Nigel Rapport

Diverse world-views in an English village

This is an account of the diversity of individual perception and the ambiguity of social interaction in an English village - Wanet. It examines the development and maintenance of social relations between three individuals: Doris, a farmer; Sid, a builder; and Nigel, the anthropologist and newcomer. Focusing on the multiplicity of world views which individuals use to make social life meaningful to themselves, it shows how these three communicate their meanings to others in daily conversation. It argues that social life is farcical, chaotic, multiple and contradictory and should not be represented by neat mechanical models or singular, authoritative, overarching systems.

An Outline for Cosmopolitan Study Reclaiming the Human through Introspection

The history of anthropology, according to George Stocking, represents an argument between Enlightenment and Romantic impulses: on the one hand the universalism of anthropos, on the other the diversitarianism of ethnos. In its structural and relativist emphases, the latter impulse has tended to predominate in social and cultural anthropology. A case can be made for the importance of emphasizing a continuing Enlightenment heritage in social‐scientific thought. Introspection provides a methodology for gaining access to universal human truths concerning individual human capacities and conditions. Through the psychically intensive study of the self one accedes to a psychically extensive appreciation of the other, of Everyone. One comes to know the psyche as a constant in human life.

The Ethics of Apology: A Set of Commentaries

■ On 13 February 2008, the Australian government apologized to the ‘stolen generations’: those children of Aboriginal descent who were removed from their parents (usually their Aboriginal mothers) to be raised in white foster-homes and institutions administered by government and Christian churches — a practice that lasted from before the First World War to the early 1970s. This apology was significant, in the words of Rudd, for the ‘healing’ of the Australian nation. Apologizing for past injustices has become a significant speech act in current times. Why does saying sorry seem to be ubiquitous at the moment? What are the instances of not saying sorry? What are the ethical implications of this era of remembrance and apology? This set of commentaries seeks to explore some of the ethical, philosophical, social and political dimensions of this Age of Apology. The authors discuss whether apology is a responsibility which cannot — and should not — be avoided; the ethical pitfalls of seeking an apology, or not uttering it; the global and local understandings of apology and forgiveness; and the processes of ownership and appropriation in saying sorry.

Anthropology through Levinas : knowing the uniqueness of ego and the mystery of otherness

An anthropological commonplace since Evans-Pritchard has been that ethnographic subjects will have their rationality circumscribed by the discursive opportunities made available by a “culture.” Hence, social science comes to terms with the “internal” nature of judgements (Winch). Ultimately, the relativist nature of both Winch’s and Evans-Pritchard’s conclusion has its source in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. For Wittgenstein, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Moreover, “language” in this connection extends to the “textual” nature of behavior per se. There exists a determining habituation of embodiment and dwelling as well as of reasoning, believing, and talking. This article explores the nature of a pretextual or nontextual sphere that exists beyond conventional—“cultural”—languages. Wittgensteinian assumptions are set against those of Max Stirner and Emmanuel Levinas. While in many ways disparate, the writings of Stirner on the ego and of Levinas on the “other” both insist that knowledge can be derived—knowledge, indeed, of a fundamental, even absolute, nature—by way of a transcending of a taken-for-granted symbolic, conceptual, textual, and doctrinal language-world. What is key is the attention one pays to corporeality: to the “flesh and mind” of the self (Stirner), to the “body and face” of the other (Levinas). The article is theoretical and epistemological in register. An ethnographic afterword points in the direction of how the argument might be grounded in representations of fieldwork encounters.

The liberal treatment of difference : an untimely meditation on culture and civilization

John Stuart Mill’s liberal vision included a notion of “civil advancement” whereby the free expression of a diversity of opinion would result not only in an initial collision of difference but also in an eventual consolidation as truth. The work of this article is to explore the ways and extents in which such liberalism can translate into a cosmopolitan anthropology. Is toleration of difference the appropriate anthropological ethic, or can one hypothesize a liberal “magnanimous” overcoming of difference? In a wide-ranging discussion, the voice of Mill is juxtaposed against those of C. P. Snow, Ernest Gellner, Stevie Smith, and Karl Popper. Much commentary would suggest that liberalism is passé. A political context dominated by renascent particularisms, militant religions, and resurgent ethnicities spells the collapse, it is told, of any Enlightenment project of liberal-humanist universalism. “Cultures are not options.” Notwithstanding, the argument is made here that as “opinion” grades into “knowledge,” so “culture” grades into “civilization” and local community (polis) into global society (cosmos). Difference may become a step along the way to a recognition of universal human truth.

Personhood, Anthropology of

The anthropology of personhood encompasses the definition and study of three conceptual terms: person, self, and individual. It explores the identity of the individual actor and the relationship between that identity and the symbolic forms and material and moral practices of various sociocultural milieus. Recognizing the individual in the role player , the anthropologist comes to portray sociocultural milieus as composed of and constituted by a diversity of individual consciousnesses: human actors making a diversity of meaningful worlds by way of a commonality of cultural forms. Recognizing that any human individual may exist within any sociocultural role, the anthropologist moves from particular environments of conventional symbolic exchange toward an appreciation of personhood as an issue of moral universality.

Debating irony and the ironic as a social phenomenon and a human capacity

What follows is a set of paired articles, followed by a statement by both authors where they debate their distinct positions. Both articles treat irony, but while Rapport looks to it as a possible ...

Being undisciplined : doing justice to the immensity of human experience

This monograph has been an appraisal of the anthropology of Britain as a project. In this final piece, the volume is reviewed and an argument is made along Kierkegaardian lines. Human life is an inward, personal adventure, of each in the face of the other: life is individual and possessed of infinite depth. Conducting social-scientific research (whether ‘anthropological’ or ‘sociological’) in a language – verbal, gestural and conventional – with which the researcher is ‘at home’ enables that individual and inward life, and its public and social dimensions, to be apprehended with a subtlety and sophistication far more difficult to acquire in ‘foreign’ settings. Anthropology ‘at home’ is ideally placed to differentiate between the cultural forms of life, the social structures of life, and how these are individually inhabited and personally experienced. To do justice to human life – descriptive, analytic – is to apprehend an immensity – a complexity and contrariety – beyond the delimitings of partial labels and categories, even beyond particular disciplines of study.

The Garden of Meaning (Behind the Fabrication of a “Culture”)

captivating political drama it is, evoking what is a very complex reality through the struggles of people in a small, even temporary community. Scholars of Thai studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, and cultural psychology will find much that is worth thinking about in this book, especially in the increasing attention paid to social inequalities and the competing social values that reinforce and resist them.

The Composition of Anthropology: How Anthropological Texts Are Written

ed some general properties of the entities under examination. Yet, because a concept cannot be stretched indefinitely, the process of mastering it is also the process of mastering where its limits lie. Some concepts (like some rules) will tolerate much flexibility and others will not—but that is precisely how we learn to live with concepts rather than just using them in some rarefied processes of organizing our experience. These issues are the swirling thoughts and emotions that went into my writing the above text and, in turn, generated new questions that are not likely to be resolved any time soon, if ever, but in relation to which I took some steps forward in my own thinking. TCOA.indb 20 10/12/2017 7:17:47 PM The life of concepts 21