Adventures in Sociology - Three: Structural Aspects

Part III Social Structure : Structural Aspects

6. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION STRUCTURE

The allocation of specialized duties to specific social position is called the process of social differentiation

The process of hierarchically arranging social positions on the basis of cultural values is social ranking.

A social stratification structure is composed of a hierarchy of social position and the accompanying network of social relationships.

Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore contend that social inequality exists because societies require it. Ie. Functional Theory of Stratification Rewards are attached to achievement of social position.

Proponents of Conflict Theory believe that stratification structures are the product of power based conflict.

Social positions having a sufficiently similar rank are termed a social class.

Those at the top of a stratification structure, the elites and sometimes those at the bottom have their own ideology, their own set of ideas that serves to justify their values.

Social Mobility is the movement of individuals or families within a stratification structure.

Intergenerational Mobility is measured by comparing a father’s occupational level that of the son.

Comparing the same person’s occupational level at different intervals in his career is a measure of intergenerational mobility

Age, Sex, Ethnicity and Race are viewed as master social positions.

- Ascribed positions that significantly affect the likelihood of achieving other social positions within a stratification structure.

The determinative characteristic of age, sex and ethnicity as master position is declining.

The r R’s of Social Stratification Structure

1. Ranking is the process of virtually arranging social positions on the basis of a criteria rooted in cultural values.

2. Retention characterizes the tendency of endurance of hierarchy of positions and associated social relationships.

3. Rewards are the differential benefits derived from social class placement (Respect, Wealth and Influence)

4. Resources are the means by which persons and groups attain social class placement on a stratification structure – Assets that are negotiable in the process of achieving, maintaining or passing on to others a social class level.

5. Repercussions Behavioral and cultural patterns with certain social classes.

7. The Five R’s of STRATIFICATION STRUCUTE



Those who own capital would be the rulers, bourgeoisie those without ownership of the means of production would be the ruled, the proletariat

Karl Marx

Only one criteria was taken into by Marx – Economics

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Weber conceived straight structure as multidimensional and introduced three orders of stratification – Economic, Prestige and Power.



Weber underscored



Life Chances – the likelihood of securing the “good things of life” such as housing, education, health, food and various other desirable goods and services.



Prestige is the favourable evaluation of some persons by other persons. Most stable source of prestige is associated with social position particularly with occupation.



Prestige is a cultural and social matter, depending on the norms and values professed and practiced in a social structure.



Honour deference and the like must be given to one by another.



“Robinson never got any respect” until his man Friday came along.

Rodney Dangerfield

Social classes tend to share everything from food tasks to levels of education.



Power is the capability of one person to exert his ill on other person, whether or not they wish to cooperate.



The phenomenon of being high in some dimensions and low in others is called status inconsistency.



Wealth, prestige and power can be used as resources as well.



Ranking Various Approaches



When members of a stratification structure are asked to rank others in the social class hierarchy – reputational approach



When they are asked to rank themselves a self-locationed approach



When researchers establish standards that reflect the beliefs of stratification structure –

Objective approach.



If a move from one social position to another carries with it a change in social class level, vertical social mobility has occurred.



There can also be horizontal mobility, intra generational or intergenerational.

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In closed class structures inheritance of social class is the rule. By means of religious, biological, magical or legal justification superiors keep inferiors at a social distance. Eg. Caste System.



In open class systems

Social class movement is a desirable event.



Personality is composed of the patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that are characteristic of a person.

COMMUNITY STRUCTURE –URBANISM



Community structure is an inter-related set of social relationships that fulfill on a daily basis the major social and economic needs of the population living within a delimited geographic area.

In today’s world sheer size plus frequent and extensive geographical mobility tend to create a community of strangers. Urbanism has made obsolete the psychological definition of community.



Each of the organizations to which urbanites belong engages only a limited segment of their personalities.



Extremely high degree of occupational specialization found in cities promotes impersonal, segmental, superficial and transitory social relationships.



Wirth identified these characteristics to distinguish urban social structure; population size, population density and heterogeneity.



8. FORMAL ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE



Weber responsible for the formulation of the bureaucratic model as an ideal type, expressed fear that bureaucracy would breed excessive conservatism among persons within such organizations.



Radicals rail against the bureaucracy or the Establishment, claiming it to be the house of decision making that dictates the fate of an essentially powerless and apathetic public.



Conservatives deplore the encroachment of the govt bureaucracy on the free enterprise system.



Both converge on the point that organizations in modern society are too numerous and too large.



They service the social and economic needs.

“There is something about a bureaucratic that does not like a poem”- Gore Vidal

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Nature of bureaucratic organization



Bureaucracy may be defined as a formal organization based on the following principles.



1. Hierarchy of authority



Application of bur tie principles increases effectiveness and efficiency through the coordination of people and their activities that is accomplished via a hierarchy of authority.



Power is the capability of a person or group to exert its will on other persons or groups, whether or not they wish to cooperate.



Manipulation, coercion expertise are correlates to power



Authority is power attached to a social position.



Legal authority is attached to the position regardless of the person occupying it at any given time.



In the case of Traditional authority compliance is based on acquiescence to the person occupying the traditionally approved position of authority.



In the case of charismatic authority no legal or traditional position exists but obedience is given to another person as a result of his magnetic personal characteristics or the trust he elicits.



2) Division of Labour



The breaking up of total production or service operation into their component parts. Specialization is the key principle.



Line Organization

Functional Organization

Staff Organization



3) System of rules and procedures. – prescribes and proscribes the manner in which organizational members perform the various facets of their jobs.



