Negotiating Personal Autonomy

Communication and Personhood in East Greenland

Sophie Elixhauser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351654784
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Negotiating Personal Autonomy offers a detailed ethnographic examination of personal autonomy and social life in East Greenland.

Examining verbal and non-verbal communication in interpersonal encounters, Elixhauser argues that social life in the region is characterized by relationships based upon a particular care to respect other people's personal autonomy. Exploring this high valuation of personal autonomy, she asserts that a person in East Greenland is a highly permeable entity that is neither bounded by the body nor even necessarily human. In so doing, she also puts forward a new approach to the anthropological study of communication.

An important addition to the corpus of ethnographic literature about the people of East Greenland, Elixhauser's work will be of interest to scholars of the Arctic and the North, Greenland, social and cultural anthropology, and human geography. Her conclusion that, in East Greenland, the 'inner' self cannot be separated from the 'public' persona will also be of interest to scholars working on the self across the humanities and social sciences.

1
Setting the scene

Communication, autonomy, and personhood

The relationality of personal autonomy

The great importance of personal autonomy has been demonstrated for many so-called hunting and gathering societies around the world, and ethnographers have used different terms to describe this autonomy, ranging from ‘individual independence’, ‘freedom of choice’, and ‘equality’ to ‘egalitarianism’ (e.g., Gardner 1991; Myers 1986; Ridington 1988; Woodburn 1982). Speaking of ‘hunter-gatherers’, it is important to mention that I do not regard this expression as an economic (or socio-political) category, but as signifying a particular relationship between humans and their human, as well as non-human, environment.¹ As the 1965 symposium on band societies showed, many hunter-gatherers do not recognise formal authority, are non-competitive, and enjoy a great deal of personal and group autonomy (Lee and DeVore 1968). Numerous ethnographic accounts from around the circumpolar North highlight the value placed on personal autonomy and portray a complex interplay between social responsibility and group cohesion on the one hand, and personal autonomy on the other (e.g., Briggs 1970, 2001; Morrow 1990, 1996; Riches 2004; Sonne 2003; Therrien 2008).

Autonomy has often been associated with equality, a term which has been subject to much discussion (Helliwell 1995; Ingold 1986: ch. 9). Christine Helliwell (1995) criticises the conflation of autonomy and equality in many anthropological writings, and argues that one must distinguish between an ‘equality of condition’ and an ‘equality of opportunity’, of which only the latter implies a strong emphasis on autonomy (Helliwell 1995: 360). She stresses that societies in which people enjoy a great deal of autonomy may indeed reveal inequalities between one individual and another, yet it is important to differentiate ‘between inequality as the outcome of autonomous group or individual action and inequality as socially imposed and as thus constituted through the denial of autonomy’ (ibid: 361). The distinction to which Helliwell refers has often been proposed in the Western² tradition. It is, for example, what distinguishes liberalism (equality of opportunity – free-market competition) from socialism (equality of condition – the classless society). Ingold, however, has argued that the nature of equality in hunter-gatherer societies differs from both of these. The Western liberal argument is that differences of individual ability, given equal conditions, lead to inequalities of outcome. For hunters and gatherers, he explains that although differences of ability may be recognised and even celebrated, they are of no consequence, since the equality lies in the relationship of part to whole. Nor does this ‘equality of relations founded in their commitment to the whole’, again, correspond to the imposed equality of conditions of the socialist mode (Ingold 1986: 238; cf. Endicott 1999, on gender relations among hunter-gatherers).

Several ethnographers have observed that the notion of autonomy is deeply embedded in western experiences of sociality and personhood, which makes the translation of non-Western conceptions in terms of ‘autonomy’ rather difficult (Helliwell 1995: 362; cf. Myers 1988: 27; Ingold 1986: ch. 9). The autonomy of hunter-gatherers has often been confused with a common understanding of individualism of the kind, for example, proposed in the classical work of Louis Dumont (e.g., 1980, 1983). Dumont compares homo hierarchicus and homo aequalis, the former standing for what he terms the ‘traditional’ world and the latter for the West. For him, homo hierarchicus is encompassed in the collective totality, which underwrites his destiny; homo aequalis, on the other hand, is a self-contained, autonomous individual, taking his or her own decisions independently from society (Ingold 1986: 221; cf. Celtel 2005). Individualism or autonomy among hunter-gatherers, however, is of a different kind. In East Greenland, and similarly in other hunting and gathering societies, a person is, from the outset, embedded in relationships with others, and his or her autonomy, in terms of both intention and action, is conditional upon trust in support from others (see Ingold 2000: 69–70). Hence, ‘the collectivity is present and active in the life of every individual’ such that, as Ingold continues,

there is no contradiction, no conflict of purpose, between the expression of individuality and his [a person’s] generalised commitment to others. Since the world of others is enfolded within his own person, these are one and the same.

