The Truth Is Alive

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`The truth is alive' : Kierkegaard's anthropology of dualism, subjectivity and somatic knowledge
Nigel Rapport Anthropological Theory 2002 2: 165 DOI: 10.1177/1469962002002002629 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ant.sagepub.com/content/2/2/165
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Anthropological Theory
Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 2(2): 165183 [1463-4996(200206)2:2;165183;023629]
The truth is alive

Kierkegaards anthropology of dualism, subjectivity and somatic knowledge
Nigel Rapport University of St Andrews, Scotland
Abstract Kierkegaard argued that the scientic method was inappropriate for gaining an understanding of human experience; the natural science of the physical world and the social philosophy of the human condition must, he felt, be clearly differentiated if one hoped to take account of the richness, the inwardness and the individuality of human experience. This article takes Kierkegaards stance against a certain kind of scientism as the starting point for a discussion of the nature of scientic knowledge and an elaboration on the place of the individual agent in the social-scientic accounting of that agents behaviour. Aspects of Kierkegaards argument are rst introduced, followed by the pointing up of some of its more contemporary anthropological resonances. Criticisms of a Kierkegaardian position are next mooted, such as might be made from the scientic standpoints of Ernest Gellner and Karl Popper. From this triangulation the article offers some conclusions on the kind of truth sufcient for a personal anthropology of experience. Key Words agency experience Gellner individuality interiority Kierkegaard method Popper science subjectivity
INTRODUCTION
The privileged position which the agent enjoys in respect of the explanation of his actions is not such that the agent can explain his action better than anyone else. . . . [O]thers may recognise what I am doing, t an apter description to it than I can. It remains true that the agents honest avowals have nal authority. Alasdair MacIntyre (1962: 589) I do not know how MacIntyre would reconcile the beginning and the end of the above quotation: what weight he can give to the agents nal authority to have his honest avowals deemed true, if at the same time it is true that others can explain his actions better than he can. Nevertheless, MacIntyres paradoxical claim usefully sets the scene
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 2(2)
for this article: a deliberation on the place of the individual agent in the social-scientic accounting of that agents behaviour. More broadly the article is a discussion of the nature of scientic knowledge; and the place I properly begin is with the views of Soren Kierkegaard (18131855). Kierkegaard argued that the scientic method was inappropriate for gaining an understanding of human experience; for a number of reasons he felt that the natural science of the physical world and the social philosophy of the human condition could and must be clearly differentiated. The wider context for Kierkegaards making of his argument was the need to privilege the miracle of the leap of faith whereby an individual found (the Christian) God. Unlike predecessors who had sought both skeptically to disparage religion for its unworldliness such as Hume and enthusiastically to embrace religion for its progressive worldliness and objectivity, its coming more and more to reect the fundamental nature of reality such as Hegel Kierkegaard sought to celebrate (the Christian) religion as encompassing a truth which lay beyond either rationality or history. Whilst I do not have sympathy for Kierkegaards religious privileging, I do nd the Kierkegaardian stance against a certain kind of scientism provocative, and apposite for adumbrating an anthropological method which takes into account the richness, the inwardness and the individuality of human experience. The course of the article, then, is for me rst to introduce aspects of Kierkegaards argument; also to point up some of its more contemporary resonances. This is followed by criticisms of a Kierkegaardian position such as might be made from the more scientic points of view of Ernest Gellner (19251995) and Karl Popper (19021994). From this triangulation I mean to accede to a more general overview of a sufcient, personal or liberal anthropology of experience (see Rapport, 1997a). I concur with Fernandez (1992: 135) that, while it may not be possible to know what another persons experiences are, it can be an anthropological aspiration to know what they are like.
QUESTIONS OF A PERSONAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Kierkegaard is especially apposite for this project because of his insistence on a form of metaphysical dualism. And while not necessarily agreeing with the terms in which Kierkegaard stated this as the absolute distinction between knowledge and faith any more than one might want to return to the Cartesian version (mind or spirit versus matter) which had preceded it, one can appreciate the proto-Existentialist direction in which Kierkegaards dualism led him. According to a dualistic argument, physical facts about the objective, external world and its properties can be differentiated from facts about how things appear from a particular mental point of view. The latter facts treat qualia: subjective, conscious experiences; desires, sensations, feelings, emotions and thoughts; what something is like for a certain individual. What is distinctive about qualia is that they must be described in the rst person. When, as with physical things, qualia are described in the third person, their nature is radically transformed and there is no way to be certain that the transformation has not altered their identity. Kierkegaard insisted that subjective consciousness be treated as a category of its own; it was something inexplicable and paradoxical. The substance dualism of regarding body and mind or spirit or soul as different kinds of entity came in for much criticism in the 20th century. The ghost in the
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RAPPORT The truth is alive
machine, in Gilbert Ryles pejorative depiction (1973: 17ff ), was disparaged by behaviouralists and structuralists, by deconstructionists and all manner of materialists (from Marxists to positivists). Nonetheless, despite the disparagement, there remains the problem of accounting for consciousness and its subjective qualia in a purely physical model of the world a question as current in neuroscience as in social science (see Cohen and Rapport, 1995). The vauntings of cognitive science and post-structuralism aside, there is little convincing modelling of how our seemingly rich mental life is to be reduced either to physics or to discourse; nor how notions of personal identity and rational agency are to be negated. What one wants to do, perhaps, is to replace notions of substance dualism with one of property dualism, as Kripke has put it (1980). One wants to say that body and mind refer to two kinds of property or bodily being, one mental and one physical (equivalent to the difference between oxygen and hydrogen atoms and water), whose relationship is still scientically unclear. And one wants to say that the real world is only ever an object in relation to its user, its construer; the relationship is without essence, and is not transparent to the outside. The task of a personal or liberal anthropology is to nd ways to retrieve this individual relationship in as approximate a way as possible: not to reduce or to abstract, to generalize or to collectivize, to typify or to