Questions of Consciousness

Anthony P. Cohen, Nigel Rapport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134804689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A pioneering attempt to formulate an anthropological approach to consciousness, Questions of Consciousness explores the importance of the conscious self, and of the `conscious collectively', in the construction and interpretation of social relations and process. It thereby explicitly raises questions, the answers to which have previously been neglected in anthropology: how aware are people of their behaviour? To what extent is the consciousness of individuals modelled by the cultures and social structures within which they live?

Part I

Chapter 1
Amazing grace
Meaning deficit, displacement and new
consciousness in expressive interaction

James W.Fernandez

Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now I’m found,

Was blind but now I see!

THE HUMAN CONDITION

Newton’s famous hymn, so widely known and widely sung in the Anglo–American religious tradition as frequently to be listed as simply Traditional’, may stand in apt epigraph to my anthropological experience of consciousness and particularly self consciousness: that is consciousness of the possibility of, the desire for and the achievement of radical transformation of wretched self into something other, something more ‘grace full’. For I have been mainly a student of religious and political movements which, recognizing a situation of deficit in their members, have promised to them or achieved for them, on a temporary or a permanent basis, such significant transformations in their lives. They promise and achieve conversions—a notion that I shall discuss under the rubric of tropic displacement— which are in effect conscious changes in their selves. These changes are most usually revitalizing in their consequences. The self and those with whom it is grouped are given or restored to a new life, to a state of grace.

Hence I have been conscious of myself professionally as a student of revitalization movements and of my career project as the study of revitalization. In this chapter I wish to continue to explore this revitalization of consciousness with the simple additional thought that in some way anthropology itself, perhaps the social sciences entirely, have themselves been revitalizing for the kinds of wretched selves who find themselves singled out and moved by Newton’s hymn. I mean that through the ‘amazing’ work of our methods of abstraction we regularly transform self consciousness into system consciousness. And that’s a good thing too. But would ‘saved’ or ‘salvation’ be apt words for the rapture or epiphany obtained by these mainly intellectual operations? We have at least returned the self to the whole (Fernandez 1986: Ch. 8). Or in a rather more recondite vocabulary I find useful and shall return to below: the social sciences have been revitalizing by saving us from the complexities and contrariness of cultural consensus by putting forth collective representations purporting to account for how systems operate so as to assure our social consensus.¹

Revitalization theory is a long–established theory in anthropology (Wallace 1958) and it rests like all theories upon metaphor: in this case the organic metaphor (Nisbet 1969). It is a metaphor which like all metaphors fleshes out, enlivens and animates the bare bones of the theory and gives it pertinence in the consciousness of those in social science who deploy it for explanatory purposes! There is, as has been said, a ‘shock of recognition’ in effective metaphor that drives in a vital way deep into our consciousness, linking, thereby, in a gratifying way corporeal and intellectual experience, the orectic and the theoretical poles (Turner 1967).

Both personally and theoretically I have become over the years quite self conscious about the presence of the tropes in argument (Fernandez 1991), including my own, and in this colloquium on (self) consciousness I shall be deploying that self consciousness to argue for the centrality of these figurations of life and thought in self consciousness itself. That is to say I will be arguing for the centrality of meaning deficit, of figurative displacement and, as a consequence, new consciousness—all phases in the metaphoric predication of new identities—in the human condition.

Despite anthropology’s penchant for demonstrating difference I shall argue that, in at least a general way, all we ‘wretched mortals’ are alike, in respect of the impetus of meaning deficit and thus live within and live out the human condition in comparable ways. That living within and living out, of course, takes many different interesting forms—they are differences that make an important difference—according to the different transformative root metaphors of existence chosen by particular cultures, which is to say by particular influential individuals, to cope with these deficits (Pepper 1942; Fernandez 1986; 1974; Ortner 1973; Turner 1974).

Also no deficit can be discussed without reference to the pressure exerted by political and economic circumstances on the worldview implicit in the root metaphors embedded in social discourse. Also, too, this humanistic recognition of the universality of deficit is no doubt conditioned by having lived within the Judaeo–Christian tradition with its sombre and repressive emphasis on human sinfulness and its Nietzschean ‘tragic sense of imperfection’ (Sahlins pers. comm.)

