JON W. ANDERSON

That is, I am interested in the engagement of the social sciences generally and my own discipline of anthropology particularly with the moral discourse of our culture which throws up the place of the person in society as a problem. At this point, the anthropologist normally has recourse to a body of research findings that call this discourse into question: these include diverse concepts of and about persons, humanity, individuality, and so on, of which ours are historically circumscribed and peculiar to but one historical experience among many. In that larger world, our concepts of person, lodged as they are in a discourse that is also about society in relation to which it emerges historically, frankly do not travel well. When transported to other cultures, they retrieve a limited slice of experience and are reshaped in unpredictable ways--modernization theory notwithstanding--in other historically specific relationships. This is the anthropologist's caution about the social sciences' version of what A.O. Ro rty has called "distinctions that are often lost in the excess of zeal that is philosophical lust in action: abducting a concept from its natural home, finding conditions that explain the possibility of any concept in that area, and then legislating that the general conditions be treated as the core essential analysis of each of the variants."¹ The universe constituted by that transportation comes to be one of family resemblances only, and the transportation itself a form of critique, a partial fitting that can show others only as failed versions of ourselves or usually of an idealization about our selves. Such a critique occasionally is brought home with equally unpredictable results. Professional discourse at this point usually stands on relativism, or more precisely on a weak historicism known in my trade as particularism and nowadays hopefully cast as enlarging the universe of human discourse.² Ever hopeful, anthropology is the "yes, but . . ." discipline of the social sciences, and to a considerable extent its message has gotten out. In fact, I would argue, it occupies much the same moral space populated by alternative systems of personal belief and practice from popular Z en to imported gurus, culture "cafeteria-style" in a universe less of discourse than of consumption.

Anth ropology contributes to this culture in another, more analytical and less appetitive way, however. At the level of production rather than of consumption of its findings, where its own database is expanded, it is also method-driven. This level is what I want to examine by focusing on the context it shares with motives and means in our culture for examining the place of person in society. These are assembled from materials as old as anthropology's are wide and which Marcel Mau ss, who could deal with both, limned in the characteristic form of a journey:

That context, Mauss's "parcours accompli," was introduced in our discussion of Voltaire's Candide as a benchmark of the sensibility called "modern." For its classic formulation of Enlightenment, this 1759 work stands in what Michel Fouc ault has called the archaeology of our knowledge⁴ as, in proper archaeological terminology, a type-site. It contains not only the fully articulated form, but also its setting against the decadence of and transition from aristocracy as a ruling principle. It records this moral transition as a fable of journey, modernism's enabling trope of reformation through movement. Contemporary with both Kan t's more professorial "Was ist Aufklärung" (1784) and Frankli n's more popular Poor Richard's Almanac, it offers the same vision as those, of personal responsibility, and makes thematic, even dramatic, the optimism of that vision. This perspective is bracketed at its other end by the most perceptive chronicler of its development, Max Web er, who at the conclusion to his examination in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism remarked pessimistically that what its early formulators had strived so hard to construct had become in its own success an Iron Cage.⁵

At this point, We ber backs off, as he elsewhere says the social scientist must,⁷ from the realm of values and from adjudicating those, into questions of method. In so doing, he exposes the point of their articulation.

This articulation of method and value is always problematic and never a simple reflection. Metho dology responds to imperatives not shared with values at the same time that they both share something of the same space and contribute to its evolution. How we limn the world since Weber depends in part on the way in which how we see contributes to what we see in it. Contributing to that vision, Weber stood at the cusp of where we are now, in the traverse to a post-"modern" world.

Post-modernism implies something being left behind in a number of projects and ambitions whose singular characteristic is a rejection or departure from some form of modernism and most particularly from notions such as "form follows function" to something more broadly imitative, historical, and contextualizing. It includes turns to embellishment in architecture, to neo-realism in painting, to simultaneity in literature. James Jo yce is the touchstone of po st-modernism, with his flooding prose carried by lists in place of categories, the imitation of real time, and other techniques for presenting a reality more immediate than the "realism" that modernism sought to re-present. The signature of the post-modern that initially appears as eclec ticism, as departure from the re-prese ntationalism of func tionalisms, emerges across a number of projects as more than grab-bag eclecticism, however, and as more than a concern, such as that traditionally of phe nome nology, with immediacy. It is imitative, with the twist of simultaneity of subjects in place of the monolithic one-rule-for-all that has come to be the critique of modern ism. After all, after "modernism," which in its various manifestations also proclaimed similar values and similarly claimed moral import for them, post-modernism is less a break with, than an enlargement of, those.

