Anthropology Through a Double Lens: Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory

By Daniel Touro Linger

How can we hold both public and personal worlds in the eye of a unified theory of meaning? What ethnographic and theoretical possibilities do we create in the balance? Anthropology Through a Double Lens offers a theoretical framework encompassing both of these domains—a "double lens." Daniel Touro Linger argues that the literary turn in anthropology, which treats culture as text, has been a wrong turn. Cultural analysis of the interpretive or discursive variety, which focuses on public symbols, has difficulty seeing—much less dealing convincingly with—actual persons. While emphasizing the importance of social environments, Linger insists on equal sensitivity to the experiential immediacies of human lives. He develops a sustained critique of interpretive and discursive trends in contemporary anthropology, which have too strongly emphasized social determinism and public symbols while too readily dismissing psychological and biographical realities.

Anthropology Through a Double Lens demonstrates the power of an alternative dual perspective through a blend of critical essays and ethnographic studies drawn from the author's field research in São Luís, a northeastern Brazilian state capital, and Toyota City, a Japanese factory town. To span the gap between the public and the personal, Linger provides a set of analytical tools that include the ideas of an arena of meaning, systems of systems, bridging theory, singular lives, and reflective consciousness. The tools open theoretical and ethnographic horizons for exploring the process of meaning-making, the force of symbolism and rhetoric, the politics of representation, and the propagation and formation of identities. Linger uses these tools to focus on key issues in current theoretical and philosophical debates across a host of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, history, and the other human sciences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812203691

Book preview

Anthropology Through a Double Lens

Anthropology Through a Double Lens

Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory

Daniel Touro Linger

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2005 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Linger, Daniel Touro.

Anthropology through a double lens : public and personal worlds in human theory / Daniel Touro Linger.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8122-3857-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Anthropology—Philosophy. 2. Anthropology—Methodology. I. Title.

GN33 .L56 2005

For my father

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Meanings

1.Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?

2.Missing Persons

3.The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life

Part II: Politics

4.The Hegemony of Discontent

5.The Semantics of Dead Bodies

6.Wild Power in Post-Military Brazil

Part III: Identities

7.Whose Identity?

8.The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori

9.Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Double Lens

On the way to the new millennium, anthropology, still a young field, became prematurely forgetful. Anthropos almost vanished, crowded out by culture, the discipline’s celebrated contribution to social science. That contribution has been valuable, but too imperious in its claim on human lives. This book, while reserving an important place for culture, seeks to recover a focus on human beings for an anthropology worthy of its name.

The essays collected herein run against the strong culturalist current that has carried anthropology for the past several decades. Culturalism is a type of social or historical determinism. It consigns human beings to the margins of the analysis, as incidental to culture or else, more tendentiously, as culture’s effects. Its job is the interpretation of public representations, or symbols—words, images, performances, and narratives—which, it is said or implied, hold human minds in their thrall. Culturalism has a long pedigree in anthropology, especially in the United States, but recently it has, in its discursivist guise and in tandem with parallel shifts in critical and textual theory, achieved a position of near-dominance in the discipline. Indeed, many anthropologists now say that they practice cultural studies, an emerging, heavily discursivist field strongly influenced by literary criticism.¹

To be sure, culturalism opens up unique and fascinating problems. Culturalist perspectives illuminate human affairs from an intriguing angle, suggesting that human groups (tribes, nations, ethnicities, classes, castes, genders, and so on) cut up the world into arbitrary chunks, represented by arrays of symbols. In newer, more radical versions of culturalism, representations constitute, fragment, and reconfigure groups themselves. Culturalism encourages studies of the diverse frameworks of thought and feeling that purportedly ensnare us all. The thousands of ethnographies gathered in any university library attest to the fecundity of culturalist theories and their associated research practices.

But culturalism bears a high cost. That is why its triumph has not been complete. Many anthropologists, myself included, have now come to view the culturalist wave with reserve. Culturalism seems reductive. It arrogates too much to its own domain, disfiguring and oversimplifying human worlds. One line of criticism has emphasized culturalism’s appropriation of economic and political relations, its penchant for converting the materialities of social interaction into constructions of culture or discourse (Shaw 1995: ch. 1). Equally serious is the issue I highlight in this book: culturalism’s tendency to turn personal experience and human minds into derivative, spectral phenomena.

