âAre ghosts real?â I asked Tren. At that moment, the context of the question made sense in my mind, if not in his. It was a hot night. Close to the equator, Bangkok nights are almost always hot, and usually muggy. We were walking west along Silom Road, toward the river and away from what serves as the cityâs financial center during the day then transitions at dusk into a sprawl of night clubs, sex clubs, restaurants, and tourist shops. As we continued moving, the cityâs congested traffic and glaring neon illumination gradually gave way to quieter blocks of shophouses, stores on the first floors closed and shuttered for the night, the lights in the residential rooms above slowly switching off. Eventually, we came to the neighborhood where Trenâs grandparents had settled when they first came to Bangkok, when his father was a boy.1 This comparatively dimly-lit and deserted old street was the sort of place that frightened most of my friends here. For Tren, who kept hopping behind me so that I would protect him from the cockroaches skittering across the sidewalk, the fear was of these malaeng saab, and not, as it was for most of the Thais I knew, of ghosts.
Tren said he wasnât sure if ghosts exist. âTheyâre like love,â he explained, taking his eyes off the sidewalk for a moment. âIf youâve never experienced love, how do you know if itâs real?â
This was an unexpected turn. âIs love real?â I asked.
He told me a story heâd seen earlier on the news about a man who had killed himself so his son could use his life insurance to pay off his gambling debts. That was love you could be sure of, Tren said, setting the bar rather high.
Love, ghosts, death, and money: These themes float through Thai conversations all the time. But how do they relate? One of the tasks anthropologists set for themselves is to understand how people bring their visions of the world together. In recalling the experience, I canât help but wonder: What moved Trenâs thoughts from ghosts to love, then money, and back to death? Where did these connections, shaped together into a loose story, come from? How much was standardized by his society, and how much was drawn from Trenâs own idiosyncratic history? How much came to him at that moment, simply in response to the dayâs events, the drift of our conversation, or by walking near his familyâs old home? And how much did these sources all overlap?
If I understood this, it would help me understand my friendâbut it was important for other reasons as well. Exploring the way he connects love, death, and moneyâand karma, and cockroaches, and his family and everything elseâreveals how he puts together a vision of his world. Human beings are limited in what they can know, but they create visions of reality that are as large as their universesâalmost infinitely larger than the lives that create them. And the way Tren conceptualizes a reality that is larger than his life matters, because this lets us see what motivates him: It gives us a window into the sorts of questions he worries about, the limits of his knowledge, and its possibilities. It reveals the goals he has, the interests he pursues, the fights he will take on, and the ones heâll let pass. In other words, this vision of the world can also explain how he fits himself into his society. And this matters because the way he thinks and acts and speaksâhis unconscious habits and the well-thought-out decisions he makesâconstitutes his contribution to Thai society. If we look a bit wider, to the people who have taught him, and the people he influencesâpeople pursuing their own aimsâwe begin to see that Bangkok and Thailand are the products of millions of people following their own motivations moment to moment, creating the moving, changing systems that give rise to the next generation of worldviews. There is a line, then, that travels through the narratives individuals tell about their lives, connected to their visions of the world and their conceptions of self. This line travels through the cultural information that members of a society share and teach one another, and then back through to the stories they tell.
Knowing this, how can anthropologists talk about how people interpret their worlds? As Sapir pointed out, humans live in dynamic social contexts. They move from one context to the nextâone job site, one relationship, one conversationâand the understandings that emerge from those contexts change as well. But Sapirâs vision of a cultural reality made dynamic through communication is only a start. Often, the challenges individuals face donât come with a good guide for resolution and require a response that doesnât fit with cultural norms (Holland et al. 1998; Mattingly 2012). Tren could have defaulted to one of several not-so-original answers in his thinking about love. Even when predictable responses are available, drawn easily from a cultural context, people will often come up with theories that come and go, that satisfy for the moment but lack enduring value (Rorty 1989). The flux of ideas and interpretations (restrained more, perhaps, than many people realize, by social forces) is a consistent element of human life. This is one result of living in a dynamic social environment: Making sense of the world, and making sense of other peopleâs descriptions of it, is often a matter of heuristics more than of identifying pre-set patterns and rules.
When Tren set out his theory, he was wondering about the nature of love, but also about the nature of what he could know about love in other hearts. And to some extent, this reflected his notions about what it means to be human, as seen through his ideas about his human abilities to love and to know. The answer that Tren came up with at that moment is part of this dynamic system. It doesnât reflect some grand final answer about the nature of human life, but it does reflect something fundamentally human, an ongoing project that all of us undertake every day: Starting from his own perspective, he was attempting to put together, in a new and possibly better way, what he knew about this changeable world, and to work out how he fit into it.
We can think of this fragment of conversation about love and ghosts as the work of being humanâa tiny, transient piece of Trenâs project of making sense of himself in his world. And just as money and death are rearrangeable pieces of the cognitive networks that Tren used to think, feel, and act with, Tren himself was contributing to the fluid social networks that make up his community, his city, his nation, and the family of our species. How, then, can we make sense of all these moving parts?
