The reality of society

The reality of society

Week 1: Why do we need anthropology? / Economic rationality and the reality of society

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/1.2

Main reading: Marx ([1843a] 1978)

What is anthropology

Is anthropology different from other social sciences?

Anthropology is not the solution to anyone’s problems

Anthropologists are not experts. They are the enemy of expertise.

If the world’s biggest problems are truly global, then they affect everyone. But they affect everyone differently, because everyone is different and everyone is in a different situation.

Anthropologists employ an ethnographic imagination. To learn about any social situation or experience, we have to un-learn our own preconceived ideas from our own social and cultural backgrounds.

We assume that

• we don’t know everything,
• other people know things we don’t, and see things from their own perspectives, and
• we can see things from another perspective if we are willing to learn

For that reason, anthropology is an exercise in hope.

Anthropology in an unequal world

Anthropology is not naive. The world is FUBAR.

The world today is very unequal in several respects. It may seem like this a permanent reality.

Do you agree? What’s an example of inequality that you think is important.

As if

A theme that runs through many of the topics this semester is that societies are based on fictions. Members of a society live as if their shared fiction is true.

This class today is based on a fiction:

• We all act as if you are students, and I am the teacher.
• We act as if this room is a lecture hall.
• We act as if “Australia” is a nation.

Together, without knowing it or consciously agreeing to it, we “dogmatically prefigure” the world in which we live together (Marx [1843a] 1978, 13).

Let’s pretend

Every person who has ever lived, was also a member of a larger community and participated in its specific order, even before they were born.

There is no outside of a society. It is the unstated background to every moment of everyday life, like water for a fish.

Living in the contemporary world means living according to the “let’s pretend” game of one society that has been imposed on everyone else.

• We are members of one community
• but we are taught also to live as if we were individual actors who make choices based on economic rationality:
  • what gets me the most in return for the least amount of effort or expenditure of my resources.

This game of as-if was also identified by Marx, who said that the bourgeois class (the owners of capital, property, and wealth) imposes its culture of individualism on everyone else.

• Robinson Crusoe is a fiction but we all have to live as if this fiction from bourgeois culture is true (Marx [1843b] 1978, 222).

Anthropologists ask ‘what if?’

Anthropology can reveal the fictions of a society, including those of the anthropologist.

Anthropologists always begin by saying, “What I learned is based on a fiction. I have to forget everything I learned.”

I grew up in a society in which I learned that each person is a rational actor, and applies economic rationality to every decision:

• They each consciously consider the costs and the benefits.
• They choose the option that gives them the most in return for the least expenditure.

This is a fiction of my society.

• If I want to study how an economic system works, I have to forget everything I learned about the economy from my own life.
• I have to listen to people who are part of the community I want to understand. I have to learn from them how they see the world.

Each society is based on an “as if.” Anthropologists ask “what if.”

Societies are collective phenomena

While anthropologists have many different ways to define society and “the social,” they all have something in common:

• There is no such thing as a society of one. Societies are collectives.

Emile Durkheim is a founding figure of sociology and anthropology

• Prior to Durkheim’s idea of a social science, people thought about society and its order as a question of what should be, that is, as a question of right and wrong.
• Durkheim proposes that we should ask instead what is and why.
• Durkheim states that a society is sui generis—it causes itself (Durkheim [1895] 1982, 144)
• For the same reason, Durkheim states that a society is a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts.
• To study any one thing that people do or experience, we have to see it as part of a larger whole: This is a perspective of holism.

Durkheim’s metaphors of society

If society is a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts, and we’re the parts, then it is an abstract reality that is hard to grasp. You can’t actually see or touch the whole.

Durkheim uses many metaphors to convey his sense of the social

• Society is a machine, and its elements fit together like gears (Durkheim [1895] 1982, 123).
• Society is a body, with distinct organs that are also interdependent (Durkheim [1895] 1982, 121)
• Society is a collective consciousness, a big brain that thinks for each member of society (Durkheim [1895] 1982, 238).
  • We aren’t aware of the thoughts that the big collective social brain thinks. To us, they are our reality. We act as if the thoughts of the collective consciousness are facts.

The contemporary world is one in which one group’s collective consciousness and its fictions dominate the lives of everyone else.

Next week we will use ideas drawn from Durkheim to critique the fictions of capitalism.

References and further reading

Durkheim, Emile. (1895) 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method. Edited by Steven Lukes. London: The Macmillan Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16939-9.

Marx, Karl. (1843a) 1978. “For a ruthless criticism of everything existing.” In The Marx-Engels reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 12–15. New York: Norton. http://archive.org/details/marxengelsreader00tuck.

———. (1843b) 1978. “The Grundrisse.” In The Marx-Engels reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 221–93. New York: Norton. http://archive.org/details/marxengelsreader00tuck.