Explorations towards intercultural accounts of socio-cultural reproduction and change.
Merlan, Francesca
INTRODUCTION
In the call for papers for the session 'Articulating cultures:
Understanding engagements between indigenous and non-indigenous
lifeworlds' at the Australian Anthropological Society conference of
2002, the convenors characterised my book, Caging the Rainbow (Merlan
1998), as an attempt to implement a notion of an
'intercultural' ethnographic description involving Australian
Aborigines. I had used this word of my effort to describe the situation
of Aboriginal people in a town in the upper central Northern Territory.
My concern was to find ways of dealing more fully than many descriptions
do with forms of engagement and influence between Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal people and institutions, and the implications of this for
change. It was important to keep 'engagement between' in view
at all times, especially with reference to a town situation. But the use
of the word, I must admit, remained more indicative than examined. The
kind of descriptive and ethnographic issues to which it was intended to
apply are difficult ones, involving questions of difference, boundedness
and transformation of indigenous life-ways in relation to the broader
Australian social order. To these there is no simple 'answer',
but there is a variety of potentially relevant theoretical positions,
several of which I explore here. Beginning with an ethnographic
fragment, I consider what potential they may have to assist in
developing the issues raised.
JULIE AND THE RAINBOW
In Caging the Rainbow (1998:49-50) I tell how an Aboriginal woman,
Julie Williams, in sharing her experiences of the town with me, talked
about a time when roadwork was going on in Katherine's central
street. Her understanding, in common with many other Aboriginal people
who remembered this period, was that road workers doing excavations dug
up a 'rainbol', a little red rainbow serpent, in the course of
their work. How are we to understand this episode?
This is a kind of creature that Aborigines of this area associate
with caves, and the regional underground limestone system on which the
town is partly built. They believe it reacts angrily--creating storm,
wind and rain--to people whose 'sweat' or 'smell' it
does not know. According to the story as Julie told it from her
witnessing of the work, the road workers removed the rainbow serpent
(its being red indicated it was young) and threw it in the rubbish tip
outside of town.
Julie told me of having seen the road-work that exposed the little
red rainbow with her closest age-mate, Margaret Katherine. Her account
makes it clear (1998:58) that she did not understand what it was on
first seeing it: her idea of what it was came after she and her friend
Margaret went home and told their mothers of having seen something, a
'find' of the road workers, that they thought was unusual.
Their mothers told them what the creature was. As this suggests, ideas
were then widely shared among Aborigines about the association of
'rainbols' with the limestone sinkholes of Katherine town and
the surrounding area (Rose 1992:70-71).
Julie and Margaret probably heard their relatives talk about
rainbows on other occasions beside this one. But from her story, we
realize that here Julie was learning about these matters in the novel
and perhaps challenging context of building activity in the town.
Did the girls wonder whether there might be consequences? we might
ask. But no question requiring definitiveness could be asked without,
according to my experience of her, violating Julie's sense of an
answerable question. 'Was the rainbol really gone'? is an
hypothetical question that would require too great a departure from
circumstances, and too much absoluteness, to answer. She is not inclined
to think in such explicitly absolute terms as 'gone for ever'.
Such an idea might occur to me and perhaps to many of my readers, but
does not come naturally to Julie. The viewpoint from which one may ask
about presence and absence, consequence and lack of consequence, in
terms of finality is a socially conditioned one, not available to
everyone.
There was something common and something different in Julie's
and the roadworkers' understandings of what was being done. Like
them, Julie understood the roadwork as a widening and improvement of the
road. She had, or came to have, a different understanding from theirs of
what was underneath the road. She has heard of and even herself seen
rainbows in other places at other times.
At the same time, Julie has some of the cosmopolitanism consistent
with enthusiasm for and acceptance of the idea of building the town,
fixing it up. She also realizes that most whites would see the rainbol
as superstition. Julie, more than some of her elders, but perhaps
typically for her age group, recognizes the existence of these varying
perspectives.
In the book I evaluate this incident as an aspect of the conversion
of a 'place' in Aboriginal terms into just another part of the
town. I suggest the overall effect may be loss of the place's
distinctiveness in certain Aboriginal terms. While this
'place' had had particular physical characteristics (its
location in the area of limestone sinkholes associated with rainbols),
as well as the potential of interconnection with other places (via
caves, the movements of the creature, etc.) which we also know to be
characteristic of ways of conceiving of places in terms of relations
among them, it loses this in being turned into part of a roadbed. It no
longer has such features which mark it out (other than those of a major
road intersection), and presumably, this way of understanding places as
distinctive undergoes contraction within town space. Other places are
and may become distinctively associated with Aborigines and their
activities, but not in these terms. However, this change is not
something that Julie undergoes; to this day she retains her sense of the
ambiguity and vital potential of this place, having known it before. The
change can be registered in people who did not know the town under the
conditions Julie did.
INTER-
The rainbow story illustrates at least one kind of understanding of
the place-world and of process in relation to it. While this might be
considered to be in 'traditional' Aboriginal terms, the story
also involves Julie's seeing the actions of 'whites' in
dynamic relation to the place. This is thus a story of engagement, even
if tangential. The world is nobody's solely; imaginatively and in
other ways, the co-presence of people with different ideas and forms of
action is kept in mind. And thirdly, our sense is that this very small
incident points to general issues about kinds and directions of change.
The 'inter-' in my use of 'intercultural' was
modelled after the 'inter-' in intersubjectivity. Influential
models of subjectivity (Mead, Husserl, Schutz, Habermas) do not begin
with a notion of a pre-existing 'subject' and then try to
specify how that subject comes to relate to others. They begin from a
notion of interrelationship and its specific moments of interaction as
crucial to the on-going formation of subjectivity. Subjectivity is
always fundamentally under construction, and always fundamentally
relational. It is, of course, 'subject' to the patterning of
historical, on-going socio-cultural organization, and so not randomly
variable.
In similar fashion, I was looking for a formulation of the
'cultural' which recognizes difference but does not begin from
an overspecified notion of 'culture'; as well as for a way of
writing about relations 'between' people that focusses on the
processual character of interrelationship.