(1986: 240, brackets added)

A relational autonomy has not only been found to be prevalent in hunting and gathering societies, but a number of theorists have also contended that autonomy is always fundamentally social in nature (see Christman 2004; Oshana 1998, 2006; Westlund 2008). Andrea Westlund emphasises that relational autonomy, ‘does not require that one stands in idealized, egalitarian relations with others’ (2008: 7). Describing personal autonomy as a matter of self-governance in choice and action, she writes that this self-governance ‘point[s] outward beyond itself, to the position the agent occupies as one reflective, responsible self among many’ (ibid: 7). A person is thus never ‘independent’ or without influence from other humans and, I would argue, from the non-human environment as well. On a general level, personal autonomy, as Marina Oshana asserts, is ‘a matter not just of what goes on in an agent’s head but also of “what goes on in the world around her”’ (1998: 81). This relational autonomy is thus closely connected to a particular understanding of the person, upon which I elaborate below.

Personhood and selves

I understand a person not as a bounded, indivisible entity – characteristics that are often regarded as the hallmarks of the Western notion of the person – but as part of a dynamic process, constituted within dialogues with others, and being at the same time singular and multiple (Harré 1998: 20). Even the putatively ‘Western’ concept of a person is problematic, however, as it can exist only as an abstraction. On an ethnographic level, as Susan Rasmussen explains, the West ‘is just as complex and internally differentiated as are those cultural settings outside of it traditionally designated as “non-western”’, and there is no such thing as a monolithic western understanding of the person (2008: 36). Before evaluating other people’s understandings of the person, we must thus problematise our own categories.

In the literature, one encounters diverse usages of the terms self, person, and individual, which are sometimes defined in different ways and at other times used interchangeably. I shall use ‘person’ to denote what others have called either self or person, arguing that in an anthropological enquiry the two cannot be distinguished on a conceptual level as their meanings differ from one cultural context to the other; distinguishing the self from the person right from the start carries the danger of projecting Western academic classifications and dualist paradigms onto other people (Morris 1994: 8; Rasmussen 2008).³ Many early anthropological writings on personhood (e.g., in the work of Mauss, Hallowell, and Fortes) build upon a fundamental distinction between the self on the one hand, understood as the psychological unit and as the centre of self-awareness, independent of its involvement in relationships, and the person on the other hand, defined as the cultural conception – or ‘category’ (Mauss 1985) – of a particular community (Morris 1994: 10). Implicit in this distinction is the premise that social anthropology is the study of different concepts of the person formed within society (Carrithers et al. 1985; Morris 1994), and not of the self as the internally-defined locus of individual experience or the psychological substrate. According to this perspective, presupposing an opposition between self and society, the self is regarded as ‘pre-social’ (Ingold 1991: 356), a view that is in line with other fundamental dualities of Western thought. Yet many ‘non-Western’ people, Ingold asserts, tell us that there exists no self in advance of its entry into society (such that it becomes a person only thereafter), but rather that the person, just as the organism, is – right from the start – embedded within social-relational contexts (ibid: 367, see also Myers 1986; Rosaldo 1980). This corresponds to the East Greenlandic understanding of a person, as I will show in this book. My field material suggests that a person in East Greenland constantly grows within the process of social life, a process which does not start at birth in order to end at death, but is connected to a far wider relational field. Hence, I follow Ingold’s conclusion that

personhood is no more inscribed upon the self than it is upon the organism; rather, the person is the self, not however in the western sense of the private, closed-in subject confronting the external, public world of society and its relationships, but in the sense of its positioning as a focus of agency and experience within a social relational field.

