The Subject of Anthropology

Gender, Symbolism and Psychoanalysis

Henrietta L. Moore

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745608099, 9780745608082
• eBook ISBN: 9780745638171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this ambitious new book, Henrietta Moore draws on anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis to develop an original and provocative theory of gender and of how we become sexed beings. Arguing that the Oedipus complex is no longer the fulcrum of debate between anthropology and psychoanalysis, she demonstrates how recent theorizing on subjectivity, agency and culture has opened up new possibilities for rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality and symbolism.

Using detailed ethnographic material from Africa and Melanesia to explore the strengths and weaknesses of a range of theories in anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis, Moore advocates an ethics of engagement based on a detailed understanding of the differences and similarities in the ways in which local communities and western scholars have imaginatively deployed the power of sexual difference. She demonstrates the importance of ethnographic listening, of focused attention to people's imaginations, and of how this illuminates different facets of complex theoretical issues and human conundrums.

Written not just for professional scholars and for students but for anyone with a serious interest in how gender and sexuality are conceptualized and experienced, this book is the most powerful and persuasive assessment to date of what anthropology has to contribute to these debates now and in the future.

1

Body, Mind and World

Symbolism must make its appearance with the earliest appearance of human culture. It is in essence that modification of the human organism which allows it to transform the physiological drive into a cultural value.

Malinowski, 1939: 955

Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him ‘by flesh and blood’; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they give the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and even beyond his death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it.

Lacan, 1977: 68

This book is about how we come to be sexed beings, and how in that process we also become makers and users of symbols. The crux of this enquiry is the complex relationship between body, mind and world. Anthropology and psychoanalysis address themselves to the complexity of this relation, and while they have often proceeded in parallel rather than in concert, they share an abiding concern with culture and with symbolism. The puzzle for both is how does the social come about? – how do humans acquire culture? The idea that civilization depends on the control of instincts was an old one even in Freud’s day, but he developed it into a theory which linked the psyche to the social, arguing that human social life is only possible if individuals restrict their possibilities of satisfaction, relinquish something (1985a [1929/30]; 1985b [1927]). Freud made extensive use of anthropological data in his writings, and his interest began a process of borrowing and lending that has continued to this day (Wallace, 1983).

Relations between anthropology and psychoanalysis are frequently portrayed as turbulent, but the image of dislike and suspicion that pervades their relations is belied by the huge volume of psychoanalytically inspired work in anthropology,¹ and the great number of psychoanalysts intrigued by anthropological data. What seduced earlier generations of anthropologists was Freud’s insight that culture was the product of the repression of incestuous sexuality. In the first decades of the twentieth century, evolutionary thinking was giving way to questions about the relationship between instinct and social rule, between the repressed passions and the forces of law and morality. Freud’s view of the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny via a primal parricide intrigued a generation of anthropologists in Europe and the USA who were fascinated by the origins of culture and of cultural difference. Durkheim’s influential work on collective representations found a particular connection with Freud’s interpretation of religion as the outcome of oedipal conflict, of the relinquishing of desire and identification with the father. What these two theories shared in their different ways was a concern with the relationship of the individual psyche to the ‘collective mind’, as well as a question about how to account for continuity in the mental life of successive generations: in other words, how does culture get reproduced?² A generation of anthropologists built on these ideas and formulated a view of culture as a collective fantasy projected into the external world in response to each person’s need to control their anxieties (e.g. Devereux, 1967; 1978; 1980; La Barre, 1954; 1978; Roheim, 1950a; 1971). In accounts of this kind, myth, ritual, religion, joking, folktales and other aspects of culture are treated as defence mechanisms against anxieties (e.g. Kilborne, 1981; Levine, 1992; Spiro, 1987). Many anthropologists have sought ways to link cultural symbolism to unconscious fantasy, arguing that while culture is the product of individual unconscious fantasy, it is also the means through which individuals organize their own fantasies and internal worlds (e.g. Crapanzano, 1980; Hook, 1979b; Obeyesekere, 1981; Turner, 1967; Spiro, 1982; 1987). The idea that individuals use cultural symbols, myths and rituals to convey and manage their personal symbols and psychic processes is a dominant feature of much contemporary work in psychoanalytic anthropology (e.g. Blum et al. 1988; Hook, 1979b; Kracke, 1987a; Obeyesekere, 1990; Paul, 1982).

