Human nature as capacity: transcending discourse and classification 9780857458100, 9781845458157, 9781845456375

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Human Nature as Capacity

Methodology and History in Anthropology General Editor: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

Volume I Volume 11 Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute Existential Anthropology: Events, Edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen Exigencies and Effects By Michael Jackson

Volume 2

Franz Baerman Steiner: Volume 12

Selected Writings An Introduction to Two Theories of Volume I: Taboo, Truth and Religion. Social Anthropology: Descent Groups and

Franz B. Steiner Marriage Alliance Edited by Jeremy Adler and By Louis Dumont Richard Fardon Edited and Translated by Volume 3

Robert Parkin

Franz Baerman Steiner: Volume 13

Selected Writings Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Volume IT: Orientalism, Value, and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau

Civilisation. By Henrik Vigh Franz B.Jeremy Steiner Volume 14oe ee eee Edited: by Adler and gaara The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice Volume 4 Edited by J. Solway

Richard Fardon B The Problem of Context: Perspectives

from Social Anthropology and Elsewhere Nolumie ae

Bditad be Row Dille ; A History of Oxford Anthropology

piece y Edited by Peter Riviere

Vol 5

Religion in English Everyday Life: yore Te

eat ead putes Holistic Anthropology: Emergence and An Ethnographic Approach ee By Timothy Jenkins pene Edited by David Parkin and

Volume 6 Stanley Ulijaszek

Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Na Scie Colletiors 2igents and Agenty Learning Religion: Anthropological

in Melanesia, 1870s-19 30s ees ea arco

Robert L. Welsch awe

Edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Edited by David Béciner and Ramon Sarro

Volume 7

Anthropologists a Wider World: yorumet . in ; ; Sa a ie Ways ofinKnowing: New Approaches pou ys IC Bere the Anthropology of Knowledge and Edited by Paul Dresch, Wendy James pia hn Ponegys Meet

and David Parkin pearEdited angby Mark Harris

Volume 8

Categories and Classifications: yore aeof: ue ; | as Difficult Folk? A Political History

By David Mills sorume : ; ae Volume 20 Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition By Robert Parkin ; Volume 10 Classification Maussian Reflections on the Social ava

By NJ, Allen Social Anthropology

Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and

Categories of Self: Louis Dumont’s Edited by Nigel Rapport

Theory of the Individual By André Celtel

HUMAN NATURE AS CAPACITY Transcending Discourse and Classification

Edited by Nigel Rapport

6 Berghahn Books New York * Oxford

Published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2010 Nigel Rapport All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Human nature as capacity : transcending discourse and classification / Edited by Nigel Rapport. p. cm. -- (Methodology and history in anthropology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-637-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Anthropology--Philosophy. 2. Human behavior--Philosophy. I. Rapport, Nigel, 1956GN33.H94 2010 301.01--de22

2010006440

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-1-84545-637-5 (hardback)

how we live measures our own nature Philip Larkin

Blank page

List of Illustrations ix List of Contributors X Introduction: Human Capacity as an Exceeding, a Going Beyond = 1 Nigel Rapport

Part I: Beyond the Economy

Introduction to Part I 29

Nigel Rapport

1. Conversations with Eulogio: On Migration and the Building 31 of a Life-Project in Motion Nelson Ferguson

2. The Limits of Liminality: Capacities for Change and 54 Transition among Student Travellers Vered Amit

Part II: Beyond the Polity

Introduction to Part IIT Vi. Nigel Rapport

3. ‘Crisis’: On the Limits of European Integration and Identity oe in Northern Ireland Thomas M. Wilson

4. Making the Cosmopolitan Plea: Harold Oram’s International 101 Fund-raising in the Early Cold War Laura Suski

Part III: Beyond the Classificatory

Introduction to Part III 127 Nigel Rapport

5. Money, Materiality and Imagination: Life on the Other 130 Side of Value Andrew Irving

Vill Contents 6. Acts of Entification: The Emergence of Thinghood in 154 Social Life Tord Larsen

Part IV: Beyond the Body

Introduction to Part IV 179 Nigel Rapport

7. Embodied Cognition, Communication and the Making of 182 Place and Identity: Reflections on Fieldwork with Masons Trevor H.J. Marchand

Index 254 8. ‘Live in Fragments no Longer’: Social Dance and Individual 207 Imagination in Human Nature Jonathan Skinner

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1. ‘Working the fields away from home ...’ 31

1.2. ‘... and working the fields at home’ 46

5.1. ‘My name is Denis Bete’ 59 5.2. ‘How did we used to spend Christmas when our dad 140 was alive?’

5.3. ‘Ahh, Diana. What are you cooking?’ 140 5.4. ‘The other house was better, self-contained’ 14] 5.5. ‘This is the house where we used to live when our 142 Daddy was living’

5.6. ‘You can see Denis is very tired’ 142 5.7. ‘You know here in Africa we women we have to 143 follow orders’

5.8. ‘If it is true Daddy is under the ground, watching us, 144 he is crying’

5.9. ‘Where did you get the strength to go and have that 145 HIV test?’

8.1. ‘In Guantanamo Bay’ 20:7 8.2. ‘Same Sex Dancing World Championships, 208 Nijmegen 2007’

Vered Amitis Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal.

Nelson Ferguson has been a Fellow of the Concordia Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, Montreal, and is now a member of the Department of Social Anthropology, York University, Toronto. Andrew Irving is RCUK Fellow and a member of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, Manchester University.

Tord Larsen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department

of Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.

Trevor Marchand is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, London University.

Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies, and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies, at the University of St Andrews. Jonathan Skinner is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of History and Anthropology, Queens University, Belfast. Laura Suskiis Instructor in the Department of Sociology at Vancouver Island University, British Columbia.

Thomas Wilson is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Binghamton.

Introduction

HUMAN CAPACITY AS AN EXCEEDING, A GOING BEYOND Nigel Rapport

The Nature of the Human The issue of human nature, what it is to be human, has been the central enterprise of an ‘anthropological’ science — nominally, at least

— since Immanuel Kant’s (1996) first, modern formulation of the disciplinary endeavour in the late 1700s. At the same time it has been argued that in ‘human nature’ anthropology conjures with a concept

compromised beyond redemption by its essentialistic, hierarchical and exclusionary history: its role in an imperialism of male over female, adult over child, advanced over primitive, Occidental over Oriental, rational over emotional, and conscientious over brutish,

as representative of the essentially human. Others again would contend that its very unscrupulous usage, its ubiquity, makes the concept of ‘human nature’ necessary for anthropology to unpack, if not rehabilitate. Indeed, the impurity of the concept is perhaps an additional attraction: a fitting conceptualization for a human condition equally ‘impure’ in its complex amalgams of objectivity and subjectivity, knowledge and desire, science, morality and taste. Recently Maurice Bloch called for a rehabilitation of ‘human nature’

whose study represents anthropology’s ‘ultimate aim’ and ‘core concern’, its ‘anchor’ and its ‘centre’ (2005).

The position adopted by the present volume is that the term deployed is not the fundamental issue. ‘We are all human’, Ernest Gellner urged shortly before his death (1993:3), and we should not take any ‘more specific classifications seriously’. Robin Fox (2005:7)

2 Nigel Rapport has recently claimed a ‘nature/nurture’ dialectic as fundamental to an anthropological project and asremaining unresolved (2005:7). Marilyn Strathern (1980) has seen sense only in recognizing the simultaneity of ‘nature—culture’, with no possible either/or. The ‘cosmopolitan’

is a term to which a number of contributors to this volume turn, recalling Kant’s projection of inextricable links between human being in its local diversity (polis) and its global commonality (cosmos): the cosmopolitan was the general human being, ‘Everyman’, identifiable

at once as possessing immediate, everyday attachments and as not limited or overwritten by these. More important than the particular term employed is the intent to address the generality of the issue of what

it is to be human, the singularity of the phenomenon. An alternative title to the volume might be: ‘Claiming the Human: Anthropological Reflections upon a Complex, Cosmopolitan Singularity’. The core thesis of the volume is that anthropology apprehends the human as a complex singularity not on the basis of the substance of a human nature — ‘To be human is to be like this, to want this, to have this’ — but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, say, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. A focus on capacities rather than substance provides a way to bring the nature of the human again to the centre of anthropological deliberation without

revisiting the culs-de-sac that some have felt arguments over the proportionate mix of nature as against nurture came to represent. One could frame the approach as follows: There is an intrinsic openness to animal life. The animal’s nervous system translates into the organism being at the centre of a two-way traffic of information

and energy constantly crossing the integument of the skin. An organism is not made distinctive by the existence of a boundary, a skin, animal physiologist Scott Turner explains (2000), but by way of what its boundary does: exert an active, ‘adaptive’ control over the flows of matter and energy such that the organism’s internal state is regulated in the face of changing external conditions. More than this, regulating the flows of energy and matter across its boundary effects an ‘orderliness’ in nature such that the generating organisms may be described as ‘architects and engineers of their environments’ (Turner 2000:7; cf. Rapport 2003:220—6). To be human is to have the capacity to attend to the world in a particular way: to direct that traffic and have it directed with unique subtlety, complexity and flexibility. Beyond the animal necessity to be-in-the-world in specific ways is a human capability, and liability, to create diverse possibilities of attentiveness and to suffer diverse constraints. Human beings have unique capacities to become: they can be uniquely fulfilled and thwarted. A focus on capacities turns the anthropological attention to action

and the ethnographic: to activities witnessed in the field and an intuiting of their causes and meanings. The volume comprises eight

Introduction 3 contributions from anthropologists approaching the question of the human from the perspective of their various fieldworks. Questions of human being, becoming, and the origins of difference are, as David Parkin observes (1987), a universal component of the ethnographic record. In Maurice Bloch’s terms (2005:3), the question ‘What are human beings like?’ is universally asked, irrespective of cultural tradition, knowledge practices, intellectual school or educational

attainment. If the present volume is to accede to abstractions concerning the singularity of ‘the human’, then it will be from a position of anthropological expertise and strength: amid a sense of the complexity and contingency of social interaction. Terms for human

capability and liability such as ‘imagination’, ‘action’, ‘learning’, ‘suffering’, humiliation’ and ‘pain’ may avoid becoming reductive in the context of rich ethnography.

The intuition or working assumption of the volume is that the human reveals itself as a kind of going beyond. Anthropologists most readily witness the human in a ubiquitous capacity to treat ironically

a boundedness to identity: to go beyond present circumstances of being, their lineaments and seeming limits; to go beyond the categorial features of symbolic classifications — the boundaries between things and relations — that human beings at the same time invent so adeptly

and defend so vehemently. The volume is structured, therefore, in terms of pairs of chapters, each of which interrogate one kind of going beyond: beyond the cultural community (economy and polity), beyond the classificatory system, beyond finite embodiment. On what occasions do these different kinds of going beyond become visible? To what particular human capabilities do goings beyond attest? To what do the varied and routine acts of ironical transgression or digression make us liable? Clifford Geertz has described as anthropology’s ‘recurrent dilemma’

the question of how to square the generic human rationality and the biological unity of humankind with the great natural variation of cultural forms. Witnessing the capabilities and the liabilities of a human going beyond the particularities of current categories of identity is a way for anthropology to claim the human as a complex singularity: the discipline’s unique insight into the nature of human being and the crucial lever of an anthropological science.

Being Humans In his collection Being Humans (2000), Neil Roughley allowed for an approach to human nature by way of plurality — ‘humans’ — and transitivity —‘being’. Hethus pointed the way towards aconceptualizing

of human nature as a lived quality, and a capacity. Our nature

- Nigel Rapport includes, inter alia, the capacity to be open to the world, cosmopolitan — to transcend one’s self, place and time; also the capacity to make spatial sense of specific environments; also the capacity to understand

the norms and constitute the cultures of particular places; also the capacity to satisfy one’s desires for an autonomy necessary to uphold the values one has set oneself and to avoid loss of self-esteem; also the capacity to gain interpretive insight into others’ aims and beliefs; also the capacity for communication and intuition; also the capacity

to appreciate reciprocity and mutuality, symmetry, clarity and smoothness; also the capacity for hope and projection; and so on. If our nature is a plethora of capacities, an excessiveness, an overriding capacity to be open to the world and go beyond what it is made out to be at present, then, in the words of the poet, Philip Larkin, ‘how we live measures our own nature’ (1990:103). Our circumstance is a manifestation of our nature. We make our circumstance according to the particular deployment of our capacities. The variousness and changeability of our circumstances, their specificity and idiosyncrasy, make manifest our capacity to remain open to the world, and to attend to it in ways that reflect a deliberate and flexible intentionality (cf. Rapport 2003). One is led in the direction of considering a lived human nature

as complex and impure, transitive and individual, by the work of Ernest Becker. Human being has no essence, Becker begins in The Denial of Death (1997), but it has an existential dilemma. The essence

of human being is a paradox: being half animal and half symbolic. Human beings are creatures with names and life histories; creators with soaring minds, able to contemplate atoms and infinity, able ironically, imaginatively to consider themselves and their history and their planet from outside. Our dexterity, self-consciousness, ethereality afford us a god-like, transcendental capacity. At the same time we are food for worms, hopelessly embodied, bearing the evolutionary marks

of single-cell organisms and fish. We are aware, moreover, that we stick out of nature with a unique, towering majesty. Our material casing is alien to us in many ways. It aches and bleeds and will decay and die and disappear forever; and yet it pleasures us physically, sexually, even scatalogically. We are split: individuality within finitude; transcendentalism amid morbidity (even the new-born, as Montaigne observed,! is old enough to die). Where are we really? Lower animals, it seems, are spared this terrifying dilemma, this painful contradiction. They lack our self-consciousness and the symbolic means to project and express this. To have to live a lifetime haunted by bodily waste, fallibility, decay and death is uniquely human: a human constant.’ Body and self can never be reconciled seamlessly, Becker concludes.

But to grow up and develop characters, as individuals, to develop cultural traditions, as societies, is temporarily, perhaps necessarily,

Introduction 5 to repress the realization. The individual and the society succeeds in concealing a recognition of the intrinsically complex and split and transitive nature of human being. The realization throbs in dream and myth, nevertheless, in outbursts of madness and genius: a form of scar tissue. Everyday, ‘commonsensical’ character traits and culture traits are ‘secret psychoses’, in Sandor Ferenczi’s words: pyrrhic victories over our contradictory nature (cited in Becker 1997:27). What might anthropology say to this? Typically, that Becker’s

universal thesis is itself culture-specific. That embodiment and conceptualization, notions of death and dilemma are social facts, culturally and historically specific. What wouldit be, however, not tobe satisfied with the typicalresponse

and to wish to frame something more supra-cultural, cosmopolitan, to do with the existential domain of the universal—individual human actor? To accept that the capacity to know and to deny finitude, death and decay, for instance, are human capacities: human capacities which transcend cultural particularities; instantiation of a sameness over and against our inhabiting different cultural worlds? What does our being humans come to look like in a ‘post-cultural’ dispensation which confronts the common ‘embodiedness’ of an individual human being-in-the-world (Jackson 1989:135), beyond cultural-classificatory

diversity and social history. Here is culture re-drawn not as the foundation or final cause of social life but as a synthetic medium, an idiom: a means of individual comings-together and exchange, a kind of surface or social skin. It is also the skein left behind from past efforts at meeting and sharing (and distancing) between particular interactants,

the formal residue of acts of individual meaning-making, a skein always in the process of being sloughed off and re-worked, given new form and new meaning in particular situations (Rapport 1997a:3042).The cultural, in short, is one avenue — poetic, dramatic, rhetorical — by which individuals might hope to represent, to themselves and to others, features of their common human bodiliness — such as their

intrinsic contradictoriness and contrariety. The ambiguity at the heart of all social existence concerns the indeterminate relationship between the flux of individual life and the seemingly frozen forms of ongoing cultural tradition. The personal is never translated fully into the social (Rapport 1993). No cultural discourse does more than create the practical illusion of fusion and balance between personal and interpersonal life-worlds. In this individuality of experience exists,

paradoxically, a universality to our being humans, a singularity of condition over and above proximal differentiations of culture and society, nation, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and locale.