systematize. For what is distinctive about human action is its consciousness, its reexivity, and its individuality. It may be impossible to know for sure what an individual agents own interpretation of his situation is, just as certain knowledge of physical reality is only ever, at best, an approximation. But we can hope to judge a worse approximation from a better one, and perhaps to know when we are wrong. Such judgements are vital to social science, I would contend, because it is interpretations of their psycho-somatic experiences which individuals can be said to project out into the world via cultural codes and social practices. Our experience is . . . anchored in our body with its endless internal motilities, as Fernandez has put it (1977: 478), and the codication of experience in symbolic forms (codes and practices) represents a kind of hypothesis which individuals bring to bear in an effort to gure out what their lives are and are like. Exchanging symbolic forms, individuals seek to make more concrete, graspable and resolvable what is incomprehensible or inchoate in their internal understandings of themselves and their environments, and their relations with them. The argument of this article is that the questions which Kierkegaard posed himself concerning the generality, rationalizability and truth of the worlds of individual, conscious experience resonate clearly with the personal-anthropological project. Appreciating his insights can point the way towards a better anthropological approximation of the construction and experience of social reality. More broadly, it is mooted, an identication of the ways in which Kierkegaardian claims are championed or challenged by more traditional scientic and social-scientic postulates, such as might be proffered by Popper or Gellner, elucidates a number of key areas of general anthropological concern. For instance, in regard to world-making, Kierkegaard asserts that the world is only ever an object in relation to its dweller, its user; the relationship is one of construction, and remains opaque from the outside. But, Gellner retorts, construction of the world is a collective and collaborative venture which takes place in terms of languages, concepts,
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norms, institutions, social structures, complexes of mores and climates of opinion which amount to historical working wholes: cultures. It is these which furnish the experience, wants, beliefs and knowledges of various individuals, and, more importantly, what they take for granted. Indeed, it is because they take so much for granted that individuals experience of the world can be wrong: a cultural fallacy, set against essential scientic truth. And yet, Popper is mindful, there is more than one kind of real world; physics, subjectivity and objectivity each have their own kind of ramifying reality. It is also true that our individual consciousness possesses qualities of both rationality and inspiration which can give rise to new and unique models of the world, of problems within it and environmental relations to it. In regard to the conventionality of experience, Kierkegaard continues, brute existence must be described as something with innite depth that cannot be reduced to or assimilated by the purely surface and historical phenomena of customary systems of ideas or shared norms: only living is like living. How, for instance, is one to begin translating suffering into thought, ideation or language such as it might be accessed by another? And yet, Popper responds, even though the meaning of words and other symbols can never be certain, they can most of the time be sufciently meaningful to do the work for which they are intended. There is never absolute or complete knowledge in human life, whether it is a matter of knowing reality or knowing one another, only possibly a knowledge of when we are wrong; nevertheless, an evolution and advance of human knowledge concerning existence does take place. From his perspective, Gellner insists that the seeming depths of human existence can be abstracted to the social facts which serve as the conditions, initial or nal, of that existence. These social facts, moreover, give rise to statistical regularities at the level of groups and allow us to make sociological generalizations about classes of individuals, their behaviours, even their sufferings (their suicides, for instance). In regard to the nature of truth, Kierkegaard denes human existence as always and only subjective, its truth a matter of authentication by moving, individual selves, and beyond evidence and argument. But, Popper claims, the truth that we can attain through criticism and experiment can take us beyond subjectivism even as it pertains still to matters of individual human existence, to inwardness, revelation and transcendence. For Gellner, meanwhile, what is true for most of us, most of the time, is precisely what we draw from the common stock of concept, symbol and class in the social milieu in which we are born and live. In regard to the rationalization of experience, lastly, Kierkegaard argues that the human being who exists prior to scientic systems as do all cannot be turned into an object within such systems. It is an error to seek to transmute living issues into generalized curios and to treat states of affairs entailing personal choice as if they were topics of common, rational insight. For to remove matters from the world of concrete realization in this way is to transform their nature. But this, to Gellner, is pure anthropomorphism. Traditions, institutionalizations and typications of behaviour do exist in social milieus and it is appropriate for sciences of society to set out to describe these. Forms of materiality exist prior to (individual) human being and it is precisely our systemic apprehension of these which enables us to objectify both the biophysical and the sociocultural nature of existence, and to intercede so successfully (certainly with regard to the former). For Popper, however, it is not so much the priority of human
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being that is the crucial issue the material body and brain might indeed come to be piloted by the later-emerging non-material mind, for instance but human complexity. Inasmuch as an experimental and explanatory apparatus must possess a higher degree of complexity than its object, it could be true to say that the manifold complexities of human existence might ever be matters of conjecture and conviction rather than proof. All our theories and models of the world are, thus, imagined ctions which can never be absolutely proven only disproven. And yet, it is not so much theoretical systems which Popper would deem scientic as their critique and transcendence; and the subjectivity and reexivity of individual knowledges is precisely that which is transcended when a tradition of science gives rise to civilization, to libraries and databases. In ensuing sections of the article, the respective positions of Kierkegaard, Gellner and Popper are treated in turn. The threads of their interlocution, their meetings and divergences, are drawn out and contextualized, before being woven together into a methodological proposal concerning a more liberal possible accounting of the experience of social life. The treatment is offered, in part, as instantiation of the wider thesis that the temporary ction (Leach, 1989: 137) of conceptualizing social reality primarily in terms of cultural difference may no longer be optimal, and a personal anthropology of the individual body and its engagements, perceptual and other, with the environing world be more persuasive (Wilmsen, 1999; Rapport, forthcoming).
