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Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History Theory in Anthropology: Small is Beautiful? The Problem of Complex Cultures Author(s): Ulf Hannerz Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 1986), pp. 362-367 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178977 . Accessed: 11/02/2014 01:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Cambridge University Press and Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Studies in Society and History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 141.213.236.110 on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 01:26:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Theory in Anthropology: Small Is Beautiful? The Problem of Complex Cultures' ULF HANNERZ University of Stockholm The recenthistoryof anthropologicalthought, SherryOrtnerhas shown us in her enlightening overview, has included the development of symbolic anthropology, cultural ecology, and structuralismin the 1960s; a Marxist (or Marxizing)structuralismand political economy in the 1970s;and an emergent concern with "practice" in the early 1980s. More in passing, we can also catch an occasional glimpse in Ortner'sarticle of the ethnographicmaterials that have helped anthropologistsfashion theory duringthis twenty-yearperiod: New Guinea pig slaughters, South American myths aboutjaguars, Balinese conceptsof time, the arrivalof CaptainCook in Hawaii. Exotic stuff all, for a largely Westernaudience. But where are the least-understoodcultures now'?In Lagos or Paris, San Francisco or Bombay, cities with slums and skyscrapers,places at least as likely as Oceaniaor the Amazon. They are the culturesof cities, nations, and the world system, ratherthan of villages or bands. To recognize this is to acknowledge what anthropologyhas accomplished in its traditionalfields. But it also goes to say that a considerablepart of the unfinishedbusiness of anthropologyinvolves developing a coherent theoreticalstance towardcomplex cultures. I am concerned here especially with culturaltheory, with ways of understandingsystems of meaning-the kind of effort most unambiguouslyassociated, among the theoretical tendencies discussed by Ortner, with symbolic anthropology. So I do not use the terms complex culture and complex society interchangeably.Whateverweaknesses the anthropologyof complex societies still may have, there has at least been more work on the nature of social The point of view expressed here will be furtherelaboratedelsewhere. These comments were preparedwhile the author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford,California. I am grateful for financial supportprovidedby the Tercentenary Fund of the Bank of Sweden and by the National Science Foundation(United States) (BNS 8011494). l Comments inspired by Sherry B. Ortner's article, "Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties," ComparativeStudies in Society and History, 26:1 (1984), 126-66. 0010-4175/86/6109-0010 $2.50 ? 1986 Society for ComparativeStudy of Society and History 362 This content downloaded from 141.213.236.110 on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 01:26:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THEORY IN ANTHROPOLOGY 363 relationsin them than on their orders of ideas. A culturaltheory adequateto the task of understandingcomplex cultures must be able to deal with the fact thatthe division of laboris in large parta division of knowledge, makingvery problematicthe notion thatcultureis by definitionshared. It should illuminate the shifting and often contested boundariesbetween domainsof expertise and common sense. It should help us see in all their haziness the views people have of other people's views, and offer some indicationof the significance of that metaculturalsensibility which may build up when people are aware of culturalalternatives.For a last example, it should offer some insight into what happens when the connection between culture and locality is attenuated,so that someone may be more linked through his ideas to an individual living thousandsof miles away than he is to his neighbor next door. Why anthropologicaltheory has until now done so little that is useful for such purposes is something which Ortner's article goes some way toward explaining-sometimes straightforwardly,at times obliquely. The cluster of issues that I will comment on here, with Ortner's discussion as a point of departure,includes the difficulty anthropologistshave had in giving a balanced attention to culture and to social structure;the relationshipbetween actor and system, and between micro and macro levels in analysis; and our shifting understandingsof what anthropologyis really about. The last question is one about which Ortnerin fact says little explicitly, but it is the one with which I will begin. Anthropologyhas always been, if not unique, then at least unusualamong the human sciences in not concentrating most of its attention on Western society. Since it became politically and intellectually unfashionable, and in fact no longer true, to say that its field of study is non-Westernor even primitivesocieties, there may have been two majorways of characterizingthe anthropologicalenterprise. One has been to say that anthropology is concerned with "the Other", the culturallydifferent. The second is to propose, more prosaically, that anthropologytries to build a comparativeunderstanding of humanways of life and thought. It may seem that the two formulations amountto much the same thing, but I do not think this is quite true. Ortnermay come closest to the first of these views, as she suggests thatthe distinctive contributionof anthropologyto the humansciences is the attempt to "take the perspectiveof the folks on the shore." Indeed, she observes that the ability to see otherness becomes even more important as more anthropologists do their field work in Western societies. This concern with othernessand difference is a majorintellectualresourceof anthropology.Yet I think that some of its value is lost when it turns into a more exclusive concernwith the most other. I preferan anthropologythatexamines the entire spectrumof