Beyond nature and culture

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBeyond nature and culture Forms of attachmentPhilippe DESCOLAPhilippe DESCOLACollège de France Search for more articles by this author Collège de FranceTranslated by Janet LloydPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreModes of identification broadly schematize our experience of things, distinguishing between parcels of ontological properties distributed in accordance with the arrangements of existing beings, arrangements whose structural characteristics we have examined above, each in turn. It is a distribution of beings according to their attributes, the principles according to which socio-cosmological collectives are organized, the dominant regimes of knowledge and action, and the boundaries of identity and otherness. Each of these forms of identification defines a specific style of relations with the world. Long-established expressions of these relations are to be found in geographical regions, many of which are immense, and over very long periods. Yet we cannot use those styles as criteria for distinguishing between singular collectives with contours limited both in time and in space—the kind that historians, ethnologists and sociologists usually choose to investigate. Rather, we should regard those stylizations of experience as what are usually called “world views,” “cosmologies” or “symbolic forms,” all of these being terms of vague epistemological status yet that constitute a handy intuitive way of synthesizing under a simple label (such as “the modern West,” or “shamanistic societies”), “families” of practices and mind-sets that seem to display affinities despite the diversity of their concrete manifestations. However, within those great archipelagos marked out by a shared mode of identification one comes across numerous kinds of collectives that consider themselves to be very different from one another (and that are, indeed, perceived as different by those who study them). This is not only on account of their different languages, institutions and, more often than not, the discontinuity of their territories, but also because the interactions within them present remarkable contrasts. For even when the ontological distribution of existing beings and the ways that they come together are based on identical principles, the links that they weave between one another, the ways that they affect one another and the manner in which they treat one another can all vary through and through. It is thus primarily the general form of the local relations that structure the connections between entities that are all distinguished by the same process of identification, which makes it possible for collectives to differentiate themselves from one another and for each to display the singularity of their own particular ethos, of which any observer soon becomes aware.Like modes of identification, relational modes are integrating schemas; that is to say they stem from the kind of cognitive, emotional, and sensory-motor structures that channel the production of automatic inferences, orientate practical action, and organize the expression of thought and feelings according to relatively stereotyped patterns. A relational schema becomes dominant in a collective when activated in a whole range of very different circumstances in relations with humans or nonhumans. The effect of this is to subject all relations to its particular logic, either by limiting their field of application or by subordinating this to the achievement of the ends that the dominant schema embodies. But, unlike modes of identification, dominant relational modes are also identifiable thanks to the fact that in many cases they express the greatest possible difference from those in action in the immediate neighbourhood. It is as if each collective would concentrate its greatest efforts on whatever it judged to be capable of distinguishing it most effectively from the collectives surrounding it and with which it coexists: namely, the styles of interaction and behaviour that its human members are led to adopt in the course of daily life. However, the nature and the limits of a collective of this kind are never fixed a priori since it is, on the contrary, the area covered by the dominant relational schema that establishes them in the first place. A collective defined in this way does not necessarily coincide with a “society,” a “tribe,” or a “class,” all of which are misleading terms to use because of the substantive closure that they imply. Rather, it is characterized primarily by the discontinuity that is introduced all around it on account of the ostensible close presence of other principles for the schematization of relations between existing beings. Its existence is thus positional, not intrinsic, and is revealed through comparisons.When seen as dispositions that bestow form and content upon the practical links between myself and a human or non-human alter, relational schemas can be classified according to whether or not that alter is or is not equivalent to me on an ontological level and whether the connections that I establish with it are or are not mutual. So numerous are the kinds of relations that can be established between the entities that fill the world that it is clearly not possible to summarize them all. So let us concentrate here upon no more than one group of six types of relationships which appear to play a preponderant role in the connections that humans establish between one another and also with non-human elements in their environment. Whether they are identified by the words that I use or are given other names, these relations have for many years attracted the attention of the social sciences, some of them even to the point of becoming key concepts. The relations in question are those of exchange, predation, gift, production, protection and transmission. These relational modes that come to modulate all modes of