KIERKEGAARD, AND TRUTH AS SUBJECTIVISM
According to Plato, the real world was an intelligible system of essences or forms. What was essential to individual things (such as human beings) and what was transcendent or divine in them was the way in which they manifested an ideal form in their habitual actions and the way their lives functioned. (Beyond this, individual lives were paltry affairs, trivial, non-ideal and defective.) For Hegel, Christianity represented the best way by which human beings could approach and appreciate the abstract, Platonic system of universal forms of which the world consisted. Soren Kierkegaards philosophizing was, in particular, a reaction against the Hegelian version of a Platonic system. Hegel (1977 [1807]) sought to show how Christian morality was a repository of objective truth and, hence, Christian faith a rational response. All social norms, according to Hegel, were at once historical relativities and expressions of an unfolding Absolute. Religion, par excellence, was a mode of consciousness which had progressed, over time, to the point where, as Christianity, it could be seen to reect certain fundamental aspects of the nature of reality. For one thing, it shows up the falsity of the commonsensical view that the world and others are not external to the self (which then gives rise to the standard philosophical problem concerning what and how anything can be known). In fact, world and self all partake of the same basic structures, all meet through Christ in God: all are part of an all-encompassing, spiritual, cosmic process, or Geist. A developing (Christian) human consciousness would show how, willy-nilly, an apparently external and unconscious natural-social realm was, really, already in us individual human beings, and we in it. Kierkegaard was antipathetic to the foregoing view on three accounts: its abstraction, its systemicism and its impersonalism. Under the inuence of Hegel, Kierkegaard asserted, his contemporaries were preoccupied by illusions of objectivity which had the effect of smothering the vital core of human experience subjectivity beneath
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historicizing commentary, pseudo-scientic categorization and abstract theory. In point of fact, existence was a narrow, inward, personal adventure: each person by himself in the face of others and of God. This brute existence had innite depth, moreover; it could not be reduced to or even assimilated by the purely surface and historical phenomena of conventional systems of ideas or shared norms. How, for instance, was suffering to be translated into thought, ideation or language such as it could be accessed by another? Only living was like living, and only living could cause a change to lived experience; inasmuch as thought, ideation or language were unable to transform experience, so the latter was distinct from them and could not be reduced to them. It was a separate reality. Or again, how was spontaneous feeling to be made sense of in terms of a systematic view of consciousness? Causal regulation as a notion describing either the contents of consciousness or the relation of the latter to an unfolding universe extraneous to it failed to do justice to the vital inconsistencies and creativity of an existence which deed the limitations of Platonic essences or teleological sequences. To do justice to experience was to emphasize its solitariness and its uniqueness; each individual acceded to his own system of true values, and only indirectly did one communicate with or inuence another. The major failing of systemicism (such as Hegelianism) was that it treated states of affairs as abstract theoretical possibilities, and so removed them from the world of concrete realization where they might happen and transformed their nature. It regarded matters entailing personal choice as if they were topics of common, rational insight; it thus transmuted living issues into generalized curios. To questions of personal fullment, there could be no properly scientic approach; one could attain to no impersonal, transcendent viewpoint on matters of ongoing, individual choice. Live issues could only be faced in their appropriately living form. It was not that the kinds of question raised by system-philosophy did not have relevance but that they did so only when seen from the point of view and the life-narrative of the existing individual. In practice, this meant a return to the world of inner experience, and gaining knowledge through reecting on what the individual did, had done and might do. In short, Kierkegaard sought to afrm the integrity of the individual and a personal sense of self-identity in the face of impersonalizing trends. Pure and passionate, unique subjectivity possessed an intransigence in the face of an objectivizing, universalizing or absolutizing mediation of reality which must be recognized. The subjectivity of experience had an all-encompassing breadth: it was behind and within all human things, including abstract systems such as logic or physics. Existence preceded all and could be reduced to nothing; hence, the existing individual and his or her subjectivity must remain the touchstone of any human accounting. In positing existence over and against abstraction, of individual consciousness over and against systematization, Kierkegaard also proposed a form of methodological dualism. Two possible stances were construable with regard to human perception, he argued: the disengaged and contemplative, objectifying and objectivizing (what Kant called pure reason), and the engaged and participatory and agential (Kants practical reason). The former impersonalism was ne for mathematics and science (for stars, ora and fauna), even for history, Kierkegaard argued, but it was out of place where the individual was a particular centre of action, choice and self-consciousness. And the difference was absolute: only the qualitative could treat human existence. Far from aping the perceived objectivities of natural science, then, social science ought to resist the
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pressure to transmute knowledge of experience into abstract generalizations, and individuality into typication. If it was to approach the truth about human existence, social science must eschew notions of category and treat live issues in their appropriately living form. Kierkegaard based his notion of methodological dualism on two main insights, one concerning human ignorance and one knowledge. The limits of human reasoning were such that human beings could never take the place of God and his total vantage-point and knowledge; only God could formulate an existential system of reality. For all human judgement was made from a partial, subjective and limited standpoint. Furthermore, life was movement, and human beings could accede to no Archimedean resting-place from which to view it askance. Put differently, if life was lived forwards then it could only be understood backwards the upshot of this being that life could never be properly understood in time, because there was no resting place. The human being who existed prior to scientic systems (as all did), in short, could not be turned into their object.1 If this was the nature of human ignorance, then Kierkegaard also had things to say about the particular nature of human knowledge. To be a person, he considered, was to exist in the mode of becoming; the human situation was a constant striving. Moreover, what a person became was the product of his will, and even if he sought to conceal this from himself something for which he was responsible (Kierkegaard, 1959). At the heart of every individual life lay a tension, a conict and sense of unrest, regarding future possibilities. Such was the freedom inherent in his becoming that the individual could choose to act unconstrained by reason, by logic, by objectivity, by external authority or constraint; none of these needed to impinge on either an individuals action or his judgement. Such was his freedom and the possibilities of his will that the individual could incur vertigo: I could throw myself into the precipice, he said to himself. As responsible and self-determining, Homo sapiens distinguished himself from the rest of nature; he also differentiated himself from the science of impersonal, external systems. For what was true about human beings depended on the place of a state of affairs in the forward movement of an individuals life; the truth, its apprehension and its representation could not be separated from individual being and could not be made abstract. Truth did not derive from an external system but was intrinsic, something encountered through individuals own efforts and made part of their own nature. Truth, in other words, was subjective and subjectivity [was] the truth (Kierkegaard, 1941: 118). Finally, human truth, Kierkegaard felt, the truth of the individual human situation, possessed a moral quality. To submit to majority opinion, to what was merely conventional, was an act of cowardice, and a consequence of a lack of respect for ones own integrity. Similarly, positing abstract entities such as humanity or the public was a means merely of eschewing and absolving individual responsibility for what was done, thought or said. At all costs one ought to resist the comforting temptation of according abstractions a separate reality. For bloodless universals, bland generalizations and deceptive collectivities soon substituted for reality and so obscured the truth. To be rid of illusory and objective notions one should dare to say I in ones cogitations on the truth, and eschew ventriloquism. It was morally incumbent on one to draw forth notions of the individual and the subjective that which, as we have heard, the systemicists had sought to sacrice. This meant, in effect, two things. First, one must know oneself before knowing
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anything else (Kierkegaard, 1958: 46); the self was a relation which related itself to itself and was of more fundamental signicance (to itself ) than anything outside itself. Second, one had to be accountable to oneself for ones outlook and ones life, and thus become an entire man (Kierkegaard, 1941: 309). These things were both to be effected through a project of inwardness; this did not mean introspective observation or reection from a purportedly detached vantage-point (for there was none) but rather selfcommitment: a sincere identifying of oneself with ones own resolutions, with the true thoughts which the forward movement of ones life had given rise to, and a singleness of purpose in furthering them.