The Katherine situation has been one of obvious, great differences
in forms of life between Aborigines and other townspeople. Entrenched
forms of social classification are associated with big differences in
power and access to goods and services of the dominant society. Many
Aboriginal people are marginal to routine institutional forms of that
society--work, school, money, and so on. In this situation, Aborigines
and others constantly operate with each other in mind, but often with
stereotyped ideas, and at some physical distance. Town camps, which
since the 1960s have become home to those Aborigines that most
townspeople would consider maximally different from themselves, tend to
be on the margins or indeed outside of town. Aborigines move around town
in distinctive ways, their activities demarcating some spaces with which
they become identified. These tend not to be occupied by white
townspeople, or at least not at the same time. A long period of my field
research was characterized by the growth of land rights activity. During
this time, many issues (e.g. resource exploitation such as
gravel-quarrying, larger-scale mining, land use issues, living space for
Aborigines, 'public drunkenness' etc.) were shaped in public
debate in dichotomous Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal terms.
In Katherine, people assume the solidity of social classifications,
whites treating 'Aborigines' as a discrete category of
persons, and vice versa. A great deal of the discussion by whites about
Aborigines proceeds in terms of the presence or absence of
'culture'.
There is a widely held view of 'traditional' Aboriginal
culture as esoteric, strongly determinant of behaviour (and generally,
practised by only a remote few). Secondly, it is seen as having been
destroyed, and the poor exemplars of Aboriginality one sees on the town
street as having lost their 'culture'. Behaviour judged
unacceptable is attributed to loss of culture, and lack of proper
enculturation into the wider society.
Clearly, the town is a volatile space for Aborigines, in which
their patterns of life become subject to a whole range of possibilities
that are difficult to manage (involving e.g. money, transportation,
alcohol, the pressures of many people trying to accomplish everyday
tasks and relying heavily on others to help them do so). But this rather
unpalatable pair of options raises the question for the ethnographer,
how to represent the everyday relations of people in town space in a way
that neither deprives Aborigines of any claim to living in cultural
terms, nor exaggerates and falsifies what those are. I did not want to
begin with a notion of what Aboriginal culture 'is', a
finished product. Nor, especially in town space, did I want to assume
finished social persons or subjects. An 'intercultural'
description needed to emphasize processes of reproduction as well as
non-reproduction of socio-cultural patterns, interaction, and the
varieties of reflexivity of participating subjects.
Two different senses of 'inter-' have emerged above. The
first is the commonsense understanding that prevails in Katherine that
there is a significant, sharp socio-cultural difference between two (at
least) kinds of people in town, Aborigines and others. Any relationships
must bridge differences 'between' one group and the other.
This is a kind of perspective that leaves out of account kinds of
commonality (recognitions of various kinds, for example), and apparently
pervasive mutual awareness.
The second sense is, in a way, opposite to the first. It is the
'inter-' of categories, understandings, modes of practical
action, as reproduced and reshaped in interaction, interrelationship and
event--sometimes in engagement with whites--rather than pre-given. This
directs us to consider the social conditions of the production of
commonsense and practice. Forms of practice and commonsense, and
'cultural products' are possible under particular conditions.
JULIE'S COMMONSENSE
What kind of social experience is compatible with the kinds of
understandings and commonsense Julie displays? A town-dwelling person
with relatively good English and sophisticated knowledge of the white
social order of Katherine, yet thoroughly at home in (certain) local
Aboriginal camps, Julie accepted (and accepts) her mother's story
of the rainbow.
Julie had been born in a War-time compound (a temporary settlement
in which Aboriginal people were brought together during the Second World
War), where Aborigines lived under the authority of military personnel.
She spent her early childhood living in Aboriginal camps on the fringes
of pastoral properties and the regional towns of Pine Creek and
Katherine. While Aborigines were subject to Prohibited Areas Ordinances
which kept them from freely living in towns into the 1950s (and
thereafter informally, given their lack of resources and allowable
places to live), she, her parents and other close family were able to
live on the edge of Pine Creek, a small Northern Territory (ex-mining)
town, because her father had a job with the railway. She was later able
to live in modest housing in Katherine (at the time of the road-work)
because both her parents and Margaret Katherine's worked at
Katherine's main grocery store, helping to load and unload produce
and doing yardwork. In these ways their families would have been
recognized by other Aborigines as having 'good job', and as
having to live up to certain standards (of neatness, time deployment,
responsiveness to employers, and so on).
Julie and Margaret Katherine had some schooling (Julie says she
spent about four school years at Bamyili, an Aboriginal compound built
shortly after the War). She developed feelings for the desirability of
schooling, regular employment, and moderation in habits (especially with
respect to drinking, so problematic for Aborigines communities after the
liberalization of access to alcohol from 1964 in the Northern
Territory). Though subjected to disciplines of schooling for a time, and
living with parents in employment, she explicitly objectified these
values not so much for herself and her own life as it unfolded (she
never reads, and only writes to sign her name), but in expressed desires
for her children (that they go to school, not drink, get training and
jobs, etc.). Despite this, as things went on, neither woman was entirely
successful in avoiding some of the problems for themselves and their
children they saw about them. Though their parents were irremediably outside such institutions as the school, in the post-War policy climate
of 'assimilation' they themselves were seen as educable youth.
Both women had kinsmen and close associates living with them,
elsewhere around the town and at outlying communities like Bamyili, a
constellation of campsites with whose residents there were ties of
relatedness and shared background. They saw these people in their daily
movements around town, and less regular movements among locations (as
when people from outlying communities sometimes were brought in for the
outdoor picture-show in Katherine). The older people of this loose
configuration were reference points for their understandings of everyday
life, and of the organization of people in relation to places.
Julie also had lasting ties with some white people. She and her
parents lived a number of years at Dumigan's, a white Katherine
family for whom her parents did yard-work, laundry and other tasks, and
where Julie, in some sense, grew up with their children. When the family
left town, they wanted to take Julie along; but she said no. Julie never
saw the family again, except when one of the girls came back to a school
reunion. Julie speculates about her in terms most relevant to her own
sense of female futures: 'might be she got a big mob kids'.
But she does not know, because the terms of closeness with the family
that were constituted by the relationships of "working for'
and co-residence were cut off when the working relationship ended. It
was not sustained on either side, except in memory. That makes it
different from the sort of relationship that obtained among Julie's
'countrymen', who kept active tabs on where their people were.
Julie's basic schooling did not relate very directly to the
terms of her life then, or even later, but it did cause her to harbour
some hopes and expectations for her children. The affectively and
cognitively important understandings of her life were generated in the
activities in camp, undertaken collectively or in small groups with
those people (like Margaret); and later, also by her interaction with
employers and their families for whom she worked as a domestic. More
important than anything attributed to them as a result of school, both
Julie and Margaret had a sense of their families' legitimacy and
standing in town as a result of their employment. Margaret Katherine has
told how her father, Victor, took the store-owner, Cyril Cox, to visit
Katherine Gorge and told him about some of the places and waters there.
