Reflections on Imagination

Human Capacity and Ethnographic Method

Mark Harris, Nigel Rapport, Mark Harris, Nigel Rapport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317069607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In this innovative volume, anthropologists turn their attention to a topic that has rarely figured as a focus of concerted investigation and yet which can be described as an intrinsic aspect of all human knowing and part of all processes by which human beings process information about themselves, their identities, their environments and their relations: the imagination. How do anthropologists use imagination in coming to know their research subjects? How might they, and how should they, use their imagination? And how do research subjects themselves understand, describe, justify and limit their use of the imagination? Presenting a range of case studies from a variety of locations including the UK, US, Africa, East Asia and South America, this collection offers a comparative exploration of how imagination has been conceptualized and understood in a range of analytical traditions, with regard to issues of both methodology and ethnomethodology. With emphasis not on abstraction but on imagination as activity, technique and subject situated in the middle of lives, Reflections on Imagination sheds new light on imagination as a universal capacity and practice - something to which human beings attend whenever they make sense of their environments and situate their life-projects in these environments - the means by which worlds come to be.

PART I
Introduction

Chapter 1
‘Imagination is in the Barest Reality’: On the Universal Human Imagining of the World

Nigel Rapport

Enlightenment and Romanticism

For the Romantic movement of early nineteenth-century Europe, the Enlightenment and the modernism of the French philosophes represented the degradation and destruction of much that was sacred in humanity. The mechanistic world-view of Newton and Voltaire that saw nature as inert matter to be understood by dissection, experiment and analysis was false and sacrilegious. Nature constituted a single living organism. One understood it through intuition and above all through imagination, revealing its powers and mysteries through a kind of spiritual ‘dematerialisation’. Hence, one has statements such as the following from Romantic notables:

• von Schelling: ‘Nature is visible Spirit: Spirit is invisible Nature’;

• Novalis: ‘The poet understands nature better than the scientific mind’;

• Goethe: ‘I return into myself and find a world’ [The Sorrows of Young Werther];

• Baudelaire: ‘[Imagination] decomposes all creation, and with the raw materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with the rules whose origin one cannot find save in the furthest depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of newness’.

Self-absorption did not mean isolation: quite the opposite. Imaginative and intuitive insights became for the Romantics a redemptive mission.

When I learn this about Romanticism I find myself torn. On the one hand I appreciate the emphasis given to, even the primacy given to, a universal and individual human capacity to know through the private and personal activities of imagining and intuiting. In the words of Fichte: ‘Intellectual intuition is the only firm standpoint for philosophy. Thence we can explain everything that occurs in consciousness; and moreover, only thence’. On the other hand I want to know my anthropology as a kind of human science. I have no truck with mystical talk of spirit and superorganicism. One way in which to conceive of this volume is as a project to explore the imagination as data for a human science, as evidentially valid, while recognizing its distinctive nature: a matter of the individual turning inward or being inward, practising an interiority that has no necessary exterior anchor or limitation (Rapport 2008a). I imagine what Doris, my farmer-informant from Wanet, variously intends by her berating of her daughter Karen in the house kitchen; I imagine what Roger, my porter-informant from Constance Hospital, experiences when he walks down the corridors playing air guitar to an intoning of Black Sabbath. I have the external evidence of their words and actions, of course, but I am intent, above all, on entering my informants’ consciousness, getting under their skin, and imagining their worlds from their perspectives. How can this be science? What kind of claim does my imagination represent on evidencing another life-world? What kind of knowing (Harris 2007)?

One further feature of Romanticism was to assume an analogy between individual and community: tribe, nation and race. The individual was metonymic of a particular collectivity that was to be recognised equally as an organic, self-determining whole. The nation, for instance, as with the race, contained its natural, volkisch wisdom of which the individual formed a part. Das Volk and the traditional culture and language of a nation were to be promoted, even worshipped, as were the insights of the individual. If Nature constituted a single living organism, then nation and race were intermediate phenomena by which the individual belonged to the whole, the conduits through which individual connected to and lived within Nature. Looking inside himself or herself, the individual knew (intuited and imagined) because there was a prior organic connexion that made him or her part of the whole: the nation, race and Nature beyond.

