Social and Cultural Anthropology in Perspective

Their Relevance in the Modern World

Ioan M. Lewis, Ioan Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765809865
• eBook ISBN: 9781351490627
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Social anthropology is, in the classic definition, dedicated to the study of distant civilizations in their traditional and contemporary forms. But there is a larger aspiration: the comparative study of all human societies in the light of those challengingly unfamiliar beliefs and customs that expose our own ethnocentric limitations and put us in our place within the wider gamut of the world's civilizations. Thematically guided by social setting and cultural expression of identity, Social and Cultural Anthropology in Perspective is a dynamic and highly acclaimed introduction to the field of social anthropology, which also examines its links with cultural anthropology. A challenging new introduction critically surveys the latest trends, pointing to weaknesses as well as strengths.Presented in a clear, lively, and entertaining fashion, this volume offers a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to social anthropology for use by teachers and students. Skillfully weaving together theory and ethnographic data, author Ioan M. Lewis advocates an eclectic approach to anthropology. He combines the strengths of British structural-functionalism with the leading ideas of Marx, Freud, and Levi-Strauss while utilizing the methods of historians, political scientists, and psychologists. One of Lewis' particular concerns is to reveal how insights from ""traditional"" cultures illuminate what we take for granted in contemporary industrial and post-industrial society. He also shows how, in the pluralist world in which we live, those who study ""other"" cultures ultimately learn about themselves. Social anthropology is thus shown to be as relevant today as it has been in the past.

Chapter One

Aims and Methods

OURSELVES AND OTHERS

Ethnocentricity is the natural condition of mankind. Most peoples of the world do not, in their conservative heart of hearts, like foreigners and display feelings of hostility (often tinged with fear) towards them. This indeed is one of the most widespread ways in which people declare and affirm their identity – by saying who they are not. Today, however, especially among the younger generation, we see a very different set of attitudes in western countries. Under this new dispensation things foreign and far removed from our own polluted urban world acquire an exotic piquancy, an exciting glamour, which causes them to be approached with a mixture of reverence and hope. For all its faults, it can at least be said for the modern world that it has produced a substantial body of articulate opinion that blends passion with compassion in its concern for the impoverished and starving peoples of the world. This expanding (though by no means unambiguous) sense of common humanity is encouraged by the rapidity and intensity of modern communications and by a growing awareness that mankind as a whole may face extinction unless some more harmonious and rational adjustment can be achieved between the world’s rapidly growing population and its dwindling natural resources. Ironically, the sudden realization by the oil states of the Third World that they possess a powerful weapon capable of commanding world attention and respect adds a new element of self-interest to this wider sense of common human identity.

This extension of the boundaries of acknowledged humanity, however fitful or partial, is especially favourable to social anthropology, which is by tradition a Third World subject. In fact it is the Third World subject, the authentic founder of Black Studies, the original academic discipline devoted to the study and understanding of alternative cultures, institutions and beliefs. Here com parison is of the essence, and concentration of social anthropology on the differences and similarities between tribal and industrial cultures and institutions the world over gives it its unique character. Writing in 1783, long before social anthropology had assumed any coherent shape or even possessed a name, the eighteenth-century French social philosopher, J. J. Rousseau proclaimed our guiding assumption: One needs to look near at hand if one wants to study men: but to study man one must learn to look from afar: one must first observe differences in order to discover attributes.’ It is this comprehensive perspective on the human condition that social anthropology seeks to achieve.

Clearly there are many ways of studying man, and the phrase ‘I am interested in people’ that is often used to express and justify an interest in social anthropology is encouraging – but not very enlightening. We need to be much more precise about the aspects of man that engage our attention and the methods of study we propose to adopt. This book seeks to present social anthropology as a humanistic discipline which, by its very nature, claims to be less ethnocentric and insular than history or sociology but which has strong and significant links with both these subjects as well as with social psychology and psychiatry. (I use ‘psychiatry’ here in the broad sense to refer to psychiatric theory as much as therapy and to include depth psychology, i.e. various forms of psychoanalytic theory.) That it has also close ties with comparative religion scarcely needs to be said.

