Chapter 1 CONTEXTUALISATION AND PARADIGM SHIFTS Ladislav Holy A recent volume of essays by anthropological linguists edited by Duranti and Goodwin (1992) stresses that linguists are no longer con- ‘tent with ‘analyzing language as an encapsulated formal system that could be isolated from the rest of a society’s culture and social organi- zation’ (Goodwin and Duranti 1992: 1). There is of course a long lin- guistic and philosophic tradition in pragmatics which resorts to context to account for aspects of meaning in language that could not have been accounted for by traditional semantics. But those who work in this tradition still use as their data mostly isolated sentences and descriptions of contextual features which they have themselves con- structed to illustrate their theoretical arguments. The present move in linguistics is from this style of analysis to the analysis of actual utter- ances, conversations or talk embedded within a context. To anthropologists, the present-day linguists’ interest in actual events (naturally occurring conversations or talk) and their attempt to understand them within the context of their occurrence, does not sound particularly novel. Anthropologists have always been con- cerned with actual events (observing actual situations and unlike lin- guists and philosophers not constructing them for the sake of illustrating their theoretical arguments) and as far as their attention to context is concerned, Gellner, among many others, repeatedly made the point that the distinguishing feature of most social anthropology ‘was its stress on context in analysis (1970, 1973a and b). It would not be controversial to say that, in spite of all the changing fashions or48, Ladislay Holy epistemological shifts in the discipline, context is and always has been the key anthropological concept. Tam not sure whether most anthropologists would equally be pre- pared explicitly to grant the same status to interpretation, given that a specific style of anthropological enquiry, which emerged in the 1960s, styled itself as ‘interpretative’ anthropology. Its basic assumption has been that the interpretation of a people's culture, in the sense of prop- erly identifying the meaning of specific cultural phenomena, is a pre- condition of the explanation of these phenomena in the sense of elucidating the reasons for their existence. In this connection, Ortner and Whitehead suggested that ‘one of the persistent problems of social anthropology ... has been that, in the rush to connect “culture” to “society”, analysts have often taken culture in bits ..., nailing each bit to some specific feature of social organization ... without going through the crucial intervening phase of analyzing what that bit means’ (1981; 4). I fully subscribe to this view that it is the lack of importance ascribed to the interpretation of cultural phenomena within the overall strategy of their explanation which is responsible for the failure of many attempts at relating ‘culture’ to ‘society’. I am, however, inclined to see the main problem of social anthropology somewhat differently. In my view, this problem is not the neglect of interpretation or the neglect of the meaning of the studied phenomena as such. Either as human beings or as anthropologists, we cannot avoid interpretation any more than we can avoid speaking or writing in symbols. Interpretation is unavoidable in principle as no phenomenon can be contemplated inde- pendently of, or prior to, its interpretation, and anthropologists have been constantly interpreting the phenomena they study. Likewise, neglect of the meaning of the studied phenomena is not a persistent problem. For again, meaning cannot be neglected in principle since it is ontologically inseparable from the existence of the phenomenon as such. The persis- tent problem lies in treating the interpretation — i.e. the ascription of meaning to the phenomenon and, consequently the proper identifica- tion of the phenomenon - as non-problematic, Instead of asking what the phenomenon means, it is assumed that we know what it means in the first place (Ortner and Whitehead 1981: 1). We know what it means, of course, because we have endowed it with our own meaning in the process of preinterpretation, as Hobart calls it (see chapter 5). ‘The basic tenet of the anthropological study of meaning carried out by symbolic, semantic or interpretative anthropologists is that meaning of social and cultural phenomena is contextual, in the sense that it derives from the relationship to other phenomena within a particular systemic context. It is precisely this emphasis on context which keeps the semantically informed study of meaning methodologically in com-Contextualisation and Paradigm Shifts 49 pany with orthodox positivist approaches whose basic methodological tenet is also that social and cultural phenomena must be analysed in the context of the total system of which they are part. Different con- ceptualisations of what precisely constitutes the systemic context of the studied phenomena reflect the ontological differences between the anthropologists explicitly interested in the study of meaning and their more positivistically inclined colleagues; but a methodological and epis- temological agreement underlies this ontological difference (Parkin 1982: xvi). As meaning is the product of interpretation, one can argue that the accounts of social and cultural phenomena formulated by orthodox positivist approaches in anthropology were as much con- cerned with the elucidation of their meaning as are the analyses of many symbolic, semantic or interpretative anthropologists. In spite of all the changing epistemological traditions in anthropol- ogy, the concepts of meaning and context constitute the perennial linchpins of our interpretations. Meaning has been the subject of a considerable amount of scrutiny. Context, on the other hand, has always remained ‘a wastebasket label, to explain away an array of fuzzy phenomena, too complicated to understand’ (Keesing 1972: 28, n. 5). It seems to me, however, that we need to pay more attention to the process of contextualisation to understand why we interpret the studied phenomena the way we do. To my mind, neither the positivis- tic nor the semantic style of investigation in social anthropology has paid sufficient attention to the problem of contextualisation. Context isa frame that surrounds the phenomenon which we try to understand and that provides resources for its appropriate interpreta tion. The notion of context thus implies a fundamental juxtaposition ‘of two entities: a focal phenomenon and an environment within which it is embedded (Goodwin and Duranti 1992: 3). As the formu- lations which I have used in the preceding two sentences suggest, the best we have so far been able to do is to picture context metaphori- cally: context as a frame (Goffman 1974) surrounding the phenome- non to be understood and made meaningful, context as an environment (Scharfstein 1989: 1), as a background, as a perspective (Hobart 1985, 1986: 8) or asa stage on which the phenomenon to be understood occupies the central position. The variant of the latter imagery is the linguists’ metaphor of the figure and ground (Goodwin and Duranti 1992; 9-11). ‘The reasons why we have such difficulties in defining context and why, when talking about it, we resort to metaphorical imagery, are not difficult to grasp. Both the purpose and the meaning of a phenome- non, like the purpose and meaning of a statement, are constructed through its interpretation. When trying to comprehend the meaning of a statement, act or object, we place it in various possible contexts in