KIERKEGAARDIAN RESONANCES
Before moving on to such criticisms of Kierkegaard as might be made from those who defend a more conventionally scientic account of the human condition, let me point to some signicant resonances of Kierkegaardian assumptions in contemporary socialscientic scholarship. The rst concerns a brand of interpretive social inquiry of growing currency: existential or phenomenological anthropology (Douglas and Johnson, 1977; Kotarba and Fontana, 1984; Jackson, 1996). The tenets on which this approach rests often seem direct Kierkegaard:
Knowledge
Three different types of knowing can be identied: introspection, self-observation and systematic observation. The latter two, however, presuppose the rst. Any study of the world ultimately depends upon the minds knowing itself (Douglas, 1977a).
Experience
Experience is something in and of itself; it is the truly empirical, it is being-in-itself. Meaning is being-once-removed (Lyman, 1984). Individual experience must be the beginning and end of all abstractions about community, constraint and power (Douglas, 1977a).
Body
The self is an incarnate self: of reason, thought, emotion, anxiety, biological urges and cultural traits. The self cannot transcend its physical vehicle whose sensations give it its stimulations to act (Fontana, 1984). The body is the self s means to fullment (or destruction); the self becomes as feelings and emotions constantly change (Kotarba, 1984). Feeling is the beginning, the foundation, the brute being (Merleau-Ponty) of human existence (Douglas, 1977a).
Self
Here is an appreciation of the self not as a dependent variable but as an independent phenomenon which accepts that no closed, predictive, determinate picture of how the self appears and assembles itself in society is ever possible. Each self may have one body, but within this, the self evolves, develops, grows organically; the self is always more than its appearance, its social roles, and against a background of seeming fully formed always becomes (Lyman, 1984). The self becomes, changing in relation to its changing perceptions of the world. The self is also situational, deriving from current contexts its
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grounding and sense of belonging. And the self is reexive, and always aware of itself (Fontana, 1984).
World
To comprehend the ordering and patterning of the world is to appreciate that utter diversity and complexity whereby the true values of time and space depend on context and perspective (Fontana, 1984).
Method
The fundamental method of studying human existence, or experience-in-the-world, is direct personal experience, of ourselves and others (Douglas, 1977a). Existential sociology begins with the man of esh and bone, the concrete individual, in concrete social situations as observed and experienced by ourselves (Douglas, 1977b). Further resonances exist between the principles of skepticism, uncertainty or indeterminacy regarding objective scientic knowledge which Kierkegaard voiced and the Writing Culture debate in which anthropology has been engaged at least since the mid1980s (Marcus and Clifford, 1986). This too has expounded upon the situated character of (anthropological) observation, how what is observed exists in constant process, and how the ways and means by which a linear, static, and singular account is made out (and made up) reects the interests, the brute experience and the will-to-power of one or more authorial individuals-in-the-world as distinct from others (Rapport, 1994).
GELLNER, AND TRUTH AS MATERIALISM
Ernest Gellners critique of the foregoing argument entails reiterating the objectivity of scientic explanation. Gellner (1973a) begins by stating that the notion of anthropomorphism has been discredited by natural science; there is no longer a call for scientic results to be compatible with humanitys self-image or for them to underwrite its purposes. Social science, however, remains stubbornly human-centred and anthropomorphic writings abound. It is as though humanity had privileged access to understanding social life and human institutions, or these necessarily reected its interests, values and aspirations. But this is nothing but another attempt to escape from nature as muddleheaded as Descartess transcendent thinking-substance (res cogitans), or Kants cognizing agent who is able to achieve freedom, responsibility and rational thought. This is Gellner at his most Durkheimian. Society in social science can be made the equivalent to Nature in natural science, he espouses, an environment in which humanity dwells but for which it is not responsible, an environment which will possess its own ends and means which may have nothing to do with human ideas, desires or will. Far from the notion that society is an environment of humanitys own creation, legitimation and propagation (never mind individual creation and propagation), the reality, Gellner seems to say, is that society is the encompassing organism in which (individual) human beings play a part of which they may be, are likely to be, unaware. The schools of social science most guilty of anthropomorphism today, Gellner continues, are interpretivism and relativism. For the interpretivist, the ruling notion is that social behaviour is meaningful, and that its meaning explains the behaviours properties. The relativist, meanwhile, insists that forms of behaviour add up to sociocultural wholes
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and that these latter are ultimate: they cannot be criticized from some real, external standpoint or independent standard science for there is none. Both fallacies can be traced back to the fashionable following of Wittgenstein, according to Gellner, and to Wittgensteinian apologists such as Peter Winch (1979: 113) and Clifford Geertz (2000: xixii). Gellner describes anthropomorphism as a form of humanism, and he can see the temptation of wishing to retain for human subjects a sense of freedom not having human phenomena subsumed under explanatory laws and not robbing human situations of their richness and idiosyncracy, to replace them by generalities. Nevertheless, the intrusion of blind and extraneous necessity into the sociocultural realm of meaning is a fact; however we make our behaviours meaningful, they are, in fact, slave to antecedent material causes. Hence, amid the diversity of sociocultural metaphysics and mythologies, empirical common-denomination represents a touchstone of correctness, a sign of reality: of some sociocultural practices which are materially valid and some which are not. It is not true, Gellner avers, that nature is one thing and society another because the same material reality expresses itself in both. It is true that human social life takes place in a realm of man-made concepts, but these ideas and illusions nd themselves in crucial interplay with brute extraneous forces of nature. At any one point, either nature or concepts might be the vital factor in accounting for behaviour, but a priori it is impossible to describe their weightings, and never is it true to describe the realm of concepts and meanings as untainted. It is more usually the case that the causes of human behaviour, both social and physical, entail antecedent events which lie outside the range of human concepts and beliefs the latter turning out to be not merely illusory but irrelevant. (Think of Azande witchcraft beliefs as an explanation for illness set against that of microbes.) The social order, in a word, is not the artefact of culture. Kierkegaards pairing of faith above science nds its equivalent, one might say, in Gellners of science above common sense. It is true, Gellner admits (1970), that as the Wittgensteinians have insisted, the experience of human beings amounts to a Gestalt: experience takes place within a certain systemic form or language-game or paradigm, to which anthropologists have come to give the name culture. Human life must operate within certain symbolic systems of classication and conceptualization, and most of us, most of the time, cannot avoid using those drawn from the common stock of the social milieus in which we are born and live. Even if we refashion a few of their components during our lives, it is mostly true to say that systems of classication and conceptualization provide a fairly permanent institutional frame, independent of any one individual agent, within which a group of individuals thought and conduct takes place. These systems, moreover, correlate in quite a close way to other features of the social scene institutions, social structures, complexes of mores, climates of opinion to make a working whole which represents not what various individuals want or believe or even know but what they take for granted (Gellner, 1959). The systems amount to facts of the social situation, social facts, quite independent of particular individuals. They may not be as tangible as individuals but they can and do serve as the initial or nal conditions of causal sequences in human life, and they give rise to statistical regularities at the level of the group, and therefore they can be said sociologically to exist. They allow us to make generalizations about classes of individuals group members and their behaviours.