The project to which post-modernism seems to lay claim takes shape in terms of a methodological reading of modernism as re-presentational. That is, in this view, the projects and conceits of modernism, whether in art and architecture, or in society and social science, have been framed in terms of the re-presentation of one thing in terms of another, and over and over, vulgarly in a sort of neo-Plato nism of formalist essentialism. In sociology, its great themes have been bureaucratization and modernization, or more generally the rationalization of all realms of life in terms of the pattern or rule of one, such as Weber described. Driven in the examination of our own society by consensus theories and by notions of culture as shared understandings, modernist themes are driven in the examination of other societies by a sort of convergent evolutionism in "modernization" theory. The conceit of the latter, slightly better hidden in the former, is that persons in society and societies in the world become all more alike, and that the process is somehow essential.

The first methodological step from modernism is, perhaps, the dawning realization that its views are self-constituting or, in the more conventional discourse of social science, amount to self-confirming hypotheses. Modernization theory is another transformation of imperialism (we are repeatedly told by the supposedly modernizing), or another ethnocentric projection of Western experience, an attempt to generalize the world in our own terms, as much to justify those terms as to generalize the world in what amounts, as Marshall Sa hlins has put it,⁸ to a derivation of ontology from methodology. It is this claim of modernism to linearity that gets criticized first, then its mono-mania: more parsimonious than life, more orderly than experience, it is too spare to contain those and particularly too spare to contain any sense for, or of, growth and changing, multiple points of view. But the more effective, because more penetrating, critique is methodological. Mod ernism depends on a method of re-presentation to be linear in the first place, and under this method too many anomalies or residues accumulate in a world refractory to its brand of functionalist reduction. Too much data are left over, or left out of account; and that, among the social sciences, is the point of departure for their post-modern versions.

Stru cturalism, in its many varieties across all the social sciences, more and more appears to be their version of mode rnism. Not because of its emphasis on order and form, or its mistakenly so-called high level of abstraction, but more fundamentally methodologically because it is at base theoretically re-presentational. Structuralism's objects are re-presentations of one thing or process in another thing or process: language in speech, institutions in behavior, social structure in interaction, each of which structuralist views have sought to penetrate to realms of pure form stripped of exigencies treated as accidental. What this does is to reduce things to fewer dimensions and problems than they have in experience. Its much criticized emphasis on system is an emphasis on subjective re-presentation decoded into systems of relations whose counters don't count but are merely counted with. Fun ction is all. Against this, post-structuralist methods focus on and attempt to conceptualize presentation. I would emphasize the "pre-," for the move is not only a dialectical reaction to stru cturalism, but is also motivated to recover the anomalies I mentioned. What is "left over" by structuralist methods is not just enactment, but antecedent and enabling conditions and how those are immediate; that is, in its strong form all the data of context are "left over."

As the positional terminology of post-modernism and post-structuralism would suggest, these methods and their focus are not well worked out. There is a lot of experimentation, particularly with presentational technique, much of which looks like reinventing the wheel. Anthropol ogists are turning to autobiography, to literary criticism, and to various other forms of extensive discourse to capture or recapture presentation. This activity is as eclectic, and as seemingly ad hoc, as its counterparts in architecture and literature. I have my own counterparts for false fronts, chippendale skyscrapers and the atrium motif that turns public buildings inward to a void at the center. But mimicry that calls attention to itself is part of this method, simultaneity its signature, and capturing those its obsession. Post-structuralism in method is given to listing what it cannot typologise, or will not categorize and thus reduce to fewer dimensions than real life. And it is intensely self-absorbed.

The self, and the context of the self that we call "person," particularly as that concept is problematically related to "society," is a centerpiece of this attention. Theoretically, this is in part a response to perceived excesses or excessive narrowness in structu ralism, as exemplified in Lé vi-Strauss's famous comment on his monumental study of Amerindian mythology that he has not thought through the myths so much as they have thought themselves through him.⁹ In the dialectics of theory, it is partly also a response to other disappearances of active selves from social thinking, or perceived disappearances, such as exemplified in mid-century structural-functionalism,¹⁰ or in structural linguistics' focus on the language behind the speaker, or in the New Criticism's exclusive focus on the text, obliterating the writer.