That seems to imply that Victor was prepared to see in Cox someone who
might attribute some value to this information, and to his own role in
conveying it, rather than simply dismissing it as superstition.
Julie's experience allowed her to live with her parents and
other relatives and countrymen a form of life that, while significantly
organized around their relations as workers to particular white families
and institutions (like the hospital, the store, the large camp of the
Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organization on the Katherine
riverbank, the police station), did not compel them to experience that
organization as a radical or unwarranted imposition of foreign
imperatives. This is partly because some of those people related to
Katherine as their home, and felt linked to it by many ties (lot Julie,
on the part of both her mother and father). They were often able to
interpret bosses' directives as intimately related to their own
needs and arrangements (Merlan 1998:60). Their socio-spatial form of
organization, dispersed over campsites organized in relation to a few
pivotal white people, made it possible for Aboriginal people to have a
sense of autonomy about their movements.
Families and campsites of kin remained foci of everyday life.
Aboriginal people gathered in and around town, going hunting and
foraging, playing cards, drinking--realizing that some of these
activities might provoke police or Native Welfare, but having some space
of freedom. Forms of complicity and sharing, of course, developed
between white families and their Aboriginal employees under such
circumstances, which ranged them on the same side as against others,
like the police, who would have maintained the prescribed interracial disciplines. Mr. Dumigan, it seems, among others, was arrested on at
least one occasion for supplying alcohol to Aborigines; and
'co-habitation' of particular white men with Aboriginal women
remains the knowledge of many Aborigines, but is more restricted within
non-Aboriginal circles?
Within the manageable socio-spatial configurations of town life,
Julie absorbed and accepted many aspects of her elders' ways of
understanding their place-world. She faithfully accepted her
mother's explanation of the rainbol in the roadworks, along with
much else. In her selective relationships with whites there was no
alternative framework for the cultivation of affectively broad and deep
relationships, or forms of understanding detached from the personal
authority of knowers.
The life such people as Julie were able to live around town
contrasts in some ways with that of her husband, Peter. He had lived as
a child on a remote-area, poor cattle station, which had its own
seasonal and daily rhythms, its combination of dependence on the manager
and relative separateness of the Aboriginal camp. His understanding of
the place-world was initially shaped by travels through the country with
his father. He later worked 'rough' on a number of other
pastoral properties. On coming to Katherine with his family, and briefly
experiencing some schooling by missionaries near Katherine, after the
Wartime hostilities he was sent to the recently-established Bamyili
settlement (precisely to keep him away from town). There he was made to
eat what he always satirized as 'balloon bread' in the
communal dining room, cast into the comprehensive regime of a larger
settlement as they were then run, and deprived of the small-scale
freedoms that made life around town liveable. He absconded, going back
(among other places which he could frequent by virtue of his
connections) to the camp life on the Katherine river near the township,
where some of his close relatives had become workers at a camp on the
property of Katherine's CSIRO agricultural experimentation unit. He
was seen by Aborigines in town as of bush background, a traveller of
country. He reinforced Julie's beliefs in the vitality of country,
and in his knowledge and practical mastery of the wider countryside,
particularly to the north of Katherine. Cynical with respect to the
motives and actions of whites as employers and in many other settings,
he never felt the authority of his father's understandings to have
been displaced. In later times, with the emergence of a 'sacred
sites dispute' concerning country he was attached to (Merlan 1991),
Peter relied upon what he called his 'father's law' to
reject development proposals.
These different experiences left Julie and Peter with rather
different orientations towards the future of what they knew. Julie found
it possible to think of an explicit relationship of 'teaching'
to the young: they might learn what their elders knew, by being
explicitly 'taught'. The content could be somewhat independent
of its mode of transmission. For Peter, 'teaching' what he
knew, the important understandings he had learned while with his father,
could only be passed on through the same kind of embodied experience.
Explicit recording and teaching was yet another whitefella way of doing
things, and in the future its products would be for whitefellas, not for
anybody Peter could imagine fully identifying with. While Julie could
and still does imagine having written forms of Jawoyn for her children
to read, Peter thought written Jawoyn was for whitefellas. (2) There was
a considerable 'cultural' difference in this sense between
Peter and Julie.
By the time Julie told me of the rainbow in Katherine's main
street, she and I and many others had been through several gruelling
years of land claim preparations and hearings. In these, the areas under
claim were outside of Katherine, to the east, north and west. Rainbow
sites elsewhere were a matter of discussion, especially with respect to
spectacular deep plunge-pools and parts of the river in the Katherine
Gorge. The Katherine town site was never mentioned. It was not of direct
relevance to the areas under claim. A huge recent flood did evoke
suggestions from many Aboriginal people concerning rainbow appearances,
but none (as far as I know) immediately concerned the old place in the
town centre. Increasingly, it appears to me, places to which Aboriginal
people attribute "new' dreaming significances are selectively
distributed, in areas they frequent in travelling to and from Katherine,
or in the vicinity of the Katherine camps out of town. On the main road
into town, a few kilometres to the east of town, is a (rock formation)
'frog' dreaming, recognized and pointed out by travellers into
town from settlements of southern Arnhem Land. (See also Merlan 1998,
Chapter 7, on the discovery of 'Catfish' dreaming near a camp
on the river south of town). These are places lived in by Aboriginal
people, stopped at, and with respect to which they exercise the homely
arts of making them 'particular' places--dreaming places and,
as seems more than fortuitous, places familiar in those terms to
Aborigines and not to others.
THREE THEORETICAL POSITIONS
Let us consider some aspects of three theoretical positions that
deal with questions of difference, boundedness, reproduction and
transformation: structural history, Bourdieuian practice theory; and the
interactivist position of V.N. Voloshinov. What may each have to
contribute to development of the kind of material we have looked at?
Structural history as developed by Marshall Sahlins has focussed on
the question of transformation of cultural systems. That people relate
to and act upon the world in terms of a 'culture', a
structured set of cultural categories, is Marshall Sahlins' most
fundamental assumption. He is clear that a culture or a system of
cultural categories is a system of meanings. 'Culture' is for
Sahlins what the a priori is for Kant: the world can only be grasped
through it. But since, as Sahlins argues in Culture and Practical Reason
(Sahlins 1976) and indeed in all of his work, those categories could be
otherwise, one is entitled to deal with them as something sui generis.