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However, to repeat, for Gellner, the fact that human individuals exist in cultural frames and that these correlate with social institutions does not, as the relativists claim, either cause them to be the true or only determinants of behaviour or mean that only an internal analysis within their own terms of reference and concerned only with their own inner, logical connections, their own meanings, is possible. Indeed, systems of classication and conceptualization are frequently false and vacuous however viable for signifying a form of life. The fact that their systemic nature means that they ramify into other ideologies and other practices only serves to multiply their possible errors. These everyday, commonsensical notions are often second-rate and cognitively inadequate: they correctly represent neither their societies true characters nor their true relationships to their material environments. Fortunately, there is an alternative. Natural science and social science are both species of expert knowledge which supersede commonsensical knowledge and lead beyond participants preconceptions to externally legitimated conceptions of the truth: science, the culmination of millennia of growing expertise by which humanity has gradually distanced itself from primitive religiosity or the savage mind (Gellner, 1973b). What ultimately characterizes this science are four crucial departures from the world of the everyday. One: science takes nothing for granted, and will countenance no idiosyncratic norms of procedure. Two: science will entertain no transcendent concepts which are nontestable; all must be empirically operationalizable. Three: science works against a deep or wide entrenchment of its working ideas and practices so that any one can be challenged and replaced without the pressure of fearing a world-wide dislocation. Four: science ideally operates in a realm distinct from morality and society so that its facts have no necessary sociocultural ramications; the social realm is subject to other moral controls. Gellner concludes that any interpretivism-relativism which seeks to deny scientic knowledge and efcacy is a travesty. Not only is knowledge beyond culture and society possible, it is the central and the most important fact of our contemporary human condition by far. The existence of trans-cultural and amoral knowledge is the fact of our lives and the starting point of any adequate anthropological accounting (Gellner, 1993: 54).2
POPPER, AND TRUTH AS WORLDS 1, 2 AND 3
Karl Poppers writings represent an interesting meeting ground, in many ways, between Kierkegaard and Gellner. Popper begins by declaring himself a humanist, someone who believes in human rationality, however fallible, and in the human achievement of science (Popper and Eccles, 1977: vii). To equate man with machine or with a product of a process of manufacture is to deny or misconstrue the existence of mental phenomena, and consciousness or personal experiences more generally. It is to reduce selves to mere epiphenomena of physical events, and to treat the material world as a closed, selfexplanatory one. This is wrong both morally and empirically, according to Popper. Morally, it ignores suffering and the signicance of the human ght against materiality, culminating in the conscious facing of death; it also ignores enjoyment and the desire consciously to pursue it. Empirically, treating human beings mechanistically (or deconstructively) is to ignore their cognitive power, through speculation and experimentation, both to construct environments for themselves and to transcend these and construct anew.