The Problem and Its History: Talking About Different Lives in a Shared World
Even among members of close-knit societies that appear homogeneous, ideas about how the world works can vary greatly (e.g., Hollan 2000; Wallace 2009; Froese and Bader 2010). When he explored views of God in deep interviews with evangelical Christians in the United States, Peter Stromberg discovered that, among people for whom a relationship with God was very important, individualized conceptions differed radically, even among people who worshipped together (1993). And Schieffelin writes that, among his Kaluli subjects, all of whom ostensibly observed the same religion, the fact that there was no standardized form that allowed information about the spirit world to be passed from one person to the next meant that âthere [was] a great deal of variation in what people know about the invisible realm and many lacunae and inconsistencies in the content of this knowledgeâ (1985: 720). Schieffelin asserts that this lack of semantic order is interesting in part because of âthe difficulty it poses for conventional ways of talking about a âbelief systemââ (1985: 720). Heuristics play a larger role here than the Kaluli seems to realize. Anthropologists cannot depend upon the presence of shared, stable, underlying cultural conceptions to make sense of the societies they study.
Since Durkheimâs day, many of the approaches anthropologists have typically pursued show a marked tendency to focus on the forces that lead to conformity (Laidlaw 2002: 312). They have not gone so far as to deny the existence of difference and variation within a cultural context, but they have created the illusion of an overly stable foundation of cultural forces which bring people back to the norms when they stray. I will call these approaches sociocentric because they emphasize the power social forces have to create realities which individuals must assimilate. Sometimes the assumption of a more-or-less unassailable grounding is overtly stated in the theories anthropologists propose; at others, it is simply implied.2
Playful innovations like Trenâs give us reason to question the solidity of that foundation. In my life, at least, there are often moments when assumptions about the strength and breadth of what I take to be foundational cultural norms suddenly seem ungrounded. The evidence for this incompletely shared order in our social worlds can become visible when people become perplexed by a poem written by someone like themselves, or in the time spent with intelligent, thoughtful people who lay out unexpected views, had their perspectives challenged by a contemporary novelist or philosopher or friend, been surprised by the insight of a student, or who has ever discovered that their loved ones are not exactly the people they thought.
Anthropologists should not take the firmness of the foundation of shared cultural norms for granted. In this book, I will propose an approach that decenters the forces that lead to conformity, balancing them with the importance of individual experience, goals, empathic understanding, and practical problem-solving.
This leads to an anthropocentric approach to anthropologyâone that recognizes the power of social forces but also realizes the fact that their power is limited by several factors. First, cultural information is communicated from individual to individual. Like a great game of telephone, a societyâs understandings are apt to change as they are transmitted. In this approach (as in many other contemporary approaches), people always face one another when trying to figure something out rather than referring to a set of standardized norms. The ability to make sense of what other people think and do requires a sort of cognitive empathy. This, along with cooperative problem-solving abilities, is an essential skill for negotiating cultural life and worthy of study (Carlisle 2015). While social forces do tend to limit the changes that emerge from incomplete and flawed communication, evolution and variation are features of cultural transmission, and should not be treated as bugs in a Durkheimian world.
Second, personal circumstances often give rise to new, unexpected, and unpredictable experiences that fall outside of cultural norms. These can lead to idiosyncratic reconceptualizations of both the world and oneâs sense of self. As a result, ways of thinking, acting, and seeing the world are not just the product of individual assimilations to cultural norms, fitting new information into existing models. People often accommodate new information as well, reshaping their models to incorporate what they have learned in new and, at times, distinctly individual ways. The anthropocentric anthropology explored here examines the forces that lead to accommodationâchanging models to take new information into accountâas well as better-explored tendencies toward assimilation.
As Tren attempted to understand the world he lives in, how much was shaped by shared standards, and how much was filtered through the unique lens of his own individual experiences? The central questions in this book explore the balance between conformity and individual innovation, and the use of heuristics and empathy in creating and communicating understandings of the world. We can sum them up this way:
How do people negotiate their visions of what the world is, how it works, and how they fit into it?
If we live in a world where there are no final standards that people can refer to when they assemble those visionsâor if they are prone to play with them, as Tren was, or if they are confronted with contradictory interpretations, evidence that is incomplete or ambiguous (as Bourdieu [1977] suggests), or if, as Schieffelin argues, people only assume, mistakenly, that their pictures are complete and the same as other peopleâsâthen how is it possible for people to develop visions that are comprehensible to others?
As we ask this question about what goes on on the level of individuals, then, we must also ask about the ways people relate to one another:
How should we approach the question of social coherence without reifying a solid underlying stratum of shared understandings?
It is important to develop a model that finds an appropriate range between rigidity and openness. It must be open enough to recognize the differences among people, and the challenges to communication and cooperation that they pose. But it must also account for the ways that relatively weaker cultural norms maintain coherence so that these differences donât lead societies to fly apart, sinking human lives into mutual incomprehensibility at too large a scale. If anthropologists canât refer to a dependable set of shared cultural norms, then we must develop an approach that foregrounds the local, experiential, and relational. In other words, this model must be person-centered as it explores the impact of social forces.
For people like Tren, these issues come into focus when we look at how they negotiate their ways through their worlds. Most Thai Buddhists rely on two different sets of perspectives on reality and ways of finding meaning and value. One, embracing Buddhist values and philosophies, is taught at the temple. The other, built on the value of relationships and comfort, is learned largely in the home. This leads to another practical, ethnographic question:
How do Bangkokâs Buddhists reconcile the demands of Buddhism with the demands of family life?
A Good Place to Start: The Anthropology of Local, Experiential, Relational Worlds
Using the tools available to them in their complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory social worlds, how do people create, negotiate, and communicate their visions of what is and what should be?
Holland et al. (1998) have developed an approach that recognizes the power of social forces in shaping individual identities while also acknowledging the fact that forming an identityâmaking the connection between someoneâs vision of self and their environment, and making sense of that selfâs place in the environme...