Becker starts us in this direction — of contextualizing culture as one, particular modality of the existential — when he suggests that, ‘everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt

6 Nigel Rapport to deny and overcome his grotesque fate [to deny death]’; that all cultural expression is, in some basic part, ‘a fabricated protest against natural reality, a denial of the truth of the human condition, and an

attempt to forget the pathetic creature that man is’ (1997:33). We are taken further in this direction by an anthropology that admits of deliberate ‘existential’ or ‘phenomenological’ concerns. The question

of being is universal, Michael Jackson observes (2005), only its symbolic expression differs, and it is properly the starting-point of an attempt to explore and compare human life-worlds. He continues: Albeit that individuality may be played down in the milieux where anthropologists often work, that identity and responsibility are taken to be primarily matters of community belonging, that meaning and fate are supernaturally lodged — these local, ‘cultural’ practices and habits of mind are not ontologies. Existence does not reduce to category

terms, whether ‘society’ or ‘culture’, or ‘individual’, or ‘belonging’, ‘relationship’, ‘habitus’, ‘structure’, ‘ideology’, and these terms cannot be made foundational to a theory of human being. These terms are themselves rhetorical devices: some of the symbolical vehicles by which human beings have designated some of the modalities of their experience and sought solutions to the issue of existence; the terms have meanings inextricably connected to the experiences of individual

subjects. Culture, race, tribe, nation, cosmos ... such terms are instances of an intersubjective discourse that has in countless places and times reflected a human-individual struggle between contending imperatives: between being an actor and being acted upon; between

furnishing the wherewithal of life through one’s own efforts and through one’s memberships; between a search for pure self and a search for belonging, for being through others; between being at home in the world through everyday attachments and through distant hopes. One possesses a fluid consciousness which oscillates between solitude and sociality, speech and silence, reflection and habit, aimlessness and purposiveness, bodiliness and cerebralism, passion and calm; between

illness and health, the past and the present, futurity and limitation (Rapport 2005a). Society, Culture, Structure, Habitus or History, as isomorphs of the fluxional world, are illusions, forms of wishful thinking, with an indeterminate relationship to the lived experience they purport to concern. Human experience is not so systematized, but characterized by a ‘going beyond’: beyond structures, situations, statuses, roles, patterns, substances and things, inaconstant becoming. It surpasses the environmental givenness in which it arises. This is not to downplay the dialectical nature of human experience, Jackson stresses (1989:1—18). Capacities for openness, and going

beyond, operate in contexts that might be variably closed and constraining, and manifest themselves in a variety of ways of beingin-the-world. One protests against closure, constraint, limitation; one

Introduction 7 seeks out and chooses bonds; one elects to acquiesce to custom and move with the collectivity; one strikes a balance between the freedom of autonomy and the isolation of anonymity. To do analytical justice to the human capacity is to do equal descriptive justice to this diversity of modes of being, of fashioning human life — including the ‘openingup’ of individuality to collectivity, of personal being to superordinate Being, of cosmopolitan connection to parochial insularity (cf. Jackson

2002:107-8). Important to insist on, is that here, too, are instances of intentionality and aspiration: the capacity to attend to the world so as to bring about new and particular states of affairs. ‘Everything decisive comes about “in spite of”’, Nietzsche summed up (1979a:100), even as decisiveness is recognized as our common condition. If human practice is intrinsically decisive, going beyond

the present in an extension of order (structure, habit, pattern) or of disorder (anti-structure, spontaneity, randomness) into the future, then there is a diversity to how such capacity manifests itself at different moments. An ethnographic approach lends itself to an elaboration of the dialectic between practice and prior conditions: an illumination that what may be brought about is not circumscribable or pre-determined. There is an excessiveness intrinsic to the human.

Theories of Human Nature ‘|I|t is no exaggeration to say’, Leslie Stevenson writes (1981:79), ‘that the main theme of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been thle] problem of the relationship between scientific and other understandings of human nature’; ‘how a complete physical explanation of the workings of our bodies could be reconciled with our view of ourselves as free agents, and as having distinctively mental powers of rational thought’ (1981:79).

Philosophical arguments have swung back and forth between varieties of materialism and of dualism without resolution.* To Rene Descartes’s assertion of a body subject to deterministic, mechanical

causation as against a mind (an incorporated soul) free to deliver explicitly human attributes of thought and rationality, Baruch Spinoza

could retort that mind and body were the same, merely conceived under the different attributes of thought and of extension (occupancy of space): mind had no power to act independent of bodily activity, and all human phenomena were capable of explanation by way of the deductive methods of mathematics based in natural law. To John Stuart Mill’s assertion that psychology could not be derived from physiology, that there were laws of the mind — causal laws linking introspectable mental states such as thought, emotion and sensation — which could not (yet) be derived from physiological laws, J.B. Watson retorted that

8 Nigel Rapport all behaviour was a matter of stimulus and response; the psychological may appear private but it was in fact an outward, public, behavioural

domain, and so-called intentional activities such as writing were as much a determined bodily movement as were automatic reflexes. To Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that there were material things possessed of a being-in-themselves as against consciousness which was a beingfor-itself and a freedom, an intentional capacity to change the world from nothingness, to believe, consider, desire, fear what is not the case, E.O. Wilson retorted that instinct could always be regarded as fundamentally causative ...

There has been a tendency in anthropology to hold ‘human nature’

in a certain disdain, as we have observed. No entries under that designation are to be found in its recent, professional ‘companions’ or dictionaries.* If post-Enlightenment, Western philosophy had been caught on the horns of a dilemma, between varieties of dualism and materialism, then anthropology’s response, as a newer discipline, a younger and more radical discipline, has often been to seek to change the terms of the debate. ‘Context’ could be brought to bear on the old dichotomy, such that the figure that human nature represented derived from the ground in which it was situated (Dilley 1999). Given the inexorably reflexive nature of human knowledge, the way in which materiality was constantly being colonized anew by the sociocultural,

anthropology could endeavour to demonstrate ‘third options’ between the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ model of the self-created mind and the ‘Romanticism’ of environmental absolutism (Gellner 1998:79, 18291). Anthropology could ‘go meta’: elucidate how it was subsequent

upon human activity-in-the-world — an individual and original and changing phenomenon — that our nature, as organisms-amidenvironments, was decided (Rapport 2003:74—-88). (It was likewise

the case that twentieth-century philosophical voices latterly urged similar complexifying or ambiguating departures. Hence, between dualism and materialism could be insinuated ‘anomalous monism’ (Donald Donaldson): while every mental event may also be a physical event in the brain, this did not mean we need accede to strict psychophysical laws because the two vocabularies could remain irreducible. Or again, between ‘empirical-analytic’ (scientific) explanation and

‘historical-hermeneutic’ (psychological) understanding could be inserted a ‘critical’ social-scientific insight which deconstructed the conditions of our knowing or understanding something to be true to our natures (Juergen Habermas). ) In perhaps three main ways, anthropology has sought to change the terms of a debate over human nature. The first is cultural relativism: ‘the anthropologist’s heresy’ (Williams 1978:34).° Relativism, as Clifford Geertz more approvingly described it, has been a major source

of anthropology’s ability to ‘disturb the intellectual peace’ in the

Introduction 9 Western academy; through its relativism, anthropology has asserted

the illusionary nature of objective, ‘pasteurized’ knowledge, and insisted that provincialism is a greater danger (epistemological as well

as political) than spiritual entropy (2000:42-46). Through the lens of culture one espied the ‘set of control mechanisms — plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs” ) — for the governing of behavior’ (Geertz 1970:57).

In other words, claiming culture as foundational, anthropology

approached mind and body alike as social constructions, and knowledge practices as phenomena of symbolic exchange. Culture represented a totality of symbol-systems (religion, ideology, common

sense, economics, sport) in terms of which people made their worlds: made sense of themselves and their world, and represented themselves to themselves and to others. The imposition of meaning on life was the major end and primary condition of human existence, and culture provided the patternings ‘of’ and ‘for’ social practice. Knowledge was a matter of an encompassing, collective, public and shared cultural context; hence anthropology’s ‘outdoor psychology’ (Geertz 1983:151). Considering ‘the impact of the concept of Culture on the concept of Man’, Geertz concluded that while ‘becoming human is becoming individual’, we nevertheless ‘become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns, historically created systems of meaning in terms of which we give form, order, point and direction to our lives’ (1970:63). Representing a ‘manipulation of cultural forms’, of systems of symbols of collective possession, public authority

and social exchange, human thought was ‘out in the world’ (Geertz 1983:151). The symbolic logic of thought, and the formal conceptual structuring, may not be explicit, but they were socially established, sustained and legitimized. Affording meaning to the world was not something that happened in private, in insular individual heads, but something dependent on an exchange of common symbols whose ‘natural habitat is the house yard, the market place, and the town square’ (Geertz 1970:57). Meaning was something publicly enacted, tied to concrete social events and occasions, and expressive of a common social world. Hence, outdoor activities such as ploughing or peddling were as good examples of ‘individual thought’ as were closet

experiences such as wishing or regretting: cognition, imagination, emotion, motivation, perception and memory were directly social affairs. A cultural anthropology insisted on human life as a matter of plein air proceedings, public, organized and collective: all always live in worlds of ‘group efforts, group clashes, and group commitments’ (Geertz 2000:44,164). Culture, society, psyche and organism should

not be considered separate levels of being, Geertz concluded: one did not adhere to a stratigraphic conception of human nature. The human brain may subsist in individual heads, but ‘cabbages, kings

10 Nigel Rapport and a number of things’ — including mind — existed outside it (Geertz

2000:204).

Anthropology was not unique in its turn to relativism. Both Geertz and E.E. Evans-Pritchard drew heavily on the (revolutionary) ordinary-language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1978). Geertz was happy to acknowledge Wittgenstein as his ‘master’ (2000:xi), for the way in which he turned human knowledge into a language-game: not something accumulative but a series of positionings with regard to an assortment of ends. Evans-Pritchard adverted to Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘form of life’ famously to argue that people could not but

think within the rubrics of their own cultural logic and the limits this set; the Azande affirmed witchcraft beliefs and practices which challenged the limits of Western rationality because this was all they could know: the rest was silence, or chaos (1976). Cultural relativism

brought anthropology to possess a new kind of claim on human nature: ‘if one sees the behaviour of a living thing, one sees its soul’

(Wittgenstein 1978:#357). To be human was to behave under the aegis of particular, cultural forms of life.

Similarly swimming in the currents of more radical ideas, this time the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, led to a second way in which anthropology found it could change the terms of a debate over human nature: an emphasis on relatedness. ‘|T|hings are epiphenomena of the relations between them’, asserted Gregory Bateson and Juergen

Ruesch (1951:173), their nature deriving from the manner and moment of the relationship. The individual human organism, the human society and the larger ecosystem are, Bateson elaborated, but three levels of one cybernetic or homeostatic system: complex assemblages of interrelated parts that depend on internal feedback loops of communication to maintain certain truths about themselves. The elemental cybernetic insight is that to comprehend anything in human behaviour is always to deal with total circuits. ‘Mind’ itself can only be synonymous with cybernetic system: the total ‘informationprocessing, trial-and-error completing unit’ in which humanity dwells (Bateson 1980:434).

When Marilyn Strathern (1990) employed the ‘cyborg’ — parthuman, part-machine; part-body, part-tool; part-self, part-other (the Six Million Dollar Man; the Cybermen; Robocop) — as a paradigmatic figure, she did so in order to overcome the false mathematic of seeing entities either as a series of discrete atoms or as parts of a monolithic, static whole. It was necessary to appreciate ‘the relation’ in identity

(Strathern 1995): the nature of things in the world was an effect elicited by the ongoing (circuiting) reciprocal relationship between

social partners at a particular point in time and space. It was the ‘cultures of relatedness’ (Carsten 2000) between people, between people and objects, the networks of effects, which afforded things their natures.

Introduction abe The relationality of identity should also alert us to the crucial role that positioning plays in nature, Tim Ingold adds (1992). There is an embeddedness to being, not a distinctiveness. Mind is not distinct from body, species is not distinct from species, the organic is not distinct from

the inorganic, in any absolute sense. All is a view from somewhere, attending to something. Attention gives identity. Nature in an absolute sense is the whole in which all dwells, but more nearly the competency accrued by a particular positionality, relationality, to achieve an effect. Technology provides a paradigmatic case: it is a mistake to abstract and objectify the techniques we use in relating to the world, to make an object out of our making of objects and relations. What the Greek

word techne should alert us to how a world is at once made and attended to by way of a certain ‘craftiness’, bodily skill, and practice. A ‘technologist’, then, is not someone who mechanically applies an objective system of rational principles and rules, but more properly

a being wholly immersed in the complex nexus of an instrumental coping-in-the-world and dwelling-in-a-landscape. For Maurice Bloch this translates into a ‘functionalism’ which he defines as an anthropological ‘commitment to seeing culture as existing in the process of actual people’s lives, in specific places, as a part of

the wider ecological process of life’ (2005:12). For functionalism ‘the mental exists in the practical, and both are conjoined functions of bodies’; ‘ideas, representations and values [are seen] as occurring in the natural world of action and transformation, of production and reproduction’ (2005:12). In this way Bloch would see anthropology steering a path between materialism and idealism, between nature

and nurture (the innate and the socially constructed), between evolutionism and diffusionism. The former held that a determining innate nature necessarily leads Homo sapiens along a single path of progress, with a unilinear history and an optimal cognitive and moral evolution. The latter recognized that human progress was a matter of acquired traits. The accidental history of diffusing ideas, of cultural

transmission and revolutionary communication, made _ people what they were; because human beings learned from each other, human culture proceeded along no predetermined evolutionary line. There could be no predictable laws of history or society because the history of contact was ‘an entangled, disordered, infinitely complex mess’ (Bloch 2005:6). But while evolutionism or naturism led to an essential materialism, diffusionism or constructivism ushered in a whimsical idealism which gave complete power to cultural traits and beliefs, symbols and discourses. What was called for was an approach — ‘epistemological monism’ — which united biology and _ history, people and the environment, in ‘an inseparable totality created by the particularisms of the specificity of human history and the properties

of natural being in the natural world’ (Bloch 2005:13). In short,

EZ Nigel Rapport relationality, an emphasis on the relation, allowed anthropology the

new kind of claim that human nature was a matter of situational connectivity. To be human was to come to consciousness and identity amid a network of exchanges, of social and physical engagements.