Still, I shall argue for meaning deficit as motivating in the human condition in general. And in the present context I would argue that this meaning deficit consists in the impermanence and transitoriness of our individuality vis–à–vis our imagination of the possibilities of its perpetuity, as well as in the imperfection of the realization of our projects in practice vis–à–vis the more perfect models we hold of them in thought, which we test and upon which we operate! Of such wretched unrequitement and of such needful search for grace is self consciousness, sooner or later, surely though not uniquely composed.

TWENTY–TWENTY HINDSIGHT: THE ARGUMENT SO FAR

When we are under invitation to participate and offer argument in the situation of a collegial colloquium—and this goes to the situatedness of all problem–provoked self consciousness—we undertake first (at least someone as long in the tooth as I) to review, to bring into consciousness, the personal thought lines (PTL) in one’s own work—in relation to the Great Thought Lines (GTL) of one’s art and science or one’s skilful practice from which one has learned and to which one desires to contribute. These are the skills and understandings of the PTL and GTL that are relevant to and might be seen as contributing to if not leading up to the subject matter.

So, self–conscious of consciousness as our subject matter, I shall first take advantage of the licence for introspection of my own mind as such a mind lives in its academic ‘vat’ hooked up mainly to its own thought lines and the network of thought lines, great and small, that are in some way interconnected with it.² But this intellectual web–building must necessarily be accompanied by some feeling of awkward self consciousness at appearing to hawk one’s wares or, to tend the trope, jangle one’s thought lines. So though I at first incline towards my own thought line(s) here, the hope is that it (they) can turn out to be more than ‘one liners’ brought forth over the years by a wretch like me. I am also conscious that in that wretchedness lies a transformative dynamic that can hopefully save my consciousness from itself, enabling it to hop out of the vat, as it were, into a different if not a larger world! Presumably that is what anthropology is mainly about.

The PTL I would like to use this opportunity to bring into question has to do with social and cultural consensus in interaction (Fernandez 1965) and its relation to ‘economies of thought’ or essentialization (stereotyping) processes by which self and others are identified (categorized) in the process of that interaction. Somehow or other societies manage, despite the contingencies generated by both existential unpredictability and the great diversity of self consciousnesses of which they are composed, to find through categorization processes enough consensus to cohere and get their work done. And societies expect to get work done by such motivating collective representation. And an important part of self consciousness lies in the fact that the self is conscious not only of its own pressures to be itself but of the consensual pressures to conform to expectations bound up in categorical allegiances imposed or freely chosen.

Simply put, satisfaction, that is positive self consciousness, or distress, negative self consciousness, derives from conformity or lack of it to categorical obligations. Social consensus and coherence is managed by these processes which are, often enough rather wretchedly, essentializing in implication. At the same time the confidence in coherent belonging or the consciousness of coherence lost can be managed by imaginative displacement of category of various kinds which result in new consciousness. And it is this displacement towards new consciousness which trope theory, as both a PTL and a GTL, addresses.

SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT? ACADEMIC ARGUMENT AND ETHNOGRAPHIC WORLDS

It is one thing to self consciously put forth a thought line. It is quite another thing for an ethnographer to presume that we can hand such a line over to those among whom we do our ethnographies in any way that will be relevant to their self consciousness. Until very recently the people I have worked among in Africa and rural Spain have read little or nothing either from the GTL or the PTL and it is doubtful that much in either line would be immediately relevant to any deficits in meaning or material well–being they themselves were conscious of needing to repair. As the rural and working people I am now working with like to say, ‘Más enseña la necesidad que la Universidad’ (Necessity teaches more than University).