identification may be divided into two groups. The first is characterized by potentially reversible relationsbetween terms that are similar. The second is characterized by univocal relations that are founded upon connections between non-equivalent terms. The first group covers exchange, predation and gift; the second covers production, protection and transmission.Giving, taking, exchangingThe relations at work in the first group correspond to three formulae that ensure the movement of something valuable between two terms of the same ontological status, terms that may themselves actually contain that value and therefore circulate in such a way that one may be led to disappear physically as a result of being absorbed by the other. The first relationship, that of “exchange,” appears as a symmetrical one in which any agreed transfer from one entity to the other requires something in return. The other two are asymmetrical. In the one, entity “A” takes something of value from entity “B” (perhaps its life, its body or its interiority) without offering anything in exchange: “predation” is what I call this negative asymmetry. In the other, entity “B” offers something of value to entity “A” (maybe even itself) without expecting any compensation: I call this positive asymmetry “gift.” At least two of the terms that I use to qualify these relations have a long anthropological history, so I need to specify their meaning in relation to previous definitions.As is well known, Lévi-Strauss ascribes a crucial role to exchange in the developing and functioning of social life. The prohibition of incest is a rule of reciprocity in that it instructs a man to renounce a woman for the benefit of another man who, in turn, rules out his use of another woman who thus becomes available for the first man. The prohibition of incest and the exogamy that is the positive side to it would therefore simply be a means of instituting and guaranteeing reciprocal exchange, which is the basis of culture and a sign of the emergence of a new order in which the relations between groups are governed by freely accepted conventions. But culture does not play a totally innovating role here. According to Lévi-Strauss all it does is codify universal mental schemas that pre-exist the norms that bring them into play. Among these categorical imperatives that are written into the architecture of the mind before the emergence of the symbolism that makes it possible to express them, one finds “the notion of reciprocity regarded as the most immediate form of integrating the opposition between the self and others; and the synthetic nature of the gift, i.e. that the agreed transfer of a valuable from one individual to another makes these individuals into partners and adds a new quality to the valuable transferred” (Lévi-Strauss 1969 [1967]: 84). The pre-eminence of reciprocity and gift thus results from the fact that those two means of founding and maintaining the social link are a legacy of human phylogenesis, a reminder of the function of natural predispositions in the structuring of the “being together” that is organized by culture.It is no doubt not necessary to go as far as Lévi-Strauss and postulate an innate neural basis for reciprocity and gift, in order to agree with him that those two relational schemas do indeed orientate many forms of human behaviour. Besides, there is nothing new about the idea. The suggestion that reciprocal exchange and gift constitute the true cement of all social life seems to be a leitmotif in Western political philosophy, in which it is hard to sort out how much of the idea stems from empirical observation and how much from a moral ideal regarding the most desirable way of ensuring that a collective of equals sticks together. Although he does not explicitly acknowledge it, Lévi-Strauss is thus positioned along the main line of development from a tradition recorded as early as Antiquity. Aristotle, for instance, declares that reciprocity in relations of exchange “is the bond that maintains the association,” and Seneca declares that gift “constitutes the chief bond of human society.”1 However, this venerable precedent should not deter us from asking two questions. Is it legitimate to associate reciprocity and gift within the same set of phenomena? And is it certain that every collective considers those two values as the basis of its social life?In answer to the first question, we must briefly look back to Marcel Mauss’ famous Essay on the gift and consider this text’s influence on Lévi-Strauss (Mauss 1950).2 Although critical with regard to certain aspects of this essay, Lévi-Strauss does confirm the conception of the gift that Mauss presents there, namely “a system of total prestation,” characterized by the three obligations of giving, receiving, and giving back. Lévi-Strauss does not challenge that definition, but he does criticize the way in which, he claims, Mauss explained the reciprocity involved in the exchange of gifts and counter-gifts, namely by resorting mainly to a local theory centred on the Polynesian notion of hau, a mysterious force that resides in the given gift, which forces the gift-receiver to reciprocate. Lévi-Strauss claims that Mauss allowed himself to be mystified by a deliberate interpretation put forward by a group of native specialists instead of endeavouring to discover the underlying realities of exchange where they could be found, that is to say “in the unconscious mental structures that may be reached through institutions” (Mauss 1950: xxxix). If exchange plays a founding role in social life, according to Lévi-Strauss that is because it constitutes an absolutely primitive phenomenon, “a synthesis immediately given to, and by, symbolic thought” (Mauss 1950: xlvi). What is paradoxical about this famous critique is that Lévi-Strauss seems not to have realized that Mauss’ characterization of the gift, with which he himself does not disagree, was in truth derived from