Conceptualizing Society

Adam Kuper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780367475376
• eBook ISBN: 9781134926480
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

The social anthropologists represented in this volume share the view that, together, ethnography and theoretically informed comparison constitute a single, plausible enterprise, and they reject both the postmodernist criticism of ethnography as epistemologically problematic, and the opposing view that no theory could possibly do justice to the insights and complex descriptions of ethnography. In this volume, the first papers taken from the first conference of the newly-formed European Association of Social Anthropologists, the contributors discuss the various models at the disposal of the modern ethnographer. Their concerns range through structuralism, postmodernism and world systems theory, and the volume as a whole offers a lively account of the state of general theory in social anthropology today.

Part I

Individuals and networks

Chapter 1

Towards greater naturalism in conceptualizing societies

Fredrik Barth

The distinction now generally drawn in social anthropology between the connected concepts of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ was most clearly articulated by Firth:

If…society is taken to be an organized set of individuals with a given way of life, culture is that way of life. If society is taken to be an aggregate of social relations, then culture is the content of those relations. Society emphasizes the human component, the aggregate of people and the relations between them….

(Firth 1951:27)

Thirty years later, Leach could still write,

In practice, ‘a society’ means a political unit of some sort which is territorially defined…. The boundaries of such units are usually vague. They are determined by operational convenience rather than rational argument. But they are objective. The members of ‘a society’ at any one time are a specifiable set of individuals who can be found together in one part of the map and who share common interests of some sort.

(Leach 1982:41)

Thus, while Leach, with many contemporary social anthropologists, finds the concept of culture, and especially that of cultures, highly problematic, his reservations with regard to the concept of society and societies are less strong and focus mainly on the avoidance of naive comparison between small-scale and large, complex societies. The idea that our conceptual difficulties are found mainly on the cultural side of the antinomy, those concerning society having been more successfully resolved, may be more prevalent among anthropologists than among other social scientists. We may note Tilly’s call that we discard the ideas of society as a thing apart and societies as overarching entities’ (Tilly 1984:17) and Wallerstein’s wish to ‘unthink’ the whole of social science because of an unease with the way in which its object is conceptualized and partitioned (Wallerstein 1988).

Mainstream social anthropology responds to such misgivings in rather cavalier fashion. It is a commonplace that a map depicting the world as partitioned into separable, internally cohering ‘societies’ is a highly simplified representation of the terrain of social relations. The arbitrariness of identifying any particular level of region as a society and the embeddedness of all local regions in a world system are thereby acknowledged; yet we seem to continue the practice, and the disclaimer is not allowed to impede our comparative operations. It is also often said that ‘society’ should merely be regarded as short for ‘social system’, in the hope that this will sidestep the remaining conceptual difficulties—but observe how the term is actually used, that is, the template that it serves to evoke. Not only is the comparative project so embedded in anthropological thought that ‘societies’ will despite protestations be used to constitute the units of comparison but the concept of an overarching ‘society’ serves to frame our particular objects of study as if they axiomatically had to form a part of such an encompassing, larger whole. These infelicitous habits of language and conception almost invariably affirm the orderly closure that allows a holistic assumption to be applied at any level where this might seem convenient; they create the justification for a simplistic separation of endogenous and exogenous processes, and they subtly insinuate the nation-state as the implicit model for all organized human sociability.

MISCONCEPTIONS OF SOCIETY

It would probably prove tiresome and unnecessarily provocative if I were to search through anthropological texts for examples of the errors and confusions which this infelicitous use of the concept of ‘society’ has introduced into our theoretically intended discourse. Let us instead see what might remain of ‘society’ if we expunged the more patent distortions and oversimplifications which form a normal part of its content.

