. As such it is not affected by the cultural background of the humans who interact with it. For that matter it is unaffected by the presence or otherwise of any humans, who were absent for most of the earth’s history and will be again. Such is not the case for our fleeting, changing knowledge of the world. Having made this distinction Bhaskar stresses that this is not empiricism, let alone positivism: there is more to the world than can be simply (naively) observed. We can make inferences from experience, from observation about the existence of unobservables, such as the facts central to social science (e.g. family, class, religion) and these can play a role in social causation. Bhaskar and his school have devoted much attention to the layered, emergent properties of phenomena (physical and social) as well as the role that intentions (reasons) play in social action.

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In that sense, critical realism provides a well-developed philosophical basis for engaged social research. Some readers may prefer a more loosely defined programme, such as that labelled policy realism.

Policy Realism This phrase is largely associated with the work of Rom Harré (who perhaps unexpectedly is often grouped with the critical realists). However, it has not been formally developed to the same extent as critical realism. Perhaps for that very reason we are sympathetic to the programme. In broad terms Harré wants to explore the ecological niche occupied by the human species. By starting with these biological terms (he talks of the human Umwelt (1990)) he requires us to accept the non-human constraints of the physical world and of biological evolution: we must eat, but cannot eat rocks; and we interact with objects only of a certain scale, although objects we cannot perceive directly affect us (e.g. pathogens). That sets the scene within which human life unfolds: constrained but not determined by biological and physical parameters. This is the basis for Harré’s realist approach to science in general, which he is careful to develop so as to include social science. Policy realism then emerges as ‘the principle that taking plausible theories to be putative descriptions of actual states of affairs is the best way to design experiments and to advance our knowledge’ (Harré 2012: 23). It is as much a code for practice as a strictly defined philosophical position, and connects neatly with the ethnomethodological ideas of bootstrapping discussed above.

Dilemmas of Falsehood and the view from anthropology Both realists and relativists have problems with realist statements made by people in the world. These pose problems for all anthropologists, which Latour identified in his call for symmetrical approaches (discussed in the Traps for Thought section above). The problem can be summarized as follows. As far as we can judge from the ethnographic record, most people in the world are realists of some sort. (Of course very few people in the world have studied philosophy, let alone epistemology, so vanishingly few people would couch the issue in these terms4). Realist anthropologists can 4

According to official figures there were 11,885 philosophy students in the UK in 2006-07, when the world population was approximately 6.6 billion: some 0.0002%.

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agree with the people they seek to understand that there is a world independent of their existence and independent of their beliefs about it; generally they will disagree about much else, and often about the content of the beliefs about the world. Such disagreement becomes more acute when the comparative method is applied. It is all very well for an anthropologist to identify with a group and ‘share their beliefs’ in some sense or other. But what happens when that anthropologist then works with another group who hold very different (realist) beliefs? The career of Fredrik Barth exemplifies this: he has carried out research in, among other places, Norway, Bali, Sudan, Papua New Guinea and northern Pakistan (see his own reflections in Barth 2007). How many ontologies should we attribute to him? However many it is, we do not believe that he suffers from severe cognitive (or ontological) dissonance. Comparison requires that anthropologists distance themselves from the beliefs they report and analyse. A logical consequence of recognizing the many different ways in which humans understand the world is that they cannot all be correct. For us this is part of the appeal of the humility of Sandra Mitchell’s pluralist-realist approach quoted above. However, even this does not solve the problem: we may hold that there are ‘multiple correct ways to parse our world’ but that means we must respectfully disagree when we are working with people who say there is only one. Although relativism starts with a claim to sympathy and even-handed neutrality between belief systems (Rabinow 1986 is a classic case) it has a similar and perhaps harder job to remain neutral in the face of realist others: the relativist anthropologist has to disagree not so much with the content of the belief (‘the world is not as you say it is’) but has to give an account along the lines of ‘the world is as you say it is, but there is no such world in the terms you use’. This is a denial of ontological coevalness (to rephrase Fabian’s 1983 mantra), a difference of viewpoint more profound than a disagreement about how the world is. The irony of this is that neither realist nor relativist anthropologists can escape from profound disagreement with those among whom they work, those they are trying to understand. Relativism provides no comfort to those who aspire to an ideal of liberal sympathy between humans. The practice of anthropology inevitably puts anthropologists in situations of bad faith (see above). Our response to this is to suggest that the discipline should accept it, and that we should think about how to manage it, rather than pretending it does not or should not happen. Working across cultural differences causes dilemmas which are moral as well as epistemological and ontological. Better to accept them as real dilemmas than to adopt a position (strong relativism) which seems to remove the dilemmas but at

