Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I Preface
Consequently,
CHAPTER
ONE
Absent Persons
in the Social Sciences
must be our subject . The social sciences are an apparatt1s for seeing, and we must mark the areas that have been occluded by the
equipment . Several dark places show up, but the most extensive
is the idea of the person to whose impoverishment or welfare the
theorizing attends . Consequently, this has become not a discussion of poverty, though that topic was the impetus for the rest of
our consideration, but a discussion of a blind spot that has frequently been noted before, especially by anthropologists. It is the
defective theory of the person, how the defects came about, and
why they are so difficult to remedy. These are admittedly rather
well-worn topics, and to honor Aaron's originality we also feel
bound to be constructive. Thus we have tried to expose a theory
of the person that underlies the cultural the01y to which his work
contributed so much.
ANTHROPOLOGISTS'
CONUNDRUMS
ABOUT POV E RTY
Anthropologists
and practice rhetoric; time and opportunity for groom ing, pray-
tion was collected from herders and the hunting and gathering
Starvation: An International Peispective,there is a cartoon of a little man looking at the view from the top of an eminence labeled
EEC Food Mountain and saying: "On a clear day you can see
Ethiopia"-this
at a time when famine gripped that country
(George 1988). Programs to feed the hungry of the industrially
undeveloped nations would patently bring wealth to the food
producers of the developed countries (Griffin 1987; Raikes
1988). Programs to help the undeveloped countries to produce
their own food were patently advantageous to exporters of agricultural machinery. As for programs to industrialize the nonindustr ial nations, the worthiness of the projects justified ruthless
competition to open new markets and to break clown subsistence
economies (Goodman and Reclclift 1991). When there seemed
to be no way to do good to others without doing good to oneself,
innocence was lost. Altruism became suspect; selfish interest and
ideological bias lurked under every pulpit .
Almost simultaneously anthropologists announced two discoveries: Both affluence and freedom were already available
without benefit of technology . Consider what the constituent
elements of affluence include: short working hours; convivial
company; food to eat and to share; social obligations that can be
fulfilled; intellectual stimulus; opportunity to reflect on history
and mythology, to speculate on metaphysics, to compose poetry
lance and toil was questioned. Philip Gulliver had already shown
how few hours of work are required for an African pastoralist
economy (Gulliver 1955). Even less in a hunting economy: A
famous time-and-motion study made the demonstration for Australian hunters (McArthur and McCarthy
1960); Woodburn
The idea of poverty combines three ideas. One is lack, the sec-
things are often those who display the most resolute commitment
in the social sciences . But the move stalled. The position turns out
tionary and yet radical at the same time. How are the hearers sup-
poverty has acquired a new meaning: Not just lack but poten-
posed to respond? Is the message that we can abo lish poverty and
establish true democ racy if we all set out for a life of herding or
the economic man because "his wants are scarce and his means (in
come s from its import ant role in Ricardo's economic theory and
value into prices . Even if it wer e not for these issues, subsistenc e
level had to be measured for welfare administration . Measurability of this lowest point of poverty made it a physiological and
one that keeps rearing its head and producing confusion among
material matter .
poverty and human needs (Table 1). They all have one thing in
not about to tell the industri al poor that they should reduce their
wants and that they would be happy and free without welfare
can satisfy the needs . No one else is there . Or, rather, there is no
TABLE
ABOUT
I.
FOUR CONVERSATIONS
HUMAN NEEDS AND WANTS
Nonsocial Individual
Needs
Basic
vVtmts
Capabilities
Higher
Arts, selffulfillment,
pleasures of
altruism
Economist's
revealed
preferences
of individuals
Actualization
of individual
capabilities,
access to
opportunities
for selfdevelopment,
equity
there are really many more than four official conversations about
from the institutions that embed them . They have little interac-
from flaring up, and they share one assumption. All four analyze
and abstraction .