Sahlins' argument for cultural meanings as not determined by
utility is most fully developed in Culture and Practical Reason;
insistence that any given cultural order could have been otherwise, and
is not narrowly or simply determined, is found throughout his work.
Meaning values exist in relation to each other rather than directly to
'the world' (a re-framing of the Saussurean notion of valeur,
whereby the value of signs is determined by their relationships to each
other rather than to the objects they refer to, which is seen as an
arbitrary relationship.). As Robbins (2004:11) has put it, notions of
change depend on a 'more fundamental model of human behavior in
which people are held to act in the world in terms of categories that
are given meaning by their systematic relationship to other
categories'.
The considerable power of structuralist theory arises from its
concept of ordered system and regularities among elements in a system,
which are seen as definable in relation to each other. Signs in
structuralist theory are not prior to the relations between them, but
exist in the play of differences among them. The maximum degree of such
interdependence, logically, exists within systems that are seen as
having definable boundaries. Structural theory by definition makes the
boundedness of system a central issue.
The reproduction and transformation of cultural categories occurs
when people act, putting their cultural constructions into play. This
'structure of the conjuncture' is an engagement of categories
as people act in terms of them; they are 'risked' and subject
to change in action. Robbins (2004:7-9) outlines three possibilities of
change as envisioned in structural history: first, action in the world
through categories may encounter little discrepancy and undergo no
change (in Sahlins 1985, Islands of History, the Hawaiians equate
Captain Cook with their god Lono); second, there may be a discrepancy
between the categories they use to engage the world, and these may then
be stretched or changed (as when the Hawaiians eventually decide that
Captain Cook is not Lono); third, 'the cultural system' may be
abandoned or rapidly transcended by another adopted alternative (as
perhaps when the Hawaiians are forced to abandon their traditional modes
of land tenure or religious practice and take up something new). (3)
The view of categories as external to action, capable of being
'brought into play' as if object-like, reproduces the
Saussurean dissociation of language system from the flux of speech, and
synchronic system from diachronic change. These are theoretical prices
paid for the clarity of system.
The rainbow is a classically 'object-like' icon of
Aboriginal culture. It certainly exists within a set of associated
elements: notions about landscape (the rainbow lives in caves, secret
places), about weather (rain, lightning, storm), and within a set of
notions concerning the moral significance of rainbow appearances (it is
disturbed by unfamiliar scents or intrusive presence).
We have said that Julie shares to some extent a variety of
understandings about Katherine with other town-dwellers, Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal. What does the rainbow episode suggest about the notion
of a distinct, bounded cultural system through which she grasps the
world around her? Sometimes, at least, elements of an Aboriginal
cultural repertoire (like the rainbow) become present to her in her
engagements and experiences with 'settler' practices and
projects. To an extent, the activities of whites are the catalyst of her
experiences of distinctively Aboriginal perspectives on the world. But
for Julie, these experiences, though perhaps 'caused' by
whites, were mediated by the authority of her old people (and later, her
husband). I have suggested that Julie's acceptance of her
mother's version of events is possible under certain circumstances:
one in which the conditions of learning and knowing had not been severed
from an intimacy of social relationship. We have seen how she and
Margaret went to their mothers, there confirming what they had
'seen'. At the same time, her world has become one in which a
great deal of what 'happens', is attributed to the activities
of whites. She also accepts the authority of the project of
road-building, at least here, in town, where it seems important. There
is inequality in the ways in which whites and blacks figure in each
others' accounts of Katherine town life (Merlan 1998:56).
I think of an 'intercultural' account as one which
attempts to deal with the relations among different forms of experience,
knowing and practice that are visible from the rainbow episode. One
cannot begin with a notion of any whole culture of categories in place
through which people like Julie grasp the world. Despite local
perceptions and the objectively great degree of segregation of
Aborigines in many aspects of daily life from whites, one is not
justified in assuming radical boundedness between black and white
'worlds'. There are some kinds of common experience and
understanding that Julie shares with other townspeople, of which she has
close experience through her family's association with such people
as the Dumigans; and some kinds of difference in habit and practice, and
ideas about these, including fairly strong practices of mutual
black-white stereotypy, spatial separation, and all the practices of
racially underpinned socio-economic subordination of Aborigines within
the town. We must assume certain kinds of habit and practice as routine
and normal in Julie's relations with her family and other
Aborigines. Much but not all of her experience is mediated in terms of
those relationships. Julie also makes room in her understandings for
white actors, their different purposes and modes of action. As in the
rainbow story, kinds of cultural motifs and meanings distinctive to
Aborigines may be evoked by the activities of whites. The roadworkers
cause the rainbow to be exposed, and throw it out; what this was as
'experience' is partly shaped by Julie's mother's
explanation. An intercultural account of the situation needs to assume
kinds of difference, not absolute difference or completeness of system;
must attempt to understand inter-influence despite apparent
separateness; and explore the reproduction and alteration of habit and
practice in terms of its social conditions. The latter notion directs
our attention to the work of Bourdieu.
PRACTICE THEORY
Bourdieu's practice theory, which grew out of a critique of
structuralism and its associated 'objectivism', features two
concepts of apparent relevance to consideration of difference,
boundedness and transformation: 'habitus' and
'field', or embodied dispositions and the social positioning
which conditions them.
Bourdieu (1977a) begins what remains his central work, Outline of a
Theory of Practice, with a critique of objectivism. Wishing to
understand but lacking practical mastery, the anthropologist is forced
into the position of observer and resorts to the formalization of
practice as rules, maps, or whatever, thus introducing into the
'object' of description his own relation to it. Practical
experience is, in these ways, objectified and made a representation
(Bourdieu 1977a:2); or, as he puts this later in Pascalian Meditations,
a 'metadiscourse' is placed 'at the origin of
discourse' (Bourdieu 1997:53). The first critical move is thus a
problematization of the categories of social description. In relation to
the intellectual heritage of structuralism, this is a deconstructionist
move; for structuralist accounts tend to rely on the category
'category' as if it is unproblematic, and in their
'classical' forms tend towards assumptions of the universality
of categories. Bourdieu's observation is that the 'whole
social order is present in the way that we think about that order'
(1997:83), and the formulation of socio-cultural organization as a
system of categories cannot be exempt from this insight.