another theory, every bit as native as that of the hau, but also truly Western. For Mauss implicitly echoes his own cultural tradition when he interprets the gift as resting upon the obligations of giving, receiving, and giving back. As Denis Vidal has shown, this is a common interpretation that goes back to the well-known ancient image of the Three Graces. These constitute a most precise allegory of the three obligations that surround gifts, as Seneca makes perfectly clear: “some would have it appear that there is one for bestowing a benefit, another for receiving it, and a third for returning it” (Seneca 1935: 13). Despite his extensive classical culture, Mauss never mentions this line of thought on the theme of gifts, which commentaries on the Three Graces have high-lighted from Chrysippus right down to Pico de La Mirandola. But it seems unlikely that that unacknowledged source did not affect his conception of the nature of gifts (the three obligations). It may also have affected his desire to see restored the values associated with it, namely generous behaviour, in particular the energeticism ofprominent figures, that testifies to a reputedly more authentic sociability as illustrated by archaic societies (Vidal 1991).3In view of its antecedents, it thus seems reasonable to question whether this concept of the gift bequeathed by the Ancients, which anthropology then took to its heart in the wake of Mauss, really does match the practice that it claims to characterize. For, unlike exchange, the gift is above all a one-way gesture that consists in abandoning something to someone without expecting any compensation other than that, possibly, of gratitude on the part of the receiver of the gift. For if the notion is given its literal meaning, reciprocal benefaction is never guaranteed where a gift is concerned. To be sure, reciprocation is a possibility that one may well hope for, either as a tacit wish or an out-and-out calculation, but the realization of such a wish remains independent of the actual act of giving, which would, ipso facto lose its meaning if it was conditioned by an imperative to obtain something in compensation. Alain Testart is thus quite right to draw a clear distinction between exchange and gifts: the former consists in handing something over in return for something else; the latter, in doing so with no expectation of reciprocity (Testart 1997). Thus, the presents that I receive from those close to me on the occasion of my birthday cannot in any way be regarded as a deferred return in exchange for the presents that I gave them on their birthdays, for there is no obligation inherent to the custom according to which these gracious transfers take place that would make the present given to me conditional upon the gifts that I offered. It is true that one may say that one is “much obliged” by the gift that one receives. But, contrary to what Mauss claims, the fact that one is “obliged” in no way makes a counter-gift obligatory, at least not in the sense in which an initial favour might be accompanied by a compelling clause such as those that stem from a contract or responsibility and which, ignored, might well lead to sanctions. In the case of a present, the obligation to repay one’s benefactor in some way is purely moral. If one evades it, one may eventually be despised, lose face or be labelled stingy by the gift-giver, although for him there can be no recourse to any means of obtaining reciprocity for something freely given and that he would never even think of demanding. If the gift gives rise to any obligation, it is, strictly speaking, neither obligatory nor obliging (Testart 1997: 43).In this respect, a gift is profoundly different from an exchange. Every gift constitutes an independent transfer by reason of the fact that nothing can be claimed in return. There are, of course, societies where it is customary to respond to a gift with another gift, as in the potlatch of the Indians of the north-west coast of America, which is very much to the fore in the Essay on the gift: the riches offered during a ceremony provided the opportunity of presenting some appropriate counter-gift in the course of some later ceremony. Yet no-one was, strictly speaking, obliged to honour a gift with a counter-gift. In societies that had placed generosity at the pinnacle of their values, not to do so certainly meant that one’s honour was seriously sullied and one’s access to the highest spheres of political prestige would be compromised wherever that political prestige was founded above all on one’s reputation for liberality. But even if, as in many other societies too, the fear of being discredited no doubt constituted a powerful motive to respond with a counter-gift, that was not the same as the obligation to repay that would have been implied in a contractual and quasi-legal way by the fact of accepting the original gift.Exchange, in contrast, requires as a necessary condition that something be obtained in return. Regardless of whether or not it is equal in value to the thing received, it is this return that represents both the purpose and the means of the exchange, whether this be immediate or deferred and whether or not it be a commercial deal. For even when its nature is not explicitly stipulated or when the time allowed for repayment is not specified, some kind of reciprocation can always be demanded: each party only gives away the goods that he has in exchange for other goods. In this sense, as Testart also notes, the essence of exchange lies in two transfers in opposite directions, transfers that are intrinsically linked, since each of them results from an obligation the raison d’être of which lies in the other. The whole operation is thus a closed system, which may, of course, be inserted into a whole series of similar transactions, but each of which is formed by an independent combination of two elementary mirrored operations (Testart 1997: 51). Unlike a gift, which