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the cost of casting the possibility of communication into doubt. To return to the discussion of translation above, the philosopher Bill Newton-Smith wrote: ‘the possibility of translation entails the falsehood of relativism. By contraposition, the truth of relativism entails the impossibility of translation […] The fact that relativists do translate displays that they do not believe in their own thesis’ (1982: 114-15). In 2011 the journal Common Knowledge published a series of seminars about comparative relativism (Jensen et al. 2011). We agree with the authors that there is no ‘view from nowhere’, but there is a view from anthropology. Anthropology is an academic subject which shares the relatively short5 and clearly biased history of all academic social science disciplines. We take the authors of the Common Knowledge seminar (and others arguing for relativistic positions) to be, in effect, cautioning us against a confusion between absolute/ideal objectivity (the view from nowhere) and the view from academe in general, and anthropology in particular. What is the view from anthropology? It starts from a reading of as many ethnographies from as many different groups around the world as possible. One of the few general lessons this teaches is that different social groups at different moments in time, and in different places, give radically different accounts of the world and what it is like to be human in it. Many are radically incompatible, which leads to the quandary of anthropology: we cannot be true or faithful to all our informants at once. This puts anthropology in a position of bad faith. Our contention is that it is better, more honest although more uncomfortable, to accept this position than to try to relativize anthropological accounts to the norms of any one set of people. Of course our accounts are biased and relative. Relative to what? To the discipline of anthropology. This we can summarize by returning (with few apologies) to the paraphrasing of Marx presented in the Introduction above. We can agree, first, that ‘we make our own worlds but not in circumstances of our own choosing’. Those circumstances range from the physical through the biological to the historical, and place considerable constraints on our world making. We conclude with a second paraphrase of Marx: ‘we make our own worlds in ways which foreign others can (albeit with difficulty) 5

The basis for this claim is that universities as we now know them were only born when they stopped being theological colleges and started teaching, among other things, modern languages, and experimental sciences such as biology, and began discussing the possibility of admitting women. This, controversially, puts the birth of university history somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century, just before Durkheim and Frazer were working.

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come to comprehend’. If human life, social life, teaches us anything, it is that anthropological understanding is repeatedly and surprisingly achievable.

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INDEX

Acciaioli, G., 66, 69, 79, 83 Agar, M., 103 Apollo Bay fishers, 11, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 Ardener, E., 32, 42 Aristotle, 65 Asad, T., 53 Asad, Talal, 43 Ayer, F., 56 Azande, 28, 37, 57 Bal, M. and Morra, J., 106 Banks, M. and Morphy, H., 8 Barth, F., 64, 65, 129 Bateson, Gregory, 6, 43, 35 Béarn, 66, 67, 69, 70, 74, 79, 80 Becker, H., 32 belief, 2, 10, 11, 28, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 109, 115, 125, 126, 129 Bhaskar, Roy, 12, 13, 26, 127 Bilmes, J., 112, 117, 119 Bloch, Maurice, 19, 37, 57 bootstrapping, 1, 8, 9, 11, 112, 126, 128 Bourdieu, P., 11, 56, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 101 Brandom, R., 126 Brown, P.B. and Levinson, S.C., 110, 111, 117 Buchowski, M., 121 Callon, M., 107 Candea, M., 125 Cartwright, N., 27 Charsley, S., 96, 97 Clark, H., 112 Clifford, J., 8, 64