Furthermore,
anthropologists
ogy is divided from the rest of social science on the idea of the
self-interested
fouls up interpretation
son" one could write "gift," she is not being flippant. In Melane -
not, or perhaps yes: Their being so tightly locked into their insti-
and other-interested
PERSON
AS LOCUS
OF TRANSACTIONS
IO
social sci-
ences make the idea of the person stand on its own, without soc ial
made its
tion of Hume, Berkeley, and Kant . This flattering view was much
ates an unarticulated
difficult for anthropolog ists to say what they know about other
Mauss's hands was that he could distinguish two parts of the per-
tive, and aware . While paying honor to the second of the pair, the
that your idea about persons is flawed. It is like being told you
have misunderstood human beings and morality, too. The con-
MYTHIC
PARTICIPATIONS
It is tempt ing to suppose that Mauss wrote this untyp ical essay
under the influ en ce of Maurice Leen hardt, the missionary-
always has moral and political app lications. Two examples from
ethnographer
.l,1111es
C lifford (1982), says how much Leenhardt found that he
biographer,
de ]'esprit humain: La
tionist and determinist. But it turned out that the two shared a
veyed a wide range of ethnography and modern and anc ient his-
tory and separated the idea of a person into personnage on the one
hand-that
to
12
13
gested that the early evolutionary stages of culture only saw the
external mask and ignored the inarticulate person inside, but the
it thus: "I think, on the contrary, that if a lion could talk that lion
Canaque person gave the lie to Mauss's belief that primitive civ-
would have a mind so different from the general run oflion minds,
Leenhardt
about the way tl1e Canaque people think or about the Canaque
idea of the person is also doubtful. But this is not where the real
son and keep it precise enough for use in the social sciences,
between incongruent
1947). It
loading; the other is the problem of the glove. No one can toss
away his or her regular notion of the person like an old glove and
Thinking
his view of the Canaque as ammunit ion against his own adver-
saries-the
the surrealist poet who studied with him, felt support for his own
t\11
:1uss 1936, 1950). In his early work under Durkheim's sway
The teacher simply tried "to think aloud 'like a Canaque' ... tak-
1here
ing for his main order of business the dense dilemmas of a single
, .1111
c later on to writing about the category of the person, Mauss
to understand him (1953: 22 3). So how did it happen that the stu-
15
If there really are people who live most of the time in a state of
mythic participation and if that means that their idea of the person is weakly articulated and inconsistent, then we can assume
that they place little value on coordination and perhaps even that
they do not need to coordinate very much. Elsewhere the idea of
the person is put into a body furnished with attributes fit to serve
complex sets of quite precis e expectations. African anthropology
has many beautifully written examples of how exterior and interior persons are appointed with the furnishings for elaborate
forms of social intercourse (Jackson and Karp 1990; Jacobson-
separated comp artments open up, politics breaks in, and the tired
old synt heses show their cracks. The signs are th at the liberal consensus that seemed to be so stable is now experiencing renewal
.md change, thanks to new forms of international dialogue.
T he Industrial Revolution left a legacy of undefended intellectual bastions. While we are still trying to update the philosophy of liberal democracy, globalization is upon us. What has happened to com ,modities is happening to ideas: Barriers against
tr .1de burst open, currencies flit from corner to corner of the
globe, old consumer habits fade before invasive floods of indus1rial
Widding 1991).
As for them, so it is for us: The person in action and the per-
made . The task of the next chapter will be to examine the domi-
.ilw.1ys the case in a plural democracy, and we have seen that one
We will also see how closely the idea of the rational individual is
l \ 11L
WESTERN
CONSENSUS
Ii.,~ lost any local hegemony it had. The French are here, talking
111
,1ch other and to us about our own ideas about welfare and
Every now and again there is a grand cleanup, when current terms
are inspected and some are thrown out of the window. It happens
,11111
because every now and again some shock has exposed intellectual
t.d king politics. The Spanish are here, talking about conflict and
time, talking about the public sphere. The Italians are here,
17
other; the Japanese are also here, the voices of the Koreans and
yet he believes that the part of our history which can unite West-
ern E urope most effectively, in spite of its horrors, is this century 's
to be excluded. International
says, on "some variant of the democratic and market ideal" (p. r 5).
No one would dispute his view that this ideal plays a central role
l he
1l'ial democracy are far from fragile. The fear that they need pro-
respective histories.
cLion is part of their strength. We will show how well they are
TOTAL
OBJECTIVITY
111
ust make standard measures. But now a call for political honesty
1, r 11:1de in the n ame of total objectivity: The discourse on po verty
I1.1\
lo
,/ 11111011deillustrate
of poverty,
what they are being told; they scrupulously base their analyses on
set of assump tions will pass the test. Disgust with domination
the data; their method is designed to protect them from the well-
,md pressure for equality and fairness can make any judgment
known distortions
.1nd exclude otcher possibly valid judgments. When the same dis-
of surveys. Nonetheless,
their own clear-cut schemas on the confused notions of the int er-
:1'i,.ation can bring all formulations of public policy to this bar, all
lence . How can they justify their select ion of what is really
on the data. Their own mental habits and categories have prede-
t \\ U Cs,
termined the results. The inquiry has set its sights so that it can
,t' I
the policy
of received ideas? Either way, the cri tic wins. When the critic
11ritcr is in trouble not for sloppy wr iting but for cheating . For
,11111
c critics any kind of schematizing or organizing of data is
With
researchers' pretensions. One prong look s for signs that the high
11111
1vio lent though he was, the reviewer innocently imposed his
20
2I
suffered not from material lack, not from want of things, but from
that poverty took in this book had a lot to do with the poor per-
OLD DIALOGUE
ABOUT
THE PERSON
social theories. We will examine the implicit psychological theory that seems to be accepted in neoclassical economics, but we
will not join the economists who love to berate each other for
111cntsbetween economists.