4) Universalism – refers to an impersonal attitude toward and treatment of another person.

The narrowness of vision and inability to change with the times that is based on training and experience is known as trained incapacity – an example of bureaucratic principles gone awry.

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Also goal displacement when organizational means are elevated to ends in themselves.

Adventures in Sociology - Two: Components of Social Structure

Part II Components of Social Structure



3. THE NATURE OF CULTURE


Pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving vary from society to society.


1. Culture is a human creation – It is man-made

2. Culture is transmitted socially – It is learned

3. Culture is abstract – It consists of patterns for thinking, feeling and behaving.

4. Culture is structured – It consists of organized patterns for thinking, feeling and behaving.

5. Culture may be differentially shared – it socially transmitted to members of an entire society or to members of segments of that society.



Human beings are forced into culture as against animal’s instinct. For humans lack solutions to many problems of survival.


Process by which culture is transmitted from generation to generation is called Socialization.

Man is the only animal capable of the arbitrary assignment of meanings (Symbolizations). Hence, he is the only animal capable of creating and perpetuating a cultural heritage.


Culture accumulates and cumulates – Creations at one point in time may be combined with later creations in order to form yet another creation. This is the process of invention. Base of culture is broadened and progress occurs.

Reification fallacy is the mistake committed when an abstraction is thought to have a material substance.

Eg. Society may be taken to eat drink sleep, while actually persons do these things.

Cultural patterns are guidelines for thinking, feeling and behaving.

Subculture refers to cultural patterns that are in some way different from those of larger culture.

Where there is a conflict with the larger culture, there is contra culture.

The Content of Culture

The three primary dimensions of the contents of culture are the cognitive, material and normative dimensions.

Cognition is the process that enables humans to comprehend and to relate to their surroundings.

Ideas that are accepted by person as representing reality as being true are beliefs.

The normative dimension brings long periods of order and stability in human behavior. Recurrence and predictability are possible.

Adherence to norms is fostered through both childhood and adult socialization, the process whereby culture is socially transmitted and through sanctioning, or behavior designed to ensure conformity to norms.

William Graham Summer originated the concepts of folkways and mores.

Formal Sanctions reside in the hands of appointed or elected representative of the social structure.

Informal Sanctions are expressions of reward or punishment by one or more social structure members for either an unusual fulfillment of a norm or a violation of a norm.

Sanctions may be positive or negative.


TYPES OF SOCIAL CONTROL

Strength of Society     Informal        Formal

Light                            Folleways      Laws

Heavy                           Mores            Laws


Folkways are norms that define customary ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.

Mores are norms that have been defined as central to the well-being of a social structure.

Laws are formally defined and recorded norms whose enforcement is carried out by public authorities.


THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURE

Cultural specialties are cognitive material and normative aspects of culture that are practiced only by certain socially recognized segments of a society.

Culture provides some amount of choice. The cognitive mat and normative patterns that may be adopted by only certain persons are called cultural alternatives

Inter-societal and intra societal cultural diversity are with consequences.

Ethnocentrism is the judgment on the part of members of one social structure that their particular patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving are superior to those of members of other structure.

The idea that any given aspect of a particular culture must be evaluated in terms of its place within the larger cultural context of which it is a part, rather than according to some alleged universal standard that applies across all cultures is termed cultural relativism

Cultural universals are those aspects of culture within a particular society that are shared by nearly all adults of sound mind.


6. SOCIAL STRUCTURE


The past is transmitted (or the future) through the creation of arbitrary symbols (symbols that have no intrinsic relationship with the thing for which they stand)


Culture


Via


Role prescription


Attached to


Social Positions


guides


Role behavior


Through


Social Interaction


Which may be observed as


Social relationships


Which constitute


Social Structure

Ascribed Social positions are those that are assigned to persons automatically and these are beyond their power to choose or reject (sex, age, race)

Adhered social positions are those over which people have some degree of control, and are thematically open for competition.

Rights are what the occupant can expect from another person in a position set.

Obligations are those through that a position holder is expected to do in relation to another person within the position set.

Carl Jung my favourite psychologist

Jung and Christianity:


An Interpersonal Perspective

By Robert T. Sears, S.J.

We have only to look at our spirituality today to see how much of Jung 's agenda we have taken over. Dream and fantasy workshops, a growing awareness of ecology and care for the Earth, a recognition of our shadow and neglected side are just a few. I believe Jung is speaking a very important word to our one-sided religion and culture, and yet this word needs to be put in a different context — one  that is interpersonal, in contrast to the intrapersonal focus of Jung himself. Jung interpreted "faith" as an intellectual adherence to dogmas without religious experience. He sought experience of God in a way that left "faith" in the actual existence of God open to question. An interpersonal view of faith was beyond his "scientific" interest. He retrieved the "whole individuated person," but in the
process lost, I will argue, a mature interpersonality.

In recent times several attempts have been  made to put Jung's contribution to Christianity,

healing, and spiritual direction into right  perspective.' With the wide use of Jung's thinking

in healing ministries and spiritual direction,  it seems important to present a critique of his

position, especially with respect to implications for the healing ministry. Jung was always concerned

with the religious implications of his perspective. He had six theologians on his

mother's side of the family, with a bishop grandfather, and two uncles, besides his father, who

were ministers on his father's side. Jung was steeped in religion, and his concern, as Murray

Stein has well argued, was to treat not just individuals, but the whole Christian tradition as well.2 He felt that the religious neurosis of  his father (his inability to move beyond dogmas to experience and, hence, his suppressed doubts) was not peculiar to him, but expressed the one-sidedness of his tradition. The church,  he felt, had excluded nature, as seen in its abstract art and architecture; had repressed

animals, as seen in their extinction; had neglected its own inferior and dark side — sexuality,

hostility — and its creative fantasy because of intellectual dogma.3 It had cut itself

off from primitive roots and mythology and had lost its inferiority and soul. It sought an idealistic perfection rather than a realistic wholeness, and the neglected side was causing
alienation, wars, division between the sexes,  and separation from God.