This has happened before in anthropology, and appears to be part of a cycle between the polar concepts of Enlightenment philosophizing that at once separated and sought to join concepts of individual and society. The first time was in anthropology's first synthesis. So called "evolutionary," its project of enlarging the concept of culture to include, as E.B. Ty lor put it, "any . . . capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society,"¹¹ took as its root metaphor not population biology but the individual life cycle and sought phylogeny in ontogeny. Cultures were seen to develop by shedding mistaken notions and to progress toward true knowledge of things such as Kant had admonished a century earlier. What was for Ka nt personal responsibility became a necessity in the thought of those for whom it was, indeed, necessary personally. Individualism was seen as the trend and goal of this process, and societies were seen as individual moments in a stratified history of societies, some more advanced (enlig htened) along this path than others, and all capable of, even destined to, follow it. This conception foundered upon accumulated empirical investigation and reporting of diversity that could not be fitted into an ontogenetic model, but more significantly upon a more sophisticated conception of society that divorced it from individual phenomena.

Dur kheim's delineation of social phenomena and that, as he put it, "we are two beings,"¹² might have put the matter to rest had not the methodology developed from his discovery concentrated largely on one, on society, and left over the individual, which social scientists repeatedly tried to reintegrate. That methodology was, broadly, structuralism which in turning to social, collective, shared phenomena of society, culture, or language turned away from their vehicles in persons, actions, and speech. Thus, preserving those as vehicles residues for which the methodology had only a weak account invited their reconsideration in their "own" terms, that is, in the terms of their Enlightenment formulation.

Put differently, the structuralist synthesis was not comprehensive enough to be proof against end runs, returns actually, to equally holistic conceptions of the individual. Resistance to structuralist method has always been put in such terms: it ignores the individual configuration for the system (in language, culture, and society) by stressing plan over enactment (in speech, belief, and behavior) and flattening time and diversity. But most prominent among its methodological residues was the Enli ghtenment notion of the autonomous self, the center of consciousness, with collateral histories, upon which was founded the alternative conception of society as a contract, culture as choices (or distinction), and language as intentional (e.g., Port-Royal grammar). Each of these is variously reintroduced as shorter cycles within the longer cycle. The 1920s and 1930s saw a turn to culture and personality that reversed the emphasis and treated culture as personality,¹³ almost in a return to the evolutionists' root metaphor, refracted significantly through Freudian psychology. The 1950s and 1960s saw a turn to choice, driven by games theory, and there are numerous, more subtle and shorter cycles. Hervé Var enne for instance has described with elegant economy how holistic sociological perspectives such as Durkheim's and those descended from this are peculiarly vulnerable in Anglo-American anthropology and social theory not just to individualist critique but to individualist redaction that squanders the Durk heimian gain.¹⁴ Victories of the Scottish Enlightenment over the French?

The opening in this regard for anthropology comes in linguistics with Dell Hy mes' identification of "breakthrough into performance."¹⁶ Casting for the terms of authenticity of cultural expression, Hymes catalogued three ways in which performance breaks through report, or direct speech breaks through indirect: the speaker forgets the audience, and particularly that it may be inappropriate for saying sacred things; continuities between genre make it difficult to keep them apart; and what is spoken is so deeply believed as to have a reality that description can't touch or convey. Upon this discovery is founded the ethnography of communication, and particularly of speaking,¹⁷ as a holistic account not only of linguistic resources, but also, and with equal weight, of situational factors of intent, occasion, audience and roles assumed in performance.

The discovery is not unique. It replicates the emphasis at the base of the symbolic interactionist focus on other-responsiveness against overly inner-directed conceptions of social action from G.H. Me ad to Herbert Blu mer to Erving Gof fman.¹⁸ Much of the ethnography of speaking draws on this contrarian sociology for elaborating the performative surroundings of speech events. But the significance of this sociology for anthropology is less than the significance of linguistics itself because of the privileged place occupied by language as the model for, and type-site of, the most cultural of phenomena. In this context, Silv erstein developed a more radical critique of the place of language phenomena in theorizing about culture by delineating how the semantic-referential core of language provides only special and limited samples of the means and properties of communication.¹⁹ Asking, in terms of rule-governed views of language, how one knows when and how to apply, use, and manipulate its rules, Silverstein pointed to "shifters" that convey meaning quite outside of language or even its avatars such as gesture.²⁰ A key example is tense: nothing in grammar or syntax itself identifies particular elements as marking past-ness, only the position of an utterance in a stream of utterance. The markers, once identified, may signal, but nothing in the markers contains the signal. The signal belongs, he argued, to the pragmatics as well as to the syntagmatics of language, to its performative surrounding rather than only to its internal structure.