Bourdieu is clear that his own aim is not to do away with
objectivist knowledge--nor does he think one can--but rather (as Marx
said, alluding to his relation to Hegel) to put it 'back on its
feet' (1977a:4) by posing questions of its conditions of
possibility and its limitations. He wants to avoid reduction of practice
to determined or mechanical reaction or enaction, and of action to the
conscious and deliberate intentions of its authors (1977a:73). Cultural
differences and regularities are real and need to be explained. Modes of
practice differ; frames for action and modes of thought differ. (But
ultimately, he assumes political economy to be the source of any
cultural and symbolic system, thus bringing back a determinist
assumption that Sahlins rejects).
Habitus denotes systems of durable, transposable dispositions,
'principles' of the generation and structuring of practices
and representations which can be objectively 'regulated' and
'regular' without in any way being the product of obedience to
rules. Bourdieu accepts a notion of objective conditions of existence,
defining habitus as the product of inculcation and appropriation
necessary for the products of collective history, the objective
structures (e.g. of language, economy, etc.), to succeed in reproducing
themselves more or less completely, in the form of durable dispositions,
in the organisms (which one can, if one wishes, call individuals)
lastingly subjected to the same conditionings, and hence placed in the
same material conditions of existence (Bourdieu 1977a:85).
Among forms of habitus, he has dealt at length with the
'scholastic disposition', arguing that it involves theoretical
viewpoint and sovereign gaze. Development of these, as always, depends
on certain conditions of possibility. A crucial process is the
differentiation of economic and symbolic orders which allows the
'detached, gratuitous, ludic relationship with the world'
(Bourdieu 1997:16). Self-reflexive and critical of homo academicus, his
own sense of mission is to conserve and transcend objectivist knowledge
by 'integrating the truth of practical experience and of the
practical mode of knowledge which this learned knowledge had to be
constructed against' (1977:4). Never does he deny the relevance and
necessity of some notion of enduring regularities, or structure, to an
account of social order. But these are important as the conditions for
the production of dispositions and schemes of perception that frame the
social actor's modus operandi.
First, then, Bourdieu shifts the emphasis from structure to
structured 'disposition'. (If one accepts the emphases upon
social conditioning and durable modification of the body in practice, it
is not clear that a plainer term like 'habit' would not do as
well). The second reworked tool in Bourdieu's kit for the
description of regularities is the concept of 'field'.
'Fields' are forms of social organization involving roles,
positions, structures, and historical processes in which positions are
taken up (Hanks 2005). They are not inert or merely contextual. Fields
are characterized by values in terms of which agents compete, and
possibilities of social positioning that give rise to embodied
dispositions, so that persons are shaped by the positions they occupy:
'The field thus becomes not an external feature of context, but a
formative input that shapes the individual through the habitus'
(Hanks 2005).
How is a field to be defined'? The emphasis on spatial
metaphor--'field' as 'social location'--arises
partly as an aspect of Bourdieu's perception that human beings are
socially situated--they cannot be ubiquitous--and that social
oppositions and differences are objectified in physical space.
Bourdieu (1997:11) suggests that the limits of field are the doxa
(tacit acceptances) which distinctively define it. He also characterizes
field as involving an illusio, a sense of a 'game' with its
particular pursuits; and as relatively bounded by 'constraints on
who can engage in which positions' (Hanks 2005).
Bourdieu tended to concern himself with institutionally defined or
demarcated 'fields' (the 'academy' and its
disciplines, for instance). Bourdieu would reject any mechanical notion
of field, or any simple attempt to match persons with a particular
field. Julie, for example, might be seen as operating within a range of
them, a range which might be shared with given other Aborigines and
whitefellas. For example, let us suggest a 'field' of her work
as a domestic, which would include both whites and other Aborigines, in
different positions in the field. There might also be a
'field' of camp life, which would include within it only a
very small but potentially influential set of whites (a son-in-law)--a
person with distinctively different habits, background and sense of
project, but someone who also shares and takes a significant role in
camp life. Conceptualization of different forms of 'field'
might help overcome the commonsensical tendency to see Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal ways of living as bounded off from each other.
Bourdieu's notion of habitus usefully addresses issues of
conditioned subjectivity: certain ways of orienting to the world tend to
be produced under particular social conditions. His emphasis on the
embodiment of these orientations is also important. Recognition that we
need to think in terms of a diversity of fields, suggests that persons
might come to embody different forms of disposition, habit and practice.
Bourdieu comments in places on 'cleft', tormented and variable
habitus as dependent on the conditions of its production and exercise
(Bourdieu 1997:64), and has produced an empirical volume on social
suffering (Bourdieu et al. 1999). In general, however, he has relatively
little to say about this, or what he designates the 'breaking of
the cycle of reproduction' of dispositions (Bourdieu 1997:14). By
omission, irregularity and transformation have their usual special
status, rather than being simply part of a general theory of practice.
Complexity of habitus is also something of an anomaly. From the
perspective of the Katherine material we might complain that in
Bourdieuian practice theory, the notion of the habitus remains
overburdened by a weight of social normativity and regularity, and
relatedly, the notion of field, characterized by underdevelopment of
empirical and theoretical approaches to process and the dynamics of
interaction.
VOLOSHINOV AND BAKHTIN
The Russian social and linguistic theorist V.N. Voloshinov deals
with some of the same issues, and legacies of structuralism, as do
Sahlins and Bourdieu. (4) Voloshinov (5) asks after the
'essence' or basic reality of language. One is put on
one's guard by this metaphysical position: is there necessarily a
basic reality, rather than just multiple ways of looking at language,
each better for some purposes than others? He eventually concludes that
its basic nature lies in verbal interaction (1973:94)--not structure. He
deals with the legacy of two 'trends of thought', or ways in
which the problem of the nature of language has been posed. Voloshinov
labels these 'individual subjectivism' and
'objectivism'. He identifies the first as involving the
propositions that the 'individual creative act of speech'
(1973:48) is fundamental, and that the source of this creativity is the
individual psyche. Voloshinov identifies some exponents of this position
with romanticism (1973:58, and more with German rather than French
national traditions of scholarship); for them, language is an
'ever-flowing stream of speech acts' in which nothing remains
fixed and/or identical to itself.
The second trend, objectivism, takes precisely that which remains
self-identical and normative for all utterances--in phonetics, grammar,
and meaning--as prime, seeing these structured fixities as independent
of individual creative acts. In this view, language stands before the
individual in its basic essence as an inviolable, incontestable norm
which the individual can only accept (1973:53).