We have only to look at our spirituality today  to see how much of Jung's agenda we have taken over. Dream and fantasy workshops, a growing awareness of ecology and care for the Earth, a recognition of our shadow and neglected side and the need for recreation to offset the one-sided workaholism of both culture and religion; a recognition of the feminine in men, and, one hopes, a recognition that women do not have to identify with their masculine side but to integrate its virtues in their own way.


Certainly, more could be done to enhance each of these directions. The concern of this article, however, is to highlight what can well be lost in the way Jung and many of his followers view me Christian tradition to meet this agenda. Jung interpreted  "faith," as lived by his father, as an intellectual adherence to dogmas without religious experience.  He sought experience of God in a
way that left "faith" in the actual existence of God open to Question.5 An interpersonal view
of faith was beyond his "scientific" interest. He retrieved the "whole individuated person," but
in the process lost, I will argue, a mature  interpersonality. As a result, his reinterpretation
of Christian "dogmas" in experiential terms distorted their interpersonal nature and made
the church a way station on the road to  individuation rather than making individuation
a step toward mature spiritual community. It is  this ultimate horizon of understanding that concerns
me in this article, not his agenda for healing  the church, an agenda that seems to me a
real need. How one interprets this agenda and meets it is at issue.

My points, then, are two: (1) I believe Jung is speaking a very important word to our one sided
religion and culture, a word that needs to be heard, and yet (2) this word needs to be put in a different context — one that is interpersonal, in contrast to the intrapersonal focus of Jung himself. In this article I focus on the second point. I will first highlight Jung's neglect of the interpersonal, then place his contribution in an overall view of human interpersonal growth, and finally indicate what implications this changed perspective would have on healing and Christian spiritual growth.


I. Jung's Neglect of the Interpersonal Jung was clearly interested in human interaction, as his Psychological Types (1923) documents at length and his analysis of how the projection of shadow and anima/animus corrupts human communication develops further. Yet he focused on withdrawing "projections" between individuals (such as those he discovered in his relationship with Freud) or owning one's own religious experience "projected" onto institutional religion. Analysis  frees the individual to full self-expression.  Society and the church are the womb of this new  birth but not its ultimate goal. This can be seen  in Jung's view of faith, his treatment of projection, and his view of God.

A. Jung's view of faith. For Jung, as for many moderns, "faith" is adherence to cultural or religious dogmas without full experience or understanding. When asked whether he believed in God, Jung answered: "I do not believe. I know." Very early he determined not to adhere blindly to dogmas, as he felt his father had done to the detriment of his own life conviction. He would let his experience of "God" lead him, as untraditional as it seemed. He concluded early that "in religious matters, only experience counted."6 Jung was both a scientist and a convinced  Kantian. Kant held that we cannot know the other, only the phenomenon of our own experience. We must leave the ground of this experience to "belief that cannot be proved.

A dream of his father that Jung had around 1950  (while struggling with his Answer to Job) brings
his view into clear focus. After a scene where his father is a distinguished scholar explaining  a fishskin-bound Bible to Jung and two other psychiatrists at breakneck speed in a way too erudite for their understanding, the scene changes to a large, circular second-story hall with a sultan's throne elevated in the center.
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Jung was both a scientist and a convinced Kantian. Kant held that we cannot know the other, only the phenomenon of our own experience.His father points to a small door high up on the wall
and says: "Now I will lead you into the highest presence." He then kneels and touches his head to the ground. Jung follows suit, but does not go all the way to the floor. That door, he then realizes, leads to the chamber of Uriah, King David's betrayed general, whom Jung sees as a Christ-image. Jung acknowledged that he ought to have submitted to his fate, but "something in me was defiant and determined not to be a dumb fish.... Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?"7 In this view, to believe fully is to lose one's independence and freedom.

"Faith" meant to Jung an unquestioning submission that would hinder individuation. Jung's wariness of "faith" in this sense will always be needed if individual experience is to be taken seriously and social systems are to be challenged, yet there is an interpersonal aspect of faith that his view neglects. When Jesus asks his disciples, "Will you also go away?" (John 6:67) and Peter replies that "you have the words of eternal life and we have come to believe...,"  he is not asserting a dogma so much as a commitment to a relationship. Faith in this sense is a committed, loving relationship to another person,

a basic trust that, in another's self- The Journal of Christian Healing revelation and faithfulness. God is communicated. Par from de-individualizing us, this interpersonal faith ultimately calls each of us,

as it did Jesus' disciples, to full uniqueness at the same time that it builds a believing community."

Jung was aware that his focus on individuation was to offset the rampant collectivism of his time (seen in Nazi Germany and communist Russia but also in the institutional church). He felt that this individuation was itself "one-sided," and took great care to carry out his responsibilities to the state and to religion by his military and political service through his writing.9 The individualism of our day10 is not what Jung meant by individuation that required sacrifice of egoism for the self. Yet even so, the self, for Jung, is not ultimately grounded in interpersonal faith but in one's own nuministic
experience." Though he had his children belong to the church as a container for their initial growth (his mother took charge of this aspect),12 he and Emma did not attend church. Not interpersonal

faith but personal experience grounded his religion.