cross-cultural, 1, 10, 42, 114 da Col, G., 108, 109, 114 de Castro, E.V., 114, 123, 125 De Regt, H., 23 Dent, M., 124 Descartes, 9, 15, 76 divination, 37, 109, 125, 126 Dummett, M., 105 Duranti, A., 112, 117 Durkheim, E., 5, 64, 65, 79, 84, 90, 130 Eco, U., 107, 108 Edwards, D., Ashmore, M. and Potter, J., 24 Eisenstein, E.L., 14 empiricism, 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 13, 16, 19, 22, 23, 25, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 79, 89, 90, 101, 104, 111, 122, 124, 127 epistemology, 5, 6, 22, 24, 25, 26, 42, 64, 76, 121, 122, 124, 128, 129 ethnography, 1, 10, 11, 12, 17, 22, 26, 30, 35, 37, 48, 53, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 76, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, 113, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130 ethnomethodology, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 102, 104, 105, 111, 112, 118, 128 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 3, 28, 37, 39, 41, 43, 52, 53, 54, 57, 102 exotika, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96 Fabian, J., 104, 118, 122, 125, 129 Farnell, B., 65, 66, 70, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83 Feleppa, R., 104

154

Works Cited

Ferme, M.C., 126 Feyerabend, P., 101, 114 fieldwork, 1, 3, 4, 16, 17, 30, 36, 44, 57, 59, 60, 74, 75, 90, 94, 105, 116, 121, 125, 126 Finnegan, R., 14, 109 Firth, R., 64, 65 Fischer, Michael M.J., 24 Fischli, P. and Weiss, D., 29, 30 Forsythe, D., 101 Garfinkel, H.M., 101, 111 Gauntlett, D, 27 Geertz, C., 15, 18, 19, 55 Gellner, E., 43, 52, 53, 111 Gentzler, E., 100, 102 Gerrans, P., 66, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84 Goheen, M., 127 Goody, Jack, 14, 110 Graeber, D., 108, 109, 114 Griaule, M., 3, 5, 39 Grice, H., 114 habitus, 11, 65, 66, 67, 69, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84 Hacking, I., 23, 140 Hallen, B. and Sodipo, J.O., 102 Harré, R., 12, 23, 128 Harris, B., 107 Hassard, J., 124 Hastrup, K., 6, 25, 33, 34 Hendry, J., 101 Henriksen, G., 44, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56 hermeneutics, 2, 3, 100, 111 Herzfeld, M., 2, 32 Hjort, A.M., 103 Hobart, M., 6 Holbraad, M., 109 Horton, R., 40 House, J., 106, 113 Hudson, L., 39 Hume, D., 41 Husserl, 9, 65 incommensurability, 1, 22, 108, 114, 115 Ingold, T., 118, 119 intention, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, 24, 30,

31, 39, 52, 77, 116, 127 Jackson, M., 109 Jenkins, R., 66, 69, 78, 79, 82, 83 Keane, W., 27 Keesing, Roger, 52, 104 Kirk, R., 102, 104 Knorr-Cetina, K.D., 34 Kuhn, T., 114 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., 7, 8, 25, 51, 53, 56 Latour, B., 9, 22, 30, 31, 32, 128 Latour, B. and Woolgar, S., 124 Leach, E., 99, 116 Lee, N., 124 Leenhardt, M., 20 Leibniz, 25 Lem, S, 29 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 41, 42, 63, 65 Levy-Bruhl, L., 43, 108 Lewis, D., 103 Lewis, G., 18, 24, 26, 32, 36, 38 Linehan, C. and McCarthy, J., 15 Lloyd, G.E.R., 108, 114, 115 Lloyd’s List, 54, 55 Lydall, J. and Strecker, I., 110 Mackendrick, A., 24 Mackenzie, D., 14 Malinowski, B., 30, 59, 116, 117 Mambila, 11, 35, 36, 37, 40, 60, 61, 62, 103, 105, 106, 107, 111, 115, 116, 118, 125 Marcus, G., 64 Marx, 130 Marx, K., 2, 23, 107, 130 Mauss, M., 65 meaning, 5, 7, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 42, 43, 77, 91, 96, 97, 99, 102, 103, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 126 Meganisi, 66 Meillassoux, C., 109, 110 merological, 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 69, 97, 113 metaphor, 7, 8, 11, 26, 27, 41, 51, 52,