Voloshinov examines the logic underlying the Saussurean view that
there is an unbridgeable gulf between synchrony and diachrony, present
system and history: if language as system is the incontestable norm, it
follows that change is unavailable to subjective consciousness. In this
case systematic relationships connecting linguistic forms as elements in
the system of language have nothing in common with relations that
connect a form with its altered aspect in some other historical period
(1973:55). Thus synchrony and diachrony are two separate aspects of
language, and history cannot be systematic but is rather in flux. This
is explicated in the 'Course in General Linguistics':
For a science concerned with values the distinction [between
synchrony and diachrony] is a practical necessity and sometimes
an absolute one. In these fields scholars cannot organize their
research rigorously without considering both coordinates and making
a distinction between the system of values per se and the same
values as they relate to time (Saussure 1959:80).
Voloshinov (1973:57) sees these Saussurean tenets of language as
conventional and arbitrary as modelled on an ideal system of
mathematical signs. He argues the inadequacies of both individual
subjectivist and objectivist positions. In relation to the former, he
argues that there is no purely individual speech--that speech is always
social: 'The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience,
is not within but outside--in the social milieu surrounding the
individual being' (Voloshinov 1973:93).
Voloshinov resolves the opposition between the two positions in
allowing for the creativity of concrete action and utterance as authored
by individual body-subjects, but by locating in both an assumed
orientation towards interaction and some large degree of givenness of
circumstances in a broader social environment, in interrelation with
which forms of consciousness are forged. While allowing for creativity,
he does suggest that what usually is called 'creative
individuality' is nothing but the expression of a particular,
consistent line of social orientation shaped in the reactions and
responses, resistance or support, on the part of the social audience
(1973:93; and indeed he adumbrates the differentiation of this
'audience', though he does not enter into detail on the
point).
In exposing inadequacies of the second, objectivist view,
Voloshinov argues that the subjective orientation of speakers is not to
language as a system of normatively identical forms (1973:71)--here he
leaves undefined what kinds of consciousness of language we may
have--but opines that the notion of a language system is a theoretical
abstraction arrived at through a philological orientation involving the
study of defunct, preserved languages. The objectivist view of language
tends to lead away from questions of its social function (6) and is thus
unable to provide an adequate answer to his question, what is the basic
reality of language?
Voloshinov puts his different starting point this way:
The actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of
linguistic forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the
psychophysiological act of its implementation, but the social event
of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances.
Thus, verbal interaction is the basic reality of language
(1973:94).
This kind of position, I think (minus the metaphysics), can serve
as a fundamentally different orientation to social reproduction and
change than the structuralist one. It takes a basic orientation of
subjects towards interaction as its prime starting point. It forces us
to reconsider 'structures' as those elements of social meaning
and ordering that perdure as the products of interaction, rather than as
elements of a system stored in separation from the world and only
engaged and 'risked' at particular moments. This kind of
approach seems to allow wide scope for theorisation of subjectivity, or
the forms of consciousness that individuals will internalise, espouse
and be aware of and engage in a range of circumstances.
Asserting that the authorship of a 'word' (7) is not
simply that of the 'individual' (but the implementation of it
certainly involves some individual initiative in given circumstances,
1973:86), Voloshinov considers interaction. The word is a
'two-sided act', shaped both by whose it is and for whom it is
meant, shared by a speaker and his interlocutor (1973:86). Enunciation is hardly ever 'what one wants to say' in some simple sense of
expressiveness, but is always shaped by the interaction itself in a more
than trivial way. He does not mean to reduce the word to some simple
kind of strategizing, or to questions of calculation, or of plain
determination by forces beyond control. His concern is a
communications-theoretic one, to express the idea that there is basic
orientation in the 'word' towards the other, and that in fact
the 'word' is in part that of the other, or anticipates in
some way the understanding and response of the other. It is, in his
vocabulary, essentially 'dialogic' rather than monologic. A
'response' in an ordinary interchange is thus not simply a
'response' because in some ways it is that which is already
anticipated by the fact of any exchange: the word already prefigures and
shapes that to which it is a response.
There are strong resonances of M.M. Bakhtin here (see footnote 5),
and his famous notion of 'dialogism' which he develops in his
exploration of discourse in the novel (1981). Bakhtin, too, elaborated
the idea that in the process of communication, the response or
anticipated response is the activating principle; the expectation of
response, and perhaps a specific kind of response, shapes every
utterance. Of this idea Bakhtin says that an active understanding is
one that assimilates the word under consideration into a new
conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand,
establishes a series of complex inter-relationships, consonances
and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements.
It is precisely such an understanding that the speaker counts on.
Therefore his orientation toward the listener is an orientation
toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of
the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his
discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different
points of view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing
expressive accents, various social 'languages' come to interact
with one another. The speaker strives to get a reading on his own
word, and on his own conceptual system that determines this word,
within the alien conceptual system of the understanding receiver;
he enters into dialogical relationships with certain aspects of
this system. The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual
horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien
territory, against his, the listener's, apperceptive background
(Bakhtin 1981:282).
This view of the 'word" as multiply sourced, with the
party normally regarded as the speaker and author of the word in a sense
seeking to 'get a reading' of what he means through the
interaction, is a very rich and provocative idea. It introduces an
inherent indeterminacy and dynamic potential into interaction without
doing away with the relevance of notions of regularity. Given this
understanding of what it means to say something, Bakhtin concludes that
'discourse lives ... on the boundary between its own context and
another, alien context' (1981:284). (8) It is, in short, inherently
'inter-'.
It seems promising to explore the possible extension of these
notions to action and ethnographic description more widely. Instead of
imagining action or event as some kind of dimension to which categories
are external, we can imagine it as a continuous medium to which a
variety of resources can be relevant. Action may take place along a
spectrum from 'enaction' of something already fairly clearly
scripted according to the ideas of the participants, to improvisation;
there may be greater or lesser commonality among those interacting
concerning what may take place in any particular instance. It might help
to develop a notion of a diversity of interfaces, or possibilities of
different, perhaps conflicting potential engagements among parties to
interaction, particularly where this becomes 'oriented around
problems of bridging, accommodating, segregating or contesting social,
evaluative and cognitive standpoints' (Long 1999:1). The Katherine
social field, for example, certainly involves the possibilities both of
extreme spatial segregation of Aborigines and others, as well as of
fairly extreme difference 'interfacing' in interaction. As
Bourdieu (1999:3) notes, when people come together (even or perhaps
especially in contrasting or conflictual ways), it is not enough to
explain each point of view separately. Interaction has an inherent
polyvalence about it: no single perspective will account for what
happens, because there are a variety of issues having to do with the
dynamics among participants which could be described in terms of
Voloshinov's notion of the word/act as double-sided, Bakhtin's
parallel use of the notion of the 'dialogic' and his related
notion of 'heteroglossia' or polyphony, the idea of
multivocality or the multiplicity of voices that intersect within the
utterance.