(ibid: 367)

Though nowadays only a few social scientists would still argue that the self is a ‘pre-social’ entity, and most studies speak of a relational self, the categorical distinction between person and self still underpins much contemporary writing. For instance, Rom Harré has proposed to distinguish ‘between the individuality of a human being as it is publicly identified and collectively defined [i.e. person] and the individuality of the unitary subject of experience [i.e. self]’ (1984: 76, brackets added). He thus justifies the division between self and person with reference to the public/private distinction, not however taking into account that the distinction between private and public realms is also culturally relative (Rosaldo 1974). Yet, in one of his later works, Harré refines his position, arguing that ‘[t] here are only persons. Selves are grammatical fictions, necessary characteristics of person-oriented discourses’ (1998: 3–4). Selves, accordingly, are ‘aspects of persons’ (ibid: 5). Brian Morris concurs with this view by declaring that the self is an abstraction, produced by a human person, and that it refers to a process rather than to an entity (1994: 12). Much in line with the latter view, I use ‘person’ as the fundamental notion, arguing that depending on the cultural context, it may or may not be set in contrast to some kind of self.

Closely related to these discussions, a number of authors such as Marilyn Strathern (1990), Tim Ingold (1999b), and Michelle Z. Rosaldo (1980, 1984) have questioned the assumption that at the heart of every society lies the antinomy between society and individual. In her work on Melanesian societies, Strathern introduced the notion of the ‘dividual’ person as a multiple partible agent who ‘contain[s] a generalized sociality within’, and which she sets in contrast to the Western idea of the indivisible and unitary person (1990: 13). The Melanesian person, she asserts, has to be imagined as a ‘social microcosm’ and ‘a derivative of multiple identities’ (ibid: 15). Some authors have (rightly) observed that under the guise of the distinction ‘Western’ versus ‘Melanesian’, which are indeed idealised categories, Strathern is comparing an abstract category with an ethnographic reality (Hess 2006: 286). Nevertheless, anthropologists and other scholars who find similarities among different peoples around the world have picked up her concept of the ‘dividual’ person (e.g., Bird-David 1999). On a broader level, it bears comparison with a number of similar approaches that highlight the relationality of a person, for example discussions about the ‘dialogical self’ (leading back to Mead 1934), or Lave’s (1988) notion of the ‘person acting’.

Slightly broader than Strathern and other scholars who mainly refer to social contexts when speaking about relational personhood, and much in line with my own approach, Jean Lave emphasised the ‘fundamental priority of relatedness among person and setting and activity’ (1988: 180). She argues that various aspects of the ‘lived-in-world’ constitute the embodied person, yet that the person’s direct involvement with his or her environment has often been neglected. This argument parallels other criticisms of social constructivism, a line of thought that has for long prevailed within anthropological circles and still frequently appears therein. Contrary to conventional theories (including many social constructivist approaches) that have often conceived of the person’s setting and activity only in terms of their location within the field of a person’s (cognitive) representations, Lave argues for a theory of practice in which ‘setting and activity connect with mind through their constitutive relations with the person-acting’ (ibid: 180–1). This closely parallels Ingold’s ecological approach and his notion of ‘direct perception’ (e.g. 1993a, 2000), which he draws from the work of J.J. Gibson (1979).

A further important point, highlighted by both Lave and Strathern, is that personhood is not necessarily bound to the physical body, and that, as Lave writes, ‘The person-acting and social world as mutually constituted are not always or exactly divided by the surface of the body’ (1988: 181). The person may have permeable boundaries, and it may be a ‘partible’ entity ‘that can dispose of parts in relation to others’, as Strathern shows in her work on exchange in Melanesia (1990: 185). She demonstrates how items may circulate as parts of a person (ibid, cf. Gosden and Knowles 2001), and Christopher Tilley (2004) argues that places and landscapes may also become parts of persons. These studies epitomise a general trend in social science research which points to the ambiguities in the boundaries of corporeality itself, questioning the view of the ‘physical’ body as a bounded entity. Thomas Csordas has argued:

Our lives are not always lived in objectified bodies, for our bodies are not originally objects to us. They are instead the ground of perceptual processes that end in objectification.