We study peoples rather than people. Our primary units of reference are ‘societies’, that is, distinct and relatively autonomous communities whose members’ mutual social relations are embedded in, and expressed through, the medium of a common culture. Culture is a key term here. Not only does the possession of culture conventionally mark the great divide separating humans from other animals, but different human societies tend to possess distinctive cultures. Culture is thus the protective shell of a community and cultural distinctions become, to some extent, an index of social identity. We assume this, of course, when we associate variations in speech or accents and life style, that is cultural differences, with variations in social class or place of origin. Our everyday awareness of these value-laden distinctions makes it all the more necessary to stress that in social anthropology (and sociology) ‘culture’ is a neutral term. It is not something that I have and you do not, or vice versa; nor is it a commodity with which some people have the good fortune to be more generously endowed than others. It is thus not employed in the sense in which people speak of being more ‘cultured’ (or ‘cultivated’) than others. For our purposes, culture is simply a convenient term to describe the sum of learned knowledge and skills – including religion and language – that distinguishes one community from another and which, subject to the vagaries of innovation and change, passes on in a recognizable form from generation to generation. Culture thus transcends the lives of its living exponents in any one generation: if it did not it could not survive. Its component elements are absorbed in the first few years of life largely unconsciously, and later more deliberately by informal and formal learning processes. Socialization inevitably takes place within and through the medium of a particular cultural tradition. When people do not know how to bring up or what to teach their children their cultural heritage is indeed in jeopardy.

CULTURE AND RACE

This is the place to emphasize that culture is a very different thing from ‘race’ – if, that is, we are to understand race in its scientific sense of a genetically distinctive breed. In popular speech, when people expatiate upon the virtues or vices of the British, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Jewish or any other so-called ‘race’, they are really talking about particular cultural attitudes and characteristics. By appropriating the term ‘race’ they seek to invest these cultural stereotypes with a unique finality and meta-physical value, implying that culturally patterned behaviour is genetically determined. But there is no general evidence that distinctive cultural traits are associated with particular genes. No geneticist has yet isolated a Jewish gene or a British gene transmitting specific cultural attributes. If culture were transmitted genetically it would scarcely be necessary to expend such time and energy training children: it would be so much easier! It is precisely because there is no direct correlation of such a kind between genetic make-up and culture that we can afford to ignore race as a significant variable in our discussion of different social and cultural arrangements. Genetics and biology have little to tell us that is relevant, except in so far as these sciences throw light on human nature in general.

Racism, and racial antagonism and conflict are therefore, paradoxically, essentially social and cultural rather than biological phenomena: it is not biology but culture that makes ‘race’ socially significant. Social racism, which is a form of chauvinistic nationalism or tribalism, exists quite independently of the geneticists and biologists for whom alone the term race has some residual scientific validity. Social circumstances in which one dominant ethnic group or ‘race’ confronts others may engender a climate favourable to research aimed at exploring possible relationships between genetic and cultural phenomena. The recent revival of interest in the relationship, if any, between race and intelligence (notoriously difficult to assess in absolute terms that are cross-culturally valid) is itself a social phenomenon, reflecting our ethnically mixed contemporary environment.

On a wider front, men everywhere seek to view their way of life and culture as part of the natural order of things, as indeed a fact of nature. So, as the song has it, we do what comes naturally, and we ‘naturalize’ those whom we adopt fully into our own community – those who are born into it need only be ‘socialized’. In the same idiom which would transform facts of culture into facts of nature we speak of ‘natural rights’ and ‘natural justice’.

Our more significant and currently fashionable meeting-point with biology is not at the level of race, but at that of species. As the immense success of works by Desmond Morris and other popularizers of ethological research on primates demonstrates, Homo sapiens never tires of contemplating the behaviour of his nearest animal kin. Some presumably find this reassuring. Certainly the popularity of ethology is a testimony to the deep-seated character of western civilization’s abiding concern with the nature–nurture problem. In fact, as Lévi-Strauss has helped us to recognize in his distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, it is in all likelihood a universal human obsession. Having invented and evolved culture, man, it seems, never ceases to marvel at his own creation. In the process he endlessly ponders the point at which his culture stops and his nature begins, where – as Shakespeare poses the issue in The Tempest – Prospero ends and Caliban begins.