A third way by which anthropology has sought to change the terms of a debate over human nature has derived from what might be called an aesthetic sense, shared with literary modernism. Virginia

Woolf (1938) critiqued the writing of her literary contemporaries —H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett — for the way that ‘life

escaped’. They wrote with plot, characterization, probability, filling pages in a customary way, but such materialism was trivial. Life was not like this: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? (Woolf 1938:149)

Anordinary mind on an ordinary day received a myriad of impressions: frivolous, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. They came from all sides, incessant, shaping themselves into different moments from before. To give testimony to this experience was not to

write with plot in the manner of an order exteriorly imposed, but to write out of feeling (not convention). ‘It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses’ (Woolf 1978:82). In other words, the nature of human life was an aesthetic consideration (the meaning of the world was a function of taste (Friedrich Nietzsche), of how feeling was interwoven with perception), and an authentic accounting should attempt to do justice to its taste: Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. (Woolf 1938:149)

No method, no experiment should be forbidden; only falsity and pretence. Every feeling, thought — everything was the proper stuff of fiction. No perception came amiss; every quality of brain and spirit was to be drawn on. Translatedinto an anthropological idiom, one finds James Fernandez

describing the struggle against the ‘fundamental solipsism’ of other lives (1985:749): it is impossible to share another’s experience, its

Introduction 13 inchoate nature. Nevertheless, anthropology should see as its main

objective ‘phenomenological subjectivity’: providing testimony for the ‘sensorium’ in which other human minds are enmeshed (Fernandez 1992:127). One endeavours to register what it might be like to have conceptions by way of a particular, individual sensory apparatus operating from a particular point of view. To this end the anthropologist works, above all, against reducing ‘the materials of expressive culture’, the ‘tropical’, whether in his own account or others’ accounts of themselves. Talk of ‘nature’, natural analogies, metaphors, metonyms, the poetic, the ironic — these are some of the literary tools by which one hopes to make more concrete, graspable, resolvable the inchoate condition of individual-human experience. The literary — anthropology’s (and fiction’s) main expressive culture —may be regarded as a kind of hypothesis brought to bear on inchoate subjects: a means by which to attempt to grasp the circumstances and selves of significant others. Being free, open, expansive, in his tropic

endeavours, the anthropologist may hope to do justice to the ‘very rich sense of reality’ delivered to him by the character of fieldwork (Fernandez 1974:132). Michael Jackson concurs. The ‘personal and affective life’, he argues (1989:5), is not noise to be filtered out of an anthropological report. Experience is not reducible to objectivities. Conceptual orders, determinate structures, theoretical schemes, impersonal idioms — all external social patternings — are defences against our unsystematic experiences of social reality and its unmanageable flux. But orderly systems do not represent inherent orderliness in the world so much

as instances of wishful thinking: consoling illusions in an instable world, neither accurate nor privileged. ‘Society’ and ‘culture’ may be properly regarded as ‘idioms or vehicles of intersubjective life, but not its foundation or final cause’: they have an indeterminate relationship

to lived experience (Jackson 2002:125). ‘Society’, ‘community’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘culture’, and so on, are instances of intersubjective dialectic that have reflected the abiding human struggle to strike a balance between a wish for subjective autonomy and a fear of anonymity. The role of the anthropologist, according to Jackson, is to engage in edifying open-ended conversation with his data and to eschew the subjugating of lived experience: to avoid generalizations that deaden the essence of the lived-in purported underlying rules or overarching

schemata, to welcome uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. The aim of the anthropologist should be to do justice to the lived complexity of experience, not reduce it to the conventional discursive idioms which commonly articulate it in social life. To this end what anthropology must endeavour to do is to annul the language of cultural essence, boundary and identity: pursue a pragmatist critique of culture so

14 Nigel Rapport as to reveal ‘the issue of existence’: that endless experimentation concerning how the given world can be lived decisively, on one’s own terms (Jackson 2005).

It is a form of inhumanity, Jackson concludes, to ‘elide the line that separates words and worlds, language and life’ (2002:115). The danger, the potential tyranny, of reification (collective nouns, identity terms, generalized category oppositions) is that it converts subjects of experience into objects of knowledge, ‘transmuting the open-endedness and ambiguity of lived experiences’ into something determinate, and false (2002:125). An appreciation of the richness, the ambiguity, complexity and flux of experience, in short, led anthropology to a distinct kind of claim on human nature: to be human was to practise an irreducible variousness both in terms of the drafts of self, other and world to which consciousness was home, and in terms of the routines though which self, other and world were addressed in everyday life.

Relativism, relationality, ‘richness’ are three ways in which anthropology has added its own signature to the issue of human nature, its ontology and epistemology. The various contributions to this volume can probably be read under the dispensation of each of these paradigms, and likely more.

It is under the last-mentioned, ‘richness’, that I personally have found it most appropriate to write in the past. The ‘diversities’ of personal world-view, the ‘contrarieties’ of individual interpretation, the ‘randomness’ of human consciousness, are some of the ways I have sought to draw attention to the rich nature of our experience, and our capacities for coming to terms with self, other and world — for deciding terms (Rapport 1993, 1997b, 2001). It is under this dispensation, too, that I think it most fruitful to regard the contribution of this volume as a whole: as concerning the richness of human nature, its capacity for excessiveness, for ‘going beyond’. There is an excessiveness intrinsic to the human.

‘Man is a giddy thing’ For Georg Simmel, excess was a condition of modernity (1950:40924). There was an excessive amount of information and sensation available, of opportunity and choice, an excessive call upon resources; there was an excessive amount of difference and strangeness pressed together in new metropoles, of momentariness, an excessive possibility of differentiation and change. I would locate excess within the human condition as such, and suggest that modernity was a significant stage in the releasing of excess from repression: of human beings coming to a more open recognition of themselves.® Following the liberal

Introduction 15 and secular revolutions of modernity, there was an emancipation of the human, our excessive nature, an allowance in social spaces and cultural domains of capacities for idiosyncrasy, invention and multiplicity hitherto hidden by the despotism of closed, religious and

hierarchical world-views, as of deprivation, hunger and injustice. Modernity has seen freer rein being given to human capacities for difference: for circumventing the customary and making difference in the world, for being and becoming different to oneself.’

An anthropology of the modern is, as Gellner says (1995:8), a matter of working through ‘the social options of our affluent and disenchanted condition’: ‘the fruit of our liberation from want and tyranny’. I take this coming to terms with human excessiveness, modernity’s admission of the excessive to public expression, to be a reason for that celebrated nineteenth-century emphasis in literature and the arts, philosophy and science, on individualism: the individual epitomized an excessive irreducibility to human being. It is not, a la Foucault, the creation of Man as an individual subject that we witness

in these various ‘disciplinary’ discourses so much as the varied appreciation of the complex nature of human individuality, now more truly evidencing itself: The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. ... [W]hatever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter what name it is called. ... All good things which exist are the fruits of originality. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

The individual is something quite new which creates new things, something absolute; all his acts are entirely his own. Ultimately, the individual derives the value of his acts from himself; because he has to interpret in a quite individual way even the words he has

inherited. His interpretation of a formula at least is personal, even if he does not create a formula: as an interpreter he is still creative. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

This was not an absolutely new admission. But with the evolution of modernity, the recognition of human excess, its public avowal if not vaunting, and its epitomizing in the paradigmatic figure of the individual — unique, multiple, transitory — became at once a literary, moral and scientific project of central import.

16 Nigel Rapport I will not forget the effect on me of hearing Benedick’s words towards the end of Much Ado About Nothing (I admit it was the film version of

the Shakespeare play, with Richard Branagh and Emma Thompson): ‘man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion’ (Act V, sc. iii, I. 109). What had been encapsulated in these few words, admitted and embraced by Branagh’s character speaking of his own contrariness, was the nub of a thesis I had come to as a result of my anthropological fieldwork in a village setting in northern England, ‘Wanet’, trying to come to terms with the individualities of behaviour exhibited by the likes of Doris and Sid, Fred and Florence (Rapport 1993). The individual was a container of a diversity of possibly contradictory selves. These emanated from the ongoing creative drafting of self, other

and world at which individuals did not stop working. Contradiction was a ubiquitous form of cognitive and practical excess: a conscious playing with, and denial of, identities and relationships; a multiplying of symbolic classifications at the same time as each was assumed true. The deployment of particular constructions of self, other and world — their being lived— occurred at the same time as it being contradictorily appreciated (and willed) that there were any number of other possible ways in which things might be things in human life. Doris, Sid, Fred and Florence et al. brought to life for me another nineteenth-century observation: ‘Everything is true; only the opposite is true too; you must believe both equally or be damned’ (Robert Louis Stevenson 1995:359). When exchange took place between individuals in Wanet — verbal or behavioural — even of mundane kinds in habitual relationships and in terms of anative tongue, it increased this diversity exponentially. Social life was the stage for an expression of the multiple and contradictory,

the inconsistent, random and gratuitous. Social life was not about neat, mechanical models, about orderly systems, whatever may be the conventional usage of explicatory terms such as structure and function, synthesis and consensus, coercion and coherence; social life was complex and contrary, chaotic, farcical, polymorphous, a muddling through (cf. Rapport 1997b, 2001). A compelling recent exposition of this thesis comes from George Steiner in an autobiographical text of his own (1997). Human life, Steiner begins (in an echo of Becker), is quintessentially bounded by finitude: it is an homage to infirmity, limitation, illness and decay. And

yet we witness a human nature whose life is pluralistic to excess: a body whose substance is ‘turbulent, vulnerable, incessantly changing,

pathetic, risible, and infinitely moving’; a consciousness whose impulses are mixed and uneven to an extreme: complaisant, libidinous,

inattentive, mediocre, wasteful, sensual (Steiner 1997:39,65). Language, above all, manifests the infinite resources of human being (the above list of English descriptors could be vastly extended), each

one affording ‘a wealth of exact discrimination’, a density which

Introduction 1/7 is psychologically, socially and materially responsive. Language embodies the escape we have manufactured from the constraints of the mortal. Its extensive resources are a testament to how bearable and fruitful we have made our ephemeral human state. In language we define and safeguard our humanity, we hope, and we imagine the future. Language embodies our obsession with being in defiance of bodily mortality, pain and decrepitude (Steiner 1997:93ff.).

Even language, however, with all its wealth of reference and discrimination (and with no two languages offering the same worldly inventory), still cannot come to terms with (do justice to, encompass) the human capacity for experience: ‘cannot substantiate the existential circumstance’ (Steiner 1997:6). The life-force that is human nature

continues to give birth to such a ‘teeming diversity’ — purposes, artefacts, customs, concealments — that the detail, particularity, ‘quiddity’ of this creativity always exceeds the resources of language to represent. Humanity thus exceeds itself, exceeds its ability to define its own capacity for invention. There may be any number of systems of classification — discourses, paradigms, cultures — each tailored to human expression in a particular way, but still the diversity escapes. No inventory, no encyclopaedia, atlas or index, however compendious,

could ever be complete or comprehensive. The throng of human existence, the thingness, the detail without end, is incommensurable with a systematic knowing: excessiveness obstinately, obdurately, resists.

The necessary response, for Steiner, is indicated by his characteristically profligate style. It is art and poetry which pay proper respect to the ‘holiness of the minute particular’ (William Blake). In treating human nature, the social sciences and the humanities should

offer ‘narratives of intuition’ reflective of their authors’ personal engagement. The turn to theory, to an abstract and purportedly systematic reading, represents a failure of nerve: theory outside the exact and applied sciences is ‘intuition grown impatient’; theory ‘cannot alter or communicate the life-force of individuation’ (Steiner 1997-0). Clearly there are overlaps in Steiner’s response and what we earlier heard from Virginia Woolf — as from James Fernandez and Michael

Jackson. I understand him to be saying that the general truth of human nature is to be found in the abiding capacity to create new particularities: details and distinctions, things and relations. No hermeneutic is sufficient for the comprehension of this paradoxical truth (even one, such as the anthropologist’s ‘culture’, which purports to attend to difference). Indeed, no sooner has a hermeneutic been construed that it becomes redundant, an anachronism, the differences it exhibits tame and over-written. For a hermeneutic is a rearguard action: a matrix for containing what experience has already thrown

18 Nigel Rapport up, describing symbolically a world already known. The capacity for going beyond is always at the fore, drafting quiddity afresh: it is experience’s van, outpacing the customariness, the conventional and cosy fixity, of intellectual modelling (cf. Rapport 2005a). New things are always being said and sayable, being done and doable, new

ways in which the present can be meaningfully lived, the past and future imaginatively constructed. ‘Life’, in Woolf’s memorable phrase (1938:148), ‘escapes’.® Finally, we are enjoined, the study of human excess might endeavour to reflect that nature. The ethos and style of

a human science should be to respect that capacity for engendering difference and not try vainly to reduce it (circumscribe, systematize,

determine, predict). Any such ‘will to a system’, in Nietzsche’s summary judgment, displays ‘a lack of integrity’ (1979b:25). One celebrates difference, lets it be. In their seminal work on intentionality, Franz Brentano and Edmund

Husserl emphasized its transitive character: intention was always an addressing of a particular something beyond itself; one always intended vis-a-vis. This need not be taken to mean, however, that intention as a capacity cannot be distinguished from the occurrence of particular acts of intending. The nature, the power of intending is not limited by the sum of all the particular instances of intention on record. Intention as a capacity, one may argue, is distinct from what it intends. Intentionality is made visible by its intendings but it is not the same as them: it has its own nature. Man, one can claim, is an intending creature, and a human science can predictably set itself the task of pursuing particular acts to draw up a richer (though not necessarily systematic) portrayal of the underlying capacity.

By the same token I would contend that the human capacity for excess is not limited to all the excessive acts it perpetrates. It is, in any case, impossible to comprehend these. The capacity for excess might

be materially known by its substantives but it exists beyond them: it is, indeed, the means to go beyond: always to attend to the world gratuitously, in novel terms. Besides a celebration of the substantives that human capacity produces — the excessive differences — what more might a science of human nature endeavour to inscribe? This book is a beginning. The contributions to this volume tread a fine line; they celebrate ethnographic detail while also adverting to something

beyond themselves: the trace of the general in the particular. The anthropology of human nature distinguishes between the substance of excess and the abiding capacity to go beyond, hoping through a fine-grained accounting of the substantial to accede to an insight into the capacitous. It is a challenging work. How might it even be prefigured?

Introduction 19 Georg Simmel offered the figure of Human Being asa ‘differentiating’

creature. The physical anthropologist, John Buettner-Janusch (1973),

envisaged Human Being as the ‘symboling’ creature. From Johan Huizinga (1970) we have Homo ludens, Human Being ‘the player’, and from Karl Popper, Human Being ‘the problem-solver’. From the likes of Donna Haraway (1985) and Marilyn Strathern we have Human Being ‘the cyborg’. Arguably, all the above figures partake of a realization

which goes back to Kant that human nature has a transcendental quality: humanity can gain leverage on itself, know itself as a self, and alter itself, to an extent, in a recursive, incremental fashion. ‘Human Being’ differentiates, symbolizes, plays, solves problems, acts upon the world by way of networks of mechanic extensions. The ‘excessive creature’ might be the figure offered by this volume: an oxymoron, in the spirit of pointing up what will always go beyond. The ‘excessive creature’ is arewriting of anineteenth-century figure

(to which Simmel was also indebted): the ‘Overman’ of Nietzsche. ‘Man’, Nietzsche portrayed (1979c:#62) as ‘the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed’, also as ‘the questioning creature’. In the figure of the Overman, Nietzsche imagined the implications of a science of

human nature whose knowledge was taken to heart. ‘Man’ would welcome the constant overcoming of himself by way of newness and excess. Instead of repressing knowledge of the paradoxes of the human condition (‘transcendence within finitude’ (Becker)), instead of the ‘psychoses’ of fixed character- or culture-traits (Ferenczi), ‘Man’ would affirm transition and becoming: Man would possess the psychic health to endeavour openly to make himself into what he can become — becoming the measure of himself. The Overman captures

Nietzsche’s hope for a knowledgeable humanity (1979a:49): ‘My humanity is a continual self-overcoming’. Man is the creature who continually overcomes himself in living fully. One need not share Nietzsche's value orientation to appreciate the

aptness of his imagery. In the Overman is the fundamental human nature to go beyond, capacitated to effect a transcending of what is. The Overman is Everyman, this volume contends (‘Anyone’, better), whom anthropology might ethnographically illuminate in manifold acts of everyday becoming.