variationsbetween most otherand self, deliberatelyavailing itself of opportunitiesto learn from contrastsbetween them as well as interactions among them. This content downloaded from 141.213.236.110 on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 01:26:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 364 ULF HANNERZ When the concern with othernesscomes to dominateanthropology,it turns away from the large-scale, complex Westernsocieties in which it is, after all, intellectually rooted. And it turns to what is not only geographically and culturallymost distantbut also to the organizationallymost different. Consequently, small is beautiful. The anthropologyof the Otherthrives in the local communitywhere the division of labor is strictly limited, where there is little diversity of experience, and where social contacts are face-to-face, with meaningscarriedby body movements and spoken words, or by song, dance, and ritual. The particulartheoretical problems involving large-scale, high degrees of organizationalcomplexity and variedtechnologies of intellect and communicationare, conversely, low-priorityconcerns for this anthropology. It flirts with them, in occasionally expounding on the view from Bongo Bongo towardmodernsociety, but this seldom results in any serious engagement. For culturaltheory, this may have particularlysignificantimplications.The several recent tendencies in anthropologicalthought have differed in their backgroundassumptionsconcerningthe natureof anthropology,but I suspect thatthe anthropologistsconcernedwith systems of meaninghave been particularlyapt to become preoccupiedwith otherness, with graspingalien perspectives. And from this it follows thattheir biases of attentionwill be incorporated into culturaltheory. Of the remaining theoretical strands identified by Ortner, the one least concerned with otherness, and most immediately engaged in developing a view of all human societies within one theoreticalframework,is that of the political economists. These, however, Ortnersuggests, have often been "too economic, too strictly materialist," not even political enough. At least in an early period, certainly, few of them showed any real interest in systems of ideas and symbols. So we have here the problemof attendingat the same time to the structureof social relations and to culture. While symbolic anthropology and cultural ecology in Ortner'sjudgment have both been lacking in systematic sociology, the theoreticaltendencies that emerged later may have done better in this respect-but at the expense of an understandingof the subtle and manifolddimensions of meaning systems. The structuralMarxists have shrunk the culture concept to ideology. The growing number of adherentsto conceptualizationsof practice may not make much of any distinction between the social and the cultural, but in fact rathersimilarly concentrate on how ideas serve the political animal in strategies and structuresof dominationand resistance. If we count the political economists among the one-worlders of anthropology, structuralMarxists are again more concerned with otherness. In no small part, as Ortnersuggests, their enterprisehas been to rethinkclassic Britishsocial anthropology.With regardto those for whompractice is the key word, it is not yet so easy to discern whetherthey have any sharedvision of This content downloaded from 141.213.236.110 on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 01:26:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THEORY IN ANTHROPOLOGY 365 the properobject of anthropology.As the works of Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and RaymondWilliams appearagain and again as major references, however, it may be that the concern with the Other matters less here. What these thinkers have in common is certainly not a concern with the exotic. Ortneralso notes the affinity between the practice points of view and earlier anthropologicalconceptions of the place of choice and decision making in social life. We should remember here that such interests have been conspicuous in the development of the anthropologyof complex societies, where they have been expressed not least in studies of entrepreneurs,brokers, and the active manipulationof networks. If practiceis not remarkablyconcernedwith the Other, however, it may be another kind of celebration of "small is beautiful" when it tends toward actor-centeredness. (Agent, individual, self, action, experience, performance, all have the sound, in these 1980s, of the vocabulary of a yuppie anthropology.)Actor-centeredness,of course, can become anothermeans of avoidingthe intellectualconfrontationwith problemsof scale and complexity. Such avoidance takes many forms. Life histories or analyses of particular institutionsare examples of genres of anthropologicalwritingthat select convenient ethnographicslices from an often vaguely conceived societal whole. Studiesof subculturesoften similarlymanageto ignore the significance of the prefix by giving only minimalconsiderationto their embeddednessin a wider system. In other words, we tend to get microanthropologiesand macroanthropologies: anthropologiesconcernedwith actor strategiesand personalexperiences, and anthropologiesconcerned with the working of whole social and cultural systems. And practically the normal state of affairs seems to be a failure to bridge the gap between them, a failure that becomes more conspicuous the more complex are the wider units involved. Among recenttheoreticaltendencies, culturalecology, political economy, and structuralMarxism are more clearly macroanthropologies.Ortnerpoints to some of the problemsinvolved in relatingactor to system in the analysis of practice. Symbolic anthropology certainly at times aspires to be a macroanthropology,but it does so most successfully when the societies dealt with are themselves small scale and relatively homogeneous, when the weakness of its sociology is least glaring. And it is noteworthy that a possible convergence between symbolic and cognitive anthropology has recently been described as resulting in a microanthropology. On the basis of this extremely rough characterizationof some dimensions of recent