Some of my colleagues despair that anthropology may already be a lost cause for human (as opposed to cultural) studies. Research on human beings, they contend, is not going away, but will simply move elsewhere (D’Andrade 2000). They are certainly right that the study of human beings will not disappear, and they may be right about its future emigration from anthropology, but I do not believe that we—anthropologists concerned with substantial personal worlds, and skeptical of what Dennis Wrong long ago (1961) called the oversocialized conception of man—should lightly surrender a field to which we have contributed so much and which still, given its unusual perspective and its distinctive sensibilities, has so much to offer.

I outline a possible route to a cultural anthropology that, building on the insights of disciplinary ancestors and contemporaries, opens vistas for future work encompassing public and personal worlds. The double lens of the title refers to a theoretical eye holding both worlds in focus. I offer a view, through the double lens, of anthropology’s central concern: human worlds, in all their plenitude, variability, specificity, and complexity.

Beyond the Cultural Relativity Effect

The essays presented here draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil, done mostly in the mid-1980s, and in Japan, a decade later.² I worked primarily in two cities: São Luís, capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Maranhão; and Toyota City, an industrial hub of central Honshu. In São Luís, I looked at local politics, Carnival, and interpersonal violence. In Toyota City, I examined the identity quandaries of Brazilian migrants of Japanese descent. Although the research topics were disparate, the theoretical focus remained the same: the intersection of public and personal worlds.

Strange as it may sound, over this period I gradually learned what I was talking about. Gregory Bateson once described theoretical advance in dynamic terms, as a dialectic between loose thinking, or heuristic play, and strict thinking, the hammering of intuitions and guesses into formal schemes (1972a). My own practice has likewise zig-zagged, crablike, between imagination and tentative formalization. I have come to understand better, and learned to formulate more precisely, my own concerns, presuppositions, and models. Such learning is not unusual among anthropologists, or among people in general. We speak or write, only later discovering what it is we have been trying to say. Then comes a moment when it makes sense to state it more coherently. I am writing this book at that moment of provisional lucidity.

Much of my work, I now see, has been spurred by a maddening ethnographic riddle: how to account for the vexing gap between abstractions of culture and specificities of persons and events. Initially, the problem appeared to me as the Cultural Relativity Effect. The first sentences of the first page of the preface of my first book read:

Doing anthropological fieldwork, I, like many others, sometimes experienced a frustrating relativity effect: the closer I moved toward a phenomenon, the faster it seemed to recede from my grasp. Every step forward revealed new complexities. The problem seems especially to bedevil the study of culture, something that when seen from a distance can appear monolithic and systematic but when viewed up close, in the ideas and feelings of individuals, seems to fragment into bewildering shards. (Linger 1992: vii)

Bewildering shards: a metaphor for the brute materiality and astonishing irregularity of people’s lives, so disconcertingly detached from the neat construct culture that pretends to speak for them. How does one reconcile such apparently antagonistic perceptions?

Obviously I am not the first writer to contemplate such questions. Repeatedly I have turned for inspiration to Edward Sapir. Early on, Sapir questioned Theodore Kroeber’s notion of culture as an evolving superorganic entity, divorced from human bodies and minds (Sapir 1917). Over a period of several decades he continued to warn against mistaking fantasied universes of self-contained meaning (1949a: 581)—that is, social-scientific abstractions—for the concrete, biographically contingent immediacies of human lives.³ Serious distortions arise when culture, viewed as a disembodied entity, is mistaken for human experience.