CULTURE AND COMMUNITY

But we must now leave these tangential matters and return to the task of establishing what social anthropology is and does. We study different cultures and the communities that produce them, placing our primary emphasis on social relations and treating culture as a vehicle or medium for social interaction rather than an end in itself. Here British social anthropologists part company with many of their American colleagues, who give priority to culture and to cultural patterns, underestimating (as it seems to us) the social dimension. Naturally those anthropologists who grant culture such imperative force tend to see social relations as the product of cultural patterning and conditioning, and thus tend to concentrate on child-rearing practices, enculturation, and socialization. Continuity and discontinuity are similarly measured and interpreted as essentially cultural phenomena and so discussed in terms of ‘acculturation’. For us, on the other hand, the dialectic between culture and society is weighted in the opposite direction. Social relations rather than their cultural vestments have priority.

Social life obviously encompasses a vast range of activities and beliefs and is of bewildering complexity. Our first aim, therefore, is to isolate significant typical events and units of social life and activity, and then to probe for the underlying blueprint, often implicit rather than explicit, that will show how they fit together into a meaningful pattern. Our interest is not simply in any one department of social life but rather in all these in a community, and especially in their mutual interdependence as parts of a whole. If communities can be thought of as houses, we are as concerned to discover what goes on in the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen as in the dining-room and sitting-room. We see action in one area not as self-contained or hermetically sealed, but as spilling over to affect and be affected by what goes on elsewhere under the same roof.

This holistic, comprehensive, catholic approach (whose history we shall briefly review in the next chapter) is usually called ‘functionalism’ or ‘structural functionalism’. Its abiding concern is with the interconnectedness of things, with all the links in the social chains that bind individuals together as members of a community. Words and actions are full of subtle meanings which, to be fully explored and understood, have to be set in a much wider social context than that of their immediate occurrence. What people do, and say, and say they think, has a logical coherence and consistency that relates to the overall social structure of the community. Community life cannot continue successfully unless there is some such orderly structure of mutually reinforcing expectations and ‘roles’, some organization of interlocking parts which click together to form a harmonious whole. This stress on the interdependence of social phenomena, though it may be circular and is not exhaustive, takes us a long way in understanding the basic dynamics of community life.

Social life can thus be viewed as a kind of theatre, an image which, of course, has always appealed to dramatists and poets. From this perspective, we set out to discover the plot of the social drama which the members of a particular community are in effect engaged in presenting, the parts or ‘roles’ that its members assume, and their mutual interaction as the play proceeds. What is the play really about? Are there significant sub-plots which cast some of the characters in the drama in a very different light from that in which they are officially cast? What room for manoeuvre is there in different productions of the same play? How far can the actors depart from their parts with improvization and adlibbing and yet remain within the accepted, culturally defined, conventions? How do we evaluate their performance?

In real life the situation is more complex than in our simple analogy. For a start, the actors all play many different roles, shedding old and assuming new parts with bewildering speed and ease: sometimes indeed they play several different roles at the same time, representing different things in different relationships. Nor do they necessarily all share the same interpretation of the events in which they participate; rival themes are thrust forward, and the same lines are used to justify contradictory claims and interests. How these are to be assessed poses delicate problems for the social anthropologist as he attempts to evaluate local ideology and its relationship to economic and political commitments. What binds all these discordant currents into something that can be called a community? What weight is to be attached to environmental and other external pressures in understanding how its members live together? If these pressures increase or decrease dramatically how will this affect the stability of the society? What will it take to shake the actors out of their accustomed parts, forcing them to assume completely novel roles? What, finally, is the vital, dynamic core of the community that gives it its uniquely distinctive character? What really makes it tick?