is a single transfer that may eventually prompt a counter-transfer but for motives other than the principle of liberality that made it possible in the first place, each of the two transfers that an exchange involves is both the cause and the effect of the other. A reciprocal relationship is inherent to this kind of deal and is peculiar to it: I give to you so that you give to me, and vice-versa.This is why the all-too vague notion of reciprocity should be set aside when analysing transfer relations. Literally, reciprocity only designates what happens between term “A” and term “B” and subsequently between term “B” and term “A.” There is no overt indication of the nature of the obligations that link the two terms. Thus, a gift may be reciprocal when it is followed up by a counter-gift, although reciprocity, even so, does not constitute an intrinsic characteristic of this type of transaction, given that a gift in return is not obligatory or binding as it is in an exchange. On the other hand, exchange does necessarily imply reciprocity, since it is precisely the obligation to respond with a counterpart that defines it. I shall therefore be using the word “exchange” to refer to what Lévi-Strauss sometimes means by “reciprocity”: namely, a transfer that requires something in return and, contrary to the use established by Mauss, I shall use the term “gift” to refer to an accepted transfer with no obligation to provide a counter-transfer. It is difficult altogether to avoid the cinematic illusion that leads to characterizing transfers of things or persons by the directions in which they move (and I am aware that I myself did that in my initial definition of exchange, predation and gifts). But if one takes into account the form of the transfers according to the obligations that they impose, it becomes possible largely to correct that distortion of perspective. In any case, it encourages one to distinguish between phenomena arbitrarily grouped under the same rubric simply because they involve the circulation of things between particular terms. It then becomes impossible to continue to set on the same level the exchange of goods in all its different forms, the exchange of signs in language, the exchange of women in marriage alliances, the exchange of deaths in a vendetta, or the sequence of gifts and counter-gifts.Whether understood in the general sense that Lévi-Strauss lends it or in the more specific sense that I give it, exchange is certainly present in all societies and takes such diverse forms that it is not hard to understand the point of view of those who have wished to see it as the principal “bond that maintains association.” Gifts are also common at every latitude. From the Stoics down to Mauss, many authors have hinted at their nostalgia for a hypothetical golden age in which this disinterested practice was more widespread and have expressed their desire to see a generalization of benevolent practices that would give some idea of the consideration that people have for one another. All the same, no moralist has ever seriously thought that gifts could become the key regulatory institution in any real society. So what grounds do I have for saying that gifts might constitute the integrating relational schema in certain collectives? How can one even think of undermining the pre-eminence of exchange by suggesting that patterns of behaviour founded on the principle of agreed gracious transfers may have been adopted as an ideal norm by certain human communities? These rhetorical questions prompt a reminder: a mode of relations does not become dominant because it has successfully supplanted schemas of interactions that do not accept its logic. It does so because it provides the most effective cognitive model for a simple and easily remembered synthesis not only of many patterns of behaviour but also, and above all, of those recognized to be the most distinctive of the collective not only by its members but also by outside observers. Just as with modes of identification, no relational schema is hegemonic. The most that can be said is that one or other of them acquires a structuring function in certain places, even if it is not always possible to put a name to it, when, in an immediately recognizable manner, it orientates many attitudes vis-à-vis both humans and non-humans. It is not the case that exchange disappears when the ethos of gifts dominates, for in truth it is simply encompassed by the latter.If one accepts this, one has to agree that there are plenty of collectives that do seem to place the logic of the gift at the heart of their practices. Without anticipating the ethnographic case studies that will be discussed in the next chapter, I would like to draw attention to the importance granted to the action of “sharing” in recent studies devoted to hunter-gatherer societies, in order to characterize both their internal relations and those that they maintain with plants and animals. Bird-David has played a decisive role in this domain, at least at the terminological level, by forging the expression “a giving environment” to synthesize the conception that the Nayaka of Tamil Nadu have of their forests. Just as humans share everything between them with no thought of obtaining anything in return, similarly the environment unstintingly hands out its liberalities to the Nayaka, so that the human and the non-human components of the collective find themselves integrated into one and the same “cosmic sharing economy” (Bird-David 1990). The idea and practice of the gift constitute among the Nayaka a habitus so deeply rooted that it is inconceivable not immediately to give someone whatever he asks for. When, very exceptionally, the Nayaka do not want to part with something, “rather than disrupt the ongoing sense of sharing—the rhythm of everyday social life—they hid it away or avoided people” (Bird-David 1999: 72). For Bird-David, the values of sharing and the gift are typical of