1. The first distortion I wish to arrest is that ‘society’ can be summed up as an aggregate of social relations. If by a social relation is meant a relationship of social interaction, this does not hold. In our society, my relationships and those of others are held in place by myriad actors and agencies that I have no social dealings with but that shape my behaviour, ranging from the employees of public utilities to the organs of law and order and the branches of government. The foci of my attention and interests, and thus my activities, are further shaped by untraceable chains of intellectuals and public speakers around the world; and the options and premises for my opinions, decisions, and forging of social relations are delivered by unknown technologies and industrial concerns, buffered by the results of collective bargaining and market forces, and manipulated by mass communications. The concept of an aggregate of social relations cannot, with the utmost of goodwill, be claimed to retrieve these complex connections; and the characteristic forms of social acts and relations are not reproduced by processes which can themselves be represented as comprised of such social relations.
2. Nor can ‘society’ be represented as the aggregate of institutions of a population. Such a view limits social reality to its normative form and thereby resurrects the familiar difficulties of having to reintroduce informal relations besides the formal ones, deviance besides conformity to norms, and other intractable distinctions between the supposedly truly social and the additional, empirical intrusions from the supposedly non-social or anti-social.
3. Indeed, ‘society’ cannot defensibly be represented by any schema which depicts it as a whole composed of parts. Probably no such hierarchy of nesting parts within wholes will exhaust the social organization of any population; it can certainly not be taken as paradigmatic for all social organization. If individuals are taken to form the elementary parts, they regularly will prove to hold memberships in groups of a diversity of levels and scales and in groups which transect the boundaries of any designated region. If social statuses are seen as the minimal units, they regularly combine in overlapping structures: in corporate groups, in the status sets of reciprocal interaction, and in the composition of social persons. The complexities of social organization can neither be bounded in delimited wholes nor ordered in the unitary part-whole hierarchies which the schematism of our terminology invites us to construct.
4. Nor can these difficulties be escaped by declaring the whole world one society, a modern world system. Too many of the connections in the world are asymmetrical and indirect: decisions in a board room impinge on the life situation of an aboriginal population without that board’s or its corporation’s having any place in the cognized world of the population so affected or, indeed, probably vice versa. Moreover, the intersecting circles of membership and connection in the world are much older and more pervasive than the modern world system. But above all, the concept of ‘society’ is useful only when it helps us to identify, differentiate, and compare variations in the organization of life, not when it merges all into one unmanageable Leviathan.
5. ‘society’ cannot be abstracted from the material context: all social acts are ecologically embedded. It is therefore not meaningful to separate ‘society’ from ‘environment’ and then show how the former affects or is adapted to the latter. Though the aggregate of social behaviour has a significant effect on the environment and is contained within it, social decisions on all levels are connected with these ecological variables and have their forms significantly affected by them. Thus the social and the ecological cannot, with respect to the forms of social events and institutions, be treated as separate systems.
6. Finally, a concept of ‘society’, as much as ‘culture’, serves to homogenize and essentialize our conception of the social. Yet we know that not only interests but also values and realities are contested between persons in stable social interaction with each other. The perfection of mutual comprehension and communication which is generally enshrined in our definition of society is not paradigmatic of social life. All social behaviour is interpreted, construed, and there is nothing to indicate that two persons ever place the same interpretation on an event. We have poor data on the degree of difference in interpretation that may obtain between regularly interacting individuals or groups. All we actually need to posit in a social relation is a degree of convergence on passing theories between the interacting persons (cf. Rorty 1989; Wikan n.d.).

In these six misconceptions I would identify the sources of the major fallacies I have noted, namely, the notions that by calling any particular area of the world a ‘society’ we are justified in imposing a holistic format on our description of the social organization of its population; that certain processes are endogenous to these isolates and should be understood in terms of internally shared cultural features, while others are exogenous and should be linked to culture contact, change, and modernization; and that the relevant context for human social life is everywhere a territorial unit, politically organized on the model of a nation-state.

If these fallacies are discarded, then what is left of ‘society’? Something needs to be reconstituted, for to handle the materials of social anthropology we surely need a template for systems above the level of discrete social relations. But to enhance our analysis we need to revise the definitional properties with which we invest our concept of such systems. Above all, I see a need to recognize that what we have called societies are bordered systems, further characterized by an absence of closure. But how do we conceptualize and describe disordered open systems?

THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION

First, we need to lay a new set of foundations by updating our view of the structure of social action, taking account of the theoretical insights gained during the last twenty years.¹ Such revision will primarily need to attend to the cultural construction of reality: that human social behaviour is intended and interpreted in terms of particular cultural understandings and is not transparent, objective, and uncontested. Let us try to redescribe social action in conformity with this insight.

One possible vocabulary would distinguish two aspects of behaviour: ‘events’ and ‘acts’. The former would refer to the outward appearance of behaviour, the objective and measurable data of positivism. The latter would refer to the intended and interpreted meaning of that behaviour, its significance for conscious persons holding particular sets of beliefs and experiences. An event is an act by virtue of being intended and construable. Leaving aside for the moment the question of epistemology, we can trace the connections of acts in two directions: back to their intent and forward to their interpretation.