Unfortunately, much culture theory in the intervening years does, in spades, exactly what Sapir warned against. A big problem is the now-customary definition of culture as a system of symbols. For if, as conventionally characterized, symbols—public representations such as images, words, and rituals—are tangible forms that carry meaning, woven into a dense conceptual net, then they are in a weird sense mindlike.⁴ In employing the usual metaphors—symbols as vehicles for meanings, culture as a sticky web—cultural anthropologists, in the spirit of Durkheim, tend to fetishize representations. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is the idea that texts (or text-analogues) constitute an ideational cage, a cultural Supermind occupied by mindless people. Backing off from such a bizarre claim, we might more modestly propose that symbols evoke meanings in people, who draw upon their past learning and their own mental faculties in making sense of them. This premise also involves a strategic reification, as I note below, but it is a far cry from the notion that symbols constitute a weblike worldview inhabited by zombielike human beings.

The Cultural Relativity Effect appears when the notion of culture as a Supermind clashes with the empirical fact (apparent to anyone who takes a close look) that the minds supposedly dwelling within it show incredible variation, activity, and eccentricity. The effect vanishes if, as Sapir suggests, we jettison the idea of a Supermind and move culture back into human lives. This move, I argue, replaces a pseudo-problem with a set of generative questions. But I am jumping ahead. Before I get to the specifics of my proposed alternative, some general observations about anthropological theory are in order.

Geometries Versus Models

Constructing human theory resembles a mathematical exercise. Mathematicians build imaginary edifices (sets of interrelated theorems) by applying rules of inference to an inventory of axioms, which are arbitrary specifications of elementary objects and relations. Thus in mathematics, certain definitions of points and lines and their properties yield the elegant plane geometry taught in high schools; a single alteration, denial of the parallel postulate, opens the way to non-Euclidean geometries, inventions in which triangles have less or more than 180 degrees and extraordinary universes emerge. János Bolyai, a pioneer of the new geometries, wrote his father in 1823: I have discovered things so wonderful that I was astounded . . . out of nothing I have created a strange new world (O’Connor and Robertson 1996). Similarly, assumptions about the nature of people and groups form the base upon which one can erect elaborate, ingenious, and diverse theories of the human cosmos. And in human as in mathematical theory, a shift in the foundation can have radical effects on the superstructure.

But human theories also differ from the strange and wondrous worlds of contemporary mathematics. The new geometries created by Bolyai and others are formal systems for which internal consistency, not conformity with the world, is fundamental (Black 1959: 156–59). Such geometries are jewels of the imagination. The Greeks, in contrast, thought of geometry as the study of physical space. For all its ethereal beauty, Euclid’s geometry was a model of something else. In an important respect human theory more closely resembles ancient geometry than contemporary mathematics. Human theories are models. Models are guides and blueprints: they orient thought and action in the world. Their adequacy depends not just on coherence but also on plausibility and explanatory value. Unlike the pristine fantasies of modern geometers, theories of the human cosmos touch the earth: they abstract, and are accountable to, a reality outside themselves.

To be sure, grossly unrealistic or questionable postulates, when employed in a provisional or experimental manner, can yield theories that cast human affairs in an unfamiliar, provocative light. Such theories can provide useful elliptical accounts, and they can be good to think with, even when one knows that they are bizarre or destined eventually to fail. Significant advances in theory, however, require significant refinements in basic postulates: quantum mechanics is unimaginable without a more complex, accurate foundation than the notion of indivisible atoms advanced by Democritus. Human theory is no different. Even theories based on sophisticated, plausible postulates can, and typically (though not always) do, sooner or later collide with the world and demand reformulation.

For most of his career Sigmund Freud built his psychodynamic model around the notion that the life instincts (bodily needs, especially sexual impulses) created tensions that the human organism was compelled to discharge (a tendency Freud described as the pleasure principle). But after the Great War something new intruded into Freud’s model, as he indicates in this passage from his late masterpiece Civilization and Its Discontents:

men are not gentle creatures. . . . [T] hey are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. . . . Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? . . . Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as the Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War—anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view. (1961 [1930]: 58–59)

Life instincts and the pleasure principle failed to account for the carnage of Verdun. Freud’s cumulative experience of life and of history forced him reluctantly to wedge the death instinct, a novel postulate, into the foundations of his psychodynamic theory. My purpose here is not to argue for or against a death instinct—though had Freud lived past 1939 he would surely have found no reason to recant. Rather, I cite Freud to suggest that, like him, every practitioner of the human sciences draws on her own compelling experience for judgments about and reformulations of premises.

