This is a development on a series of blogs on what Ray McDermott once called “reply anthropology”
For some years, I have started the required initial course in a doctoral student’s career in the Programs in Anthropology at Teachers College, by asking them what is the concern that drives them and what is the audience they wish to reach. As I have thought further about it recently, this request fits within my interest in reconstructing “culture” not only as a produced state in history (the houses we inhabit) but as a producing moment in a long sequence of statements/actions triggered by earlier ones (that may be institutionalized as a state).
In other words, as Master to apprentice doctoral students, I consider it my task to help then craft (construct, write, say, [choose your verb]) a NEXT statement in the various conversations within which they will be caught (or into which they will crash). The one statement I am particularly responsible for is the crafting of their research (in proposals or dissertations) as contributions within the decades (indeed centuries) of anthropological debates so that 1) they can be heard 2) they move the conversation forward, and, 3) they do not reproduce, unwittingly, earlier statements that we hopefully buried but sometimes re-emerge under new guises (e.g. “culture of poverty”).
To think through the implications of this stance, it makes sense to generalize what conversational analysts have taught us over the past half-century. For example, take “inequality”—a classic concern in the literature and one about all students come with. Take Rousseau on the matter who presented the concern as a universal one. Three centuries later Graeber and Wengrow (2021) present it as a particularly “Western” (18th century and beyond European then American) one that puzzled some among the Wendat Confederacy as they started interacting, or as I would now say, conversing with the Europeans invading their lands. (See also Dumont [1961] 1980).
What is one now to do with, that is respond to, the various challenges? An initial response is the polite, and somewhat condescending, common framing of some ancestor as “a person of their time.” Rousseau is collectively known as one of the oldest ancestor of the current social sciences (Durkheim [1918] 1960, Lévi-Strauss [1962] 1976). Durkheim stressed Rousseau taking on Hobbes on the foundations of society. Lévi-Strauss stresses Rousseau’s responding to Descartes on his centering on his own thinking, rather than taking into account the multiplicity of ways to be human that delighted Lévi-Strauss. Neither Durkheim nor Lévi-Strauss picked on the future of Rousseau in politics.
Recently, G&W acknowledged this and attempted to re-place him as one of the many who misled the social sciences, and particularly anthropology. G&W attempt a new NEXT to stress aspects of the overall human record otherwise obscured. Rousseau’s own NEXT is, famously, summarized in the first sentence in his Discourse on the origin of inequality: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”W&G pick up on what they call Rousseau’s myth of the “stupid savage” (2021: 73) in which they the find a prestatement of the European 19th century justification for colonization. Arguably, this myth, rewritten many times, is behind all “development” schemes of the 20th century.
Some will see here a prefiguration of Marx against private property. I find it redolent of “culture of poverty” as it tars the other people around the first man as “simple” (naive, ignorant, primitive, underdeveloped…). Others have seen him as encouraging the worst aspects of several revolutions.
Was Rousseau (Marx, Durkheim, W&G) a “man of his time”? Of course (what other time would he be of?)! But… he was also a “man against his time.” Strictly speaking he was a man writing something in response to a question asked by the very established Académie de Dijon “whether the reestablishment of the sciences and the arts contributed to purifying morals.” Rousseau’s response displaces the topic and opens the way both to political and analytic developments. Subsequent revolutions and theories of social structure themselves transformed further responses in conversations that are continuing. Such statements are made in a certain times but those that we remember construct a new time when, as Lévi-Strauss once put it “individual works … are adopted on a collective mode” (1971: 560). Or, to translate this into a generalized form of conversational analysis, “a statement by one speaker responding to an earlier statement moves a conversation if it is picked up by another speaker.” Of all those who responded to the question asked by the Académie de Dijon only one is remembered and his discourse is now “myth” in the strongest form of the word.
So, the “time” (culture, identity, habitus) provide the material (intellectual, institutional, and material) and, to use a word I am now appropriating by generalizing it, “triggers” some NEXT statement. But the “time” does not shape the statement into itself for the statement can change, however locally, the “time.” When Rousseau died in 1778, the world of 18th century Europe was not the world of his birth in 1712, as he, and quite a few others (Hobbes, Hume, the Iroquois, various kings, dukes and princesses, etc.), had responded to the challenges other put to them. This NEXT world answered by waging various revolutions (in the Americas and Europe) and wars (Hobbes, Hume, the Iroquois, various kings, dukes and princesses, etc.) that triggered further developments, up to this day.
Let’s formalize this further by looking again at what should now be a classic ethnographic case: Goodwin series of article on “Chil,” a man with severe aphasia (2002, 2003, 2004, 2010). In summary, the series, building on Goodwin’s earlier work in conversational analysis, is ostensibly about constructing or accomplishing “sense” or “meaning” as a joint activity. This happens as “Chil’s action is deeply indexical in that it emerges within a sequential context that provides strong projections about what a move he might make there will be concerned with.” (2004: 60). The emphasis is on the sequence of turns (moves, statements) in a conversation which produces what any turn “means’ and what the whole conversation (or part of it) might be “about.” Goodwin emphasizes the complexity of maintaining a conversational order by various means, many not syntactic, to confirm that a statement (turn) has done something opening the way for a NEXT statement answering a possibility within the first. In the usual words the “meaning” of the initial statement is confirmed by the “meaning” of the next statement, this being confirmed by what happens in the third statement (which can either be a “OK, you got it” or “this is not what I meant.” In the Chil series Goodwin documents how Chil and his interlocutors accomplished various things, from telling stories, to joking, to explaining why oranges cannot be taken from California to Florida. While the last episode is from an unpublished paper, it involves the specific “doing” of something: Chil refuses the gift of an orange and explains why the gift should not be accepted. The issue here then is not just “meaning” but “action”: conversations, like speech, “act.” And by acting they may not only restore a threatened order, or make it even more ordered (“islanding”), but conversations can also lead the assembled interlocutors (even those who may not have been directly involved) onto paths not until then explored.
(Note that I am not talking here about the recent cliches that invoke “starting a national conversation about [race, gender, etc.]”—unless one considered that most of those have actually been going on for generations and may not take those caught with them some of them might want to go)
References
Dumont, Louis 1980 “Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification’.” .
Durkheim, Emile 1960 Montesquieu and Rousseau Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
Goodwin, Charles 2004 “A Competent Speaker Who Can’t Speak: The Social Life of Aphasia.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 14, 2: 151-170.
Goodwin, Charles 2010 “Constructing Meaning through Prosody in Aphasia.” In Prosody in interaction. Edited by D. Barth-Weingarten, E. Reber, and M. Selting. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 373-394.
Goodwin, Charles 2003 Conversational frameworks for the accomplishment of meaning in aphasis In Conversation and brain damage. Edited by Charles Goodwin. Oxford University Press. pp. 90-116.
Goodwin, Charles, and M. Goodwin and D. Olsher 2002 Producing sense with nonsense syllables: Turn and sequence in conversations with a man with severe aphasia In The language of turn and sequence. Edited by C. Ford, B. Fox, and S. Thompson. New York: Oxford Academic. pp. 56-80.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow 2021 The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1976 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, founder of the sciences of man .
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1981 The naked man New York: Harper & Row.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1997 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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