ALLIED APPROACHES

Particularly if we adopt a ‘transactional’ perspective, emphasizing inter-personal exchanges and transactions, study of the forces animating community life inevitably brings us very close to psychiatry and social psychology where the roles people play are also of critical importance. There are many problems which cut right across the artificial frontiers separating these subjects, particularly when attempts are made to interpret thought and feeling. It is very unfortunate therefore that, in Britain especially, social anthropologists have, on the whole, displayed towards colleagues in adjacent disciplines so little of the ecumenical tolerance with which they habitually approach exotic tribesmen. There are many reasons for this. The most significant is probably the persistence of past misunderstandings. In the name of their founding ancestors, some British social anthropologists still feel obliged to take up defensive positions against imaginary enemies who died long ago. They seem blissfully unaware that their opponents have long since abandoned the positions at issue and now share important common ground with them.

Disciplinary frontiers should be channels of communication, not iron curtains of mutual unintelligibility and mistrust; this regrettably narrow-minded approach misconstrues the complementary aims and interests of these cognate subjects. As social anthropologists our major concern is with those ideas and ways of behaving which a given community takes for granted as the ‘natural’ order of things. These deeply ingrained socially appro priate patterns of thought and behaviour we call ‘norms’, since they are endowed with normative force and moral value by their adherents. Of course, in our actual observation and collection of data we move from particular individuals and instances to the general, abstracting from the particular what we see to be shared and are told is socially expected and approved. We look at the individual to discern the imprint of society: it is what he shares with his associates, not what distinguishes him from them, that directly interests us. For us the individual is a microcosm of the social macrocosm. His private emotions and idiosyncracies, and difficulties he experiences in internalizing the social norms of his community are his business. They are not on our agenda, at least not until they become such a common feature, shared by so many others, that they qualify as ‘social phenomena’. Here, of course, as at so many other points in the blurred frontier zone between social anthropology, psychiatry and social psychology, the key question becomes: What is the threshold incidence which transforms individual into social phenomena? The more individualistic the inner life of individuals the more clear-cut the demarcation line between our subjects.

If the Anthropologist studies alien communities the psychiatrist or analyst (once known as ‘alienist’) thus treats alien symptoms in individual patients. He examines why certain individuals cannot easily accept the ways of thinking and behaving that their social milieu thrusts upon them. The psychiatrist explores the roots of personal deviance, ‘inadequacy’ and ‘alienation’ – not the grounds of conformity and compliance. But the treatment usually consists in trying to help the alienated patient to come to terms with his situation, which means accepting his position in society and the norms of conduct he finds so disturbing. Despite the impact of liberalizing currents which encourage more give and take, this modifying or normalizing function contiues to play a major role in psychiatry. The patient, if the treatment is successful, learns ‘to live with his problem’.

Nevertheless, despite his vital if sometimes reluctantly assumed role in maintaining the norms of society, the psychiatrist is often in danger of under-valuing the weight of the social pressures bearing on his patient and of assuming ethnocentrically that his own and his society’s moral standards enjoy universal validity. Psychiatrists are more easily shocked than is generally supposed. The practitioner in psychological medicine may over-emphasize the physiological dimensions of his patient’s illness, or, if psycho-analytically inclined, exaggerate the significance of childhood and prenatal experience. The social anthropologist, for his part, while stressing the importance of social interaction (and thus joining forces with much that is practised in the name of ‘psychodynamics’) is often over-simplistic i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Preface to the 1985 Edition
• Dedication
• Chapter 1. Aims and Methods
• Chapter 2. The Rise of Modern Social Anthropology
• Chapter 3. Misfortune and the Consolations of Witchcraft
• Chapter 4. The Natural Order
• Chapter 5. Myth, Rite and Eschatology
• Chapter 6. Patrimony and Patriotism
• Chapter 7. Exchange and Market
• Chapter 8. Vital Statistics: Marriage and Kinship
• Chapter 9. Power at the Centre
• Chapter 10. The Law of the Jungle
• Chapter 11. Anthropology and the Contemporary World
• Bibliography
• Index