Closed Theories

Premises do not always give way, because some theories, unlike Freud’s, are impervious to contrary evidence. They are more like geometries than models. All theories are, in a restricted sense, provisionally insulated from the world, because their foundational assumptions are a priori specifications; I will return to this point a bit later. But in some cases the disconnect is complete, because the assumptions permit the elaboration of a model that can explain all worldly outcomes, and so neither the model nor its assumptions come under critical scrutiny. Such self-confirming theories form perceptions rather than generating falsifiable predictions. Note that rationality—the systematic inflation of premises into models—is not at issue. A theory can be rational and yet hermetic.

For example, consider the witchcraft and oracular beliefs of the Azande, inhabitants of central Africa studied by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in the 1930s. Once one accepts Zande mystical premises, notes Evans-Pritchard, it is clear not only that the system of beliefs erected upon them is entirely rational, but that no conceivable event in the world could contradict them. He describes the Zande divination practice wherein benge, a poison, is administered to a fowl, whose answer is delivered by its survival or death. A European might argue that the strength and quantity of the poison determine the fowl’s fate, but for the Azande benge is not a natural poison at all. It is a mystical substance that has been prepared in accordance with certain taboos and is used only in a prescribed ritual setting. Secondary elaborations of belief explain any apparent error in the oracle’s predictions: a taboo was breached, or witchcraft interfered with the action of the benge, or the batch of poison was stupid, and so on. Hence Evans-Pritchard’s account was intended to counter arguments that primitive people (unlike Westerners) thought irrationally. In this regard his book was a resounding success: the Azande emerge as eminently sensible thinkers.

Azande observe the action of the poison oracle as we observe it, but their observations are always subordinated to their beliefs and are incorporated into their beliefs and made to explain them and justify them. Let the reader consider any argument that would utterly demolish all Zande claims for the power of the oracle. If it were translated into Zande modes of thought it would serve to support their entire structure of belief. For their mystical notions are eminently coherent, being interrelated by a network of logical ties, and are so ordered that they never too crudely contradict sensory experience but, instead, experience seems to justify them. (1976 [1937]: 150)

One might now turn the tables and argue that Western theorists, just as rational as the Azande, are equally adept at inventing evidence-proof belief systems based on unexamined and questionable premises. Roy D’Andrade argues, for example, that much of contemporary cultural anthropology produces such models:

What theoretical work there is in [current] cultural anthropology is primarily based on reasoning from assumed first principles—people must be shaped by their symbolic worlds, psychology cannot be relevant to cultural facts, and so on. This makes for . . . much debate, principle-begging arguments, little clarity, and no progress. (2000: 226)

D’Andrade is referring to versions of culturalism that do not let the world talk back. If on first principles culture determines our ideas and actions, then our ideas and actions can only be evidence of culture’s agency. If representations axiomatically form or condense our thoughts and feelings, then why look any further than representations to infer what those thoughts and feelings are? Anthropologists’ proclivity for using the language of psychology to characterize symbols and discourses, treating them as if they were subjective phenomena, promotes such circularity. Hence we are often told, on the basis of an interpretation that makes no reference to any living person, that American films or magazines or television shows embody or transmit aggression or prurience or egoism or what-have-you—as if dispositions and desires resided in or were conveyed by inanimate representations!⁵

I do not think anthropology will prosper as a serious intellectual enterprise if it gets into the business of concocting closed belief systems. This practice leads either to camps of true believers or to epithets shouted, but rarely heard, across chasms of incomprehension. Nevertheless, every theory, however open to contrary evidence, requires provisional commitments to foundational assumptions.

Assumptions can be more or less crude, more or less plausible, more or less productive of insight and explanation. So let us begin at square one, with an examination and evaluation of the basic elements of standard social scientific theory.

