Transcendent individual : towards a literary and liberal anthropology

212 Pages·1997·0.96 MB·English

by  Rapport

Transcendent Individual
How might anthropology seem if it were written in celebration of
individuality—of the individual’s conscious and creative engagement with socio-
cultural milieux—and if it were committed to a liberal agenda which sought to
cherish and defend that individuality?
Transcendent Individual argues for just such a commitment: a reappraisal of
the place of the individual in anthropological theorising and ethnographic
writing, and a social-scientific appreciation of the individual as methodological,
moral, pragmatic and aesthetic subject. Here is an anthropological account of
individual creativity, of the narrativity of individual expression, of the originality
of individual becoming, and of the morality of the individual body.
Drawing widely on ethnographic and theoretic materials, and bringing into
debate a range of voices—Nietzsche, Wilde and Forster, Bateson and Gerald
Edelman, George Steiner, Richard Rorty and John Berger, Edmund Leach and
Anthony Cohen—the book approaches individuality in terms of a range of
issues: biological integrity, consciousness, agency, democracy, discourse,
knowledge, consumerism, globalism and play.
Written in an accessible style, and juxtaposing literary and philosophical
against anthropological voices Transcendent Individual presents its readers with
a social-scientific issue of importance and topical concern.
Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at
the University of St Andrews.
Transcendent Individual
Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology
Nigel Rapport
First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1997 Nigel Rapport
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of
Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Rapport, Nigel, 1956–
Transcendent Individual: towards a literary and liberal anthropology/
Nigel Rapport.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 202) and index.
1. Ethnology—Philosophy. 2. Ethnology—Authorship.
3. Individuality. 4. Ethnology in literature. I. Title.
GN33.R36 1997
305.8’001–dc21
97–7414
CIP
ISBN 0-203-44827-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-75651-7 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-16966-6 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-16967-4 (pbk)
What, however, does it mean that we find an insatiable pleasure in making
ourselves into our own possibilities, and cannot—in spite of knowing what it is
—cease to play the game of our potentials? It is to questions of this kind that
literary anthropology has to address itself.
Towards a Literary Anthropology Wolfgang Iser
To Elizabeth and Callum
Acknowledgements
In the preparation of these essays, a number of individuals were kind enough
to act variously as mentors, interlocutors, critics and confidants. Above all, I
benefited from the generous commentary of Vered Amit-Talai, Eduardo Archetti,
Aleksander Boskovik, Anthony Cohen, Peter Collins, Andrew Dawson, Roy
Dilley, Jeanette Edwards, Anna Grimshaw, Claudia Gross, Ladislav Holy,
Allison James, Tamara Kohn, Joanna Overing, David Riches, Anne Rowbottom,
Jonathan Skinner, Marilyn Strathern and Deborah Wickering.
Three of the essays appeared in earlier incarnations in Anthropology Today,
and I owe Jonathan Benthall, the journal’s editor, a great deal for the invitations
to contribute, as well as for his patience with my efforts.
At Routledge, Heather Gibson has remained a most supportive editor and a
stimulating fellow-traveller in the enterprise of literary anthropology.
Finally, I do not forget the support—and all else—of Elizabeth Munro, to
whom (along with Callum) the volume is dedicated with love.
St Andrews 1997 NJR
Manifesto
Towards a liberal and literary
appreciation of the conscious and
creative individual
1 This is a book of essays all of which bear on the theme of individuality—on
the individual’s conscious and creative engagement with certain sociocultural
environments—and the links between individuality and the writing of social
science. The essays have an iconoclastic agenda: the writing of social science (in
particular sociocultural anthropology) as imbued with a belief in the
transcendent subject. Here is a book of essays intent on a social-scientific
appreciation of the individual who makes himself or herself ex nihilo and in an
originary fashion—who comes to be, who achieves a consciousness, outwith and
beyond the sociocultural environment in which he or she was born and has been
socialised/ enculturated.
2 A number of keywords might be stated, for later elaboration: Individual,
Individuality, Creativity, Consciousness, Writing, Narrative, Discourse, Form,
Meaning, Interpretation, Personalisation, Anthropology, Literature.
3 The individual agenda of these essays is methodological, ontological,
aesthetic and moral.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, only by ‘intensifying one’s own individuality’,
through precise consciousness of oneself in a sociocultural environment, can one
hope to appreciate the individuality of others and thereby approach an
understanding: one must look inward in order to see outward; by looking
outward one realises one’s inwardness. Here is a necessary and continuous
dualism. Far from a narrowly introspective or overly idealistic exercise, then, it
is the case that how we conceptually understand ourselves and our lives-in-
society, how we validate our claims to self-knowledge, and how we transpose
such knowledge into narrative, are all entirely crucial to our project of
apprehending otherness, and, indeed, indistinguishable from it (cf. Stanley
1993:50; also Cohen 1994:136). In Wilde’s words, personality is “an element of