While psychoanalytic anthropology has never been a term of great specificity, living in an ill-defined cognate relation with, among other things, cultural psychology, ethnopsychoanalysis, ethnopsychiatry and cross-cultural psychology, it has, as a sub-field within anthropology, treated a number of recurrent subjects and themes. These have included the study of dreams, ego and personality formation, child-rearing practices, trauma and cultural symbolism, theories of mind, the origins of religion, interpretation and the value of psychoanalysis for fieldwork, sexuality and sexual behaviour, and psychodynamic understandings of social behaviour.³ Underlying all this work is a strong and abiding interest in cross-cultural comparison: the perennial question of what it is that all cultures share. This question is most evident in the work on sexuality and kinship, on how incestuous desires are socialized. The main discussion in this context continues to focus on the significance of the Oedipus complex, and the broader question that lies behind it of the role of fathers as opposed to mothers, and the significance of wider kin networks (see chapter 7). Most psychoanalytically inspired analyses of anthropological data continue to draw directly on Freud, object relations theory and/or ego psychology, and there is curiously still very little work that is inspired by Lacan’s re-reading of Freud.⁴ In this book, I set out to develop a new model for the relationship between anthropology and psychoanalysis which draws to varying degrees on different aspects of these psychoanalytic traditions. It takes as its starting point the question of how we become sexed beings and the consequence this has for an understanding of self, culture and power. In consequence, I do not embrace one or other psychoanalytic school to the exclusion of all others. My aim is to subject their theoretical formulations to a series of ‘ethnographic’ readings, as a way of driving forward theoretical advancements in the analysis of gender (see below).

In the last ten years, a new trend has emerged of anthropologists and psychoanalysts working closely together on interpreting anthropological materials. This builds on an older tradition of anthropologists, psychoanalysts, psychologists and psychiatrists working together in the field, of which perhaps the work done under the leadership of Henri Collomb at the Fann Hospital in Dakar, Senegal is the most famous (Collignon, 1978). These new forms of sustained intellectual engagements have produced breakthroughs in thinking because they have introduced anthropologists to recent developments in psychoanalytic thinking which have allowed some of the old antinomies in the debate to be disassembled or transcended.⁵ This does not, however, mean that anthropologists and psychoanalysts are in agreement; the evidence from these encounters suggest that they are often painfully divided over key issues, and what produces the most difficulty is the tension between the schematizing tendencies of psychoanalytic theorizing and the mass of cultural complexity to which the anthropologists feel deeply committed.

This harks back to older disagreements, since the main difficulty with psychoanalysis for many anthropologists has been the application of a universal model for the relationship between psychosexual structures and social organization, coupled with an insensitivity to cultural variation (Juillerat, 2001: ch. 1).⁶ The commitment to cultural variability in a discipline dedicated to studying cultural differences is a very particular one. Interestingly, this debate is reprised in a very similar form in the discussions between feminism and psychoanalysis (see chapters 4, 5 and 6), where critics find it hard to square a universal and invariant model of sexual difference with the lived realities of gendered lives. Feminism has criticized psychoanalysis for providing a theoretical model that describes and reinforces patriarchy and heterosexuality rather than providing alternative accounts of the construction of femininity (e.g. Braidotti, 1997; 2002; Braidotti and Butler, 1984; Butler, 2004; 1995a; Cornell, 1997; Felski, 1997; Frye, 1996). I address this problem in the chapters that follow in two different ways. First, I critique the way psychoanalysis treats mothers and fathers as self-evident, natural entities. This tendency is anyway quite at odds with the insistence in psychoanalytic theorizing on the fact that sexual difference cannot be reduced to biology, and that the relationship of the child to parental figures is one set up in representation, and thus imaginary in some very important aspects. In this process, I suggest the invariant psychosexual structures of psychoanalysis cannot be treated as if they were contentless, and we therefore need to rethink the relationship between culture and the process of how we become sexed beings (see chapter 7). Secondly, I resituate the problem of universalism as one about the more general dilemma of how to handle history – that is, how to explain the development of the individual in the context of an ongoing social/cultural system which itself changes over time and is subject to the workings of power. I suggest that the question ‘Is the Oedipus complex universal?’ is no longer one to which we should be seeking an answer, but rather we need to ask, ‘How do we become sexed beings?’ The difference between these questions may not at first sight seem very great, but it produces a seismic shift in thinking that allows new questions to be addressed in anthropology. In addition, psychoanalytic theory has now refigured its understanding of oedipal conflict in such a way (see chapter 4) that we can move outside the straitjacket provided by the older formulation of the Oedipus complex to ask new questions about the relationship between gendered selves and social relationships.