B. Freeing of projections. "Whatever is unconscious is projected," Jung affirmed, and

unless such projections (shadow, anima/animus, savior) are brought to light, they will contaminate

our relationships, whether personal or social. I (we) will fight the "enemy" outside if I (we) overlook the "shadow" within; I (we) will oppress the sexes if I (we) neglect the countersexual sides of ourselves; I (we) will carry out "holy wars" against those who attack my (our) "saving myth" rather than reverence the revelation of God in ourselves and others to help each other to saving wholeness.

Again, we have to agree with Jung's insights, but what will call us to commitment once the projections are released? What vision of "beloved community" (Josiah Rpyce, The Problem of Christianity, 1913) will be worth the sacrifice of our new-found autonomy once our religious and nationalistic "illusions" fall away? Without a divine Other to ground an interpersonal goal, we are left with individual motivation and self interest (albeit a larger "self than narrow egoism), and experience is showing us this is not enough.

C. God within experience. Ultimately, our image of God is what calls us to growth or

Vol. 12. No. 2, Summer 1990 stands in the way. As Jung saw it, the Christian God was one-sidedly "light" and masculine, so Christians projected their shadow on the  "unsaved" outside and kept women in subservient positions. Individuals were not encouraged to trust their own experience and think for themselves, so the slavish following of "-isms" was an ever-present danger. "God" must be found in each one's experience, in one's
_______________________________________

Jung's God-image individuates, that is becomes progressively more self-aware in the world,

through interaction with humans. It includes a dark, destructive side that is revealed in the death of Jesus, and warns us against total trust.______________

darkness as well as light, in fenimine receptiveness as well as masculine determination, if

we are to creatively meet the challenges of our day. The trinitarian God expresses full consciousness:

the Self (Father) expressing itself (Son) and releasing energy through explicit self acceptance

(Holy Spirit). But consciousness leaves out the unconscious (darkness, evil, the feminine). God must be Quaternity — Trinity plus that dark side — if our God-image is to lead us to full individuation."

Here we glimpse the confusing subtleties in  Jung's position. He claims to deal with God images,

yet critiques church dogmas (which claim to express truths, not images) on the basis of their symbolism for individuation. Jung's God-experience is open-ended, a personalized contact with a common "ground of being" out of which we individually emerge, an "archetype" (a basic structure of the psyche). Jung is not an atheist, nor even an agnostic. He really says nothing about the ultimate in reality but only that in the psyche. Yet that very neglect of an ultimate statement (if in fact it is possible) leaves the individual adrift in a sea of emerging consciousness with no clear affirmation

of who God ultimately is. That vacuum will be filled with implied ultimate metaphors for God, and ultimate values springing from that commitment.14

13

Jung himself seems to take this step when he describes (in his Answer to Job, 1952) the changing human conceptions of God as changes in God's self-consciousness. Jung's God-image individuates, that is becomes progressively more self-aware in the world, through interaction with humans. It includes a dark, destructive side that is revealed in the death of Jesus, and warns us against total trust (as we saw above).15 To submit totally to such a God is to gain power but lose one's distinctiveness. Such an image is not a loving, personal presence that

_______________________________________

The Spirit given through Jesus' death/resurrection brought to life a community of believers at Pentecost; gave each a different manifestation of the Spirit for the building of the community,

and opened people to Jesus as Lord and the Father as Abba.________

calls us into a committed world of self-giving

love (as David Hassel argues is necessary).16

Such a God is united to our experience, Jung's

main concern, but does not embody a transcendent

goal of perfect, self-giving Love that calls

us into union with Christ and loving community.

How can we take seriously Jung's concern

to relate God to our experience of darkness, yet

maintain an ultimate faith in God's perfect, selfgiving

love? An interpersonal perspective offers

hope for that integration.

n. An Interpersonal View of Human Growth

and Trinitarian Love

Jung focused on emerging individuating consciousness

and understood God as its ultimate

goal. If we attend to God's self-communication

through Jesus and the Spirit as leading to individuated,

self-giving love, what view of

human development and God would emerge and

how would Jung's contribution fit?

First, Christian faith must begin with the personal

God that Jesus reveals in his words and

actions.17 Jesus lived and preached God's

kingdom by healing and reaching out to the

poor. The Spirit at work in him went to the

disciples at Pentecost to build them into a com-

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munity of service. Authentic Christian tradition

came to see Jesus and the Spirit as equally

divine, a factor that grounds seeing God as a

community of self-giving love." Recent

theology has focused on Jesus' cross and resurrection

as the privileged way to understand God

(very different from the approach to God in

Jung's day). Viewing the Father through the Son

(John 14:9), we see beyond Jesus' cross to the

Father who surrenders his Son out of Love

(John 3:16). The Son's faithful commitment

leads him to surrender himself in response, and

their joint self-giving "sends" their Spirit of

self-giving love to our world to empower other

believers.

Second, this power of self-giving love is made

available to us through the gift of the Spirit in

Jesus' resurrection. Jesus' resurrection brings

human nature into union with God. It is the

beginning of a "new creation" at work in the

world (since Jesus is now Lord of the world),

and because it partakes of God's life, the Spirit

of Jesus pervades all space and time. It brings

Jesus' ancestors, and all our ancestors, into

union with God, as it does future generations,

and calls from the depths of all people whether

or not they are conscious believers. Hence, the

experience that Jung appeals to actually is an

experience transformed by the Resurrection of

Jesus, even though Jung does not understand it

in that light. If he did, what new perspective

would emerge in consciousness?