If I believed this to be true then it might solve the problem of an individual imagination and an anthropological scientist intrinsically separate from other consciousnesses and life-worlds he or she might be intent on knowing. One would simply say that the imagination is a species of collective consciousness: an individual capacity and practice, yes, but one whose form and content derives from socialisation and enculturation within a national or communitarian or otherwise collective tradition. I imagine according to my socialisation(s). And this has indeed been an anthropological thesis, a venerable one, since the days of Herder, figuring largely in the work of Durkheim, of Levi-Strauss, of Bourdieu, of Clifford Geertz. Thinking and feeling are not private activities that occur in separate individual heads, argued Geertz; to the contrary, thinking and feeling (and imagining) amount to similarly public and collective practices to interaction in the market-place. The individual consciousness is immersed in a set of symbol-systems which penetrate body and mind such that to belong to a culture is to partake in the exchange of symbols that cause one to imagine and feel and intend one’s fighting cock to be one’s perambulatory penis, say. As Geertz concludes (1973: 405): ‘under the guidance of symbols, [individuals and groups of individuals] perceive, feel, reason, judge, and act’. There is no need to give way to psychologism, Geertz urges, and the ethnographer need not pretend to empathy, because all social life, all human experience, is construed experience and interpreted experience, determined by the symbolic forms in terms of which the construing and interpreting takes place.

But I do not believe this to be true. My experience leads me to distinguish at every moment between the symbolic forms of my public exchanges and the meanings with which I animate them – and to imagine other human beings to do the same. At every moment I may make myself aware of the articulate interior consciousness that proceeds alongside but that is absolutely distinct from the exterior life beyond the surface of the self. My embodiment is an ontological phenomenon: my membership of social groups – nations, communities, other collectivities – is a symbolic and rhetorical and institutional arrangement distinct from the absolute nature of my being. I might invest my body and mind in my support of Arsenal Football Club, Israel, the British Humanist Association and the Virginia Woolf Society, not to mention my family and my university, but I know I am distinct from these and would deem it my right to be recognised as such by others.

And so my problem remains: imagination as a kind of human-scientific source of true knowledge.

Existentialism and Personality

There is an insight of Sartre’s that I find productive, in his claiming of the imaginative as key to an existentialist appreciation of the human condition. The defining feature of the imagination, asserts Sartre (1963 [1948]), lies in the ability of the human mind to imagine what is not the case. Key to the phenomenon of the imagination is the mind (and a wide bodily awareness) detaching itself from its immediate environs. We can distance ourselves from an immediate experience and so gain a distinct perspective on it. This is our freedom, Sartre goes on to assert, and the proof of our not being programmed to react to stimuli or otherwise determined.

This character of the imagination as a distancing from the present, from what presently exists, is taken up by anthropologist James Preston (1991), whose interests are commensurate with my own: achieving a kind of anthropological science which extends to include what he calls the poetic and imaginative domains of human experience.

What is particularly interesting for Preston is the way in which the imagination distorts what is the case along four transformatory dimensions or domains:

1. The imagination plays with spatial properties: through such processes as Miniaturisation, Magnification, Condensation (shorthand packaging) and Translocation (voyeurism), a locational transformation of physical boundaries is effected.

2. The imagination plays with temporal properties: through such processes as Simultaneity (sequential time becomes kaleidoscopic), Montage (progressive – of future possible events – and retrogressive – of possible past sequences), Progression/Retrogression (invention of possible pasts and futures) and Flying, explorations of impermanence are effected.

3. The imagination plays with morphological properties: through such processes as Transmutation (into another being), Materialisation (invention of beings and the demise of others), Animation (e.g. anthropomorphism) and Complementarity (e.g. the seeing of binarisms), an altering of the world of shapes and structures, asymmetries and symmetries is effected.

4. The imagination plays with comprehensive properties permeating all the above: through such processes as Chromatics (colour/light change), Focus (flexible concentration and degree), Composition (a flexible balance and make-up of all the above) and Distortion (twisting, enhancing, etc. of particular qualities and characteristics), worlds are changed wholesale. Indeed, Preston suggests that the four properties he identifies in imagination rarely appear in isolation: they interweave and layer one another.

Before considering how in the practical terms of my quest Preston’s classification or topography of the imaginative might help, let me add that Preston’s own conclusion is that anthropology should place the imagination centre stage and see it as responsible for giving reality to cultural worlds. Contrary to presumptions from Behaviourism, Functionalism, Cultural Materialism, and Structuralism, subjective experience should neither be passed over as irrelevant nor deemed epiphenomenal upon symbolic interaction or discursive positioning, nor avoided as inaccessible, but approached as the necessary process for the invention of culture and the manipulation of the environment. The imaginative and poetic are key ingredients for an understanding of the human condition: ‘every aspect of culture proceeds out of the imagination’ and is shaped by it, Preston concludes (1991: 102).