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Indicative of the subtle balance of Poppers approach is his elaboration on the subject of individuality. We should give up the idea of essences, Popper asserts, of self-identical entities persisting during all changes in time and possessing the same qualities or properties. For no matter or mass is conserved like this over time. Only energy is conserved, while even the most stable particles that we know in the universe neutrons are subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to entropy. However, it must also be observed that organic life on earth tends to be individualized. There are exceptions (multicellular structures without single, central nervous systems), but as a rule life takes the form of individual organisms. These organisms are not closed systems like crystals; material particles and energy are constantly exchanged across their borders. Nevertheless, while dynamic, the organisms remain identiably individual. As human beings, then, we know that we possess a kind of singularity from our introspective experience. Even though our attention may be divided, our experiences transient and complex, we know, to the extent that we experience anything (and are not ill), that we are one, that our consciousness has an ongoing unity.3 At the same time, no one part of the brain corresponds with this oneness; the brain like the body more generally remains a teeming process of active energy transfer: an open system of open systems (Popper and Eccles, 1977: 565). This is why it is necessary to retain the notion of the mind as distinct from the brain or body; mind or self still captures the sense in which the individual possesses a consciousness which has unique properties, genetic and experiential, which changes but is still the same psychophysical process which amounts to that individuals personality. Furthermore, even though self-conscious minds are emergent products of the human brain, it is accurate to describe the mind or self as the pilot of the human ship, the body and its brain. Central nervous systems have been responsible for piloting moving organisms throughout natural history, and human beings are no exception. Indeed, the size of the human brain and the complexity of human consciousness make this more true for human beings. The mind pilots and programmes the brain, as its instrument, as it acts in the world; the mind is also conscious of its active properties, and conscious of the effect its own consciousness has on its life and its environment. While not reducible to body or brain, mind or self has tangible implications for the material world. Signicantly, human beings employ this active subjectivity and cogitation so as to alter their natural-selective chances and affect evolution; natural selection now takes the form of an evolving relationship between external forces and human products and purposes, human consciousness. The framing of this relationship is crucial, and represents the difference between Darwins appreciation of natural selection and Lamarcks. It is not that the human organism passively receives information from outside itself, is instructed by the environment impressing itself on its sense organs; this is the Lamarckian position. Rather, the organism instructs itself, decides on its environment from within, and is rewarded for the viability of its speculations through evolutionary failure or success. Another way of saying this is that human beings are active creators of their environments and their contents and they create by way of action. They learn, gain understanding, not so much by impartial observation as by activity with an aim: guided by problems in their expectations of environmental regularities, and moving towards tentative solutions through the development of models and theories. If their choice of
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model is a good one then they succeed in creating their own kind of niche. Human beings may thus be said to be products of their own achievements of modelling and selfinstruction. This, moreover, Popper recognizes as something which each human being, as an individual organism, is responsible for doing (well or badly) for itself: By . . . individual action, the organism may choose, as it were, its environment . . . . Thus the activity, preferences, skill, and the idiosyncrasies of the individual animal may directly inuence the selection pressures to which it is exposed, and with it, the outcome of natural selection. (Popper and Eccles, 1977: 12) In eschewing notions of absolute or complete knowledge, Popper emphasizes that the essence of science is not the validating of theories but their overthrowing. He also cites Hayeks fallibility thesis that an experimental apparatus (such as a scientic theory) must possess a higher degree of complexity than that it is trying to explain. This means not only that the manifoldly complex system of the brain its cells and connections, in constant agitation might never possibly be explained in detail, but also that what is known of the real world might always be a matter of conjecture and conviction. However bold one is in risk-taking experiments with existing convictions, and however systematically one endeavours to learn from mistakes, one begins and one ends with the poetry of speculation with imaginative stories, hypotheses and mythologies rather than the absolute truth. Poppers stance on knowledge is a complex one, then. On the one hand, he admits the potentiality of any source of knowledge imagination, tradition, reason, observation, experimentation and claims that none has authority as a guarantee or criterion of truth. For there exists no known general criterion of truth which can save human beings from error and the quest for certainty is a mistaken one. On the other hand, Popper insists, contra relativism, that the choice between competing, individually created theories is still not arbitrary: we can get nearer to the truth by learning from our mistakes; we can know absolutely what is not true.4 The growth of human knowledge thus has an essentially revolutionary character, and a characteristic shape: from conviction through criticism to conviction. This is why, moreover, the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is such an important one to maintain; the notion of a delimiting, subjective Gestalt is, Popper insists, a myth (1997). When a theory is argued, subjected to rational criticism and tested, and put into practice, such that it cannot be said merely to appeal to subjective intuition, then that knowledge becomes objective however hypothetical, made up and ultimately fallible it remains. Objective knowledge lives beyond individual experience: in exosomatic institutions and artefacts. It can be stored in libraries quite apart from knowing subjects, and it can grow unbeknown to individual knowers (while their subjective knowledge, abilities and interests remain the same). By this means, humankind and its institutional practice can evolve even though individual human beings do not. In a nal synthesis, Popper ties together the world of physics, chemistry and biology, the individual world of subjective experience, sentience and consciousness, and the social world of objective knowledge, practice and institution by terming them: Worlds 1 [physical chemistry], 2 [individual consciousness] and 3 [social institution]. Each of these worlds is equally real, he suggests, each interacts with and inuences the others,
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and as human beings we are equally anchored in all three. Born as biological entities (in World 1) with bodies and brains, human beings develop minds, have experiences and grow to consciousness by way of interaction with both World 1 and World 3, and arrive at a position where, ensconced in World 2, they are able radically to affect both of the others. The entities in World 3 are products of World 2 (of human minds and imaginations) but they have acquired a separate reality their own logics and ramications which enables them autonomously to act back on their creators; equally, the entities in World 3 can be said to add to the physical objects of World 1. Thus would Popper tie in the individual to the physical and the social, and the human to the natural and the universal.5
ZIGZAGGING TOWARDS ANTHROPOLOGICAL TRUTH
There is something I nd attractive in each of the above positions: Kierkegaards subjectivism, Gellners atheism, Poppers humanism. There is also something suspect: a Kierkegaardian solipsism which severely delimits critique, a Gellnerian reductive materialism which borders on determinism, and a Popperian argument for the singularity of consciousness which begs the question of introspection. There are, too, enticing synecdochal overlaps between the three, such as their notions of transcendence: Kierkegaard describing a going beyond everyday individual experience to faith and revelation, Gellner describing a going beyond the commonsensical to the moral and the scientic, and Popper describing a going beyond subjectivity and matter to a cumulative, objective knowledge and a consciousness of matter. But then such overlaps serve also to point up their semantic differences: for instance, their understandings of humanism. For Kierkegaard, this translates into a (valid) appreciation of how individual perception obeys laws that are not scientically accessible outside the person or inside time. For Gellner, humanism means anthropomorphism: an (erroneous) antinatural assumption that the universe and its laws somehow centre on the interests and needs of humankind, and an ignorance of how human understandings are undercut by material causes and how social reality (structure and behaviour) is a function of the force of such brute materiality on human culture. For Popper, nally, humanism entails an appreciation of human rationality: of the extent to which human beings live in languagecreated worlds, and by theory and experiment can become knowledgeable of the physical processes that lie behind their own material existence, so changing the nature of that environmental materiality and the natural-selective forces upon them. This article is subtitled Kierkegaards anthropology, notwithstanding, in order to signal the important pointers to anthropological practice which I believe Kierkegaards perspective to provide. In a number of aspects I nd myself concurring with him in the forementioned triangulation: in his insistence that individuals should be seen to be world-makers, whose experience is more than a matter of social facts, and in respect to which generalization is in error and the truth a matter of subjectivity (both that of the individual and his or her anthropological observer). At the same time, the pragmatic materialism of a Gellnerian anthropology to which Kierkegaards can be contrasted has its claims. There are sociocultural forms in whose terms individual constructions of the world habitually take place and which thus give on to typications of expression and practice; and these forms are situated in a wider physical and historical environment.