Third, the new perspective would be fundamentally

interpersonal. The Spirit given through

Jesus' death/resurrection brought to life a community

of believers at Pentecost (Acts 2); gave

each a different manifestation of the Spirit for

the building of the community (1 Cor. 12:7), and

opened people to Jesus as Lord (1 Cor. 12:3)

and the Father as Abba (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:15).

In every case the gift is interpersonal, yet

implies an individual freedom to develop one's

unique giftedness. Elsewhere I have argued19

that this goal of creative individual relationship

(which I have called communitarian and mission

faith) is reached through several stages corresponding

to stages of Judeo-Christian history:

trust (corresponding to Yahwist theology);

familial faith (corresponding to the law stage of

the Elohist and Deuteronomist); individuating

faith (which we see emerging in Ezekiel 18 and

The Journal of Christian Healing

Job during the Exile and after); communitarian

faith (which first emerges with Jesus'

forgiveness of enemies and sinners, forming a

compassionate individuated community), and

mission faith (which we see at Pentecost and

beyond).

This interpersonal perspective does not

invalidate Jung's insights. Rather, it reinterprets

them from a higher viewpoint, for the above

stages are cumulative and cyclical. Cumulatively,

each higher stage builds on the preceding

and raises it to a new level. Familial faith

presupposes and deepens trust, and individuating

faith presupposes familial relationships

that have contributed to one's unfolding,

yet rediscovers them in an individuated way in

communitarian faith. Thus communitarian faith

increases with the increasing individuation of

those united, and their union, in turn, actually

increases the uniqueness of each involved.

Jung's focus was on individuation, and he saw

community, in this perspective, as familial,

since it was pre-individuated, a container for

later individuation. The Spirit moves us toward

a further form of community that individuates

its members by developing each one's unique

gifts (1 Cor. 12:7) and leads to an overflow of

communal life in mission, as we see in the early

community in Acts.

III. Jungian Insights Re-Visioned from an

Interpersonal Perspective

Jung appeals to experience and uses concepts

such as archetype, etc., to organize that experience.

Hence, there would seem to be

nothing in his view to oppose a restructuring

of his data, as long as it took seriously his concerns.

Let us look at several of his concepts and

concerns from the point of view of the interpersonal

resurrection-Spirit as the ground of our

experience.

A. The Shadow in Humans and God. Jung

was concerned that the perfectionism of Christianity

led to its overlooking its dark side. We

necessarily create outer enemies if we are not

reconciled to the inferior sides of ourselves. We

seek world peace but will never achieve it until

we recognize and reconcile our inner aggression

and suspicion. "We are the source of all

evil," Jung commented in a BBC interview,

Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 1990

"and we are pitifully unaware of it." Since we

see ourselves in light of our God-images, Jung

concluded that a root cause of our blindness was

our one-sidedly good image of God. According

to Jung, since a trinitarian God is all good, we

are led to constellate an outer enemy to be

fought (as we see happening in the Book of

Revelation) rather than focus on our inner dark

side to be understood and integrated. For Jung,

God must be at the root of good and evil if there

is one source of all. If God also has a questionable

side, then we are freed to admit our

own darkness, to look honestly at all our

experience, bring it to light, and work toward

an integration of the opposites.

This placing of evil in God has led opponents

of Jung's view to various rebuttals. Even such

a staunch Jungian as John Sanford called Jung

"frustratingly inconsistent" in his treatment of

evil, and "adamant in his affirmations."20 Jung

affirmed the Self as uniting opposites in an allencompassing

wholeness, yet states that evil

destroys wholeness. Either there is a larger

wholeness that includes evil, or there is no

ultimate wholeness. Jung seems to imply the

first, for in one place21 he speaks of God as

Love in that God unites opposites, without saying

that the opposite of God is hate. Yet other

passages affirm evil in God. In any case, Jung

misinterpreted the classical definition of evil.

He continually argued that to define evil as the

"privation of good" slighted its terrifying

power, as though it lacked being. In fact,

Augustine and Aquinas defined evil as "the

privation of good that ought to be there"

("privatio boni debiti"), such as a fallen angel.

In no sense does the angel become less powerful;

it only becomes distorted in its power. The

corruption of the best is the worst. And further,

as Robert Doran pointed out, to put evil in God

makes it impossible to trust God unconditionally.

22 Jung's own dream in which he did not

bow fully indicates his need to keep his

autonomy, but also shows a lack of total trust

in God, as though God would take away his

freedom. Augustine and Aquinas both argued,

in contrast, that the touch of God is what frees

us. Only God can free us to open to the ultimate

good. Such faith liberates rather than enslaves.

In preventing a total trust in God, Jung's view

would block the loving integration that alone

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can bring wholeness.

Let us concede that Jung's argument is faulty

philosophically and theologically. The fact

remains that we often do shy away from full

surrender to God. Do we not feel that God will

take away what we want to keep, will tell us to

"sell all" when we are not ready? To see God

is to die, the Old Testament said, so Moses

could only see God's backside. How can we take

Jung's observation seriously and still be true to

the Christian tradition? I believe the approach

to God by way of Jesus' death/resurrection

shows a way. The death of Jesus is not just an

unfortunate result of sin. Jesus freely gives his

life, and this self-gift unto death must reveal an

essential aspect of God if we see God in Jesus

(John 14:9). God's Spirit in us does put to death

what is partial and self-enclosed, and that

opposition to all that is limited must feel like

an enemy till we can see it as a bridge to selfgiving

love. The shadow in its deepest root need

not be seen as an unalterable evil.