Preston’s coupling of the imaginative and the poetic leads me to the penultimate constructive reference I would make, to insights of Oscar Wilde’s. In his book Intentions (1891), Wilde wrote that only by intensifying his or her own personality and entering it into an analytical interpretation could a critic truly, really, satisfyingly and convincingly interpret the personality and work of others. Personality, Wilde urges, is ‘an element of revelation. If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism’ (1913 [1891]: 156). And central to personality, as Wilde elaborates in the posthumously published ‘De Profundis’ (1905), is imagination. Echoing Preston’s argument on the relation between imagination and culture, but taking it further, Wilde claims that the world is made by imagination, even if the world cannot understand imagination. In other words one does not need to work to make a connexion between imagination and exteriority because it is intrinsic to our being-in and -with an exteriority beyond the self, even if the link appears mysterious to the extent that the world created by imagination cannot look back and explain its genesis. ‘It is in the brain that everything takes place’, Wilde affirms (1990 [1905]: 874); redness and larks are in the brain as imaginative transmutations of our sense impressions. And again:

Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought; the imagination can transcend them and move in a free sphere of ideal existences. Things are also in their essence of what we choose to make them; a thing is according to the mode in which we look at it. (Wilde 1990 [1905]: 887)

Pragmatism and Reason

I want to sound an empirical note, in touch with brute materialities rather than the further reaches of what might be dismissed as idealistic and solipsistic versions of our imaginative capacities. Even if imagination offers transcendence, a tension remains with the world as is: if imagination as an attribute of personality is responsible for the externalisation of our world-views and our life-projects into wider physical environments then resistance is yet encountered from otherness. The individual is not alone with his or her imagination. This, indeed, is the starting point of a sophisticated recent anthropological engagement with the imaginative, in a special issue of the journal Ethnos, edited by David Sneath, Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, and entitled ‘Technologies of the Imagination’ (2009). Anthropology can develop its own distinct approach to the imagination, they claim, if it counters the mentalism of psychology and posits a key role to materiality, to conditions, relations and situations external to the imagining individual, as responsible for constituting imaginative projects: ‘delineating the particular vistas on which that which is imagined assumes its form’ (2009: 14). There are ‘specific “technologies” through which imaginative capacities are moulded’ (2009: 5); there are ‘social and material means by which particular imaginings are generated’ (2009: 6). The imagination is to be appreciated anthropologically as an outcome not a condition, a relational object. And yet problems remain for Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen, for does not the imaginative possess very particular qualities? Yes, the anthropologist must recognise how the imagination is nevertheless defined in terms of its irreducible indeterminacy. Hence, the imagination remains ‘peculiarly underdetermined’ by the technologies that produce it, by the processes that precipitate it (2000: 19): an odd effect, bearing neither a deterministic nor teleological relationship to its source. And its source too must be seen to possess its own particularities, for what comprise ‘technologies of the imagination’ are any objects and practices that bring about imaginative effects – that is, ‘outcomes that they do not fully condition’ (2000: 25). And hence, Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen’s complex conclusion: anthropologically to study technologies of the imagination is to explore those ‘specific conditions under which the unconditioned emerges’ and unconditioned outcomes come about (2000: 26).

I wish to retain the image of a tension – imagination as a space of indeterminacy amid social and cultural life – but I would resist its anthropological domestication as, by its nature, a conditioned and material relationship. Rather than supposing that particular ‘technologies’ are responsible for opening up an imaginative space, I would retain individual agency: imagination is an individually embodied capacity, ontologically transcendent of setting (other than the body), which impacts upon the material world. Yes, that individual body (and its intrinsic capacities) is surrounded by otherness – other human consciousnesses, histories of social institutions and cultural symbologies, the material intransigencies of natural environments – but what is to be anthropologically appreciated and accounted for is the way in which human beings attend to the world around them by virtue of their own individual and individuated interpretive processes and how a personal history of such attendings-to results in a personal sensorium, a personal life-world, personal contexts, in which each of us dwells (Rapport 1993; 2003).

And here, finally, I find a definition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s helpful: ‘The Imagination may be defined to be the use which the Reason makes of the material world’ (Emerson 1981 [1836]: 35). I like this because in Emerson’s conception, imagination, reason and the material world come together as individual practice. In using my reason to engage with the world around me I shape that world in particular ways: this shaping is a creative, an imaginative process. If, as an anthropologist, I shape the world into a particular sense, then my informants, my fellow human beings, do likewise. I reason and imagine and make of the material world alongside them. We are commensurate in our use of universal human capacities even if there is uniqueness to how we individually substantiate those capacities: I imagine alongside my informants albeit that precisely how and what they imagine is hidden from me by our discrete embodiments.

Notwithstanding, to hear their words and see their actions is to observe my informants’ imaginations in action, employed in both individual and joint projects. These must be my clues.

Case Studies

I turn now to three ethnographic episodes: two vignettes from fieldwork among porters in a Scottish hospital (Rapport 2008b); one from a project, ongoing, that explores the figuration of the human body in the art of English painter Stanley Spencer (Rapport 2004; 2005).

For the first episodes it is necessary to know that Constance Hospital, Easterneuk, is a large state-funded multi-spec...