The anthropological commitment to cultural variation takes an additional form in relation to psychoanalysis and that is the worry that psychoanalytic models are culturally specific, and thus interpretation and analysis which use them must be inappropriately applying a western model to other cultures (e.g. Ingham, 1992; Kirschner, 1992; Spain, 1992). Moving away from an invariant oedipal model towards a specific enquiry about how individuals become sexed beings in a particular cultural context answers part of the problem. Once again, feminist theorists have raised a similar set of concerns, arguing that Freud and Lacan employed unexamined pre-theoretical assumptions in their theorizing, particularly in regard to the relationship between sexed identity and object (love) choice, the determination of heterosexuality as normal sexuality, the role of the father, the characterization of the mother as passive and the assumption that femininity is constructed around the lack of the male organ. All of these assumptions have been rigorously challenged and in chapters 4, 5 and 6 I explore how developments in feminist theorizing have cleared the way for a reworking of psychoanalytic theory for anthropological purposes.

The argument in this book does not rest on the validity or non-validity of imposing a universal model onto all the cultures of the world. Rather, it develops a specific ethics of engagement by placing psychoanalytic, anthropological and feminist theories alongside other cultural theories of the origins of society, the nature of sexuality and gender identity, and the relationship between the social and the symbolic. In laying anthropological, psychoanalytic and feminist theories of gender, subjectivity, representation and power alongside ethnographic material I approach the anxiety about applying a western model to other cultures from a different perspective, attempting from the outset to provide an ‘ethnographic’ reading of anthropological, psychoanalytic and feminist theories alongside readings of specific ethnographic materials. The basis for this ‘dual set’ of ethnographic readings is that both the so-called ‘western’ theories and the ethnographic materials I discuss are concerned with particular ways of imagining and delineating a cartography of the relation of self to society. In the process, they work over a series of themes about the nature of representation, the way bodies are marked by sexual difference, the problems and specifics of gender identity and the way individuals are connected to each other and to social laws and institutions. My aim is to treat all these accounts as ‘theories’, and to view them as a set of ruminations on the interconnected problems of bodies, genders, power and agency. My purpose is to develop a new ethics of engagement for the analysis of cross-cultural material and to use the fruits of that engagement to drive thinking forward with regard to the relationship between culture and gender. Paradoxically, the inspiration for this strategy is derived in part from Lévi-Strauss. He refers to The Jealous Potter as ‘a book in which I am trying to show that certain notions credited to psychoanalysis…were already inherent in mythic thought’, arguing in relation to his analysis of North and South American myths that ‘they were far ahead of us when it comes to a good many of the notions that did not find expression in the western world until Freud’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1988: 131). Lévi-Strauss does not mean that these notions did not exist in the West prior to Freud, but that they did not find systematic expression in the form of a theory.⁷ My intention in this book is to read various ‘theories’ against each other, examining their differences and similarities, tracing the effects of their differing assumptions about the relationships of self to society, and of psyche to culture. My ultimate aim is to develop a theory of how we become sexed beings, and to show how this is at the core of our capacity for representation and symbolism.

The reproduction of culture

In the first stages of its life, an infant lives in close symbiotic relationship with its mother or primary carer, and has no experiential divisions between self and other, self and external reality, subject and object.⁸ It is now generally agreed that from their earliest days – prior to the acquisition of language and the cultural conceptions of the world it makes possible – children develop representations, fantasies, as a result of their experiences of their bodies and their needs, as well as their interactions with parents and significant others. In this process, instincts and needs become attached to images and representations, and through this set of dynamic interactions the unconscious is formed. Children have an active mental life from birth, but one that has to work in concert with developing neurological competences. These early experiences all happen prior to object constancy, language competence and reality testing, and they are often accompanied by intense affect. Freud’s insight was to see that even the unconscious had to be formed out of the child’s fantasized relation to its own body, to its parents and significant others, and to the world. The result is that the child actively constructs objects (including other people) and symbols through engagement with the world, and thereby develops psychological capacities but in relation to a specific social and physical environment. The formation of the unconscious is the condition for subjectivity, for consciousness and for social relations through the mechanism of representations. It is through the capacity for representation that the child becomes anchored in and attached to a social world, and slowly begins to recognize that it is separate from the mother. Separation is a condition of selfhood, but this is a process that takes place in and through social interaction. Over time, the child is able to make a firmer distinction between internal and external worlds, and to engage in social relations with others, but the very young child’s fantasies of parents and others are reified, and can be experienced as objects and/or agents. Since the boundary between inner and outer worlds is porous, these objects can be experienced both as internal to the child and/or as external – that is, existing in the world. As the child develops physically and neurologically, it acquires the capacity to recognize objects (including other people) in a stable way, to link language to representations and to distinguish its internal world from the external world (reality testing). As object constancy, language competence and reality testing develop, the child’s earliest fantasies are relinquished, in the sense that they become repressed and form part of the unconscious. Repression is what opens children to the wider world; without it they would be caught in their own fantasized internal world.