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The key question, for me, remains that of rationalization: can one turn individual experience into a systemic object (whether that system takes the form of a story, a myth or a theory)? And here, Poppers pluralizing of worlds would seem to offer the way out of a Kierkegaard/Gellner divide. The three worlds of physical chemistry, individual consciousness and social institution, each with their own characteristics (materiality, habituality, knowledge), lead to a conclusion I have adumbrated in different ways before. The truth is to be found and represented in movement: the truth, in E.M. Forsters phrasing, is alive (1950: 174; cf. Rapport, 1994: 32ff., 1997a: 6479). Not only does this mean recognizing the reality of individual experience as a constant process, a becoming, along a trajectory which is unique, but also how this becoming entails a unique movement of that individual through different worlds of experience and interpretation: the physical-cum-bodily, the sensate-cum-imaginary, the social-cum-institutional (and possibly more). The point, however, is not only that it is through movement that individual experience derives, but also that it is in and through a narrational movement that such experience can hope to be captured (Rapport, 1999). To turn individual experience into a systemic object (whether this is by and for the individual himself or herself or the anthropologist) is only to be achieved by attempting to write of and as ongoing movement between experienced worlds. Forsters phrasing comes from his novel Howards End, and he elaborates thus: [T]ruth, being alive, was not half-way between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the nal secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility. (1950: 174, my emphasis) Forster is talking about giving an account of English society and character and the issue of how to do justice to its contrariety and the individualities of which it is composed; how is one to write holistically and at the same time induce a sense of expansion: a vision that opens out rather than rounds off (Forster, 1984: 149)? (Or, as we might put it: how to write rationally and systematically of a sociocultural milieu of experiencing individuals without generalization or stasis?) Forsters answer entails narrational ow: hitting on the truth through juxtaposing erstwhile separate sets of information about distinct domains of knowledge and people, and bringing them together so that their differences connect. Signicantly, this connection does not take the form of an integration or common denomination, or nding a middle way between. Rather, separate people and worlds are kept separate, their integrity respected, and it is the writer, the interpreter, who undertakes a metaphorical journey into the realms of each. The truth remains alive: something to be found through moving between experiences and understandings (cf. Hastrup, 1986: 14). In the past I have described this interpretive process as zigzagging (Rapport, 1992). Analysts attempt to understand their subjects in their subjects own terms in terms of the particularities of life as practised in or by each and to convey these understandings in the form of a narrative of the analysts own experience. Analysts hope to reach, transmit and persuade of certain truths by recounting the story of their own experience in acceding to them, and by remaining truthful to the existential (momentary, situated, embodied) nature of that accession. In other words, as far as possible analysts tell the story of their understandings as they happened: as something they experienced and interpreted.
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Importantly, analysts do not work towards collapsing the course and ow of their understandings into a static synthetic shape, an elision or integration. Rather, they aim for an ongoing juxtaposition, whereby it becomes plain that correspondences are manifold there is a logic to the analysts forming their discrete experiences into one story while a coalescence of features is not possible without a corruption of detail and distinction. Coming to terms with the world-views and social situations of different individuals, say, and recounting the experiential journeys made between them in the process of mentally encompassing their diversity, analysts then represent this diversity in the form of a narrational zigzag; the truth of their experience is conveyed by a zigzagging between interpretations of the distinct subject domains (individuals, world-views, situations). Thus analysts may offer accounts of systematic connections between people and worlds without a negating of discreteness and individuality; their accounts might admit to being singular views of singular analysts but can aspire not to be the viewing of singularities. Fernandez describes anthropologys main objective as phenomenological subjectivity (1992: 127): a disinterring of the particular sensory apparatus from which an individuals conceptions derive. If one agrees with Kierkegaard (and with Fernandez) regarding the personal and ultimately inaccessible nature of the experiences of others (and disagrees with Geertz [1973: 3601], or with Bloch [1998: viiviii], on this score), then the analytical disinterring of this phenomenological subjectivity will always be ctional. The further point, however, aprs Gellner and Popper, is that this does not necessarily make the exercise unscientic. (If God ever told the story of the universe, Forster once quipped, that story would take a ctional form: something far truer to real life than the narrowness and shallowness of other genres). Nor does it make the exercise unsocialscientic. Accepting that its accounts are matters of personal interpretation laying bare, indeed, the story of their construction in the process of their narration does not make anthropology necessarily less true; made or made out, as Geertz admitted, need not equal made up (1988: 140). Instead, it is the case that things can be written of a ctional kind, things of a personal provenance, of a blurred or approximate nature, to do with ambiguity and contrariety, which can be said to go to the heart of the human condition and which anthropology might call its own (Rapport, 1997b). Through a methodology of processual understandings self-fashioned, made in situ anthropology can lay claim to a holism which alone does justice to the complexity of human social life and its individual experiencing. This does not amount to a systemic depiction of a sociocultural milieu, nor does it speak necessarily to social-structural laws or to cause and effect; 6 rather it entails a Kierkegaardian respect for the property of subjective consciousness in whose terms the world is ongoingly engaged.
CONCLUSION
Embedded in different interpretive schemata and world-views, amid personal lifehistories and life-projects, individuals engage in social interactions social movements, exchanges, institutions, revolutions on different terms, along individual trajectories. Zigzagging between their processual understandings, anthropologists can hope to show their subjects between moments of being, between situations of interaction, between material constraints and imaginative transcendence, between a history of past engagements and a future of possibly random departures. Piling up their interpretations in a series of juxtapositions, not stopping to grant nal authority (MacIntyre, 1962) to any
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one, anthropologists can write with incremental subtlety and sophistication concerning matters empathetic, sympathetic and observational, perduring and spontaneous, reexive and extra-somatic. Thus can they aspire to a truthfully holistic account of the complexity of human experience, lived between bodily capacity, personal signicance and social form.