Psychologically, it is an undeveloped aspect of

the individual or social personality turned sour

because it has been repressed, but it is repressed

because we do not open our weaknesses and

perverted choices to compassionate love. In

freely surrendering his life to God's love amidst

human evil and rejection, Jesus shows us how

weakness and even death are a bridge to greater

love. From a limited perspective, the shadow

opposes our autonomy and appears to be totally

evil, but transformed by the Spirit it reveals

God's ever-greater, self-giving love (Romans 7).

Death and darkness is in God, but is

transformed in God (and in us through God's

Spirit) to self-giving love.

B. Masculine and Feminine in Humans and

God. Jung introduced femininity into God to

avoid a one-sided patriarchal image that would

not lead humans to wholeness. His culminating

work Mysterium Coniunctionis (the alchemical

sacred marriage) shows the importance he gave

this union of opposites in God, and his analysis

of the anima/animus in men and women

showed how important it was for individuals to

contact the opposites in themselves. Yet even

in this area of profound interpersonal importance,

Jung's focus was on the sexual opposites

in each individual and in the single God-image. I

16

believe Jung is correct in showing that true inner

freedom in relationships presupposes coming

to clarity about the femininity in men and

the masculinity in women, but is the goal of

human development an androgynous individual?

I think not! An interpersonal view of

God, and male-female relations in God, can integrate

both male and female aspects of God in

a community of self-giving love as well as

develop the full human potential of each person.

23 Jesus' death/resurrection reveals a God

as free, covenanted, self-giving love. Full

human healing would come when each could

freely surrender her/his life for the other in a

similarly individuated way. Such a Spiritempowered

self-giving would give rise to complementarity

and creativity rather than competition

and enmity out of sexual differences. In

social structures, it would release otherempowering

community rather than

domination.

_______________________________________

For Christians, Jesus is the key

both to individuation and to the

reconciling love so needed in our

world. For Jung, the historical

Jesus soon was lost in the myth

of Christ.___________________________

C. The Ground of Ultimate Meaning.

Perhaps the central concern of Jung was to help

clients contact a ground of ultimate meaning in

their own experience, since the church seemed

to be hopelessly one-sided and most of his

clients had lost faith in its teachings. He first

sought for his own grounding myth, which was,

as Barbara Hannah expressed it, to bring nature

to consciousness and hence to be part of the

completion of Creation.24 He found the link to

this ground in myths and neglected products of

the human spirit such as alchemy. So important

did these sources become to him that Jung

reinterpreted basic Christian dogmas (such as

the Trinity, the Sacrifice of the Mass, the

Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, etc.) in light of

world mythology and spirituality to show their

grounding in common human experience and

thus make them again acceptable to people today.

He was opposed to a slavish imitation of

Jesus that alienated people from their own im-

The Journal of Christian Healing

ages and unique selves. Analysis sought to

reconnect persons with their unique senses of

meaning through dreams, projections, etc., and

so to carry out in their lives their own

uniqueness as Jesus did in his life. Jung found

that myths often revealed to people their deep

meanings that had been eclipsed by overly conscious

modem lives. When one finds a personal

"myth" (or life meaning), paradoxically one

gains the freedom to create something that has

meaning for others. Jung's discoveries were

important contributions to his time, and continue

to be in our day. In touching the wisdom

deep inside his own experience, he could lead

others to renewed life.

Yet these myths and archetypes are

themselves no more developed than the times

out of which they emerged. Christianity

completes these underlying myths (as the Old

Testament transformed sacred meals, etc., to

historical Passover meals, and these, in turn,

were given a christological meaning in the New

Testament). Through Jesus they are redirected

to interpersonal, committed love. "Yahweh, not

Baal or Astarte, becomes the source of life, and

Christians see this life in Jesus. The sacred Rock

and Foundation is Yahweh, then Christ. Each

sacred image is regrounded historically in

Yahweh in Israel and mediated through Christ

in Christianity. What Jung has done is to

retrieve neglected aspects of the background of

Israel and Christianity by providing a sympathetic

analysis of ancient pagan mythology.

But he has reinterpreted Christianity in light of

that mythology rather than reinterpreting that

basis in light of Christ. I believe we can use his

analysis of archetypes and mythology to open

our dreams and images to their broadest meanings

if we carry those meanings through to their

fulfillment in Christ. If we are consistent with

our Christian faith, the very ground of our

experience is the Resurrection-Spirit of Christ.

So we are not falsifying our dreams and images

by rooting them in Jesus; we are bringing to

completion what nature has left incomplete.

IV. Union with Jesus in the Church as

Fulfillment of Our Individuated Selves

If Jung had an inadequate ultimate grounding,

why is it that so many Christians look to him

for guidance? Can he be trusted? What is his

Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 1990

contribution to an adequate Christian perspective?

I have studied and taught Jung and

theology for about ten years now, and I continue

to find new insights in Jung. I would explain

that through the following points:

A. Every psychology, Jung said, is a

personal confession. We see what we are ready

to see, and one who has confronted his or her

own experience more fully can point out things

to others that they would not otherwise see,

whether or not those people "believe" in the

same way as oneself.25

B. Jung's "conversion" and self-awareness

are expressed in his individuation process.

Through it he uncovered the neglected aspects

of his inner life, aspects that he saw had been

neglected by the dogmatism of the Christianity

he experienced through his father and his

clients. These neglected aspects (nature,

animality, femininity, dreams and fantasy, the

inferior side and the shadow) lay deep in the

human unconscious, and were acted out in

negative, primitive ways because they were

neglected. Every human is a product of

cumulative levels of evolution, and so whatever

is neglected remains active, though it is suppressed.