What these views do is shift emphasis to the residues left by structuralist method. Structuralist emphasis on the ultimate arbitrariness of relations between signifier and signified, and its focus upon signifiers as determined wholly in relation to each other, has perhaps not entirely solved the problem of the signifier, as Anthony Gi ddens claims.²¹ But it does leave over the problems associated with the signified, including temporality and situation (space), and it failed to reconstitute the acting subject. To reconstitute the full range of this subject, Giddens opens some methodological room between full discursive consciousness and the unconscious with his notion of "practical consciousness." In that, he includes not only knowledge not put into words, but a range of intermediate phenomena such as motives and values which partake of both discursive consciousness and the fully unconscious. Like other praxis theories, his views point to what actors know but cannot (or will not or are not permitted or inclined to) put into the limiting form of words or discursive statement. This move is designed to rescue that residue, though less to claim a privileged status for it than to put it into perspective with discursive consciousness as its limiting case.

Of contemporary social theorists, Pierre Bourdieu seems to push this perspective furthest without turning consciousness (and the unconscious) into epiphenomena of pure experience with his conception of "habitus" as the actor's total stock of knowledge and practice, implicit as well as explicit, situational as well as general.²² By emphasizing implicit and unformalized knowledge embedded in practices, Bou rdieu avoids Giddens' need to posit a potentially all-knowing, if not all-conscious, acting subject. Placing discursive consciousness as "doxa," including heterodox as well as orthodox consciousness, within a totality of habitus, Bourdieu attempts to contexualise the acting subject not within its own subjectivity but within its activity, and thus to bridge the paradox that while humans are made by society (culture, language), they also make society (culture, language) and do not merely reproduce it.

Put differently, in more methodological terms, each of these positions attempts to incorporate apparently contradictory data which one or the other major streams of post-Enlightenment thought consigns to residues. Each departs from structuralist methods which freed subjects from objects, and each aims to break out of contradictory claims and evidence about the priority of one over the other, or that would assimilate one to the other. Where they seem to arrive is a concept of the person as neither immutable essence nor social reflex, but as actively constituting and constituted--that is, on activity.

This conception of activity, not the actus purus Durk heim sought but a continuing stream such as We ber saw, is the post-structuralist version or portion of post-modern sensibilities for foregrounding subjectivity through such presentational devices as the intrusion of the author into the text, quotation that calls attention to simultaneity and immediacy, and mimicry of those by extensive over intensive narrative.²³ It does not reconstitute an autonomous subject, nor dissolve subject into object, but directs attention to the traffic as the reality that constitutes and is constituted by that activity.²⁴ The message of post-structuralist method, like that of post-modernism with which it shares a cultural space and time, is that there is no place to stand outside this activity--more radically, that there is no standing, only the activity. At this point, it rejoins the culture which spawned it and of which it would provide an account.

Returning to Weber's question at this point, where his own analysis ran up against its moral significance, I would only point out that such ideas have been around for some time now. The moral question is their jurisdiction, a matter of taking responsibility. Although some in the social sciences with which I am familiar see a return to external determinism in turns to praxis, the circle seems to me to have gone elsewhere--on, not back--in turns to temporality, to the vernacular, and to devices not so much for re-presenting as for presenting the ambiguity of immediacy and simultaneity in the multidimensional quality of consciousness that both constitutes and is constituted by activity. Far from describing a situational or any other determination prior to action, Charles T aylor has argued that as practice this "engages my whole self in a way that judging by a yardstick does not,"²⁶ that it is in fact more open, and uncertain rather than contingent. Seeing this early, Weber deserves to be the touchstone for post-modernism in the social sciences; his own practice already opposed description to categorization, temporality and the vernacular to system and analytically privileged points of view. My own view is, if not exactly cautious like Weber's, then certainly conservative. Pos t-modernism and post-structuralist method have roots in modernism and in structuralist method: they begin as changes in, rather than as breaks with, modernism and structuralist method; as additions to those,²⁷ they proceed to recover a sense for movement with which modernism began by focusing on its devices. If the synthesis to which I think post-structuralist methods point seems inconclusive, I would suggest that in part this is because it is still emerging in the ways it leaves behind both mechanism in conceiving of society and biologism in conceiving of individuals, after these methods had passed from being hopeful Enlightenment philosophies into mere doleful common sense.