The intent is the purpose of the acting person, the goal orientation from which the act sprang. This should not be confounded with the narrower question of rationality: the intent may arise as much from an urgent need to express a mood as from a clever instrumentality to achieve a specific end. Acts will generally be both instrumental in this narrower sense and expressive of the actor’s orientation, condition, and position. A further tracing back to their roots leads to plans and strategies, claims to identity, and values and knowledge. The immediate output of such an intent is an event—but an event which has these properties of act to the actor.

Moving in the other direction, the event which ensues can be transformed back into an act by interpretation: a diagnosis by the onlooker as to the actor’s intent but also an additional judgement of its efficacy and effect. It is thus read both as a symptom of the other and as a source of consequences. Considerable bodies of knowledge may be brought to bear by the other to achieve such an interpretation. Indeed, once the act is done, the actor may adopt a similar perspective and (re)interpret the act, revising the conception of what it really was/what really happened. And both actor and other may return over time to that question and construct novel insights into the act, in effect writing and rewriting history. The precipitate in the person of the interpretation of acts is experience and, synthetically, at a further remove, knowledge and values—which may in turn feed back on future plans and purposes as well as future interpretations of acts.

We should note that the interpretations and reinterpretations may be performed jointly, in interaction, conversation, and reminiscence with third parties. On such occasions, knowledge and cultural schemata may be transmitted from others, and further information, including estimates of reactions to the act and other consequences of it, are often brought to bear. These processes of discursive reflection will promote a convergence of understanding, knowledge, and values among those who engage in them and an enhanced focus on reality orientation in the actor.

Needless to say, the onlooker’s interpretation of an act may not coincide with the actor’s intent, nor will two onlookers necessarily agree in their interpretations. The event-as-act will always remain contestable and, indeed, malleable. Furthermore, the event intended and interpreted as an act will normally have a number of objective consequences in addition to, and perhaps at odds with, those intended and understood. Such consequences and entailments may in turn have important effects on the environment and on the opportunity situation of actors and others—its social consequences are in no way exhausted by a consideration of its interpretations. As noted, these further consequences can sometimes be grasped and made accessible through the reinterpretations of actors and others—we are all capable of being surprised by the turn of events and can reflect and learn from this. In other words, social action generates events and chains of consequences which are knowable and may become known: they are not only meaningful within a framework of culturally shaped intention and interpretation but create occasions when people may transcend their understanding and knowledge as well as reproduce it.

Both in conversation and in other modalities of interaction, act and response may follow each other in rapid succession, entailing a need for great swiftness in the interpretation of the acts of the other. It would seem self-evident that each step of such a chain of interaction will provide particularly useful information for the interpretation of subsequent steps, and thus there will tend to be a certain convergence of interpretations between the parties to such sequences also where their interests remain distinct and their strategies opposed. Finally, the embeddedness of all interaction in broader social networks bears re-emphasis: one might formulate the dictum that any social act involves minimally three parties— me, you, and the—both in its interpretation and in its objective consequences.

Such an account of social action seems to me to capture significant aspects of the life experience of most of us and to be consistent with contemporary testimony in fiction and writings in social science, if not with all of anthropology. But if such is the structure of incidents of social action, this cannot but have profound implications for the kind of systems which are formed in social life on aggregate levels and ultimately on the level of ‘society’. Particularly, I would emphasize the following:

1. Such an account does not link the social by definition to repetition, norms, and shared ideas as blueprints for acts and prerequisites for social action. On the contrary, it outlines interactional processes which may generate a degree of convergence, with pattern as an emergent property. I see system as an outcome, not as a pre-existing structure to which action must conform.
2. It captures a degree of disorder in that system in that it allows for lasting incongruities between actors, others, and third parties in their constructions of the meaning of events. It allows differently positioned persons to accumulate distinctive experiences and utilize divergent schemata of interpretation: to live together in differently constructed worlds.
3. It suggests a problematic connection between the objective consequences of events and the interpreted import of events. I allow the possibility of transcending pre-established understanding, but I do not assume an empirical-realist paradigm in people’s accumulation of knowledge from experience. Social consensus may indeed be the strongest factor in shaping knowledge and concepts.
4. It highlights the striking inconstancy of the import of past events which forms such an important counter-intuitive feature of contemporary views of history:² that acts remain eternally contestable, and their import can be rewritten.

If a multiplicity of actors were to engage repeatedly in interactions with these characteristics, what could be predicted about the resulting form? To simulate the kinds of social systems that might emerge one would need to develop rather careful theoretical deductions; but there can be little doubt that these determinants alone would predict at best a low degree of order, a perpetual flux both of the present and of people’s accounts of the past, overlapping soci...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III