In "reworking" the Christian dogmas,

Jung retrieved these neglected aspects and so

opened us to take seriously all of Creation.

C One can be a "believing" Christian

without being aware of those neglected dimensions,

but then one's Christianity will be

distorted in many ways. Without awareness of

one's grounding in nature and animality, the

Christian will repress these aspects in him or

herself and will also dominate nature rather than

partner it. Some have justified this domination

from the Bible (Gen.-1:28, "fill the earth and

subdue it") even though the text means quite

something else.26 If one is out of touch with

one's inner femininity (or masculinity in

women), one will dominate women and treat

them as inferior and act out sexually, or attack

men as enemies,27 a clear distortion of Jesus'

practice. The recent scandals of some

televangelists provide ample evidence of this.

If one neglects the shadow or inferior side, one

will oppress the weak and create enemies outside

rather than reach out in forgiving love as

Jesus taught, as events in South Africa amply

illustrate. In other words, the Christian who

17

seeks salvation m Jesus while avoiding selfawareness

and conversion (since Jesus saves us

as sinners) will interpret Jesus in light of his

or her own distortions. Jung's focus on

individual awareness is a much-needed corrective

of that view. We will only understand Jesus

if we become like him, and we will only

become like him if we are deeply aware of our

grounding in nature, animality, etc.; for that is

how Jesus was.

D. While individuation is needed for an

integral development of Christian spirituality,

it is not enough.29 We cannot substitute relation

to Jesus for personal growth in selfawareness,

but we also cannot substitute personal

growth for relation to Jesus. Both are

needed if the Spirit unites us interpersonally

with Jesus and not just symbolically in

ourselves. Jung reinterpreted the Ignatian

Spiritual Exercises to mean total submission to

God-within of the Self.29 He rejected Ignatius'

focus on Jesus' life as norm, saying it endangered

the individual's unique way and personal

imagery. Experience teaches us that

slavish imitation of Jesus' life can very well

submerge individual differences. However, free,

mature relationships do not submerge

individuality, but actually increase it. We come

to a deeper sense of our own uniqueness through

freeing dialogue with others, and this would

certainly be the case with freeing dialogue with

Jesus. Jesus himself reveals the perfection of

individuation. He has assimilated his own

shadow through forgiveness and taught us to

"love our enemies" (Man. 5:44).30 He was open

to equalizing dialogue with women in a way

unprecedented for his day, and he found his

Father's love and direction within himself while

remaining faithful to his tradition, at great cost

of persecution from his religion and society. In

relating to him out of an individuated selfawareness,

we cannot help being challenged to

a further growth toward illumination and

wholeness.

E. Jesus calls us not just to wholeness, but

to commitment to him and his mission of

reconciliation. He calls us to intimate union

with himself and to become a community of

reconciling love in the image of the divine community

of God. Jung's insights into collective

structures can help us find the way to the goal

18

of forming individuated, creative community

more clearly and avoid the projection of evil and

dominating relationships on to others. But the

Christian's center must remain the crucified and

resurrected Christ, who integrates all things and

all persons in submission to God (Col. 1:20).

For Christians, Jesus is the key both to

individuation and to the reconciling love so

needed in our world. For Jung, the historical

Jesus soon was lost in the myth of Christ.3' Jung

saw us as called to live our lives with the same

fidelity to the God within that Jesus lived, and

said that we then would be gods in our day as

only we could be. This development is not based

in a personal relationship with Jesus but in a

relationship with the incomprehensible ground

of all being. Without denying our call to

individuation, the biblical Christ calls each

Christian to "follow him," and sends his

followers "to all nations," to baptize all into

trinitarian love and to live that love especially

for the poor. We are, yes, to befriend the poverty

within ourselves, but ultimately that we might

reach out with God's own compassion to the

poor of the world. It is through this creative selfgift

in union with Christ that ultimate healing

and wholeness comes to full expression.

Reference notes

1. See Murray Stein, Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The

Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition (Wilmette, IL: Chiron Pubs.,

1985) and Jung 's Challenge to Contemporary Religion (Wilmette,

IL: Chiron Pubs., 1987), edited by Murray Stein and Robert L.

Moore, which come from Jung's perspective; Don S. Browning,

Religious Thought and the Modem Psychologies: A Critical

Conversation in the Theology of Culture (Philadelphia: Fortress

Press, 1987): Wallace B. Clift, Jung and Christianity: The

Challenge of Reconciliation (N.Y.: Crossroad, 1982); Robert Doran.

"Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality," I, II, III, (Review

for Religious 38 [1979]: 4, 5. 6; Christopher Bryant, Jung and the

Christian Way (New York: Seabury Press, 1983), and Robert T.

Sears, "Individuation and Spiritual Growth," New Catholic World

(March/April 1984), which are open to Jung yet critical.

2. See Stein, Jung's Treatment of Christianity.

3. Sec Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work, a Biographical

Memoir (N.Y.: C. P. Putnam's Sons, 1976) pp. 149f.

4. Sec C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 52ff.

5. See Bryant, Jung and the Christian Way, pp. 6-10. Jung was

under attack also from scientists who accused him of mysticism.

He defended his empiricism and always held that faith in God's

existence was beyond the scope of science. However, he also

implied that faith was unnecessary for one who "knew" from

experience.

6. See Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 98.

7. Ibid., pp. 217-20

The Journal of Christian Healing

8. See David Hassel, Searching the Limits of Love: An Approach

to the Secular Transcendent: God (Chicago: Loyola University

Press. 1985) for an analysis of how committed relationships require

a personal "unchoscn absolute."