1. Amelie Oksenberg Ro rty, "A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals," in The Identities of Persons, A.O. Rorty, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 301.

3. Marcel Ma uss, "Une catégorie de l'ésprit humain: la notion de person, celle de `moi'," in Sociologie et Anthropologie, edited with an introduction by Claude Lévi-S trauss (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), p. 362.

4. Michel Fouc ault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970).

5. Max We ber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribners, 1958 [orig. 1904-5]), p. 181.

7. "`Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy," in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward A. Sh ils & Henry A. Fi nch (New York: The Free Press, 1949 [orig. 1904]).

8. Marshall Sa hlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 95.

9. Claude Lév i-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. Introduction to the Science of Mythodology, Vol. 1 (New York: Harper, 1969), p. 13. Compare: The Naked Man. Introduction to the Science of Mythodology, Vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1981), "Finale."

10. E.g., Dennis Wro ng, "The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology," American Sociological Review, 26 (1961), 183-193.

11. E.B. Ty lor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871),

12. Emile D urkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965 [orig. 1915]), p. 298.

13. E.g., Ruth Ben edict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1934).

14. Hérve Vare nne, "Collective Representations in American Anthropological Conversations," Current Anthropology, 25 (1984), 281-299.

15. The concept of operators that link systems of signification is adumbrated in Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 20ff; for a further elaboration, see James A. B oon, "Further Operations on Culture in Anthropology," in The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences, L. Schneider and C. Bonjean, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 1-32.

16. Dell H ymes, "Breakthrough into Performance," in Folklore: Performance and Communication, D. Ben- Amos & K. Gold stein, eds. (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 11-74.

17. Hyme's list is elaborated in more formal detail in, e.g., Richard Bau man, "Verbal Art as Performance," American Anthropologist, 77 (1975), 290-311.

18. George H. M ead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); Herbert Blu mer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspectives and Method (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969); Erving Go ffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959); Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). This perspective also spawned the enthnomethodology of Harold Gar finkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967) and the cognitive sociology of Aaron Cico urel, Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction (New York: Free Press, 1974).

19. Michael Silve rstein, "Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description," in Meaning in Anthropology, Keith H. Ba sso & Henry A. S elby, eds. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), pp. 11-56.

20. The concept was originally coined by Roman Jak obson for how pronouns point to subjects and objects. Silverstein broadens that usage beyond dialectic function.

21. Anthony Gi ddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

22. Pierre Bou rdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

23. See Stephen A. T yler, The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Post-Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

24. E.g., Ivan Ka rp's sustained attention to activities that exemplify problematic simultaneities of social life in "Beer-Drinking and Social Experience in African Society: An Essay in Formal Sociology," in Explorations in African Systems of Thought, Ivan Ka rp and Charles S. B ird, eds. (2nd Edition; Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), pp. 83-119; T.M.S. E ven's development of E.E. Evans-Pritch ard's notion of ideas imprisoned in action in "Mind, Logic and the Efficacy of the Nuer Incest Prohibition," Man, (n.s.) 18 (1983), 111-133; also, Frank Dub inskas and Sharon Tra week, "Closer to the Ground: a Reinterpretation of Walbiri Iconography," Man, (n.s.) 19 (1984), 15-30.

25. Amelie O. Ro rty, ed., The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); John R awls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Michael Carrith ers, et al., The Category of the Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Charles Cur ran, "Catholic Social Ethics: A New Approach?" The Clergy Review, 70 (1985), 2-3.

26. Charles Ta ylor, "Responsibility for Self," in The Identities of Persons, A.O. Rorty, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 298.

27. For example, in Rodney Ne edham's essays Against the Tranquility of Axioms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); T.O. Bei delman, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).