hunter-gatherer societies in general, a point of view that Ingold takes up and elaborates. His view is that what characterizes the so-called “sharing” relations of this kind of society (both with other humans and with non-humans) is simply “trust,” that is to say a particular combination of autonomy and dependence. According to him, to place my trust in a person is to act vis-à-vis him or her in the expectation that he or she will behave toward me in the same favourable spirit as I am manifesting, and will continue to do so for as long as I do nothing to limit his or her autonomy, that is to say his or her option of acting differently. This is thus a situation of dependence that is freely entered into and that places a high value on my partner’s choice to adopt toward me the same attitude that I adopt toward him. In short, “any attempt to impose a response, to lay down conditions and obligations that the other is bound to follow would represent a betrayal of trust and a negation of the relationship” (Ingold 2000: 70; italics original). The difference between on the one hand the giving or sharing and, on the other, exchanging could not be expressed more clearly. The former is unconditional: even to suggest that it is not condemns it immediately to vanish and give way to the latter. Disinterested trust is then replaced by a tacit or contractual obligation.Hunter-gatherers—to use the current term—do not constitute the only kind of collectives that are characterized by a high value set upon sharing. Those are also the terms that Joanna Overing and some of her disciples use to analyse indigenous sociability in Amazonia, when this is apprehended at the level that seems to them the most significant, namely within the framework of a local group with consanguineous kinship relations. It appears that this domestic and village sphere is marked above all by relations of mutual trust that are confirmed by productive cooperation, daily and festive commensality, an affectionate solicitude for others and a constant flow of gifts and counter-gifts. This is a kind of moral economy based on intimacy, free of calculation and ambiguities, the effect of which is to render those within it so consubstantial that they consider themselves to be of the same species. Within this “aesthetic of conviviality,” sharing plays a central role in that it testifies to a disposition to open oneself up to others with generosity and compassion and thus, through concrete acts, expresses the ethical insistence on unreservedly helping one another that informs the whole of social life.4 Further examples are really not necessary, for our account need not ratify all the ethnographical interpretations that we have mentioned. At this stage in our enquiry all we need do is recognize that there are at least some very diverse societies which, as anthropologists confirm, are animated by an ideology of sharing, here understood as the pre-eminence of the role played by reciprocal gifts in interpersonal relations.*The opposite of a gift is seizing something, making no offer of anything in return. It is an action that creates no more obligations for its perpetrator that the gift does for the gift’s recipients. If one wishes to underline the illicit and generally condemned aspect of the operation, it may be called theft, seizure or wrongful appropriation. However, the term “predation” seems preferable here, in that it conveys the idea that an appropriation of this kind may not result from a desire to harm or some fleeting need. Instead, it may be prompted by the fundamental constraint to which the lives of animals are subjected. Every animal needs to replenish its sources of energy at regular intervals, by consuming some prey, a body originally distinct from itself but that the animal in question ends up assimilating in such a way that it becomes a part of its own organism. Humans are not excepted from that imperative, for they have obeyed it for tens of millennia, even if, thanks to the development of livestock-raising and the deferred consumption of products already transformed by agriculture and herding, the evolution of techniques of subsistence has by now succeeded in partly blurring the memory of the intrinsic link between the capture and the ingestion of prey. Nevertheless, predation remains a central mechanism in the preservation of living creatures, an elementary way in which animals are related to their environment, so much so that René Thom has constructed a mathematical model of the “predation loop,” which seems applicable to many biological processes (Thom 1990: 222-231, 526-530). Predation is thus a phenomenon of productive destruction that is indispensable for the perpetuation of individuals: far from being an expression of gratuitous cruelty or a perverse desire to annihilate others, it on the contrary transforms the prey into an object of the greatest importance for whatever creature ingests it. Indeed, it is the very condition of that creature’s survival.But is it legitimate to transpose a biological phenomenon to the social sphere and claim that collectives have simply converted predatory patterns of behaviour into a dominant relational schema? First, we should bear in mind (indeed, how could we forget?) that the primacy of exchange and sharing is not accepted by all those who have reflected upon the foundations of political existence. Hobbes was by no means alone in emphasizing, following Plautus, that man’s original condition is to be a wolf to his fellows, for his egoistic awareness of his own interests constantly leads him to try to dispossess others. And although Hobbes’s pessimism has, not without reason, above all been interpreted as an unconscious naturalization of competitive interpersonal relations within a nascent market economy, it cannot be reduced solely to that. For there is no denying that violent appropriation and the destruction of others are not the doubtful privileges of individuals fashion