Envoi: Ethnographies of Human Capacity The book is in four parts. Each scrutinizes a different form of going

beyond, interrogating the proposition that ‘the human’ exists beyond circumscribed notions of political structuration, of economic exchange, symbolic classification and embodiment.

20 Nigel Rapport Part lof the book, ‘Beyond the Economy’, finds Mexican agricultural migrant labourer, Eulogio, on a Canadian fruit farm in Ontario: a part

of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program instituted between Canadian, Mexican and Caribbean governments. In Nelson Ferguson's ethnography, however, loyalty to life-projects of their own conceiving (including efforts at self-improvement and aims at familial security)

place such actors beyond the bounds of merely economic relations and frameworks. Eulogio succeeds, at least in part, in overcoming the apparently alienating conditions of his low-status labour. Here too is Vered Amit’s ethnography of contemporary Canadian student travellers, encouraged to pursue the ‘cosmopolitan’ experience of working holidays abroad. Finding themselves between government departments, universities, housing agencies and labour markets, and beyond bureaucratic arrangements and programs, individual students evince capacities to make their way outside the national-economic arenas and agencies their experiences are expected to serve. Part II of the book, ‘Beyond the Polity’, finds voters in Northern Ireland refusing to operate by way of the terms prescribed them by national policies and politicians. In Thomas Wilson's ethnography,

inhabitants of Belfast and its hinterlands exhibit a capacity to construe identities beyond existing polities, both national and supranational. They locate themselves between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, as these might be simplistically formulated by policy makers for citizens to assume. Here too is Laura Suski’s account of the history of humanitarian appeals orchestrated by the American public-relations firm, The Oram Group. Focusing in particular on the firm’s founder, Harold Oram, the ethnography examines how notions of international injustice were formulated and communicated via appeal letters to elite social actors in a way that implied a moral bond of universal humanism but at the same time allowed for a selective practise of any ‘cosmopolitan’ impulse to help. Oram’s contributors operated in a complex moral space beyond particular polities and pure altruism alike.

Part III of the book, ‘Beyond the Classificatory’, finds Andrew Irving comparing the plight of those suffering from HIV/AIDS in Kampala and the Western world. There is a knowledge of illness and

death which exceeds any materiality of land and wealth, and yet it is within the classificatory schemata of geography and money that dramas of health and ill-health are often played out. By blurring the lines between ethnography, art and performance, however, Irving would demonstrate the power of imagination, and human capacities to enter into ironic dialogues concerning the links between bodies and surroundings. Everyday life with HIV/AIDS is continually mediated by imaginative performances, reverie and memory beyond categorical

Introduction 21 conventions; it may be an abiding irony that money is accorded more value than bodies, but it is within our imaginative capacity morally to transcend the material injustices. Here too is Tord Larsen’s reflection on the ubiquitous human proclivity to ‘entify’: to fill social spaces with ‘things’ — facts, forms, norms, institutions, habits and relations. In a wide-ranging ethnographic typology, however, where new things (‘night-eating’, ‘school-avoidance’ ‘Norwegian freshness’ ) are continually inserted into symbolic worlds, Larsen also chronicles the capacity and practice to supersede things. Entification concerns

the human reinvention and going beyond any existing system of classification as well as the habitude and the structuration to which it can give rise.

Part IV of the book, ‘Beyond the Body’, finds Trevor Marchand considering the knowledge possessed by stonemasons in Yemen, Nigeria and Mali. They are able both to know the cultural habits of constructing the environment according to norm-bound architectural designs, social relations and everyday performances, and to improvise

upon these. To understand how stonemasons can both play the language-game of cultural reproduction and not be played by it, is to appreciate the body as a site where a non-propositional kind of knowledge is practised. It exists beyond the language faculty while yet taking the form of kinds of shared ‘behavioural utterances’. The stonemasons are able to undertake physical tasks in a coordinated, but not predetermined, manner which exceeds the bounds of bodily distinction. Here too is Jonathan Skinner’s account of the teaching and learning of ‘social dancing’: salsa, jive and ballroom, practised as a hobby by men and women in Belfast, Gothenburg and San Diego. The dance class is a site of new dance translations and fusion where individuals adopt and adapt dances to suit their imaginative needs. Indeed, it is the imagination that takes centre stage in the ethnography. In connecting with another body and another self on the dance-floor — an otherness which the individual finds within himself or herself as well as without — it is the imaginative capacity to transcend — to g0 beyond existing social and physical realities, even beyond possible

realities — which is put into practice. Dance is the execution of individual imaginations, possibly ‘in sync’ with one another but not necessarily so. On the dance-floor, Skinner concludes, the body as a site where terms of gender and sexuality, class, nationality, modesty and beauty are ordinarily manifested is exceeded. Kant’s (1996) originary formulation of ‘anthropology’ as a science

was at once an ontological, an epistemological and a moral-cumpolitical venture: the science could give on to a ‘cosmopolitan’ peace amid a community of humankind. Ethically, ‘humankind’ embodied an opposition to the ideology of an ancien regime which insisted on

.. Nigel Rapport essential differences of nature and of worth between patrician and plebeian, man and woman, French and German, Christian and Jew. Scientifically, ‘humankind’ embodied a premise and a promise that a knowledge which transcended the despotism of the merely customary, commonsensical and revelatory was an appropriate goal. Reacting ‘romantically’ and conservatively against such notions, Kant’s philosophical successors such as Johann Herder and Joseph de Maistre declared there was no such thing to know as ‘humankind’, only

Germans and French and so on: humans ensconced in communities of blood and soil. According to George Stocking (1992:347,361), the discipline of anthropology has been dialectically torn between ‘the universalism of “anthropos” and the diversitarianism of “ethnos”’ throughout its modern history. Are human beings to be regarded as the same insofar as they all inhabit different cultural worlds or over and against their inhabiting such worlds? Do they only become human

within culture or does their humanity (consciousness, creativity, individuality, dignity) transcend cultural particularities? Ernest Gellner’s stand on the issue was customarily forthright. Even between ‘consenting adults’, classifying human beings in bounded

social or cultural domains was a dangerous practice (1993:3), while the ideology of relativism — cognitive and moral — was tragic nonsense (1995:8). This Introduction sets the scene to a volume that hopes to be equally forthright in its claims for an ‘enlightened’ notion that ‘the human’ comprises a complex singularity — which might be better known, whose lot might be bettered, and whose existence is the guarantor of that very communitarian (sociocultural) diversity which mediates between the human and its superficial apprehension. One does not intend a master-trope or panacea, but the notion of human nature is workable for identifying a certain anthropological agenda: claiming a particular history and a future project. A Kantian anthropology remains extensively unwritten. Here is the ontological project of defining the human, its capacities and liabilities as universalities beyond the idioms of social, cultural and historical difference. Here is also the epistemological project of finding ways best to approach the human in its individual irreducibility, to apprehend the objectivity of subjectivity; and here is the moral-cum-political project of endeavouring to secure the human, to nurture the opportunities of individual expression above and beyond the contingencies of social, cultural and historical circumstance. Globalization, it can be argued, makes the singularity of the human

more apparent (as well as more vehemently repressed). It makes a communitarian rhetoric of historically determined, collective and coercive cultural identities — and the related claim that individuals who exit such a collectively secured life-world must find themselves

Introduction 23 ontologically devastated, without social anchor or cognitive guarantee —more visible as ideology. The idea that selfhood is constituted and then limited by, forever tied to, particular cultural milieux, particular beliefs

and practices, particular histories, habits and discourses, is refuted. The contributions to this volume differ in focal scale: from individual bodies to international institutions. What characterizes them alike is an ethnographic focus on the human capacity to exceed the limits by which identity is currently formulated in sociocultural milieux and to engender and suffer the gratuitous and new. The conundrum becomes to find ways to accede to a comparative anthropology which does not itself limit the conception of the human that is inscribed.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Andrew Irving and to Michael Jackson for reading drafts of this Introduction and for offering constructive commentaries,

in particular on the works of Ernest Becker, of Sartre, Freud and Marx.

Notes 1. Cited in Steiner (1997:93). 2. Becker(1997:69) cites Eric Fromm to the effect that awareness of the contradiction between the capacity for transcendence and morbidity represents an identifiable

constant through the history of human mythology and social representation: a quasi essence. The Garden of Eden myth can be read, then, as a recognition of humanity's union of opposites: a ‘fall’ into the self-consciousness of fallibility, the birth of ‘dread’ and ‘anxiety’ (Kierkegaard 1970), or of ‘nausea’ (Sartre 1967). Likewise the cultural anthropology thesis that there is no such thing as nature that is not already simultaneously culture. 3. Lam indebted to Stevenson (1981) for this summation. 4. Forinstance, Seymour-Smith (1986), Ingold (1994), Levinson and Ember (1996), Barnard and Spencer (1996), Barfield (1997). 5. ‘[P]ossibly the most absurd view to have been advanced even in moral philosophy’, Bernard Williams opines (1978:34). 6. Simmel himself can be read in this way, describing multiplicity and manifoldness as going to the essence of man’s being (1991:15). 7. This depiction of the emancipatory quality of modernity owes to Karl Popper (1980). The open societies that grew up in the West after the Enlightenment, the secular and liberal democracies, allowed not only for a scientific exploration of the human but also for a possible alignment between social institutions and cultural mores on the one side and the potential capacities for individual responsibility, autonomy, creativity and fulfilment, on the other. This is not to say that modernity delivered a victory for an uninhibited expression of ‘human nature’, or that the latter was free from all manner of efforts, from the philanthropic to the fascistic and totalitarian, to channel or ‘improve’ it (cf; Rapport 2005b).

24 Nigel Rapport 8. Alternatively, in the words of Michel Henry (1993): ‘the watchword of this theoretical objectivism [which misrecognizes individual experience as an effect of

language], whether it knows it or not, whether it likes it or not, is one which has been more explicitly formulated on a political level: Long Live Death’.

References Barfield, T. (1997), The Dictionary of Anthropology (Oxtord: Blackwell).

Barnard, A. and Spencer, J. (1996), Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (London: Routledge). Bateson, G. (1980), Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Glasgow: Fontana). Bateson, G. and Ruesch, J. (1951), Communication (New York: Norton). Becker, E. (1997), The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press).

Bloch, M. (2005), ‘Where did anthropology go? Or: The need for “human nature”’, mimeographed lecture, London School of Economics, 24 February. Buettner-Janusch, J. (1973), Physical Anthropology (New York: Wiley).

Carsten, J. (ed.) (2000), Cultures of Relatedness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dilley, R. (ed.) (1999), The Problem of Context (Oxford: Berghahn). Evans-Pritchard, E. (1976), Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Fernandez, J. (1974), ‘The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture’, Current Anthropology 15(2): 119-45.

sd (1985), ‘Macrothought’, American Ethnologist 12(4): 749-57. (1992), ‘What it is like to be a Banzie: On sharing the experience of an Equatorial Microcosm’, in On Sharing Religious Experience, eds J. Gort, H. Vroom, R. Fernhout and A. Wessels (Amsterdam: Rodopi). Fox, R. (2005), A Life in Anthropology’, Anthropology News, 7 January.

Geertz, C. (1970), ‘The impact of the concept of Culture on the concept of Man’, in Man Makes Sense, eds E. Hammel and W. Simmons (Boston: Little, Brown).

sd (1983), Local Knowledge (New York: Basic). (2000), Available Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Gellner, E. (1993), ‘The mightier pen? Edward Said and the double standards of inside-out colonialism’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 February:

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ss (1995), ‘Anything goes: The carnival of cheap relativism which threatens to swamp the coming fin de millenaire’, Times Literary Supplement 4811: 6-8.

(1998), Language and Solitude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Haraway, D. (1985), ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Socialist Review 80: 65-108.

Henry, M. (1993), The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Huizinga, J. (1970), Homo Ludens (London: Paladin).

Introduction 25 Ingold, T. (1992), ‘Technology, Language, Intelligence: A reconsideration of basic concepts’, in Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution,

eds K. Gibson and T. Ingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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26 Nigel Rapport __-s (ed.) (2005b), Democracy, Science and The Open Society: A European Legacy? (Special Issue: Anthropological Journal on European Cultures 135),

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_ ss (1978), Jacob’s Room (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich).

Part | Beyond the Economy

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INTRODUCTION TO PART I Nigel Rapport

The two essays in Part I describe human capacities that locate actors beyond the economy; both in the sense of providing an ethnographic fullness to individual lives that exceeds the narrow determinisms of Homo oeconomicus, and in the sense of charting a course to individual lives that sees them escaping the logic of any one economic system or set of relations. Here are Mexican migrants in Canada (Chapter 1) and Canadian students working abroad (Chapter 2) whose ‘liminality’, alike, cannot be construed, conscripted, as serving purely economic calls, whether of nation, family, sector or even global marketplace. An understanding of these actors must rather attend to capacities and practices of making sense that are more idiosyncratic, more contrary, even capricious; here is human sense-making as a thing-in-itself, as its own thing, not reducible to economic terms. In ‘The Limits of Liminality: Capacities for Change and Transition among Student Travellers’, Vered Amit describes the promotion, by

a wide range of Canadian agencies, of international student and youth mobility as a crucial tool for succeeding in a global economy. The Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Student Work Abroad Program, the Youth Tourism Consortium

of Canada, and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada urge students alike to gain knowledge of other cultures and understandings of the world — ‘a cosmopolitan world-view’ — as an economic asset: means to provide a competitive edge to individual careers and to make Canadian national economies more globally competitive.

Youth travel (including university semesters abroad) increased exponentially during the 1990s, Amit explains, and now constitutes the fastest growing segment of the travel market, accounting for over 20 per cent of tourism worldwide. Drawing on her recent fieldwork, however, Amit depicts a mismatch between the rhetoric of national

30 Nigel Rapport agencies and institutional programmes and the intentions and experience of individual youth. The latter emphasize opportunism, and an escape or interlude from regular routines, more than a route to enhanced ‘cosmopolitan capacity’ or ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ as leaders of a global Canadian economy. Furthermore sojourns are more

improvised than systematic as individual travellers find themselves between national immigration systems, government departments, universities, student travel agencies, housing agencies and labour markets, and beyond bureaucratic arrangements, negotiations, and programmes. As they bump up against the contradictions and incomprehensions of different institutional, local and national systems, Amit emphasizes the ingenuity with which individual youth carve out their own ad hoc paths. The cosmopolitan capacities they evince in making their own way operate in contradistinction to, more than in alignment with, the national-economic arenas and agencies their experiences are expected to serve.

Amit’s essay is preceded by Nelson Ferguson’s, ‘Conversations with Eulogio: On Migration and the Building of a Life-Project of Motion’. Labour migrants are seldom given the same economic and civil rights as permanent residents. It is a common critique that they come to be mere ‘second-class citizens’ in their receiving countries. This chapter examines the criticism and praise given to Canada’s ‘Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Program’ (SAWP) and considers the relative benefits and deprivations which individuals experience while involved in cycles of migration. The chapter considers the differing

sets of ethical standards that can be deployed for evaluating the conditions of migrant workers in Canada. In determining migrants’ purported (second-class) statuses, the relation of expectations and standards between the receiving country and country of origin must be addressed; more precisely, the migrants’ experience and intention, their instrumental practice, must be appreciated. The chapter frames the Mexican, male migrant on the Canadian farm as an individual actor who places his efforts at self-improvement and aims at familial security between the economies of his homeland and his Canadian place of work. His loyalties to either are overshadowed by a loyalty to the life-project of his own personal (financial, familial) ambitions. It is these that take him beyond any particular economic (also social and political) spaces, relations and frameworks. How is his going beyond conceived of, by himself and others — his family, his employers, the governments involved? How does he secure for himself that space — cognitive, emotional — from where the confidence to go beyond is capacitated? Ferguson offers answers by giving an account of the life of one individual Mexican farm worker in particular, Eulogio, in the daily grind of an Ontario tree farm and in the Mexican domestic arena he continues to imagine.

