If we follow the Durkheimian conception, then, society confronts us as an objective facticity. It is there, something that cannot be denied and must be reckoned with. Society is external to ourselves. It surrounds us, encompasses our life on all sides. We are in society, located in specific sectors of the social system. This location predetermines and predefines almost everything we do, from language to etiquette, from the religious beliefs we hold to the probability that we will commit suicide. . . . Society, as objective and external fact, confronts us especially in the form of coercion. Its institutions pattern our actions and shape our expectations. . . . If we step out of these assignments, society has at its disposal an almost infinite variety of controlling and coercing agencies. . . . Finally, we are located in society not only in space but in time. Our society is a historical entity that extends temporally beyond any individual biography. . . . It was there before we were born and it will be there after we are dead. Our lives are but episodes in its majestic march through history. In sum, society is the walls of our imprisonment in history. (1963: 91–92)
In this theoretical universe, “culture”—that is to say, society’s meaningful aspect—is an ideational prison with walls so high that the prisoners (all of us, save perhaps the anthropologists themselves) mistake them for the boundaries of the world.
It is true that Clifford Geertz, the towering figure in interpretive anthropology, emphasizes his Weberian (rather than Durkheimian) treatment of culture. Weber emphasized, as does Geertz, the overwhelming importance of meaning-making for human beings. But Weber made substantial space for human agency, for psychological motivation, and for the innovations of historical figures, whereas, despite hesitations and equivocations, Geertz’s most famous analyses reject explicit forays into psychology and provide accounts of culture as “objective facticity.” Culture becomes a dimension of the social. Expressed in language, encoded in symbols, enacted in rituals, enforced in coercive practices, culture for many, perhaps most, interpretive anthropologists ultimately seems to impress itself upon waxlike individual minds, a scenario thoroughly compatible with Durkheim’s vision.
Deviants and dissenters aside, individuals are thus under the sway of culture, as they are under the sway of other social facts. Deviation, dissent, and resistance are, of course, second-order social facts, since divergence from social norms and social consensus is a relative concept. The main explanation offered for divergence is one’s adherence to the alternative meaning frame of a “specific sector of the social system” (a sub group defined by coordinates such as gender, race, ethnicity, and so on). Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing argue that such explanations “sanitize” diversity. “It is not the individuals who are diverse,” they write, “so much as the working parts of the complex social systems of which they are components and conduits . . . Diversity becomes . . . a triumph of cultural order (2000a: 194).” The scheme replicates determinism at the level of subgroups, preserving intact the empire of the social.
The Urtext that illustrates the pervasiveness of social control is Durkheim’s book on the causes of that seemingly most private act, suicide (1951 [1897]). A collectivist society that cultivates notions of sacrifice for the common good encourages altruistic suicide. An individualist society that subjects people to feelings of unbearable personal responsibility and guilt encourages egoistic suicide. And a society in which social norms are confusing or in flux gives rise to anomic suicide.7 From Suicide it is not that far, in theory or rhetoric, to Michel Foucault’s famous first volume of The History of Sexuality (1990 [1976]), in which the intimacies of sex and pleasure decidedly take a back seat to the power-infused, historically changing public discourses that profoundly shape (and even conjure?) them. Here, society’s temporal dimension is emphasized: Foucault lays bare, in Berger’s words, the “walls of our imprisonment in history.”
Society thus conceived is, understandably, rarely seen in neutral terms, despite the original scientific pretensions of Durkheimian sociology and the morally relativist pretensions of later theory. Society is prized, a thing to be nourished and cultivated as an antidote to disorientation and egoism, by those who revere community; it is viewed as a menace to be reviled and resisted by those suspicious of power and alert to mystification; and it evokes something like awe in those who see its “majestic march” as a pervasive and irresistible mana-like force. The term catalyzes the most varied, contradictory moral and political discourses. Though the alternative model I forward has ethical implications, I do not wish to make society its ideal, its bete noire, or its God.
If society and history are ultimate realities, “the individual” is by contrast a shadow. In classic Durkheimian theory, discrete living persons— you and I—become individuals. The individual is a monad: an anonymous unit among many identical units. It is easier to say what the individual is not than what it is. Internal structure seems lacking in the individual, which is conventionally treated as a fundamental particle, whose own biographical past and internal workings, whatever they might be, are socially irrelevant.8 Much less does the individual have “individuality,” the innate faculty of human consciousness (Rapport and Overing 2000a: 185).9 Seen through the single lens of Durkheimian theory, then, the individual is not unique, not psychologically complex, not the product of a developmental process, and, it would appear, not even conscious.
So far as I can tell, no one believes this image to be accurate, least of all as a self-description. But it is nevertheless the generative conceit underwriting a galaxy of prominent, far-reaching social theories.
Post-Durkheimian Anthropology
Durkheimian theory has been extraordinarily influential, giving rise to innumerable variants and refinements over the last century. Among them, I have suggested, is interpretive anthropology, which arose in the mid-twentieth century and continues to flourish. More recently, some post-Durkheimian theorists have responded to Durkheim’s capitalization of the social not by righting the model’s foundations but by tilting them even more strongly toward social determinism, in its discursivist version. Postmodern (or postructuralist) theory, for example, sets itself against the holistic and synchronic tendencies of both traditional sociology and interpretive anthropology by emphasizing the multiplicity, historicity, and power of discursive formations. In the most extreme discursivist approaches, persons are either invisible (because irrelevant) or else epiphenomenal to “history,” which, like “society,” often enters accounts as a hypostatized supra-human entity. Sometimes, as in Foucault’s book on discourses of sexuality, such accounts verge on social monism, swallowing whole the Durkheimian distinction between society and the individual.10
The epidemic use of the word “discourse” in cultural anthropology is, outside the circles of the linguists, fairly recent, dating mostly from the publication of Foucault’s works in English in the seventies and eighties. But there are anthropological antecedents for discursivism’s core claim that representational frameworks have subtle and thoroughgoing constitutive effects on human beings themselves. A version of social monism surfaces, for example, in the work of Louis Dumont (1980 [1966]), a distinguished ethnographer of India, acknowledged intellectual heir to Durkheim, and poststructuralist avant la lettre. For Dumont, the distinction between “society” and “the individual” is a false dichotomy, because “the individual” is itself a modern Western construct. “Traditional societies [such as India],” he writes, “which know nothing of equality and liberty as values, which know nothing, in short, of the individual, have basically a collective idea of man” (8).11 That is, “the individual” is a Western discursive effect, not a substantive entity in its own right. Dumont’s point echoes through any number of works arguing that contemporary Euro-American society mystifies its control through the paradox of individualism. In declaring people “individuals,” Protestantism, or the Enlightenment, or Western culture, or modernity (take your pick) created a phantom zone of personal autonomy. One might say that modern Western society granted the individual an irresistible illusion of freedom, perhaps even of existence.12
Some