Notes
1 This then allowed Kierkegaard to posit faith as lying beyond science. By taking a leap of faith into what is offensive to reason, into the seemingly absurd one could reach an understanding of what science could not and, for instance, apprehend the eternal in time. Such absurdity and paradox were, indeed, part-and-parcel of the human condition, something like a guarantee or proof that the assurances gained by way of faith could not be reached by human reason or other capacity alone. 2 Gellner (1995: 8): [C]ognitive relativism is nonsense, moral relativism is tragic. You cannot understand the human condition if you ignore or deny its total transformation by the success of the scientic revolution. . . . Valid knowledge ignores and does not engender frontiers. One simply cannot understand our shared social condition unless one starts from the indisputable fact that genuine knowledge of nature is possible and has occurred, and has totally transformed the terms of reference in which human societies operate. 3 As Kant put it: a person is something that is conscious, at different times, of the numerical identity of its self (cited in Popper and Eccles, 1977: 115). 4 Popper cites Gilbert Ryle to the effect that rationality means never being unquestioning, and taking nothing for granted. Belief is never rational, then; it is rational always to suspend belief and be open to criticism (Popper, 1999: 125). 5 When human mountaineers, for instance, force their bodies to go on, through exhaustion and into danger, then this is a psychological disposition and mental state, from World 2, affecting a physical entity from World 1. When we are moved by a painting or a book, then this is an artefact from World 3 affecting a conscious reaction in World 2. 6 Leach (1961: 512): There are no laws of historical process; there are no laws of sociological probability. Wittgenstein (1980: 60e, 62e): Who knows the laws according to which society develops? . . . There is nothing more stupid than the chatter about cause and effect in history books; nothing is more wrong-headed, more half-baked.
References
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Fernandez, James (1977) Poetry in Motion: Being Moved by Amusement, by Mockery and by Mortality in the Asturian Countryside, New Literary History VIII(3): 45983. Fernandez, James (1992) What it is Like to be a Banzie: On Sharing the Experience of an Equatorial Microcosm, in Jerald Gort et al. (eds) On Sharing Religious Experience. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Fontana, Andrea (1984) Introduction: Existential Sociology and the Self , in Joseph Kotarba and Andrea Fontana (eds) The Existential Self in Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Forster, Edward Morgan (1950) Howards End. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Forster, Edward Morgan (1984) Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic. Geertz, Clifford (1988) Works and Lives. Cambridge: Polity. Geertz, Clifford (2000) Available Light: Anthropological Reections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gellner, Ernest (1959) Holism Versus Individualism in History and Sociology, in Philip Gardiner (ed.) Theories of History. London: Allen and Unwin. Gellner, Ernest (1970) Concepts and Society, in Bryan Wilson (ed.) Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell. Gellner, Ernest (1973a) Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gellner, Ernest (1973b) The Savage and the Modern Mind, in Robin Horton and Ruth Finnegan (eds) Modes of Thought. London: Faber. Gellner, Ernest (1993) Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge. Gellner, Ernest (1995) Anything Goes: The Carnival of Cheap Relativism which Threatens to Swamp the Coming Fin de Millenaire, Times Literary Supplement 4811: 68. Hastrup, Kirsten (1986) Veracity and Visibility: The Problem of Authenticity in Anthropology, Folk 28: 517. Hegel, G. (1977 [1807]) Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Michael, ed. (1996) Things As They Are. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kierkegaard, Soren (1941) Concluding Unscientic Postscript. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Soren (1958) The Journals of Kierkegaard 18341854. Glasgow: Fontana. Kierkegaard, Soren (1959) Either/Or. New York: Doubleday. Kotarba, Joseph (1984) A Synthesis: The Existential Self in Society, in Joseph Kotarba and Andrea Fontana (eds) The Existential Self in Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kotarba, Joseph and Andrea Fontana (eds) (1984) The Existential Self in Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kripke, Saul (1980) Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leach, Edmund (1961) Rethinking Anthropology. London: Athlone. Leach, Edmund (1989) Writing Anthropology. A Review of Clifford Geertzs Works and Lives, American Ethnologist 16(1): 13741. Lyman, Steven (1984) Foreword, in Joseph Kotarba and Andrea Fontana (eds) The Existential Self in Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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MacIntyre, Alasdair (1962) A Mistake about Causality in Social Science, in Peter Laslett and William Runciman (eds) Philosophy, Politics and Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Marcus, George and James Clifford, eds (1986) Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Popper, Karl (1997) The Myth of the Framework. London: Routledge. Popper, Karl (1999) Unended Quest. London: Routledge. Popper, Karl and John Eccles (1977) The Self and Its Brain. Berlin: Springer. Rapport, Nigel J. (1992) Connexions With and Within a Text: From Forsters Howards End to the Anthropology of Comparison, Bulletin of John Rylands University Library of Manchester 73(3) Special Issue edited by Paul Baxter and Richard Fardon Voice, Genre, Text: Anthropological Essays in Africa and Beyond: 16180. Rapport, Nigel J. (1994) The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E.M. Forster. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rapport, Nigel J. (1997a) Transcendent Individual. Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology. London: Routledge. Rapport, Nigel J. (1997b) The Contrarieties of Israel: An Essay on the Cognitive Importance and the Creative Promise of Both/And, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(4): 65372. Rapport, Nigel J. (1999) The Narrative as Fieldwork Technique: Processual Ethnography for a World in Motion, in Vered Amit-Talai (ed.) Constructing the Field. London: Routledge. Rapport, Nigel J. (forthcoming) Towards a Post-cultural Anthropology of Personally Embodied Knowledge, Social Anthropology. Ryle, Gilbert (1973) The Concept of Mind. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wilmsen, Edwin (1999) Journeys with Flies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Winch, Peter (1979) The Idea of Social Science, in Bryan Wilson (ed.) Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1980) Culture and Value. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
NIGEL RAPPORT holds a Chair in Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews. He has conducted ethnographic eldwork in the English village of Wanet in the Cumbrian Dales, also in the Canadian city of St Johns, Newfoundland, and the suburb of Kilbride, and in the Israeli development town of Mitzpe Ramon. Currently he is undertaking research in a Scottish hospital setting. His main theoretic concern is with individual consciousness and identity, and with the complexity of sociocultural milieus. Among his recent publications are: Transcendent Individual (Routledge, 1997), Migrants of Identity, co-edited with A. Dawson (Berg, 1998), and Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts, co-authored with J. Overing (Routledge, 2000). Address: Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AL, Scotland, UK. [email: njr2@st-andrews.ac.uk]
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