Chapter 1

CONVERSATIONS WITH EULOGIO: e

ON MIGRATION AND THE BUILDING OF A LIFEPROJECT IN MOTION

Nelson Ferguson

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208 Jonathan Skinner

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Imagination is a faculty so wild in its own nature, that it must be accustomed to the discipline of reason before it can become tame and manageable enough for a correct production. A. Gerard, An Essay on Genius

L’imagination au Pouvoir (“Empower the Imagination’) As a social science, it is characteristic of anthropology to examine the particularities of human cultures through detailed and nuanced ethnographic investigation (Crapanzano 2004; Abu Lughod 1993). In so doing, a choice is made by anthropologists as to whether or not to deploy etic distinctions between culture and nature and between human and animal — the former with the capacity ‘to produce’ in order to live (Godelier 1986) — or to work from emic constructions of like divisions and the ways in which people locally live by them, or to challenge and contest all such divisions as anthropocentric (Bateson

1999; Ingold 2000; Milton 2002). In this chapter my intention is to explore the human imagination, its power, capacities and liabilities as a species-specific characteristic of human nature. The human imagination, I shall suggest, is key to our unique being and our unique

Social Dance and Individual Imagination 209 becoming; it is with the imagination that we go beyond ourselves. I shall make my argument through an examination of the ‘social dance’ world where people imagine, connect and communicate (as against the more choreographed ‘competitive dance’ world). As human actors we use our senses to control ourselves. We also stretch oursenses when we flex amuscle, holdaconversation, singin the shower, dance by ourselves or with others. Murray Melbin (1972:37), in his quest for a grammar of human behavior, Alone and With Others, suggests that human beings dislike ‘sensory homogeneity’, meaning that we are constantly seeking out different sensations, making new connections and communications. This would certainly accord with Stephen Lyng’s (1990) ethnography of sky-divers seeking sensation

in generally risk-averse milieux, or with Edward Bruner’s (1991) more general account of the tourist’s quest for new environments under different skies (see also van den Berge 1994). And yet, for all these different sensations sought — the fragmentation and fracture deliberately introduced into our lives to varying degrees in our human nature, in our ‘human going-ons’ - there is an internal ordering and composition taking place, a making sense of our being-in-the-world. Our individual perceptions are all being carefully ordered, structured,

screened and formatted. Here lies the work of the imagination, the mechanism, as Kant described it (1970), by which the chaos of sensation is ordered (a synthesizing faculty, productive or reproductive of images, taking us from intuition to understanding [ibid.:1 12, 144—-

45]). This mediating faculty is, for Kant, ‘one of the fundamental faculties of the human soul’ (ibid.: 146). Our imagination serves as the bridge over the gap between mere sensation and intelligible thought, so the contemporary philosopher Mary Warnock (1976: 34) clarifies. In essence, ‘imagination connects’ (Kant 1970:146). Before developing further an anthropology of the imagination by way of ethnography, I elaborate somewhat on the philosophy of the imagination, Kantian and later. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (1970:141) notes the following

human structure: There are three subjective sources of knowledge upon which rests the possibility of experience in general and of knowledge of its objects — sense, imagination, and apperception. Each of these can be viewed as empirical, namely, in its application to given appearances. But all of them are likewise

a priori elements or foundations which make this employment itself possible. Sense represents appearances empirically in perception, imagination in association (and reproduction), apperception in the empirical consciousness

of the identity of the reproduced representation with the appearances whereby they were given, that is, in recognition. (original emphasis)

210 Jonathan Skinner Regarding the workings of the imagination, Kant holds that the imagination (Linbildungskraft, Aristotle’s phantasie) works either in an ‘empirical’ or a ‘transcendental’ fashion. The imagination — ‘a power

of making images, pictures or representations of things’ (Warnock 1976:26) — can be used to distinguish the real from the imaginary such as the lived experience from the dream.! It can also refer to the perceptual understanding of the world as a universal capacity of the human being (transcendental) related to Nietzsche's will-topower project, and to Sartre’s existential projection of transcendental freedom granted by the imaginative individual (see Rapport 199 7:3 1-

35 for further elaboration). We have, in all cases, the imagination working as an ‘active faculty’ (Kant 1970:144), one which synthesizes perceptions, reproducing representations by association. So too: Since the imagination is itself a faculty of a priori synthesis, we assign to it the title, productive imagination. In so far as it aims at nothing but necessary unity in the synthesis of what is manifold in appearance, it may be entitled the transcendental function of imagination. (Ibid.: 146-47)

Kant’s exposition on the imagination as human capacity departs from previous stances such as Hume’s (1969) which contended that imagination is a faint copy, a weak form of mental representation when compared with representations raised through the memory. Kant’s is consistent, though, with previous hypothesizing concerning the imagination as the integrating faculty, one which gives continuity

to the existence of impressions, ordering or ‘narrating’ to use the language of contemporary psychologist Jerome Bruner (1986; see also Ricoeur 1988).

Alongside its shaping and ordering nature and function, then, the imagination — this manifold faculty — is also associated with freedom, creativity and interpretation (transcendental). This becomes fundamental to the work of the Existentialists. In his The Psychology of Imagination, for instance, Sartre (1966) makes two key contributions to the theorizing of the imagination. First is the point that imagination is intimately connected with personal freedom, for to imagine is to escape from the world, to withdraw: ‘imagination ... it is the whole

of consciousness as it realizes its freedom’ (1966:270). Moreover, ‘it is because he is transcendentally free that man can imagine’ (ibid.:271). Second, Sartre’s act of imagination is ‘an incantation’ (ibid.:177) whereby its objects are ghostly unreal, like silhouettes drawn by children: it gives ‘implicit meaning [to] the real’, but by way

of negation. To qualify this, he continues (ibid.:273): ‘That which is denied must be imagined’; negation attaches to imaginative acts

Social Dance and Individual Imagination ZAI insofar as to posit the imaginary is to collapse the world of the real. The imagined, in other words, is not real. Two problems raised by this existentialist take on the capacity of the imagination, one which blurs Kant’s distinction between the empirical

and the transcendental, are the extent to which the imagination is free from causal explanation and the real and hence free from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and others whose attention to perception is at the expense of imagination. We should also be wary of Wittgenstein’s point that perceptions are relational and subject to mistake and change — perceptions that include our imaginations. To also be judicial in our assessment, we should note that critics such as Kaufman (1947:374) would critique Sartre from an opposite position: that phenomenology is intuitive and therefore imaginative; that ‘the adventure of the imagination’ is one of the tools by which we devise new meanings and possibilities and thereby transcend our world. It is therefore not necessarily the case that to be imaginative comes at the expense of being realistic. That we have an imagination is not to be denied. All human beings imagine; just as we all connect cause and effect, and all plan and plot our futures. Indeed, such capacities are not even species specific as Bryne (1995) argues in The Thinking Ape: they have evolved and can be demonstrated in primates. In this chapter, I seek to ascertain some of the workings of an empirical and transcendental imagination as they pertain to the realization of our human potential. I do so through dance ethnography, and an account of the realization of dance lifeprojects. Dance, I will argue, is a prime example of how people come

together, connect and communicate, establish and gain sociality through making use of what Kant referred to as the awesome ‘fictionmaking power’ of the imagination. Social dance can be a particularly integrative way of connecting with others through creative means and thereby obviating a sense of loneliness or aloneness, that profound modern alienation which Camus described as estrangement from self and other. First I will explore the bio-sensorial nature of dance before going on to consider the socio-cultural.

The Bio-Sensorial Nature of Dance ‘To Dance is human’, declares Judith Hanna (1987). Dance is therapeutic and cathartic for both the individual and the group (cf. Spencer 1985, Gotfrit 1988, Laderman and Roseman 1996). Dance has instrumental purpose as well as providing aesthetic pleasure. Hanna elaborates (1987: 63):

pale. Jonathan Skinner ~~ Dance is about non-verbal communication, communication which possibly predates verbal communication.

~~ Dance teaches rhythm, metaphorisation, the ability to make fine distinctions and, crucially, the ability to work through a symbolical frame.

~~ In dance we come together empowered for: ‘dance provokes a sense of personal and group power for performer and observer alike’ (ibid:128). This is distinct from the ‘virtual powers’ of dance identified by Langer (1953), virtual in the sense that the portrayals of emotion and feeling are gestural and imagined.

An anthropology of dance has come to see in dance more about the body, and ways of understanding and relating with that body, than it has Kantian notions of an empirical or transcendental imagination. For Johnson (2004:135-41), then, in a study of club culture, dancing is often about abandonment: physical, as the body is loosened and changes habitual movements; emotional, as people become far more

expressive of how they are feeling; and social, as the informality of clubs facilitates new encounters. In social dance one can play, fantasize, come together, and create new feelings of sociality. Sheets-Johnstone (1966) goes so far as to suggest that both thinking

and learning come about through movement; that movement is the mother of all cognition. Movement in the context of social dancing involves a fine-grained connection with one’s partner. Writing about dancing the tinikling stick dance in Bali, Sally Ness (1992:135-36) gives us a full and detailed exposition on this connection; in particular,

the proprioceptive feelings of pressure, the awareness of movement and resistance: To dance the steps of the tinikling — at least the single-step pattern that

I was given to learn on the hotel’s stage that rainy night — I needed knowledge about more than how to conduct myself inside some reachable

imaginary microcosm. There was a partner to deal with less than an arm’s length away, a man confronting me face to face, holding both my hands, a body whose steps, grasp, smile, and gaze, were to be considered at my every step. The knowledge embodied in my dance was in part a knowledge of his dancing, his buoyancy, his timing, his agility, his finely measured touch. It was a knowledge that became embodied through my hands, which ‘listened’ avidly to his in order to move with him, reading the energy patterning manifest there and following it, absorbing it, reflecting it as movement dispersed throughout myself, up my forearms and down into my feet, seeping from the distal ends towards my center of gravity. We had only a very small area of contact. We were not even joined with

our whole hands, our thumbs were not intertwining, only our palms and fingers loosely rested inside one another, making this monitoring a

Social Dance and Individual Imagination 213 fragile activity, requiring a sustained, though not powerful and not critical, attention. Yet, enhanced by visual readings of the movement, the hold was more than enough of a lifeline to produce a rhythmic merger in our steps. It was evident we both knew in our dancing how to read a partner’s grasp for these sorts of messages. We went on together matching each other’s stride and spring and hold under more and more stressful conditions when

the dance progressed to faster and faster tempos. Innumerable minute adjustments of pressure, speed, and direction, were registered, ‘heard’ and understood performatively through the linking of our hands. The knowledge embodied was of both a general and a very individual sort.

Also writing about dance, specifically lesbian and gay dance-floor practice, Jonathan Bollen (200 1:288) talks about the erotic submission

to disco’s disciplinary beat: the performing body ‘submits’ itself both to the music and to other performing — and perhaps watching — bodies. Moreover, in his study of capoeira, the Brazilian dance and martial art, Downey (2005b:61, 65) notes how apprenticeship in the ‘sport’ changed both dancers’ external physiques (muscle growth and elasticity for example) and their internal understanding of equilibrium (such as the motor-sensory perceptual system — the neural pathways learned in skill acquisition): The two capoeiristas weave around each other patiently on the floor, cartwheeling, crab-walking, spinning, and sliding close to the ground... A kind of conversation develops between the two, simultaneously cooperative and competitive, aesthetic and agonistic. (Downey 2005a:2) As the cyclical weight shifting became a familiar pattern to ‘me’, ‘my arm’ also became more sensitive to this kinetic chaining that had to occur for complete integration of the phrase. ‘I’ began to close my eyes and let ‘my

arm’ perform. Over the weeks that passed, habit set in. The posture of everyday life disintegrated as the new patterning took over. (Ness 199 2:5)

In Downey, Ness, and others, dancing is a cooperative connection, a conversation with patterns and rhythms. It is about biology and the body.

Bollen (2001:291) cites the work of philosophers Merleau-Ponty

(1962) and Ruth Diprose (1994), the former suggesting that our own body emerges through reciprocal relations with others, and the latter suggesting that by performing/dancing with other bodies an ‘indistinction’ develops, a blurring of perceptual boundaries. Here is what I would refer to as the evolution of a connection. Diprose (ibid.: 13)

refers to this kinaesthetic occurrence as ‘the transfer of movements and gestures between dispersed bodies’, all taking place within a system of ‘syncretic sociablility’. This form — or sense — of sociability

is considered, for some, an instance of ‘collective effervescence’,

214 Jonathan Skinner found out there, immediate, tangible, biological — a form of sociability associated with sacrality (Alexander 1990:189).* To return to Bollen

(2001:292, 298), bodies learning and practicing dance skills with others come to constitute ‘interworlds’ ‘falling into step’ with each other, ‘feeding off’ each other, both imitating the other and generating

an other. In dancing with others, we might declare, in dancing like others and in dancing around others and thereby accommodating them, a ‘becoming-other’ quality emerges. This is more physical and imitative than imaginative. Again, to hear from Diprose (1994:15), due to its openness — as well as the closedness of its coupling — dancing

increases our tolerance to others. By this, social dance becomes a morality tale for participants and audience. For Bollen (2001:300), the result is that “we become ... less like ourselves and more like each other’.’ Certainly, I would argue, the attraction — and addiction — to social dance comes in part from this

feeling of indistinction from this connection and intertwining with the other: from a therapeutic blurred perception of bodies’ boundaries. Such reactions approximate what Durkheim once (1995:218) posited as ‘collective effervescence’ (cf. Fields 1995:xli): when activity in and

as a group causes us to feel ourselves transformed, transcendental, grander, transported beyond ourselves by the collective and by a force experienced and perceived as external to us. But this can also be balanced by a more individualistic ethnography and approach to social dance, one of Kantian imagination as capacity.

Human Nature, Indistinction and Kinaesthetic Sociability Grace and I (Jonathan) have a chemistry on the dance floor. We perform for ourselves, for each other, and for the audience. We connect

and we communicate well and fast with each other. We both know how the other dances, and we like that as well as each other. We can be close and we can touching but far apart, arms extended, but we are always connecting with each other; the point of connection can be a hand upon a shoulder, a left hand lead, a touch upon a knee, cupped fingertips pushing and pulling, a turn of the head or a glance with the eyes. We lead each other on, and together we are more than each separate aspect. When I spin her, I can spin too at the same time as moving towards her to pick her up for a cross-body lead. The momentum gained is not lost as we rotate on to the next move. I can play with her and she will play back: I can fake a cross-body lead and hold her before pulling her across me, and in the hold she will roll her

Social Dance and Individual Imagination 215 body and flick her feet as though doing tango. She might even invite me into a body roll, tracing torsos as we join and unjoin — but always

connecting. Apart, we might try and outdo each other, shining, imitating and exaggerating each other’s body movements from the toes to the head, joking with each other, romancing and seducing. By looking and watching each other, by spinning as one body on the floor, Grace and I dance with confidence in each other and we dance out of ourselves. We feel that we know where we are with each other at all times. Her body fits mine. It slots into my right side. Dancing bachata,

only hers feels right so close up. Though it is similar to the sexual union, there is no sex or sexuality here. It is purely about dancing. Between us, we create that body interworld.