Excursions in Realist Anthropology: A Merological Approach 53, 54, 55, 56, 69, 99, 104, 115, 116, 118 metaphysics, 2, 8, 11, 88, 90, 104 middle ground, 2, 3, 10, 12, 121, 125, 126, 127 Miller, R.D., 9, 27 Mitchell, S., 3, 33, 129 Moerman, M., 112, 117 Morris, B., 2, 8, 122 Nagel, T., 32 Naxos, 87, 88 Needham, R., 39, 63, 108, 109 Newton-Smith, B., 130 Nuer, 43, 52, 53, 54, 56, 115 object, 57 objectification, 9, 64, 65, 125 objectivism, 2, 4, 32, 42, 57, 64, 65, 67, 78, 83, 84, 85, 130 Ofosu-Appiah, L., 112 Ong, W.J., 14 ontology, 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 22, 27, 53, 78, 97, 99, 108, 114, 115, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129 Pálsson, G., 118 ƒ”–‹ƒŽ. See‡”‘Ž‘‰‹…ƒŽ Peirce, 26 Pina-Cabral, J., 3 Pool, R., 127 positivism, 2, 3, 4, 13, 33, 105, 127 post-modernism, 4, 7, 8, 22, 24, 33, 59, 62, 64, 118, 126 Potter, J., 23, 24 Price, D., 35, 36, 39 Quine, W.V.O., 39, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 124 Rabinow, P., 129 Rapport, N., 18, 44, 56, 57 realism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 35, 66, 90, 121, 124, 127, 128, 129 critical, 12, 13, 26, 102, 127, 128 definitions of, 4 middling, 35 policy, 12 policy, 128 policy, 128

155

policy, 128 policy, 128 types of, 121 varieties of, 127 relativism, 1, 2, 4, 7, 12, 13, 22, 26, 32, 42, 99, 115, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130 epistemic, 122 ontological, 123 methodological, 125 relativisms and realisms, 121 Reyna. S.P., 5 Rorty, A., 107 Rorty, R., 22, 24, 126 Rosman, S., 106 Rubel, P.G., 106 rules, 3, 11, 16, 23, 43, 50, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 94, 96, 104 Ryle, G., 19 Sahlins, M., 90 Sayer, A., 4, 5, 127 Scheff, T.J., 104 Sidnell, J, 63 Silverstein, M., 106 social construction, 2, 3, 11, 18, 24 Spartokhori, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 80, 94, 95 Sperber, Dan, 15, 37, 38, 42, 93, 113 Spivak, G.C., 100, 107 Stewart, C., 11, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94 Stout, J., 126, 148 Strathern, Marilyn, 6, 10, 20, 21, 33 Strecker, I., 111 Stump, D.J., 24 Taylor, C., 76, 77 Thomas, Dylan, 14 Toury, G., 106, 107 translation, 1, 10, 11, 12, 30, 39, 41, 43, 54, 61, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 119, 124, 130 cultural, 41, 42, 53, 54, 60, 99

156

Works Cited

Turner, T., 53 Turner, V.W., 96 Tymoczko, M., 106 understanding, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 42, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 76, 77, 78, 80, 82, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 122, 125, 127, 129, 131 Venuti, L., 100, 117 Wacquant, J.D., 65 Wagner, R., 3

Wallace, J., 112 Warnier, J.P., 127 Weber, M., 3, 65 West, H., 3, 126 Wierzbicka, A., 105 Wittgenstein, L., 15, 33, 39, 63, 75, 76, 77, 78, 100, 122 Wolf, M., 125 Wylie, A., 26, 27 Yallop, C., 106 Zande. See Azande