(1994: 7; cf. Merleau-Ponty 1962)

These studies reveal that knowledge is always grounded in a particular embodied and situated standpoint (Haraway 1988), and that culture and experiences have to be understood from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world (Csordas 1999: 143; cf. Jackson 1996).

Moreover, and as mentioned above, from the perspective of particular groups of people, personhood may also encompass non-human beings and entities (e.g., Harvey 2005). According to ‘animistic’ understandings, particular animals or environmental features may be alive, have intentions, and be considered as persons (see for example, Hallowell 1955, 1960, on the Ojibwa; or Bird-David 1999 on the Nayaka), a view which also appears in East Greenlanders’ lifeworlds.

In order to illustrate my use of the term ‘person’, and the theoretical discussions it builds upon, I have offered only a brief glimpse of theories of self and personhood, concentrating on approaches that are particularly relevant for East Greenlandic understandings of the person. I want to stress that in this book I will not focus on cultural representations or cognitive concepts of personhood, which I regard as inseparable from social praxis, or on discourses about personhood, but on the ways personhood appears in people’s practices, and, in particular, in people’s communicational practices.

Communication: a creative process and its multiple modalities

This book explores interpersonal communication among East Greenlanders in the Ammassalik region and the varied channels of nonverbal, material as well as linguistic interaction. Following Ruth Finnegan, my view of communication is ‘not confined to linguistic or cognitive messages but also includes experiences, emotion and the un spoken’ (2002: 5). Communication is regarded as a creative process rather than the transport of data or ‘meeting of minds’, and goes beyond the preoccupation with information, transmitter, and receiver that – firmly anchored in Saussurean structuralism – has shaped much of the current discussion (e.g., Shannon and Weaver 1964). It entails the manifold modes of persons interacting and living, both near and distant – through smells, sounds, touches, sights, movements, embodied engagements, and material objects (Finnegan 2002: 5; and see Birdwhistell ‘s [1970] view of communication as ‘multi-channel’). I argue that communication is a relational phenomenon which, apart from the communicating parties and other human actors, involves the broader contexts and settings of the communicative encounter. As Ingold has explained, ‘there is no “reading” of words or gestures that is not part of the [person’s] practical engagement with his or her environment’ (1997: 249, bracket added).

In order to explore communicative encounters among the Tunumeeq, I draw from studies of both sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, which predominantly consider language when speaking about communication (e.g. Duranti 2009), and approaches dealing with the body and the senses. On the one hand, as regards the former, contributions from the ethnography of speaking pioneered by Dell Hymes (1962, 1964), nowadays mostly referred to as the ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes 1986; Hymes and Gumperz 1964; Saville-Troike 2003; Sherzer 1983, 1990), have been particularly relevant. This body of work, which interrelates the study of language and culture, asks what the speaker needs to know in order to communicate appropriately within a particular speech community, thereby considering both communicative competence and performance. In relation to this, it has repeatedly been emphasised that language cannot be separated from how and why it is used (Saville-Troike 2003: 1–2). The performance-centred approach also highlights the important role of the audience in the communicative encounter, a point which has been at the centre of a number of schools of thought, ranging from Bakhtin’s dialogism (1981), to Goffman’s social interactionism (e.g., 1959, 1967), to Watzlawick’s pragmatics of human communication (Watzlawick et al. 1967), to conversation analysis (Goodwin 1990).

On the other hand, considering various communicational modalities apart from speech, I draw from studies of so-called nonverbal communication, including Hall’s comparative approach on proxemics and use of space (1959, 2003), and Birdwhistell’s (1970) work in kinaestethics and body motion. Stressing the multisensory aspects of communication, I further rely on contributions from the anthropology of the senses, which only partly coincide with studies of so-called nonverbal communication mentioned above. Amongst others, I draw from Cris-tina Grasseni’s work o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the scene: communication, autonomy, and personhood
• 2 East Greenland: historical and ethnographic background
• 3 Moving: communication and everyday travel
• 4 Family life: the power of words, personal space, and the materiality of a house
• 5 Shared hospitality: flows of guests, goods, and gifts
• 6 Social sanctions: the balancing of personal autonomy and community expectations
• 7 The animate environment: perceptions of non-human beings and the notion of the ‘open’ person
• Conclusion: nammeq and ways of communicating
• Glossary of East Greenlandic terms
• Bibliography
• Index