Back to Square One

In principle the human cosmos can be modeled in an infinite number of ways. But all ways are not equal. One starts by making some judicious elemental distinctions—judicious, not arbitrary, because our aim is to produce not a geometry, but a model. A primordial cut endemic to human theories, and one that I will strongly defend, is the division between two realms we might call public and personal. But the way this cut is made—what objects get assigned to which sphere, how those objects are characterized, and how relations among them are defined—has far-reaching implications for the construction of models in all of the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, and history). My aim is not to criticize the conceptual division between public and personal, but rather certain versions of it that seem to me injudicious.

Here I focus on sociology and anthropology, twin disciplines with deep shared roots. Examination of their origins reveals an asymmetry in the cut: a hypertrophy of the public and, correspondingly, an attenuation of the personal.⁶ The skew originates in the work of a common ancestor, Emile Durkheim, who provided axioms that have warranted a family of social science models in which public facts reign supreme. In that Durkheimian family, as distant offspring, I include currently influential anthropological models that feature cultural interpretation and discourse analysis. I argue that their refusal to build personal phenomena into their foundations—a refusal that is the trademark move of culturalism—stunts our understanding of the human cosmos.

Society Versus the Individual

Standard social science—that is, theory in the Durkheimian lineage— makes a distinction between public and personal that ultimately marginalizes or excludes the personal from its contemplation. Stripped to its essentials, the theory goes like this. Society, social science’s rightful object, is counterposed to the individual, which is assigned to psychology and romantic philosophy. The business of social science is social facts (Durkheim 1964 [1895]), aggregate and emergent collective phenomena. Cognitive faculties, psychodynamic defense mechanisms, features of consciousness, biographical particularities, and biological processes are therefore bracketed. They are denied the status of social facts or else they are regarded obliquely, as collective representations or constructions. Biology and psychology are thus disregarded or, in the more extreme versions of such theory, epistemologically nullified. Although they sometimes pay lip service to the importance of studying the individual, many social scientists consider flesh-and-blood persons to be of minor importance in human affairs, or, again, treat them as either exemplary of or epiphenomenal to the social. At best, then, Durkheimian social science establishes a cordon sanitaire between social and psychological disciplines; at worst, it smugly assumes that it is grappling with the stuff that counts, while the psychologists—practitioners of an ersatz discipline?—chase after trivia or the mirage of human nature.

In a well-known introduction to sociology, Peter Berger gets to the heart of the Durkheimian view:

If we follow the Durkheimian conception, then, society confronts us as an objective facticity. It is there, something that cannot be denied and must be reckoned with. Society is external to ourselves. It surrounds us, encompasses our life on all sides. We are in society, located in specific sectors of the social system. This location predetermines and predefines almost everything we do, from language to etiquette, from the religious beliefs we hold to the probability that we will commit suicide. . . . Society, as objective and external fact, confronts us especially in the form of coercion. Its institutions pattern our actions and shape our expectations. . . . If we step out of these assignments, society has at its disposal an almost infinite variety of controlling and coercing agencies. . . . Finally, we are located in society not only in space but in time. Our society is a historical entity that extends temporally beyond any individual biography. . . . It was there before we were born and it will be there after we are dead. Our lives are but episodes in its majestic march through history. In sum, society is the walls of our imprisonment in history. (1963: 91–92)

In this theoretical universe, culture—that is to say, society’s meaningful aspect—is an ideational prison with walls so high that the prisoners (all of us, save perhaps the anthropologists themselves) mistake them for the boundaries of the world.

It is true that Clifford Geertz, the towering figure in interpretive anthropology, emphasizes his Weberian (rather than Durkheimian) treatment of culture. Weber emphasized, as does Geertz, the overwhelming importance of meaning-making for human beings. But Weber made substantial space for human agency, for psychological motivation, and for the innovations of historical figures, whereas, despite hesitations and equivocations, Geertz’s most famous analyses reject explicit forays into psychology and provide accounts of culture as objective facticity. Culture becomes a dimension of the social. Expressed in language, encoded in symbols, enacted in rituals, enforced in coercive practices, culture for many, perhaps most, interpretive anthropologists ultimately seems to impress itself upon waxlike individual minds, a scenario thoroughly compatible with Durkheim’s vision.

