Week 5—Doing being, embodying structure, and the practice of social norms

Week 5—Doing being, embodying structure, and the practice of social norms

Main reading: Prentice (2015)

Other reading: Ortner (2006); Ortner (1984); Bourdieu (1990)

Homo duplex has never been the only option.

If Durkheim’s premise, like Saussure’s, is that each individual person is a split subject (a member of homo duplex), the Marx’s concept of the human subject is that the individual is homo faber (the making, laboring, productive subject). It is through the interaction with the material world to obtain and exploit its resources that a person realizes themselves as a being, and in cooperation with others to get food and valuable things that societies form. Wolf and the Comaroffs use the idea of homo faber and a materialist theory of social life to argue against the Durkheimian social subject and the idea of societies as discrete totalities.

What if you had a social system, and nobody came?

Any social order ultimately needs people to actually perform the actions that make society possible.

Another tradition of thought starts with this problem. It rejects the idea that the social subject is split. Instead it argues that the most important thing about the human subject is that it is always thinking, and societies are people as individuals thinking together. Moreover, in this tradition, explanations of society should come from the bottom up, starting with how things look from the individual subject’s first-person point of view, and not from the top down as Durkheim wants.

• Durkheim represents what we may call methodological holism.
  • We are only interested in the hive mind, not the other, separate part of a subject’s mind where they experience the world as an individual.
  • We look only at the whole system as an integrated totality, just as Saussure says language needs to be seen as a closed economy of signs.
• The alternative¹⁾ is methodological individualism.
  • Social life, and whole societies, are the outcome of many different social actions, performed ultimately by individuals who choose to act, and make choices based on what these actions mean to them subjectively.

Anthropology may have drawn a lot of inspiration from Durkheimian and Saussurean holism, but many people have said we need to also look at individuals’ actions from the bottom up too, because holism gives us an incomplete picture.

This has come up again and again in anthropology. Ortner (1984) provides a classic paper with a quick and dirty history of this debate. Today, thanks to Ortner in fact, the idea of studying practice is a shorthand for this general skepticism about holism. This is argument for seeing societies as they are lived and actually carried out, and that means also seeing society from the perspective of its subjects.

But the idea of practice is not so simple. Yes, people do have agency. Anybody can do whatever they want. Social rules aren’t actually objective things. We just act as if they are. (Remember as if, ANTH 1002 students? Good times.) Yet, if you think about it, what good is agency? We can all declare ourselves an independant country right now (Cohen and Gershon 2024). Did it work? No. So there has to be a more complex account of the role of agency. People don’t pick their parents, and they don’t pick their societies.

Reconciling holism and individualism as methodological perspectives is what Pierre Bourdieu sets out to do in his theory of social life as practices. He sees individual action as an important force in society, but he conceptualizes it in a new and counterintuitive way. He would argue that we embody society. We exist as social subject because we have a body, live in a body, and need to rely on social forces to learn how to use our bodies. This leads him to the idea of a habitus, and in anthropology today most conceptions of action and agency are based on a concept of a habitus. People act, and their actions have consequences because of how they have been trained to act. In that sense, agency is not free will or choice. It is part of an ongoing cycle between social forces and individual experiences. (And as we will see in future weeks, Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus is not the only one.)

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. “Structures, Habitus, Practices.” In The Logic of Practice, 52–65. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Cohen, Amy, and Ilana Gershon. 2024. “Prefigurative Neoliberalism: A Provisional Analysis of the Global Pseudolaw Movement.” Invited seminar, Ecole de Droit, Sciences Po, Paris, April 29. https://www.sciencespo.fr/ecole-droit/fr/evenements/prefigurative-neoliberalism-a-provisional-analysis-of-the-global-pseudolaw-movement/.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1): 126–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/178524.

———. 2006. “Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency.” In Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388456.

Prentice, Rebecca. 2015. “‘Keeping Up with Style’: The Struggle for Skill.” In Thiefing a Chance, 111–42. Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155jp7p.10.