Such a connection through dance does not come about without work as well as some correspondence and attraction between each other. We are both experienced dancers. Independently, we both know the dance basics — the beat of the music and how it translates into the

steps of our feet and the movement of our bodies. This dancing is a cultural practice. It has an history to it. But the connection between us is a natural one, too, transcendent in the Kantian sense as we both imagine that we understand each other and our place alongside each other. We resonate unlike others on our accustomed dance floors in Belfast, Northern Ireland. With Samura, I spin and she side steps her ‘basic’ so that I collide with her. With Janice, we communicate through

the language of salsa but there are inhibitions. With Linna, we run through the movements and the turn patterns but that is all there is to it. With Unsala, there simply is no tension or connection. With Heaven, I feel uncomfortable in her eyes and in her hands: whenever I sink into the dance and feel a connection she destroys it by making a face at me, letting me know that I have this blank expression on my face, my mouth drooping open and that I must be bored. With these others I share only the empirical imagination to make connection and pattern. With Grace, we simply dance in the moment together. bd

Here, above, is the ambiguous sociality of social dance, a varied connection between individuals by way of an unscripted choreo-

graphy in pairs: all according to a loose rhythm and mutually accepted guidelines regarding body posture and movement. Here are dancers feeding off each other, myself and Grace, Grace and myself, and others connecting and accommodating each other. This is the ‘psychophysicality of human experience’ described by Marion

(2006:8-9): a deep muscular bonding (McNeill 1995) through a sustained negotiation with others. This bonding through kinesthetic experience is powerful and addictive. It only happens with partners

216 Jonathan Skinner who return feelings and converse in the dance. Those addicted dance ten social dances for that one effervescent dance. Marion (2005) terms it ‘activity-based culture’.

Returning to Bollen (2001:301-—5), we hear that dancing is a physical capacity often relating to the group imaginary. For him, it is an exhibition of enculturation rather than a case of autonomous agency. Writing about queer kinesthesia, Bollen poses the following question: Yet what if a body’s capacity for action were considered not as evidence

of an autonomous, independent agency, but as evidence of a body's enculturation, its training and participation in socialized and cultured ways of moving? (Ibid.:301)

For Bollen, the body is inscribed and body movement is prescribed by dominant subject positions. ‘Queer’ social dancing is realized between the imaginary morphologies of the ‘feminized hag’ and the ‘phallicized dyke’ (ibid.:302). In Bollen’s fieldwork experience,

dance-floor dancings are enactments: performances of gender inflected by collective imagination and stereotype. Bollen proposes a morphological imperative to this sociality, an imagined sociality to my mind, one corroborated through the dance connection. For ‘Karen’, then, the ‘cool’ way to dance as a dyke is with a toughness accrued around weight: In contrast to the lightness of ‘girly’, the kinesthetic of ‘cool’ is less ‘up and out’ and more ‘down and into it.’ It is distinguished by a restrained range

of arm gestures, either held contracted low or swung around the torso, and by a torso ‘hunkering-down,’ or tilting, twisting, and shifting, but without the isolation of lateral pelvic action. It has a low sense of gravity, weight held back on the heels, and support shifts, when they occur, tend to be heavy. (Bollen 2001:306)

This means that when a woman ‘comes out’, her dancing style might change significantly to mark her identification as a lesbian: Emma: ‘T just know that my dancing is not the same now as it used to be ... [danced like a drag queen and I was comfortable doing that when I was straight ... But I would never do that now’. (Ibid.:306—7)

Emma now polices her dancing, leaving the ‘girly’ moves for others.

Equally, male-to-male social dancing might also consist of selfconscious movements in relation to each other and to impressions imagined to be made to the other. Ricardo, below, recounts how his relationship with his partner affected his social dancing:

Social Dance and Individual Imagination 217 I noticed this year at this party I danced differently to how I have previously and I think it’s a comment I got from a boy I was going out with... I’ve never actually danced with him [but] he made a comment saying he didn’t like blokes who danced in a girly sort of way and waved their arms around a lot. Now, I don’t think I dance in a girly sort of way but I was more conscious of where my arms were in relation to my body and instead of putting them up in the air, I put them up in front and out to the side sort of thing which was really weird, and I concentrated a bit more on moving my chest and my upper body separately to my lower body. (Ibid.:308)

And yet, my dancing salsa with Grace, and Ness’s example of her learning the tinikling dance and the distinct proprioceptive feelings which she had, do suggest that for all these conventions one’s dancing

is still very much one’s own. Furthermore, I would maintain that individuals’ dancing is imaginative in its connection with others. For all the enculturation of the dance, for all the melding of bodies, and for all the interconnections and sociality of the dance, the meanings,

feelings, interpretations and style features in social dancing can remain individualistic. The connections, fantasies, capacities and possibilities can all be imagined by the dancer at the same time as they are shared in the narrative of the social dance. Kk

Writing about the anthropology of the body rather than dance and the imagination per se, John Blacking (1977:4) makes the point that sensory deprivation interferes with human cognition. He suggests this in the context of advocating music and dance in society: the two forms of nonverbal communication both acting as mediators between the mental and the manual (1977:20). Blacking continues, in strident vein, by setting out his Durkheimian

vision for the place of music and dance and how they should be investigated by anthropologists. First, he (1977:6) writes that ‘our task, as anthropologists, [is] to experience others’ bodies through our own bodies and to learn more about some of the somatic states

that we can understand but about which we know little beyond the inadequate verbal descriptions of our society.’ He then goes on (1977:8): ‘Human society is not merely like a single organism: it is a biological phenomenon, a product of the evolutionary process.’ The reader is left in little doubt, then, as to Durkheim's legacy in Blacking: society as biological fact. However, opposed to Durkheim’s homo duplex (whereby the social and moral is set against the animal and selfish), for Blacking (1977:8), cooperation and social interaction is a ‘biologically programmed’ necessity for human organisms:

218 Jonathan Skinner Human beings are meant to share somatic states and ... this speciesspecific characteristic is necessary for the development of their cognitive processes and capacities ... Shared somatic states are consequences of the sensory and communication system of the human species which is the basic condition for social interaction. (1977:8, 10)

The chemistry that I feel with Grace is in our make-up. It is through our bodies that we understand other people, that we share states with them, that we empathize and sympathize with them. There is, in other words, a ‘human proclivity for relating with others in terms of feelingresponse’ (Blacking 1977:9), one which many deny or have blunted from an early age. It is human nature, after Blacking, for people to come together and connect in various ways and means, and to create those ways and means when necessary.

I would concur with much of Blacking’s argument about our human sensibilities and proclivities to cohere and to connect with one another. I would go so far as to add that these feelings are cravings. And yet I would dispute their natural-biological basis and bias: Blacking’s theorizing of ‘society as social fact’, his conceptualization of social proclivities as biologically programmed features common to all ‘Man’. Blacking comments upon human creativity in terms of a biological— cultural continuum, but he does not develop any substantial position

beyond these guidelines. Indeed, his closing remarks in his edited ASA collection on the Anthropology of the Body are simply to rehearse hoary questions about the body and society: What has become problematic for me in the last few years is the question of how much control man has over his own destiny and to what extent his cultural freedom is restricted by biological and evolutionary restraints.

(197725)

What happens to the imagination in this Durkheimian or neoDurkheimian conception? The issue is returned to some twenty years later in Rapport’s Transcendent Individual where he seeks to articulate ‘a developmental relationship between social structure and individual creativity (1997:31).Inthiscase, however, Rapporteschews Durkheim in favour of a Nietzschean-cum-Leachian inspired stance of individual

creator and self-inventor. For Rapport, social structure is not to be reifed or regarded as sui generis. Nor does social structure have to be a binding cloak of conformity. And certainly, neither society nor social structure are biological social facts. Rather, they are useful fictions by which we script and play out our exploits. Blacking’s musicians and

dancers can have all their possibilities and proto-potential without the conceptualization of universal collective consciousnesses, or aesthetic senses based, as Blacking insists, on theories of evolution and biological development (see Hanna 1979:28).

Social Dance and Individual Imagination 219 Rapport’s stance is fundamentally ‘humanistic’. Carrithers writes similarly. Humans have plasticity and ‘human life is metamorphic’: indeed, there is an ‘incessant mutability [about] human experience’

(Carrithers 1992:29). For Carrithers, as with Bollen, sociality is key. And yet, for Carrithers, this sociality — ‘a capacity for complex behaviour’; ‘a capacity, a potential’ linked with birth and maturation (1992:34, 40, 38)-—should have biological rather than intersubjective traits so that anthropologists can speak to other disciplines. Hence,

Carrithers proposes a purely biological evolutionary background for sociality, one ‘established through the force of natural selection’. Our capacity to connect comes from our human specificity. It is more than just long term adaptive advantage of the intellect which gives us our ‘innate human propensity for mutual engagement and mutual responsiveness’ (1992:55). Contra Rapport, Carrithers codes sociality

genetically. It is an inbuilt instinct rather than an intersubjective desire.

Rapport and Carrithers, alike, go on to draw upon the work of Jerome Bruner. For Carrithers, ‘narrative thought lives at the heart of sociality’ (1992:74, 76), establishing landscapes of action and consciousness which ‘go to the heart of the human capacity to imagine’. For Rapport, ‘there is a constant readiness to rewrite ...

narratives, to write new narratives, and so render experience (the world) otherwise’ (1997:35). And Rapport continues, ‘in the writing and telling of narratives is assured ... a human knowledge of breach and exception, of alternative ways of being, acting, striving, which we can envision. When Rapport writes in terms of our capacity to reflect, escape and reevaluate, I read into his work the creative power

of the mind and body to imagine and to then create. In the next section I should like to give evidence of this power; while linking it to sociality, I would define it as a matter of intersubjective negotiation rather than instinctual patterning — and also a matter of transcendent imagination. Here, then, are ethnographic examples of the workings of the imagination in the teaching and learning of dance.

Imagination and the Dance Let me continue, first, with the work of Jerome Bruner. In his book, The Culture of Education (1996), Bruner lends support to the Socratic and interactive style of teaching and learning. To apply Bruner to the dance

world, effective dance teaching is more than imitative action. Best practice is collaborative and also conceptual and imaginative; there must be a productive interaction between conceptual understanding and situated actualization. ‘Studies of expertise have shown that

220 Jonathan Skinner merely learning how to perform skillfully does not get one to the same level of flexible skill as when one learns by a combination of practice

and conceptual explanation’ (Bruner 1996:54; cf. Skinner and Simpson 2005). Here is apprenticeship by practice and participation, as Lave and Wenger have defined it (1991). The results on the dance floor, sometimes referred to as the acquisition of a kind of intelligence — kinisthetic intelligence (Gardner 1985) -—can be the heightening of both inter- and intra-personal understandings and feelings. Indeed,

due to the physicality of dance, its hold and connection, there is the possibility that the capacity ‘to apprehend directly’ the actions, feelings, or dynamic abilities of other people is stronger and more direct because it is not mediated by words or pictures. To dance socially ‘in sync’ with another is to embody and exemplify an imagination and to have it accepted and reinforced by another. The following are examples of dance instruction which encouraged

specifically the use of the imagination. They are drawn from several years of my fieldnotes, gathered from research into salsa, jive, tango and

ballroom dance circles in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and the southwestern US, and from individual international workshops in Amsterdam and Gothenburg. I have divided the ethnographies into

two groups: the first are examples of dance instruction where the students are mimicking the teacher and are being assisted by their using their imagination. The imagination here has a close connection with the reality of the dance class; it is being used to achieve a dance end point. In the second set of examples, the imagination is referred

to as mental representations which approximate the fantastical or transcendental more than the real. In these cases, the realization of the imagination is thought about but it is not the desired end point. The purpose of the imagination in these latter examples is to be savoured purely as the contents of the imagination; often sexual in nature, these ‘imaginations’ remain to a large extent unconsummated. In the latter instances, then, their absence from, or negation of, the everyday takes

on a Sartrean colouration, and they highlight the extent to which dancers hold themselves in check. Both sets of examples are pertinent to Kant’s theorization of the imagination. Both rely upon an ability to distinguish between the real and the imagined and how to make the imagined real. And both rely upon the human capacity for motility, and an understanding of one’s place in the world and how to stage and direct it: Example One

At the end of the social dancing in the studio, the studio manager introduces his staff. The staff line up on the dance floor and are introduced individually to the dancers. They do this every other night

Social Dance and Individual Imagination 221 yet there is still an awkwardness about it. The staff bow and curtsy with mock flourishes. You can see them projecting an adopted mantle of aself especially imagined for these moments (‘I’m a Latin dancer, not an erotic dancer’ is a commonly heard self-expression). At other times

they practice with their students, catching glimpses of themselves in the mirrors along the walls, checking to see if they are dancing as they imagine themselves to be. The students also adopt these activities, watching others and themselves through the mirrors to see if their mimicry is ‘working’. Often it is an embarrassing let-down as the visual reality breaks into their imagination. Example Two

An instructor is teaching Latin motion rotation of the hips and the importance of small steps in rumba and salsa: ~~ Imagine you are threshing grapes. Imagine the slaves in Cuba making the wine, standing there in great big vats. Imagine centuries ago, making the wine, crushing grapes, squelching grapes under foot — pushing down into the ground and transferring weight from side to side. Ideally, my head level stays the same.

~~ Imagine you are on a beach, dancing in the sand and on your beach towel; take smaller and smaller steps.

~~ This is an Afro-Cuban dance. Your body is an expression of yourself. As you move from side to side, lock the legs. This gives you one loose side and one tight side. You move the body via the rib cage and the arms should follow the rib cage out. Imagine your feet are stuck and then dance with your upper body only.

The last instructions proved to be particularly effective as the male salsa dancers worked on their body movements in front of the dance studio mirrors. Example Three

Other instances from the teaching and learning of dance which feature the explicit use of the imagination include the following mental instructions to help with body movement, body isolations, body posture, and dance attitude: ~~ Dance: it is typically from the footwork up, but salsa is the exception where it is from the body down. Imagine the music trickling down your body.

~~ Imagine the rib cage like a cardboard box with corners.

222 Jonathan Skinner ~~ Imagine you are given some stinky flowers, you look up and away. That’s how the woman should hold her head away from her partner.

~~ Imagine you are wearing a g-string around your hips; you have sparkles on your nipples; feathers on your hands; and expensive tights that can run on your legs.

Through Examples One to Three, dance can be seen to be more than merely the creation of an ‘imaginative space’ (Sheets-Johnstone 1966) in the mind of the audience. This space is acted out by the dancer — both the student and the teacher. We might say that the imagination plays a part in the formation as well as the execution of the dance

moves and dance steps. This is learning by enculturation further refined by enskillment (cf. Ingold 2000:416). Dance can only ‘flow’ with these two in tandem. The execution is the visible manifestation

or approximation of the imagination (‘Imagine you are threshing grapes’). The dancing is the imagination as capacity made concrete (‘Imagine you are given some stinky flowers’). The imaginative act leads

to and facilitates the physical manifestation of the dance. But it is not

always the case that the empirical nature of Kant’s real/imaginary distinction is played out. In more Sartrean mode, however, the next set of examples display the imagination as a personal bubble to be held in check in the mind. The examples are still drawn from my dance fieldnotes but, interestingly,

the context is different: social dancing rather than dance lessons. These are cases of more ‘fantastic’ imaginations where the social dancer dwells upon imaginative possibilities, living in infatuation, appreciating and relishing the real/imaginary distinction. Example Four

The female dancers watch Deano dancing with all of his pupils. They pay to dance across the floor with him. Their favourite moments are being escorted arm-in-arm on and off the dance floor, and when he first faces them and they lock bodies in closed position. He’s seen to be ‘gorgeous’ and the women giggle when talking about him or watching him. They are all happily married and are not looking for another relationship, but they are more than just looking at Deano. Example Five

We're sitting drinking at the bar before the free-dance lesson followed

by dancing. Jason is making the most of his second wife and their children being away visiting his in-laws for the month: he has been out dancing every night. He tells us that his fantasy at the moment is that one of the women in front of us will love his dancing, fancy

Social Dance and Individual Imagination 223 him and invite him back to her place for sex. Antonio makes a cutting motion and says these days she'd be ‘a slasher’. Jason replies that the

husband would probably be there wanting to watch. I add that he might even want to join in. Example Six

Danielle and Zani sometimes go out dancing together. Because they leave and arrive together and dance together a lot, Danielle thinks that people in the dance scene think that they are sleeping together. Danielle even thinks that Zani would sleep with her if she let him. But she understands their relationship as ‘a pact’: they can dance close and sexy because Danielle knows that Zani knows about her ‘pact’ with him — namely that it is just dancing and friendship that they enjoy together. Danielle belabours the point a bit to me. She then goes on to tell me that one of her girlfriends was a regular salsa dancer and after she brought her boyfriend along once, all of the male dancers

who danced with her changed their relationship with her. They started treating her differently and were always asking after him. She didn’t like that and resolved to keep her dancing separate from her relationships. Finally Danielle ended our interview by telling me that now she could not dance with me like we used to the past few weeks. ‘T can’t dance with you like I used to. It’s harder for me to dance with you in my fantasy world now that I know all about you, your personal life and your “practically-wife”’.