In just the same way that anticipation of 'response'
shapes the seemingly original utterance, it may be productive to think
of action as undertaken by participants according to ideas and forms of
action they employ (whether consciously or not) in orienting the action
towards other participants, as opposed to 'freely' acting. In
some sense, most of what we do is shaped, subtly or more obviously, in
terms of our understandings of the relentlessly interactive character of
our lives. Voloshinov posits fundamental orientation towards
interaction, and Bakhtin, the idea of people getting readings on their
own meanings and stabilizing them to varying degrees in interaction.
Though actors orient towards others, they may only rarely be described
as having mastery of the processes of interaction. Perhaps the novelists
whom Bakhtin discusses do so more than the rest of us, in their peculiar
creative situation--Bakhtin certainly thought so.
In relation to our Katherine scene, that the rainbow was/is not
equally recognized by both Aborigines and whites is an aspect of
difference between them. The way in which the event is understood to
unfold is an aspect of power differential between them. But in the
episode we have considered, the rainbow is some kind of medium of
interaction between people whose ideas of events and their meaning are
grounded in different forms of knowing and social reason.
On this view, the story of the rainbow would not be simply a
one-sided manifestation of Aboriginal 'culture', risked in the
events of road-building and perhaps doomed to be eliminated (at least in
the town environment) by the force majeure of white transformative
activity on the one hand, and rationalist thinking on the other. In
thinking of its being there, Aborigines were providing themselves with a
'reading' of events, making them meaningful in familiar terms,
and orienting (at least tangentially) towards the activities of
town-building. It may be seen as an orientation to an engagement in town
space on the basis of partly shared and partly different ideas about
what that situation may be. The rainbow is a way of Julie's and
others' articulating a response to events that makes sense of them
in terms of conventionalized imagery and ideas: the rainbow, the
limestone sinkholes, whites engaging in landscape-altering,
transformative projects. Though whitefellas are recognized as
roadbuilders and as not recognizing any rainbow, this sense of things
nevertheless refuses definitiveness concerning what may happen in
future. Julie recognizes but does not take the position of the
roadbuilders. Is the rainbow gone? is a nearly unanswerable question for
those who thought it was there. The likely answer from a Julie would be:
'Might be'.
While she is unlikely to change in this respect, the conditions for
the production of a contemporary Aboriginal commonsense about such
things have changed. One is less likely to find her combination of savvy
about whitefella ways and sense of a sentient townscape. These
generational changes are likely to result in the town's becoming
for Aborigines a field of interaction that does not include such
possibilities. But ideas about rainbows are carried forward in other,
somewhat different ways and places. As above, for some people this still
is a possibility outside of town, on travelled paths.
The public exposure of rainbow has become much greater over the
past two decades, in the aftermath of land claims, a regime of sites
legislation, and the sign-posting of parks. In remoter areas, some
Aboriginal people express views of the power of the rainbow in relation
to intrusions into place (e.g. park visitation), and of themselves as
having an understanding of the power and significance of the rainbow
that whites do not have. For many Aboriginal people, the plausibility of
rainbows in such remote locations is greater than in town. With
reference to such places, it has become possible to talk or make
representations to a broader public about rainbows in a way that Julie
did not; new institutional forces have come into play, projecting ideas
about the rainbow, and in so doing, regularizing and objectifying it in
ways that deemphasize its unpredictable character. There has thus been
some broadening of a possible receptive public; a spatial contraction to
outlying areas of the likelihood of rainbow presence; the elaboration of
a discursive mode of talking about this as about other elements of
'Aboriginal culture' which is detachable from the experiential
dimension so central to people's earlier accounts of encounter with
rainbows. The rainbow has become a mode of orientation and engagement in
this rather different set of ways.
CONCLUSIONS: INTERCULTURAL ACCOUNTS
We have examined a tiny fragment in the relationship to Katherine
of an Aboriginal woman which begins with her held ideas about a rainbow
serpent, reflecting continuity in understandings she gleaned from her
elders. We cannot say the rainbow is no longer relevant for Julie. What
is clear is that notions of this kind have lesser experiential basis,
distribution and currency among Aborigines than they did before. This
kind of cultural distinctiveness is rather less likely to persist into
the future than others; for example, the forms of relatedness in terms
of which Julie absorbed her understandings, and the recent, discursively
more elaborated versions of the rainbow serpent mentioned above. I have
suggested that on the basis of this tiny fragment we raise broader
questions that could be expanded in many other ways, about the nature of
difference, the question of boundedness between Aborigines and
non-Aborigines, and about the modes of transformation in this context of
difference, but mutual awareness and influence, between people of
different habits and commonsense.
I have examined some of the social conditions under which Julie
absorbed understandings concerning rainbow serpents from her elders.
This acceptance occurred in the terms of a wider pattern of habits, and
affective-cognitive orientations to persons. The rainbow is a notion
which most whites (and some others) would regard as 'unreal'
and superstitious, and thus an aspect of difference between Aborigines
and whites. In wider Australian society, despite its imputed unreality,
the rainbow is an icon of Aboriginal 'culture'. What are we to
conclude from this? The elevation of such colourful and apparently
'traditional' elements to iconic status disregards the basic
sociological truth that such things only continue as unreflective and
everyday elements in experience under certain conditions. When those
conditions change, the objectified elements may persist, but in altered
terms.
Despite many forms of social separateness and inequality between
Aborigines and whites, Julie became aware of this rainbow as part of an
episode involving town-building by whites. I have suggested that we
cannot see the rainbow one-sidedly, as an expression of Aboriginal
culture, but must consider its relevance in this engagement. We have
examined some of the implications of three kinds of theoretical
positions for perspectives on difference, boundedness, and
transformation. The overall concern is to work towards
'intercultural' descriptions that can bring out the
implications of engagement across forms of difference that nevertheless
do not imply complete boundedness, and also deal with issues of change
in such a context.
Structural history continues structuralism's tendency to
hypostacize the notion of 'cultural category' or elements of
system, treating them as if external to the dimension of
'action', 'risked' and subject to alteration in
action. In looking at the 'rainbow' as an element of cultural
representation, I have suggested that it is not external to action and
merely 'risked' in it. Its presence in the Katherine street
scene is part of what makes that situation one of a particular kind, and
intelligible in a certain way, from the perspective of Julie and others.