Deviants and dissenters aside, individuals are thus under the sway of culture, as they are under the sway of other social facts. Deviation, dissent, and resistance are, of course, second-order social facts, since divergence from social norms and social consensus is a relative concept. The main explanation offered for divergence is one’s adherence to the alternative meaning frame of a specific sector of the social system (a sub group defined by coordinates such as gender, race, ethnicity, and so on). Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing argue that such explanations sanitize diversity. It is not the individuals who are diverse, they write, so much as the working parts of the complex social systems of which they are components and conduits . . . Diversity becomes . . . a triumph of cultural order (2000a: 194). The scheme replicates determinism at the level of subgroups, preserving intact the empire of the social.

The Urtext that illustrates the pervasiveness of social control is Durkheim’s book on the causes of that seemingly most private act, suicide (1951 [1897]). A collectivist society that cultivates notions of sacrifice for the common good encourages altruistic suicide. An individualist society that subjects people to feelings of unbearable personal responsibility and guilt encourages egoistic suicide. And a society in which social norms are confusing or in flux gives rise to anomic suicide.⁷ From Suicide it is not that far, in theory or rhetoric, to Michel Foucault’s famous first volume of The History of Sexuality (1990 [1976]), in which the intimacies of sex and pleasure decidedly take a back seat to the power-infused, historically changing public discourses that profoundly shape (and even conjure?) them. Here, society’s temporal dimension is emphasized: Foucault lays bare, in Berger’s words, the walls of our imprisonment in history.

Society thus conceived is, understandably, rarely seen in neutral terms, despite the original scientific pretensions of Durkheimian sociology and the morally relativist pretensions of later theory. Society is prized, a thing to be nourished and cultivated as an antidote to disorientation and egoism, by those who revere community; it is viewed as a menace to be reviled and resisted by those suspicious of power and alert to mystification; and it evokes something like awe in those who see its majestic march as a pervasive and irresistible mana-like force. The term catalyzes the most varied, contradictory moral and political discourses. Though the alternative model I forward has ethical implications, I do not wish to make society its ideal, its bete noire, or its God.

If society and history are ultimate realities, the individual is by contrast a shadow. In classic Durkheimian theory, discrete living persons— you and I—become individuals. The individual is a monad: an anonymous unit among many identical units. It is easier to say what the individual is not than what it is. Internal structure seems lacking in the individual, which is conventionally treated as a fundamental particle, whose own biographical past and internal workings, whatever they might be, are socially irrelevant.⁸ Much less does the individual have individuality, the innate faculty of human consciousness (Rapport and Overing 2000a: 185).⁹ Seen through the single lens of Durkheimian theory, then, the individual is not unique, not psychologically complex, not the product of a developmental process, and, it would appear, not even conscious.

So far as I can tell, no one believes this image to be accurate, least of all as a self-description. But it is nevertheless the generative conceit underwriting a galaxy of prominent, far-reaching social theories.

Post-Durkheimian Anthropology

Durkheimian theory has been extraordinarily influential, giving rise to innumerable variants and refinements over the last century. Among them, I have suggested, is interpretive anthropology, which arose in the mid-twentieth century and continues to flourish. More recently, some post-Durkheimian theorists have responded to Durkheim’s capitalization of the social not by righting the model’s foundations but by tilting them even more strongly toward social determinism, in its discursivist version. Postmodern (or postructuralist) theory, for example, sets itself against the holistic and synchronic tendencies of both traditional sociology and interpretive anthropology by emphasizing the multiplicity, historicity, and power of discursive formations. In the most extreme discursivist approaches, persons are either invisible (because irrelevant) or else epiphenomenal to history, which, like society, often enters accounts as a hypostatized supra-human entity. Sometimes, as in Foucault’s book on discourses of sexuality, such accounts verge on social monism, swallowing whole the Durkheimian distinction between society and the individual.¹⁰

The epidemic use of the word discourse in