In Examples Four to Six, dancers are using their imagination to depart from reality; to enhance reality, a reality which is not there and probably never will be: the female dancers with Deano, and Zani and myself, and Jason with his roving eye and imagination. In terms of perception, these last examples are non-sense examples: they are not examples of a conscious being-in-the-world. They are examples of possible-but-unlikely futures. They are examples of not-being-in theworld, of absence rather than presence. There are no sense impressions in this example of Danielle’s imagination, no primary embodiment,

no worldly facticity. In his imagination, Jason develops and adds projections to his memory: what he entertains and desires but doubts will be realized or, if they were, would turn into a hideous nightmare. This makes these last examples very different from the first set: they are fantasy-remaining imaginations. They have an unreal aspect to them, whereas those instructed to imagine themselves on the beach (as cardboard, as smelling bad-smelling flowers, and as wine-making slaves) are drawing upon memories or projected thoughts to help out with their dancing, to act out their imaginations. The instructors rely upon an interpretive community familiar with many of the words and images painted.

224 Jonathan Skinner An Anthropology of the Imagination: Fantasy and Fancy From Classical Greece onward, the imagination has been interpreted

and reinterpreted: from Aristotle's ‘phantasia’ — imagination as sense perception (cf. O’Brien 1993:4) — to Coleridge’s imagination as creative faculty. The concept has also often been critiqued, even

derided as ‘fancy’, with associations of irrationality, illness and irreligion (Sparshott 1990; Schulte-Sasse 1986/7); untrammelled, our imagination could, it has been claimed, very easily lead to idle and

ideal (distorting and corrupting) thoughts, even unto madness. The imagination has been considered in terms far broader than the Kantian ones with which this chapter began: empirical versus transcendental. For many it is a dangerous, falsifying and misguiding faculty which

feigns unreal images, inflames minds and has the potential to lead people into ‘unlawful matches’ and ungovernable practices (Rossky 1958 [after Francis Bacon]).

In his article ‘Imagination: The Very Idea’, Sparshott (1990) considers the production of the fine arts: images created by imitation and representation and by use of the imagination. Paintings, sculpture and poems are charged objects through which we communicate but

they are also ‘arts of imagination’: representational works with a subjective character to them. The imagination, for Sparshott, is ‘the ability to envisage things otherwise than as they are merely observed to be’ (1990:2, emphasis in the original). In a pithy — and empirical — take on Aristotle, Sparshott (ibid.) explains that he is developing his own epistemology of the imagination which he also understands to be ‘the ability to formulate, frame, and consider objects of sensation and cognition other than those directly anchored in the reality presented to the percipient’. Works of the imagination are the title given to the fine

arts which appear from the human mind, whether those seemingly touched by divinity, or those works of fancy more kitschy, parodic and by-productional. They are the furthest development of our cognitive

and semiotic faculties and so should be accorded due status. The artistic imagination, we might say after Sparshott, is the realization of our human capacity. Sparshott is also critical of an Aristotelian phantasia, however. In

similar vein to Warnock’s critique of Sartre on dreaming and the imagination, Sparshott (1990:4) notes how difficult it is to preserve a distinction between the real and the unreal. Both perceived and

desired worlds are the objects of consciousness but they have radically different statuses; the imagination, with its synthesizing and envisaging powers, can both dispose of ways of world-making and

conceive of alternative orders. Jochen Schulte-Sasse (1986/7:26) develops this Janus-faced fecundity of the imagination in his study of

Social Dance and Individual Imagination 225 the place of fantasy within a global semantic system which regulates the ideological reproduction of society. He is keen to rehabilitate the imagination as a faculty of innovation and to defend it against critics such as Theodor Adorno who saw any aesthetic institutionalization as asymptom of the bourgeois. For Schulte-Sasse, as for the French Avant Garde in the early twentieth century, ‘fantasy’ is to be encouraged for its deconstructive, anarchic and revolutionary potential (“Empower the Imagination” were the cries on the streets of Paris of the famous

1968 generation). Schulte-Sasse concludes by heeding Kant’s warning that insofar as we play with the imagination, it too plays with

us (1986/7:32). Typically, anthropologists writing about the imagination have divided themselves between those looking to assert cross-cultural cognitive maps and imagery (the cognitive science route |JohnsonLaird 1983; Lakoff 1987; Whitehouse 2004]|) and those seeking to chronicle and theorize native experiences and performances (the

socio-cultural |Appadurai 1996; E. Bruner 1986; Turner 1986; Palmer and Jankowiak 1996]). In terms of my own work approaching

the imagination through dance ethnography: interview setting, experiences of sensory connection, and uses of ‘imagine/imagination’ as linguistic terms have been my points of entry. And I have found

the recent work of Arjun Appadurai and Vincent Crapanzano particularly useful for a topic so difficult to research due to its very (absent) nature. In spite of his alluding to ‘collective representations’ and his apparent support for Charles Taylor’s notion of the ‘social imaginary (social existence shared as a popular imagination |Taylor 2002]|), Crapanzano’s (2004) book Imaginative Horizons goes some way towards developing a humanistic anthropology which can cater for the individual’s relationship with space/time: their place in the world, their being in the world, their making of the world including past and future narrative positions. Considering ‘the way in which we construct, wittingly and unwittingly, horizons that determine what we experience and how we interpret what we experience’ (2004:2),

Crapanzano posits that it is through imaginative horizons on a transcendental plane that we regulate and evaluate our lives and our relations with others.

More precisely, Crapanzano would attune anthropology to the ‘paradoxical ways in which the irreality of the imaginary impresses the real on reality, and the real of reality compels the irreality of the imaginary’ (2004:15). The imagination is unreachable, Crapanzano explains, and yet we reach for it; the imagination is uncertain and yet part of our projections and prophecies - and as we reach for them we inevitably destroy them for they are reified and become displaced. The imagination is Crapanzano’s ‘intermediate reality’ (2004:5 7) existing

226 Jonathan Skinner on the edges and at the borders, ‘barzakh’ as his Morroccan informants term it. Fieldwork experiences have highlighted for Crapanzano the diversity of this imagination; amongst the Navajo, performance-based

narrations contrast with more literary Western forms of narration, a contextual and empirical imaginary as opposed to a projective one (2004:45). Citing the literary critic Jean Starobinski, Crapanzano further highlights imagination’s distancing and previewing capacity. By all this, the imagination ‘lightens our existence’ and is held in ‘anticipatory’ regard (Crapanzano 2004:19).' The space/time dimensions which Crapanzano brings to bear upon the anthropological study of the imagination allow us to situate the Latin dance students of my ethnography with imaginative possibilities to transcend themselves, narratively, first in mind and then in body. The imagination opens up a ‘fourth dimension’ where Danielle and Zani dance, and Danielle and Jonathan non-dance.

Finally, let me close with Arjun Appadurai who considers new contexts of imagination in his assessment of the cultural dimensions of globalization. Appadurai (1996:3, 31) describes the work of the imagination as a ‘constitutive feature of modern subjectivity’; it is a new social imaginary, but, crucially, one by which people can now script possible lives (whereas in the past it was but a virtual escape from ordinary life). His understanding differs from Taylor’s in its more

individualistic stance: people’s ‘imagined worlds’ are fantasies and proto-narratives which they now have the ability to realize and fulfill. People are no longer so shackled and impeded by rigid class and caste systems. In amodern mobile society, sociality in the form of connection can now be purchased and played with on demand. Imagination the

antidote has turned into imagination the possibility. Anyone can watch ‘Dancing with the Stars’ one night on the television, and book into a dance studio for lessons with Deano the next. But this is not to say that Deano will share the connection as Jonathan and Grace did.

Anthropology would do well to use the human capacity for imagination to explore further the connections, coherences and

incoherences mapped out and traced by anthropologists and informants alike.

Notes 1. Mythanks to Nigel Rapport and to Barnaly Pande for insightful comments, as well as to panelists and audience at a CASCA workshop, 2006. In respect to the above photographs (courtesy of Wikipedia free reproductions and the author), observe the contrast between people deprived of their capacity to connect under torture

Social Dance and Individual Imagination 224 or in confinement, and those connecting to the point of overloading their senses: the thrill-seeker, risk-taker, the ‘edge-worker’ as Lyng (1990) characterizes them in his study of sky divers; or the ‘social dancer’ on their night out (Lupton 1990; Goltrit 1988).

2. See also Urmson’s (1967:89) distinction between the accurate recollection from the delusional imagination. 3. ‘Interaction produces an energy like the “effervescence” of religious ecstasy’, writes Jeffrey Alexander (1990:188). Alexander goes on to refer to this energy as a ‘psychic energy’ which is interpreted rather than felt externally. 4. Ishouldremind the reader that Iam still referring predominantly to social dancing, and that this sense of indistinctness does not necessarily occur with all partner dancers. Nor is it so evident amongst performance and competitive dancers who have ‘professionalized’ their proprioception.

5. Starobinski (1970): ‘the imagination is much more than a faculty for evoking images which double the world of our direct perceptions: it is a distancing power thanks to which we represent to ourselves distant objects and we distance ourselves from present realities.’ The imagination can be at once anticipatory, distancing, transcendent and ultimately disappointing with its potentially empty images of hope.

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AC

INDEX

aesthetics 12, 157-8, 174n8, 187, Carrithers, M. 219 194 AIG 199, 701 213) 2 bo, Casey, E. 147, 183, 190-2

229 Caleeorisdlion.5420;-59, Jov iz,

Amit, V. 20, 29-30, 45, 68 129, 147, 149, 155, 166, 171-

Appadurai, A. 50, 225-6 2. 188;.195

Appiah, K. 115-16 causality 2,5, 7-8, 13, 168-9, 173, apprenticeship 183-92, 195-6, 190, 211, 214

201-2, 213, 220 citizen 20, 30, 59, 77-8, 84, 86, architecture 21, 180-202 93-7, 103-5, 109-12, 115, 119,135, 149

B civil society 88, 90, 102-3, 105

Bateson, G. 10, 208 cognition 9, 11, 16, 22—3, 30, 56,

Baudrillard, J. 158-9, 165, 174n8 130, 174n10, 181, 184, 197-

Becker, E. 4—5, 16, 19, 23n2 203, 212, 217-18, 224-5

being-in-the-world 2, 5, 128, 146, Cold War 75, 102-3, 105, 108,

133720952225 110, 116-19

belonging 6, 75 commodity LOL, 127,152,058, biology 3, 11, 117, 179-80, 213- 162-3, 165, 172, 174n8

14, 217-19 communication 4, 10-11, 17, 20,

Blacking, J. 217-18 105-8, 116, 170-1, 181, 184, Bloch, M. 1, 3, 11 186, 190, 192, 197-8, 200-3, body 3-11, 15-23, 128-35, 146- 209, 211, 214-18, 224 51, 179-86, 190-3, 196-203, communitas 56, 61, 63, 68

212-223, 226 community 3, 6, 13, 21-2, 45, 50,

Bollen, J. 213-14, 216, 219 10;-7 7; 80; 09-205 95,954 LOL,

Bourdieu, P. 180, 183, 191 119,137, 149-50, 156-7, 159,

6, 174n3 2059225

branding 92, 127, 157, 160, 163- 170, 186, 189, 192, 195-7,

Bruner-E.57; 65):209;22 5 connection 7, 94, 180, 209, 212-

Bruner, J. 210, 219-220 17; 220, 225-6

building 47-9, 103, 143, 146,181, | consciousness 4, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16,

183-96, 201-3 22, 23n2, 87, 114, 121n8, 130-

bureaucracy 20, 30, 37, 44, 76 5, 147, 156, 191-2, 209-10, Butler, ji.165, 17313; 483; 192-3 216-20, 223-4

232 Index 46,92 93,96, 106-10

contradiction 4—5, 15-16, 23n2, elite 20, 54, 76, 77-80, 82, 85, 87, conversation 13, 31—5, 40-9, 161, emotion 1, 7,9, 30, 36, 44, 83, 93,

137-38, 193,,209,213,.216 107, 135, 147, 160-1, 163, cosmopolitanism 2, 4—5, 7, 20-1, NS 2 2A 29-30, 54, 59, 75-6, 79-80, 96, empathy 187, 218

101-20, 128, 148 empire 86, 103, 109-10, 116-18

craft 11, 183-97, 201-3 entification 21, 127-8, 155-7, 159, Crapanzano, V. 134, 147, 208, 162, 165-74

225-6 environment 2, 4, 6,8, 11, 21,

creativity 2, 4-5, 8, 15-17, 22, 179-80, 183, 185-91, 194,

231/064 97106; 12) 130; 197, 201-3, 209

147-8, 158, 162, 168, 179, epistemology 9, 11, 14, 21-2, 138,

183, 194-7, 201, 203, 210-13, 147,151, 190, 224 215, 218-19, 222, 224 equality 56, 62, 88, 90, 114, 118,

culture 3-6, 9-19, 21-3, 50, 54, L555150

68, 83, 87, 92-6, 117, 135, essentialism 1, 157 155-8, 166-7, 171-2, 179-80, ethics 21, 30, 76, 101-3, 105, 112,

184-6, 189, 191, 196, 208, 116, 118-19, 151,157,188

215-22 ethnicity 5, 13,95, 134-5, 148-9,

cyborg 10, 19 156, 160, 165-6, 175n1, 186, 188,197

D ethnography 2-3, 7, 18-23, 29, 75, dance 21, 147, 170, 179-81, 201- 94-5, 127-8, 134, 138,179, 2, 209, 211-27 186, 191, 208-9, 211, 214, AAG; 220,222,227 visual 136-8

social’ 2 1) 179) 209-2 lll, 219-20, 225-6

death 4-6, 12, 20, 24n8, 41-5, European Union 75-6, 77-8, 81,

55,117, 128, 134-8, 146-50, 83,94-5,97

1521) Everyman 2, 19

democracy 23n7, 87,111, 114-15 excessiveness 4, 7, 14-19, 127-8,

dialogue 80, 105, 113m 192, 194, is a eae a

196, 200-3 exchange 5,9, 12, 16, 19, 70n4,

discourse 5—6, 11,.15,.17, 23, 59, 127-8, 132-4, 147, 151, 157, 75, 83-4, 92-5, 102, 105, 110, M7 U7 9; 1835 L OO; Loo. OZ,

