Anthropology Through a Double Lens. Daniel Touro Linger
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Arena of Meaning
Meaning is as elusive a concept as we have in the social sciences. It can seem extrinsic to human beings, located in language and images; alternatively, it can seem intrinsic, occurring in bodies and minds. The quasitheoretical, often ill-defined terms anthropologists have employed to talk about meaning—“symbol,” “representation,” “discourse,” “culture,” “subjectivity,” and so on—are shot through with ambiguities about its location and nature. It is not only undergraduates who wonder exactly what anthropologists mean when they discuss meaning.
Any given account usually adopts a general perspective that can be characterized as either “representational” or “experiential.” The former, which sees meaning as located primarily in the public realm, typifies culturalist work in interpretive and discursive anthropology. Experiential approaches, which regard meanings as occurring in personal realms of minds and lives, more often characterize studies in psychological and phenomenological anthropology. Whichever direction they lean, most accounts deal to some degree, often fuzzily, with both representation and experience. But there is a less equivocal way to bring representation and experience into theoretical conversation.
Along with a number of other anthropologists, I think of meaning as occupying, and being continuously built in, an arena that holds both public representations (language, symbols, images, performances) and personal experience (perceptions, feelings, ideas, memories).18 Public representations are, as I have indicated, best regarded as proposals, or skeletal formulations, of meaning. Such proposals, disseminated in more or less forceful terms, are accepted, rejected, transformed, tailored, and fleshed out in individual life-worlds, whereupon they may be again concretized and recirculated, often in new representational forms and combinations, back to the public realm. I restrict the term subjectivity to the realm of the personal, as a property of experiencing human beings.
Linkage between public and personal spheres has been a recurrent concern of the field known formerly known as “culture and personality” and today more commonly termed “psychological anthropology.” Psychological anthropology counts among its practitioners and ancestors many talented and inventive theorists. Some have viewed culture as a convenient fiction, a useful sociological abstraction not to be confounded with the experiential worlds of actual people (Sapir); or as a segment of a great arc of human possibilities (Ruth Benedict); or as a collective resource for the resolution of psychological conflicts (Melford Spiro, Gananath Obeyesekere); or as a bird’s-eye distribution of personal subjectivities (Anthony Wallace, Theodore Schwartz); or as a fund of shared schemas, or intersubjective units (Roy D’Andrade, Dorothy Holland, Naomi Quinn, Claudia Strauss).19 All these authors have grappled with the perplexities of double vision, attempting to move toward a unified theory of meaning.
In theoretically separating representation and subjectivity we are led to pose important questions about learning and belief. How do representations get made, and how do they circulate? What makes them efficacious—credible or compelling—to those who encounter them? Why are some ignored, dismissed, or radically reinterpreted? How do new representations arise? Such questions have a dual aspect. On the one hand, they address personal motivation, the ways ideas hook into people’s lives. Psychology and biography are relevant to such inquiries. On the other hand, they address public issues of power and politics.
Bridging Theory
Social anthropologists in the British tradition—especially Victor Turner, Max Gluckman, Fredrik Barth, and F. G. Bailey—have sought to link sequences of events with changes in patterned social relations.20 At first glance, the project seems far removed from that of psychological anthropology, but abstractly, the two enterprises share a family resemblance. Insofar as both are concerned with the tie between particular cases (events and persons) and macroscopic phenomena (social structure and culture), both demand bridging theory, a leap in analytical perception. Bridging theory connects our singular destinies to public structures and processes.
I owe much to the psychological and social anthropologists cited above, who regard the human landscape from different angles but with similar theoretical intent. Like them, I am drawn to bridging theory. But I am drawn to it, increasingly, from a certain perspective. I think singularities—specific persons and their specific actions—interest me more than public contexts or general mechanisms. This focus seems more a matter of inclination than a theoretical imperative.
That I cannot convincingly find the big causes of events or the ultimate motivations of the actors is intriguing. It has led me to think that the most credible bridging theory is not determinate theory, leading all the way, in inevitable causal procession, from macro-patterns to persons and events, but accommodating theory that permits the emergence of variability, diversity, and the unprecedented. Perhaps one could say we need more strict thinking about loose theory. For the human world constantly astounds us. “Today will be like yesterday” is usually an excellent forecast—except when an epiphany turns Eduardo Mori’s identity upside down (“The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori”). In other words, bridging theory must make room for the unexpected, if it is to accommodate— not necessarily explain—the profusion and uncertainty of the real world.
Singular Lives and Reflective Consciousness
Profusion and uncertainty have come to occupy an ever larger place in my thinking. That human lives are singularities—that each is unique, a finite flow of experience in time—is self-evident, but of great significance for studies of meaning. I find it useful to think of that unique flow of experience as the product of continual learning, though “learning”—a bridging process—may be too weak, mechanistic, and passive a term for what I take to be, often, an active meaning-making practice. New events trigger new acts of meaning-making, which always occur with reference to a specific chain of past learning and thus take on eccentric colorations. Individual appropriations of meaning are always, for biographical reasons, utterly distinctive in important respects.21
But this is not the end of the story, for there are also discontinuities in learning that yield wholly unexpected outcomes going beyond straightforward personalizations of meaning. Here we enter the realm of imagination. Words like “imagination” or “creativity” suggest rare inspiration or vision, but I am referring to a rather commonplace, if often overlooked and undervalued, quality of human thinking. A tentative approach to such discontinuities, formulated most straightforwardly in my book No One Home (2001b), is to posit, as part of the person-system (or “mind”), an important human faculty of reflective consciousness.
Formally, the move parallels Freud’s adopting, after the Great War, the postulate of a death instinct, imposed upon him, the reader may recall, by his “experience of life and of history.” Reflective consciousness acquired a name only in my recent writings, but the concept has colored my work for a long time. It is the human propensity to turn invisible patches of indefinite experience and common sense, including one’s sense of self, into objects of reflection and refashioning. Common sense, a term prominent in Gramsci’s work (1971) and also in interpretive anthropology (Geertz 1983), is transparent knowledge—what one knows without knowing that one knows it. Reflective consciousness is the catalyst that sediments common sense, rendering it visible and therefore tractable. I wish to emphasize not merely the existence of this cognitive faculty, which seems obvious, but its centrality to human lives and its significance for human theory.
Even poststructuralists find it difficult to escape some gesture, however hesitant and ambivalent, toward a version of reflective consciousness. Consider the following excerpt from Joan Scott’s provocative, if puzzling, essay on what she sees as the historical construction of “experience”:
Subjects are constituted discursively, but there are conflicts among discursive systems, contradictions within any of them, multiple meanings possible for the concepts they deploy. And subjects have agency. They are not unified, autonomous individuals exercising free will, but rather subjects whose agency is created through situations and statuses conferred on them. . . . These conditions [of existence] enable choices, though they are not unlimited. Subjects are constituted discursively, experience is a linguistic event (it doesn’t happen outside established meanings), but neither is it confined to a fixed order of meaning.