At the same time I would maintain that this thought line, my PTL in particular, is quite relevant to my ethnographic experience. Indeed, the first article in the series speculating on the nature of social and cultural consensus (Fernandez 1965) arose out of experience of the diversity of interpretations of symbols in an otherwise fairly tight knit religious group in Africa. And a further series of articles exploring the organizing images or metaphors of that religion arose directly out of the local explanations directly given to me trying to account for their religious ritual or indirectly to be found in the densely imagistic homologizing and sermonizing characteristic of the religion. My PTL, in other words, was anchored in their PTLs as these arose under the pressures (perhaps contorting) of ethnographic enquiry and text collection. At the same time their thought lines underwent significant conversion in me as I elaborated their implications in my own. And many conceptualizations relevant to the GTL of the Western tradition appear which are quite beyond any economies of thought my informants were interested in. My academic self was conscious of a tradition of discourse—the vat—to which I needed to relate, a consensual obligation as it were to former and present colleagues in the ongoing discourse of anthropology quite unknown to my local ethnographic collaborators.

Much has now been written about this discrepancy of discourses between fieldwork and subsequent interpretation in academic milieux.³ I would simply like to observe, however, that in recent years I have been invited to lecture on the theory of tropes, my own PTL in part but especially the GTL, in various parts of Spain and Latin America including in the province of fieldwork, Asturias. Very often there are participants from rural milieux in these classes, seminars and public talks quite like the rural milieux of much of the ethnographic material I later conceptualized. In these talks and seminars I use these ethnographic materials and show their possible conceptualizations. Therefore, as the world turns, the separation of discourses is happily or unhappily compromised at least for those villagers, quite a few actually, who have gone on for an education. And, of course, by no means is mine the only case in a globalized anthropology in which boarding parties now move back and forth with facility between cultural vessels. But does this mean an approximation of self consciousnesses—that intimate intersubjective knowing which the philosophers desire and some promise?

A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS: ON KNOWING OTHER MINDS

The problem of knowing other minds in other cultures both in general and in particular, has long been a major preoccupation of anthropologists. We don’t have to list the abundant literature devoted to this problem from ‘The Mind of Primitive Man’ to ‘The Savage Mind’ or trace the gradual evolution in thinking on this problem from finding the savage mind exclusively elsewhere to finding it inclusively in ourselves—from inspection or circumspection of the distinctly other to introspection in the self.

I have argued elsewhere (Fernandez 1992) the difficulty or impossibility of knowing other minds in any adequate sense of the term ‘know’ and surely in cross–cultural context. And I have suggested the intrusive not to say imperialist motives that may be present in the desire to do so. One might, indeed, be sceptical of knowing the minds of one’s most intimate family members or even one’s own mind! The tentative little phrase politely intrusive upon the meditative states of others, ‘a penny for your thoughts’, may, in fact, value the expected product, the true thoughts of others, at about its actual value.

For some time now social scientists have been invited to live in a Goffmanesque world where one has to recognize how much people warp their intimate interiority in order to accommodate to the expectations of others in their presentation of self. In respect to the consciousness of the other self, the question arises whether there is in fact any there which is anything more than an inchoate—even mystical—feeling of entity (Fernandez 1980) and which will always be swayed and shaped by the contingency of social circumstance in its public presentation. Indeed the pragmatic argument would have it that consciousness only arises from the need of communication with others. It is a product of praxis, of social adaptation, and has no investigatable antecedent existence.

For the anthropologist this has been an enduring problem. When pursuing enquiry into alien mental states among the colonized and other subordinated populations we are always at risk of being told what it is thought we expect to hear. Indeed our method has been designed to circumvent such tergiversation in ethnographic conversation and by ‘indirections find directions out’. But whether in fact we ever truly move beyond analytic understanding to synthetic understanding (Kant) in this quest for the mind of the other is an open philosophic question. The argument is to be made that, even in the most intimate conversations characterized by a high degree of mutual confidence, what is learned is an emergent and secondary elaboration occurring between participants and is not truly the bringing forth of the truly original, that is ‘pre–objective’ (Tsordas 1994), which is to say the truly intimate property of the consciousness of either party (Schafer 1980).

So there is plenty of reason for scepticism in the knowing of other minds and their (self) consciousness beyond their pragmatic consciousness of needing to present an identifiable self to take its place among other identifiable selves in the practice of everyday social life. But this scepticism, this irony, we might call it, inclusive for us all in the human condition, need not inhibit our anthropological enquiry. Indeed it might rather animate it. And this for two reasons. First, we...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHGT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION CONSCIOUSNESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III