Although an Aboriginal 'idea', the rainbow is not
something that bounds Aborigines from whites, or exists only in an
'Aboriginal world'. Rather, in Julie's view of events,
the rainbow is present to the roadworkers. She sees them as dealing with
it in a certain way, but their manner of dealing with it is not, in her
view, final or absolute. I have suggested that questions about its
finality are outside the ordinary range of things she talks about.
I have proposed that we understand the rainbow here, not as an icon
of Aboriginal difference, culture, protest or resistance, but as a way,
in Voloshinovian terms, that Julie and others had of 'getting a
reading on' what was going on, and orienting to it, in awareness of
the activities of whites.
We have also considered what especially Bourdieuian practice theory
has to say about the social conditioning of forms of subjectivity such
as Julie's, with her faithful acceptance from her mother of
something that her own children, not very different from her in some
ways, do not reproduce in the same terms.
In his effort to transcend the objectivism of structuralist
theorization (the particular angle from which he assails the structuring
tendencies of structuralism), Bourdieu places emphasis upon the habitus
as the conditioned development of 'dispositions'.
'Conditions' suggest regularity and structure, but his
emphasis is on the formation of subjectivity, and the integral relation
between forms of subjectivity and social positioning.
Bourdieu crams many other persistent issues of regularity and
structure into the notion of 'field', offering a spatial
conceptualization of social order. This disposes him towards forms of
theorization of social differences, their opposition and
hierarchization, and exclusiveness of positions in different,
objectified social spaces, rather than ways of theorizing engagement
across differences. For their contrasting orientation towards complexity
in engagement, I have examined the Voloshinovian-Bakhtinian emphases on
interaction, as well as the heteroglossia of articulation and action.
An 'intercultural' account should plausibly deal with
socio-cultural difference, similarity, boundedness and transformation.
Consideration of the varying theoretical positions leads me to suggest
that such an account would include: emphasis upon questions of the
constitution of modes of action; recognition of these as central to what
we can mean by culture, and exploration of 'culture' in
relation to them rather than in terms of categories, objects and
objectifications of widespread, reified notions of Culture; exploration
of the conditioned formation of habit and commonsense, and their
transformation; and of the Voloshinovian emphasis upon orientation to
interaction, and the polyvalence of social word/action. The rainbow
'oriented' Julie like the 'double-edged' word
between self and other, towards the understandings of her mother, and
also the events of town-building. Julie, shaped as she was, would draw
no grand conclusions concerning the destruction of the rainbow. But the
whole episode has a place in the continuous change of conditions and
Julie, among others, draws upon it at some times, but largely lets it
pass in silence, in shaping those to come.
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Francesca Merlan
The Australian National University
NOTES
(1.) During the Katherine Land Claim proceedings, Julie Williams
gave evidence of how a particular white farmer bad lived with her aunt
(sometime in the 1950s) before his marriage to a white partner. At the
time she said this in the context of the claim hearing in the 1980s, 1
believe she was aware of the disparity between the recognition of this
situation by Aborigines (who all knew it and took it as well-established
fact of restricted circulation) and whites (most of whom would not have
known it, and regarded it as scandalous, whether or not they believed
it. It was somewhat shocking merely for Julie to say it).
(2.) He did not think of activities of recording as worthless, but
as a foreign way of doing things. I learned a great deal of Jawoyn
language from him, but he was not easy to work with systematically on
language 'structure'. One could learn as he did things and
talked. He round explicit 'language-learning' or
"recording' sessions constraining, with all the apparatus of
tapes, notes, careful checking, and so on (though he did tolerate a
certain amount of this from me, on the basis of long acquaintance). What
he recorded most voluntarily were long sessions of story-telling, in
which he allowed his rich and rather picaresque imagination to range
freely over material of all sorts--mythic narratives, stories from life,
trickster tales--producing a wealth of material with his own distinctive
stamp on it. Julie, in other words, can partly project herself into the
future of the written medium, classroom teaching of things she learned
otherwise, and so on, in the belief that others can learn what she
knows; while Peter could not imagine himself as involved in those
futures of recorded knowledge. He refused to think that someone not now
able to do so, would in the future become able to understand the stories
he told.
(3.) Sahlins has not elaborated much on such radical structural
change, but has suggested that part of what is involved is
'humiliation' (Sahlins 1990, 1992). People come to hate what
they consider their own, with the proviso that what is experienced as
humiliations can only be understood in particular cultural frames of
reference.
(4.) Bourdieu may have taken a certain critical inspiration from
Voloshinov's work in formulating his own, now-famous position on
'objectivism' in 'Outline of a Theory of Practice'
(the reference to Voloshinov in Bourdieu 1977b, originally published in
French in 1974, shows that he had some familiarity with Voloshinov by
the early 1970s). But making his case for social reproduction depend
heavily on a notion of 'habitus' as embodied disposition,
Bourdieu paid less attention to the challenge of exploration of a
dynamics of interaction and practice in action. My view is that in doing
this, he remained in some ways within the recognizable limits of
structuralist theory, albeit with the promising question of the
intersection of habitus and field, but also a hefty dollop of
individualism, strategic action, and economic determination.
(5.) See Clark and Holquist, Chapter 6, for discussion of
'disputed texts' and the question of Bakhtin's authorship
of a number of works which appeared under others' names. Clark and
Holquist (loc. cit., p. 166) state unequivocally that the author of
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language is Bakhtin. Whether or not this
is so, clearly 'Voloshinov' was involved intellectually with
Bakhtin. My reference to the book as Voloshinov's follows the
established citation, without my feeling able to pronounce on the
identity or otherwise of Voloshinov and Bakhtin with respect to this
work.
(6.) Cf. Leder's 1992 argument which arose as part of recent
initiatives to re-theorize the body. Leder observes that notions of
'body' are derived from the medical study of cadavers rather
than from attempts to understand the living body as process.
(7.) By 'word' I refer to the Russian slovo, for which no
single gloss is adequate. In English 'word' can straddle the
structuralist langue/parole opposition, whereas slovo as used by Bakhtin
and Voloshinov is more clearly on the side of discourse in interaction.
(8.) Although Bakhtin's and Voloshinov's later
explorations are primarily concerned with language, neither man's
earlier ones were (on Bakhtin's earlier ethical explorations see
Clark and Holquist 1984; Voloshinov's first book was on Freudian
psychology). It is clear that the 'word' as they understand it
is action in the world, not Saussurean 'langue' separate from
it (see fn. 7).