115-16, 157-62, 170, 174n7, 202-3 179,181, 183-4, 190, 192-7 student 58-67

displacement 110-111,115, existentialism 179, 210-11 120n2 129 152, 1735n3; 135, experience 5—6, 9, 12-14, 17-18, 225 20, 24n8, 30, 37, 40, 45, 50,

Donnan, H. 88, 94 55-68, 79, 102, 105-6, 119, dream 4, 46, 210, 224 128, 134-5, 146-7, 151, 155, dualism 7-8, 183 160-1, 171-2, 180, 184, 187-

Durkheim, E. 214, 217-18 92,196, 20 1,.209-10, 215, 219,225

E expertise 3, 120n1, 188, 194, 219 economy 3, 9, 19-20, 29-30, 35-6, — expression 6, 13, 15, 17, 22, 156-7,

40, 44, 50-1, 58-9, 64, 69n2, 160, 163-4, 166, 172, 202, 221 77, 80-1, 85, 87-95, 102,

109-11, 121n8, 128-9, 134-5, F 148-50, 159, 170-1, 186 family 29-30, 35-6, 40, 44-51,

Eidheim, H. 157, 166 62=3;,65,67, 76,101, 119;

Index 233 129, 135-9, 148-51, 161, 188, as capacity 2-8, 14-23, 23nl,

193-4 2517 5:29—-50; 56; 5:1; 3%,

fantasy 12, 128, 146-7, 186, 212, 59, 68, 75-6, 102, 119,

217, 220, 222-6 127-9, 130-2, 148-50, 160,

feelings 12. 160,165; 23, 199; 179-81, 186, 197, 208-11,

212, 214, 216-18, 220 214-20, 222, 224, 226

Ferguson, N. 20, 30, 38 as substance 2, 6, 18

Fernandez, J. 12-13, 17, 173n1 human rights 90, 104, 108, 110, fieldwork 3, 13, 16, 29, 32, 34, 180, 114-15

182-4, 186, 226 humanism 20, 76, 115-17, 219, Foucault, M. 15, 174n7, 183, 225

GI

192-3 humanitarianism 20, 75, 102, 107,

freedom 7-8, 13, 15, 35, 39-40, 110-16, 119 44,107,111, 114-15, 118, humanity by a 7519223 2 3n2, 132,157, 164, 179, 210-11 76, 105, 108, 116, 149 Geertz, C. 3, 8-10, 138, 189 identity 3, 6, 10-14, 16, 20, 22-3,

Gellner, E.1, 8, 15,22 76, 80, 82-4, 87, 92-4, 96, 101, globalism 2, 22, 29-30, 50, 57-8, 116-17, 127-8, 134, 148-50, 64, 68, 75, 82, 88, 94, 96, 102- 154-65, 169, 171, 173n3,

3, 105, 108-19, 128, 134-5, 174n8, 180, 183-97, 203

148, 150, 183, 189, 225-6 illness 6, 16, 20, 128, 135-7, 147going-beyond 3-7, 14, 18-22, 29- 8,151, 154, 224 30, 36, 40, 50, 56, 75-6, 79-80, imagination 2-4, 9, 18, 20-1, 103,

90, 92-3, 95, 101-2, 104-5, 106, 115, 119, 127-9, 130-4, 112,117, 128-9, 132-3, 147, 137, 146-9, 179-80, 187, 172, 179-81, 183-4, 189, 191- 208-27 2,194, 197, 209, 214 imperialism 1, 86, 103, 110,

gratuitousness 16, 18, 23 116-17

H 183, 195-6, 201, 203 Habermas, J. 8, 118 individuality 4-7, 15-16, 22, 44,

improvisation 21, 30, 37,51, 181,

habit 6-7, 16, 21, 23, 127, 147, 51, 164, 217, 226

154-5, 169, 179-80, 183-4, Ingold, T- 11,186, 208,222

191-2, 212-13 inhabitation 5, 20, 22, 76, 137, 134-5, 148-50 innovation 54, 57, 104, 179-81,

health 6, 15, 19-20, 103, 129, 156, 194, 196

heritage 87, 158, 174n8, 186, 190, 183-4, 187, 193-6, 225

192, 194-5 instinct 8, 219

hierarchy 1, 15, 95, 162, 186-9 INSUILUUIOIE2 y-253.50; 35; 90).975

HIV/AIDS 20, 128, 134-9, 145-6, 59-60, 64, 68, 75-6, 78, 90-7,

148 101, 109, 127, 147, 149, 170,

holiday 168 225 working 20, 58-67 instrumentality 11, 30, 37, 40, 55, home 6, 14, 30, 34-6, 42-51, 55, 65, 86-7, 93,97, 156-60, 164,

58-68, 82, 84, 118, 138-9, 1952210

I OA oe a Be intention 4, 7-8, 18, 30, 36-7, 40,

human nature 1-4, 7-10, 12, 14, 50,.b054 07,312, 168,197 16-19; 22, 29n7; 117,150, interpretation 4, 14-15, 37, 104,

179, 208-9, 218 134, 137, 146, 158, 163, 168,

234 Index 181, 184-5, 189, 195, 198- 58, 68, 85, 108, 150, 157-9,

203,210; 217, 223-5; 227035 167

intersubjectivity 6, 13, 189, 192, marriage 55, 83, 161

ie ee lee, Marshall Plan 103, 109-10, 115-

IntHone 2. 4y 7 93620952 11 Oe spel 2 0) a WB a

irony 3-4, 13, 20-1, 50, 65, 75, Marx Ke 1325.149;159).172..193

92-3, 127 materialism 7-8, 11-12

Irving, A. 20, 128-9, 136 materiality 4, 8, 13, 17-21, 51,

J 166-7, 182-9, 193-6

127-8, 130-4, 137, 146-51,

Jackson, M. 5—7, 13-14, 17 meaning 2, 5—6, 9, 12, 18, 50-1,

Jameson, F. 159, 169-70 70,1 9074 996 05,100=5;

justice 15, 20-1, 76, 88, 102, 106, 147-8, 161-5, 168-9, 180,

108, 118-19 184-5, 190-2, 196-9, 210-11, Z1e¢

K measurement 4, 19, 133, 157, 159, Kant, I. 1-2, 19, 21-2, 103, 172, 165-7, 173, 174n10, 194, 212

222, 224-5 263 kinaesthetics 181, 199-200, migration 20, 29-30, 32, 35-40,

179-80, 209-12, 214-15, 220, Merleau-Ponty, M. 183, 190, 211,

204n5, 213-14 44-7, 50-1, 82-4, 91, 102, 160

knowledge 1, 3, 8-10, 14, 19-22, labour 30, 35, 39-40

10 fom (al FO Fea ose Be os Bal Nes we Bo mind 4, 6-13, 54, 128, 130-3, 162,

181, 183-4, 186, 188, 192- 183-4, 192, 196-202, 219,

2035209, 21 2=15,219 222, 224, 226

modernity 1, 12, 14-15, 23n7, 51, L 55,97, 60, 102; 111,214,114, language 16-17, 21, 24n8, 107, 118, 127, 159-60, 170-3, 181,

165,072, 181,084, 192, 187, 193-5, 211, 226

197-202 modernization 75, 102, 109-10,

language-game 10, 21 156, 161, 164, 166-7

Larsen; T. 21;.127-9, 157 money 20-1, 36, 86, 103-4, 128,

Lave;], 133,220 130-7, 148-50, 152n1, 169 learnine. 3-214. 155; 15 1130, morality 1, 11, 15, 20-3, 75-6,

183-4, 188, 197, 201, 203, 101-2, 111, 115-19, 128-9,

212, 214, 217, 219-22 132, 146, 149-51, 155-7, 163-

liberalism, 14, 23n7, 83, 105-6, 4,183, 187, 214, 217

110-13, 115, 156-7 motor 181, 192, 198-203, 213

life-project 20, 30, 36-7, 40, 44, movement

50-1 bodily 8, 44, 50, 129, 147-9,

life-world 5—6, 22 198, 202, 212-16, 221-2 lifestyle 155-6, 168 transnational 35, 45, 50, 56, liminality 29, 55-69 58-9, 67-8, 149, 189 Locke, J. 132-3 N

M National Association for the

208 103-4

managing 13, 36, 113, 155-71, Advancement of Colored People Marchand, T. 21, 180-1, 186, 189, nationhood 5—6, 20-1, 23, 29-30,

OF, 50, 59, 76, 78-97, 101-3, 111-

market 9, 20, 29-30, 38-40, 50, 12, 115-18, 129, 134, 148-51,

Index 235 158, 165-6, 183 Popper.ka19, 2307

218-19 174n8

nature 6-7, 14°15; 1 61417 2,215, postmodernity 94, 116, 172-3,

nature/culture 2, 23n2, 208 power 7, 11, 18, 20, 40, 50-1, 86,

nature/nurture 2 91,94-5, 105, 110, 134, 148Nietzsche, EF 7, 12, 15, 18-19, 134, 9, 166, 180, 190-3, 208-13, P5031 72, 2) 2S 216, 219, 224-5, 227n5 practice 3, 6-7, 9-11, 16, 21, 23, O 29-30, 37-8, 68, 76, 82, 93-5, objectification 11, 155-8, 169-72, 102-3, 114, 119, 127, 132-3,

173n1, 174n8, 186, 190 137, 146-7, 160, 167, 170,

objectivity 1-2, 9, 11, 13, 22, 24n8, 173, 179-81, 183-203, 213-

13 142,:147):13514.158;.172 15, 220-1, 224

147-8, 179 R

ontology 6, 14, 21-3, 81, 128, 133,

openness 2, 4, 6-7, 13-14, 19, randomness 7, 14, 16 29n7, 57 Al 2, 155.1 92.2 4 Rapport, N. 2, 4-6, 8, 14, 16, 18,

P 224

226 36-7, 45, 50, 210, 218-19

organism 2, 4, 8-10, 217 rationality 1,3, 7, 1O-11, 45, 56, 118-19, 131-4, 147, 151, 208,

Paine Reo den refugee 75, 105-6, 109, 112-15, parsing 198-203 relationality 10-14, 190-3, 197,

Parkin, D. 3 120-1

perception 9, 12, 80, 87-92, 96, ie es eee ie

131, 147, 158, 160, 183,185, relativism 8-10, 14, 22 188, 190, 197, 209-14, 223-4 representation: 5; 9;.11,.17;,138;

performance 20-1, 128, 156, 146, 171-2, 197-203, 209-10, 162-72, 173n3, 174n8, 180-1, 220, 224-5 183-202, 212-16, 220, 225-7 resistance 78, 96, 180, 183, 192-3,

person 5, 7, 13-15, 30, 35-6, 40, LF 46, 50-1, 54-5, 57, 62, 68, 94, Ricoeur, P. 189, 210 104, 108, 114, 128-9, 131-8, rite of passage 67 147-51, 162, 168, 210, 212, role 6, 40, 56, 58, 64, 67, 210

220;222=3 Rorty, R. 118-19

phenomenology 6, 13, 134, 183-4, | Roughley, N. 5 13-7 190=1,.197, 2251

philanthropy 23n7, 75-6, 102-19, S

120n1 Sartre: |-2.S;i514.13.714 G79;

place 4, 6, 11,45, 51, 55, 58, 62, 210-11, 220, 222, 224 68-9, 95,127, 148, 161-2, science 1, 3, 7-8, 15, 17-22, 23n7, 168, 180-1, 182-97, 203, 215, 143,173

2205025 neurological 180, 184, 225

214,218,225 208

play:6;. 06:19:72 1,°35;.66,2 12; social 1, 3, 8,17, 21, 147, 180, politics 9, 19, 21-2, 39, 50, 75-6, Seasonal Agricultural Workers’

79-80, 82-96, 102-14, 118- Program 32, 35, 37-9

19, 128, 134-5, 148-50, 157- secularism 15, 23n7, 131 8, 161-2, 170, 182, 186, 196 selfhood 4, 6, 8, 14, 16, 19-23,

polity 3, 20, 75-6, 80, 83, 86,95, 30, 36-7, 44-5, 50-1, 54, 57,

105 116-17, 127-8, 134, 155-8,

236 Index 169-70, 173n3, 174n8, 190-3, W385-162;.172;.133, 135-7,

196, 203, 211, 216-19, 221 189, 193, 196-7

semiotics 130, 159, 161-5, 190, thinghood 3, 6, 8, 10, 15-18, 21,

224 N27 =9; 15 5, £63; 1:66=75, 190;

sensation 7, 14, 150, 183, 190, 196,203) 21:0 199, 209; 224. 227n1 tourism 29, 46, 48, 54-61, 64-69,

sense-making 29, 44, 209 91-25 157,. 159,209

Simmel, G. 14, 19, 23n6, 131, 169 tradition 3-5, 40, 56, 83, 101, 104,

simulation 199, 201 VAS 27, RSs 69, 1S LS, skill 11, 69n2, 107, 113, 171, 179- 185, 187, 190, 193-4 80, 183-4, 188-93, 196-203, transcendence 4—5, 19, 21-2,

213-14, 220, 222 2312, 56,60; 103,112) 129: Skinner, J. 21, 179-81, 220 148-9, 151, 172, 179-80, 210social fact 5, 127, 218 15, 218-20, 224-6 social relations 3, 6, 14, 17, 21, 37, transnationality 35, 50, 58-9, 62,

40, 56, 62-4, 67-8, 75, 127, 64, 75-6, , 87-91, 94, 96, 1O1129, 135, 150, 161, 164, 169, 20; 148, 150,195; 220

172, 179, 187-9, 216; 222-3, transubstantiation 1 30-4, 149, 225 Uo Weel Revs. sovereignty 82-3, 86, 156-7 travel 20, 29-30, 54-69, 91, 102,

space 4, 7, 10, 15, 21, 30, 60-2, TOG e119. 67

75-6, 86, 102-3, 118-20, 127, trope 13, 22, 54, 84

149, 167, 174n10, 180-1, Turner, V. 55-7, 60-1, 63, 67-9,

182-6, 189-96, 225-6 225

spontaneity 7, 56

standardisation 157, 159-61, U

166-7,173 United Nations 75, 104, 106, 108-

statehood 44, 50, 58-9, 76, 77-84, 9,113-15

88-95, 101, 109-10, 112, 159 universalism 3, 5—6, 20, 22, 76,

Steiner, G. 16-17 103, 108, 114-19, 128, 133-4,

Stevenson, L. 7 15 2n. 1-90. 2 LO Strathern, M. 2, 10, 19

student 20, 29-30, 40, 54, 58-70, V

160, 162, 220-2, 226 value 4, 11, 15, 21, 36, 51, 76,

subjectivity 1, 13, 22, 147, 154, 78, 87-8,97, 115,119, 127-9, 156;.059,186;.209, 224,226 130-5, 148-51, 156-9, 164-5, subversion 80, 173n3, 180, 192-3, 169, 174n10, 183-5, 188, 196

17

suffering 2-3, 20,41, 75-6, 102-3, W 105, 112-19, 135-6, 149-51 Warnock, M. 209-10, 224

Suski, L. 20, 75-6 Weber, M. 158, 167, 169 symbolic classification 1, 3, 5, 16—- well-being 149, 187

17, 19-22, 127, 149, 164, 166, Wilson, T. 20, 76, 79-80, 88, 92-4

171,173, 174n10 Wittgenstein, L. 10, 211

sympathy 89, 93, 107, 218 Woolf, V. 12, 17-18

syntax 184, 198-200 work 29-30, 31-41, 44-5, 47, 4950, 58-9, 61, 63-7, 106, 136-7, ft 159, 164, 167, 173, 182, 186Taylor, C. 133, 167, 169, 225-6 8, 195-6, 199, 202-3

technology 11, 39, 57-8, 119,132, world-view 14-15, 29, 197