The relationships young children have to their parents and others are set up in representation and in that sense are fantasized. Contemporary views of psychoanalysis emphasize the importance of both parents in the development of a sense of self: both parents are sources of identification from the earliest stages in life and both provide support and encouragement for differentiation (see chapter 4). Children are born anatomically sexed, but from the time of birth, caregivers encourage development in ways they think appropriate to the child’s gender, so that anatomy and social relations, along with physiology and neurological development, provide the matrix for the earliest representations of gender. Clinical data shows that between 18 and 24 months children become aware of the differences between the sexes, but both boys and girls believe at this stage that they and others have both masculine and feminine attributes and capacities. The recognition of differences between the sexes is in tension with this ‘over-inclusive position’, and entails the child recognizing and accepting the loss of certain masculine and feminine attributes/capacities they had assumed were theirs. These lost aspects of masculinity and femininity are ascribed meanings which become attached to body parts. But the meanings do not follow from the body parts themselves (penis, vagina); they are not based on the physical sex, but rather are meanings that the child attaches to her/his body and that of others. Thus, the body is shaped by ideas about masculinity and femininity and not the other way around (see chapters 4 and 5).

What many theorists now emphasize in different ways – neurologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers – is that for humans the world is a libidinal object, because part of being human is involved in taking an interest in the world, assigning it value, interacting with it and all that it contains.⁹ This has consequences for how we develop as biological and as cultural beings. Psychoanalysis develops this perspective in relation to the body ego, the idea that the ego only emerges in the world as embodied. As the child develops, the map the ego forms of the body allows for no distinction between material and representation, between the physical and the psychical body, because there is no lived phenomenological body prior to a psychic investment in the parts and surfaces of the body. The body ego which provides the grounds for an emerging sense of self is produced by, and only grows in relation to, its interactions with the external world, and these take place via the perceptual surface of the body and in the brain. There is an ongoing discussion about whether Freud’s body ego is supported by recent developments in neurological science (e.g. Morin and Thibierge, 2004). Obviously, Freud did not have access to what scientists now know, but the available evidence suggests that consciousness is related to the development of an integrated representation of the body.¹⁰ What Freud and many subsequent psychoanalytic theorists have emphasized is that for any body part to come into psychic experience, the ego must form a fantasy relation to it, that is one set up in representation.

The way we develop our capacity for representation, and the fact that we do so only as a psychosomatic organism, has consequences for the way we think about the relationship between culture and individuals. Recent work in anthropology has provided a formidable critique of the old socialization thesis, the idea that culture is either learned by or somehow imposed on an undifferentiated and pre-existing biological organism – the idea that cultural meanings are somehow ‘dumped into the minds of children’ (Robertson, 1996: 599). The contemporary view is much more in keeping with recent work in neurobiology, and argues that rather than seeing culture as something added to a biological entity or viewing that entity as having pre-given (often neural) modular properties, we should see culture and biology as ontogenetically related (Ingold, 1991). From this perspective, humans are not biological entities with the capacity to acquire culture, but biologically cultural beings who develop as individuals through intersubjective relations with cultural others in a specific environment (Toren, 1999; Roberston, 1996). Biology and culture develop as an ensemble. The human mind and body develop as each new child enters the world, but they do so in the context of a socially constituted, interactive world.

This is part of the answer to the question of how culture gets reproduced across the generations. But, it also signals a shift in the way anthropologists are beginning to think about culture. We can demonstrate this argument by asking how the subject comes to know, understand and operate the cultural system he or she is part of. This is an area in which anthropology has been borrowing from developmental psychologists and from cognitive scientists (Bloch, 1989; 1998; Toren, 1983; 1990; 1999). Traditionally, anthropologists have seen cultural systems of cognition as forms of collective representation that precede the individual in historical time and into...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Body, Mind and World
• 2 A Genealogy of the Anthropological Subject
• 3 Culture, Power and Desire
• 4 Objects and Relations with (M)others
• 5 The Problem of the Phallus
• 6 Being and Having
• 7 Kinship and Sexuality
• 8 Mothers and Men
• 9 Social Transformations
• References
• Index