varieties of anthropological theory, what can we say about the chances of a more satisfactorytheoreticalunderstandingof complex cultures, as forms of the social organizationof meaning?It appearsthat neitherof these orientationshas all the featuresthatare requiredfor the task:an understanding of anthropologyas concerned with the comparativestudy of all humanforms This content downloaded from 141.213.236.110 on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 01:26:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 366 ULF HANNERZ of life, ratherthanjust the Other;an intensive engagementwith the study of systems of meaning that has at the same time a strong sense of social structure; and clear macroanthropologicalambitions coupled with an active concern with the problems of deriving macro-level conceptualizations from micro-level phenomenaof great diversity. On the other hand, this adequate theoreticalstancetowardcomplex culturesseems to requirenothingthat is not in one way or anotherpresent in currentanthropologicalconcerns or conceptions of the discipline. The elements would only have to be assembled in a differentway: the emphasis on meaning from symbolic anthropology,a systems view from culturalecology, the view of the world as one from political economy, and so on. Reflectingon Ortner'sreview of theory, I am also promptedto commenton changingalignmentsof interdisciplinarity.The variousrecent theoreticaltendencies have all had their outside connections with different -ologies and -isms, at the same time in some way retaininga distinctive anthropological characterand thereby making their own contributionswithin the intellectual division of labor. The reluctance to move toward a systematic engagement with complex cultureis undoubtedlyoften based on a feeling that this field is really already crowded, that there is nothing in particularthat anthropology could add to its illumination.I do not believe this assumptionis quite valid. If we see anthropologyas detailed ethnographycombined with the theoretical aim of understandingwhole systems, there may still be an identifiably anthropologicalview of complex cultures. At the same time, there are openings for new dialogues. It is noteworthy that even in those theoreticalorientationswhere there has been a more sustained concern with the structureof social relations, the links with academic sociology, going beyond the classics, have mostly remainedweak. There may be reasons to regret this. As far as culturaltheory is concerned, it is not that the sociologists already have a developed understandingof complex culture. The sociology of culture seems itself to be in a formative stage now, partly through a convergence of sociologies of art, literature, science, and other subfields. There is hardlya conception of the over-all organizationof culture within differentiatedsocial systems, such as anthropologists(one hopes) may want to look for. On the whole, also, even the sociologists of culture have worried less about problems of meaning as such than have, for example, symbolic anthropologists. But they have much to say about the conditions especially for the more deliberateproductionof culture, and aboutthe organizationalforms which carryit. To arriveat a comprehensivedistributivemodel of culture, furthermore,anthropologistsought to pay more attentionto the sociology of knowledge, in several of its varieties. When Karl Mannheim made "perspectives" a central concept for the sociology of knowledge in Ideology and Utopia, he emphasized that it would offer a richerview of the links between ideas and social involvements than the preoccupationwith This content downloaded from 141.213.236.110 on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 01:26:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THEORY IN ANTHROPOLOGY 367 ideology had done. And a sophisticated conception of perspectives and their interactions in cultural process may yield the best understanding of complex cultures we can get. In addition, an anthropology of complex cultures, involving not least a study of the interpenetration between more self-conscious and reflexive modes of thought and the cultures of everyday life, must have much in common with intellectual history, itself increasingly aware of anthropological concepts and styles of analysis. This would be an aspect of the general anthropological turn to history-a realization that seventeenth-century New England and fin-de-siecle Vienna have much to teach us about the continuous shaping of systems of meaning. Finally, there is the field of media studies, often much too segregated from a general understanding of culture. Because so much of anthropological theory is based on the experience of face-to-face community life, even the anthropology of literacy still remains on the outskirts of the discipline. Gutenberg and Marconi, William Randolph Hearst, and Alan Turing have yet to affect the anthropological view of the world significantly. As for media studies, they tend to view each medium separately, in terms of its possible implications or real effects; and the media theorists that appeal most to the public imagination are often those who make the most exaggerated claims of techmedium is the message." A satisfactory study nological determinism-"the of media in culture would entail an analysis of the interplay between the form, content, and social context of media, and the relationships within the entire assemblage of media that occurs in a society, or in different parts of a society. There is more to this, also, than just the debate about the stratification of culture into "high" culture, "popular" culture, and the like, with which media studies have perhaps also become too closely identified. The way people think now, in much of the world, is shaped by books, postcards, telenovelas, and the evening news, as well as by the words and gestures of their immediate surroundings. If anthropology is to understand the complex cultures that are now almost everywhere, this fact also must inform theory during the next decades. This content downloaded from 141.213.236.110 on Tue, 11 Feb 2014 01:26:50 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions