Central Debates within Anthropology 2008 Theme 5: Practice, culture and agency Culture, knowledge and social action Thursday 30 October

Clifford Geertz ( ): the ’interpretative turn’  ‘culture’ must be seen as the ‘webs of meaning’ within which people live; meaning is encoded in symbolic forms (language, artefacts, etiquette, rituals, calendars, and so on), which must be understood through acts of interpretation

Geertz and culture  two interlocked dimensions of Geertz’s ‘interpretative turn: - ontological (what culture is): a system of meanings embodied in symbols - epistemological (how we can know it): interpretation of the publicly available forms in which culture is encoded SO: The fundamental assumption that people are always trying to make sense of their lives, always weaving fabrics of meaning, however fragile and fragmentary, still holds.

Geertz and culture: subjectivity  An important aspect of Geertzian cultural analysis is its focus on the cultural construction of subjectivity (following Max Weber)  Geertz (cited in Ortner (2006:118) on the Balinese cock fight: ‘Yet, because.. that subjectivity does not properly exist until it is thus organized, art forms generate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display’.  Symbolic systems are not additive to human existence but constitutive of it. This includes human subjectivity.

Sherry Ortner on Sherpas and Sahibs (1999): developing agency  Geertz provides a model for understanding the cultural construction of agency in particular times and places, point of departure for theorising agency in a non-reductive way. - assumes an ‘actor’ whose subjectivity is both the source and the product of cultural constructions - assumes that ‘the actor’s point of view’ is central to the interpretative practice of ‘thick description -it has to be complemented with a focus on the power dimension of agency (Foucault, a.o.)

Sherry Ortner on Sherpas and Sahibs (1999): developing agency The concept of agency is part of the both the power problematic and the meaning problematic:  a. power: agency is that which is made or denied, expanded or contracted, in the exercise of power  b. meaning: agency represents the pressures of desires and understandings and intentions on cultural constructions

Sherry Ortner on agency (Anthropology and Social Theory, 2006) Sherry Ortner (2006: 139): the notion of agency can be said to have two fields of meaning or two ‘faces’  a. agency is about intentionality and the pursuit of (culturally defined) projects  b. agency is about power, about acting within relations of social inequality, asymmetry, and force.

Practice Theory  Practice theory: took up challenge to overcome the opposition between theories of ‘constraint’ (functionalism, symbolic anthropology, political economy, French structuralism) and theories of human social action (symbolic interactionism, transactionalism)  3 central works in the late 1970s, early 1980s: Pierre Bourdieu: Outline of a Theory of Practice (1978); Anthony Giddens: Central problems in social theory: action, structure and contradiction in social analysis (1979); Marshall Sahlins: Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981)

Practice Theory  Dialectical rather than oppositional relationship between the structural constraints of society and culture on the one hand and the ‘practices’ of social actors on the other: ‘objectivist’ and ’subjectivist’ perspectives are not seen as opposed ways of doing social science but rather as ‘moments’ in understanding the dialectics of social life.  The seeming contradiction: ‘history makes people, but people make history’ is perhaps the profoundest truth of social life’ (Ortner 2006:2)

Three overarching paradigms 1 Positivism(Durkheim, Malinowski, a.o)  social facts as things  methodological unity of sciences (explanation)  mechanical and organic metaphors  observation as method  scientific community as referent  objective truth as central criterion of validity

Three overarching paradigms 2 Interpretative paradigm (Geertz, Turner, a.o)  social facts as constructions  interpretation (humanities) versus explanation (sciences)  culture as text  hermeneutic method  community studied as referent  interpretative/communicative success

Three overarching paradigms 3 Practice paradigm (Bourdieu, Sahlins, Barth, Marcus, a.o)  social facts as actions  dialectic of explanation and interpretation  economic and performative metaphors  participation and engagement  complicity, dialogue and social action  knowledge as social action

Fredrik Barth on human action  Fredrik Barth (b. 1928) speaks at the holism conference Sandbjerg, Denmark, July 2008  (photo Maria Bræmer)

Barth (2002): focus on knowledge instead of culture  Knowledge: what a person employs to interpret and act on the world; this includes feelings (attitudes) as well as information, embodied skills as well as verbal taxonomies and concepts: all the ways of understanding that we use to make up our experienced, grasped reality.  Knowledge provides people with materials for reflection and premises for action, whereas culture too readily comes to embrace also those reflections and those actions.

Fredrik Barth 2  Knowledge is distributed in a population, while culture makes us think in terms of diffuse sharing  Differences in knowledge provide much of the momentum for our social interaction, from gossip to the division of labour.  Knowledge is not universal but is constructed in traditions

Fredrik Barth (2002) A tradition of knowledge has three interconnected ‘faces’  a corpus of substantive assertions and ideas about aspects of the world  a range of media of representation, through which it is instantiated and communicated (words, concrete symbols, gestures, actions)  social organization: it is distributed, communicated, employed, and transmitted within a series of instituted social relations.

Barth on knowledge and agency  The knowledge perspective forces the researcher to give close attention to the knowers and the acts of the knower – the people who hold, learn, produce, and apply knowledge in their various activities and lives. In the close analysis of action we see the mutual determination between the three ‘faces’ of knowledge.

Fredrik Barth: values and concerns  Values: explicit cultural constructs, expressed in words or symbols  Concerns: Implicit cultural constructs that guide people’s behaviour but that are not explicitly formulated as values; they are a precipitate of the experience of living as member of a community.

Central concepts in Barth’s theory of culture and human action  Implicit ‘concerns’ versus explicit ‘values’  traditions of knowledge are characterized by Body of ideas, with distinctive source and historyBody of ideas, with distinctive source and history Social organization, in particular interested actorsSocial organization, in particular interested actors Media of representationMedia of representation Criteria of validityCriteria of validity

Cultural premises of human action (adapted from Barth 1993: 159)

Further reading  Ortner, S Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26:  Ortner, S Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham & London: Duke University Press.  Fredrik Barth 1993a. Balinese Worlds. Chicago & London. The University of Chicago Press.  Fredrik Barth 1993b. Are values real? The enigma of naturalism in the anthropological imputation of values. In: Michael Hechter et al. (eds.) The origin of values, New York: Aldine de Gruyter.