Anthropology Through a Double Lens: Public and Personal Worlds in Human Theory. Daniel Touro Linger. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005. 236 pp.
Reviewed by: Gazi Islam, PhD, Ibmec São Paulo
In “Anthropology Through a Double Lens”, Dr. Linger sets about re-inserting the individual into an anthropology preoccupied with social context at the expense of psychological processes. He does so by introducing the metaphor of the “inkblot”, in which cultural phenomena are compared with Rorschach ink blots, with their multiple interpretations. In Dr. Linger’s terminology, this amounts to a defense of psychological anthropology in the face of fashionable cultural studies approaches, which de-center people as the fundamental units of social scientific study. Whereas cultural approaches in the past used context to ignore individuals, these new approaches tend to commit the same mistake through the introduction of “discourse,” a new form of contextual variable that occludes personal acts of meaning making. The call to arms to revive the individual, according to Dr. Linger, is important because current anthropological accounts sacrifice the subjective agency that underlies action and experience. The logical conclusion of such perspectives, we are told, is Dumot’s assertion “I am being thought”, which, Dr. Linger laments, negates the presence of “breathing persons” in their unique complexity.
Dr. Linger exemplifies this defense through his fieldwork in Brazil, both with the experience of people’s resistance in Maranhão in1984-1986, and with the experiences of Japanese Brazilians in their struggles to construct and maintain individual identities in the face of a complicated cultural mix. The first of these ethnographies focuses on the power dimension, as complex social power relations “open up” avenues for individual sense making. The second attempts to show how standardized cultural “identities” are not simply handed down to individuals to swallow whole, but provide ingredients that individuals may integrate partially according to their choices.
I enjoyed reading these ethnographies greatly. The facts were well presented and vividly described. That said, I was never quite certain how they forwarded Dr. Linger’s thesis about the centrality of individuals. In the first ethnography, we are presented with a government in the death throws of a 20 year period of military rule on the verge of systemic transformation, while in the second, we are presented with individuals whose cultural origins are diverse and ambiguous. In such examples, one would not expect straightforward cultural norms to be unproblematically handed down to individuals. It seems to me that by picking exactly those examples where cultural systems are in a state of change or mixture, Dr. Linger is stacking the deck in his favor to some extent. We are to think, “Since we cannot locate a stable cultural focus for the individual actions and beliefs, then these must reside at the level of the individual human mind”.
I have two problems with this thesis. The first, related to the above point, is that we have no reason to believe that people in stable social, cultural, and discursive systems would be as likely to play around with the meanings given to them. With lack of motive or existential anxiety, the question remains as to why people would reinterpret the inkblots, so to speak, whose interpretations they also learn through their upbringing. The second and related point is that, even if we are to acknowledge, as we probably should, the non-straightforward cultural relations in these situations, it does not necessarily mean that such relations are not formative of people’s behavior and beliefs. It could simply be that the complexity of individual interpretation is a veridical reflection of the complexity of their social situations. Their search for meaning, in other words, could also be a society’s search for meaning.
In fact, I think that the central thesis of the book, with which I sympathize strongly, is simply presented as a new way of thinking and then not really defended. To me this was a disappointment, because I would love to believe that “I really exist”, the thesis that Dr. Linger attempts to uphold. In his critique of more macro-level approaches, for example, he writes, “I find such a stance, which fails to treat persons as tangible, consequential realities, to be constricted, substantially closed, and unconvincing” (p12). This assertion and others like it, which may be merited at the end of the book after a long and careful analysis, seem out of place so early on, and seem to hint that the issue will not be given a particularly balanced treatment throughout. Indeed, throughout the book it seems more like a single, rather than double, lens is being used.
If one follows the story of anthropology as presented by Linger, however, this imbalance may seem warranted. Anthropology, it seems, has been long dominated by Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian approaches in which the individual is lost in the collective mind, a puppet without agency or moral responsibility. More recent discourse-oriented approaches follow suit, trapping the individual within rules and norms of language and social interaction, and explaining away all the space where the individual agent is supposed to inhabit. At the same time, the social sciences also have a long tradition of methodological individualism (Parsons, 1951; Weber, 1968) – defined by Popper as “the quite unassailable doctrine that we must try to understand all collective phenomena as due to the actions, interactions, aims, hopes, and thoughts of individual men, and as due to traditions created and preserved by individual men” (1944/1957, p. 157-158; see also Hayek, 1942/1957; Brodbeck, 1958). Which of these traditions has been stronger in the study of social relations in not entirely self-evident, and Dr. Linger gives little discussion of individualistic biases in psychology, economics, and sociology. Even anthropology, the center of Dr. Linger’s critique, has had a surge of approaches that have stressed how social systems are mediated by lower level interpretive processes. Skipping Geertz as an obvious choice because of Dr. Linger’s critique of Geertz, we might mention the variability of capitalist institutions in Sahlins´ (1994) “Cosmologies of Capitalism”, Shore’s (1996) work on cultural mediation of mind, and DiMaggio’s (1997) work on culture and cognition. The philosophy literature, need I mention, opens another can of worms in this area, from Searle’s (1980) “proof” of the unique capacities of the human brain to Putnam’s (1975) assertion that “meanings just ain’t in the head”. A useful theory in this area simply cannot get away with not addressing these debates. While it is true that as social scientists, we simply do not have agreement about levels of analysis, this is certainly not from lack of discussion.
I do think that the question Dr. Linger addresses is a crucial one. The social sciences have long lacked a fundamental unit of analysis, or have often switched unconsciously between levels of analysis. To establish the primacy of individual minds in anthropological study is a tall order, and a noble attempt. I think we may yet have a while to wait on an answer to this question.
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