9. See Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work, pp. 289-90.

10. See Robert Bellah. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and

Commitment in American Life (1985) for an analysis of how pervasive

such erosion of the fabric of social commitment is.

11. Jung wrote in a 1950 letter in reference to a writer who considered

the God-image as the door through which one finds God:

"I can only concur with this view, but with the best will in the world

I cannot maintain that this is a verifiable assertion, which is what

science is about. It is a subjective assertion which has no place in

science" (quoted in Bryant, Jung and the Christian Way, p. 8). As

Bryant comments, if God exists, he is concerned not only for me

but for all, and it is not just my experience that counts, but the

possibility that God already has revealed himself through another

(as Christians hold) or in many thousand ways. Bryant puts it well:

"I believe that Jung is destined to play an important pan in the

revival of Christian faith among educated men and women of the

West, but his role will be more that of a John the Baptist who

prepared the way for the coming of Christ than that of one of

Christ's apostles" (Ibid., p. 9).

12. See Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work. pp. 156-57.

13. See C. G. Jung, A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, Collected

Works, vol. 11.

14. See Browning, Religious Thought and Modern Psychologies,

for an extensive analysis of the implied ultimate metaphors of

several

therapists, with a separate chapter devoted to Jung.

15. From Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy's view of family dynamics, it

would seem that Jung was parentified by his inability to trust his

father's religious sense (see Boszormenyi-Nagy and Geraldine M.

Spark, Invisible Loyalties [New York: Harper & Row, 1973], pp.

151-66). Jung had to father his own father (and his father's religious

tradition), and this inability to receive fathering seems to have carried

over to his relationship to God. Ultimately it was his Godexperience

that he trusted, but this left his consciousness, not a

transcendent Other's, as the focal point.

16. Hassel, Searching the Limits of Love.

17. Robert Doran makes this point in the second of his series of

articles on "Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality," p. 743.

In a dream, he was descending to a basement to look at images.

On the way down be met Bernard J.F. Lonergan (a well-known

theologian he was working with), who said, "I will show you some

images." He took Doran to the upper story, where they sat down

to watch images on a screen. What Doran concluded was that the

symbolic products of the unconscious do not interpret themselves,

but need to be looked at from an authentic theological framework.

As I would put it, the higher level of consciousness (God's Spirit

in us) includes the lower, but cannot be concluded to simply on

the basis of the lower. Intelligence includes sense, but animals cannot

think. So also God's Spirit in us includes human life (Jesus

became human, and in his Spirit we can be divinized), but human

experience cannot grasp the divine without revelation.

18. See Robert Sears, “Trinitarian Love as Ground of the Church"

Theological Studies 37 (1976): 652-79. More recently, see

Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books,

1988).

19. See Sears, “Trinitarian Love," pp. 652-79, and my article

"Healing and Family Spiritual/Emotional Systems," Journal of

Christian Healing 5:1 (1983): 10-23.

20. See John A. Sanford, Evil: the Shadow Side of Reality (New

York: Crossroad, 1984), p. 146

21. See Memories, Dreams, Reflections, chap. 12, sec. 3.

22. See Doran, "Jungian Psychology and Christian Spirituality,"

III, which was reprinted in the Journal of Christian Healing 4:1

(1982).

Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 1990

23. See Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, where be shows

masculine and feminine aspects in each person of the Trinity (the

Father "begetting" the Son and in the Son Creation, the Son showing

feminine tenderness and care for relationships while explicitly

divinizing maleness, and the Spirit explicitly divinizing fcrnaleness

in Mary and the church while revealing implicit masculine traits).

See also his Maternal face of God (New York: Harper & Row,

1987), where he develops the feminine aspect of God more

thoroughly.

24. During his trip to Africa, Jung had a deep experience on the

Athi Plains near Nairobi. He felt in the stillness "the eternal beginning"

of "the world as it has always been." He felt then that human

consciousness was "indispensable for the completion of creation."

As the alchemists put it: "What nature leaves imperfect, the

[alchemical] art perfects" (Hannah. Jung: His Life and Work, pp.

171-72). Consciousness is to bring creation to its full maturity, much

as the Pueblo Indian helped the sun cross the sky, so doing a service

for all people (Ibid.. p. 160).

25. This focus on persona) experience and "conversion" now is

seen as central to theological method (see Bernard J.F. Lonergan,

Method in Theology [New York: Herder & Herder, 1972]). With

research changing "facts" from day to day, what remains constant

is the perspective the researcher brings to his or her work. The subject's

self-awareness (intellectual, moral, religious and psychic

(Doran's contribution] conversion) is the constant source of validity

in the evaluation of the data. Jung's view of individuation serves

a similar function in his psychology.

26. See Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, A Worldly Spirituality

(New York: Harper & Row, 1984), chap. 4, for a fine analysis of

the implications of that text for ecology. What the passage means

is to be God's caretaker for the Earth. Our own lack of love for

nature in ourselves alienates us from our roots in nature.

27. See my article "Trinitarian Love and Male-Female

Community," Journal of Christian Healing 6:1 0984): 32-39, where

I argue that equal complementarity is needed to bring out the full

image of God.

28.1 use "integral" here to imply a deepening through such stages

as purgative, illuminative, and unitive spirituality. Others might

distinguish "justification" from "integral salvation or sanctification."

There is an initial conversion to faith in Jesus, but that can

coexist with a narrow dogmatism or religious prejudices "Integral"

implies a total assimilation to Jesus' mind, heart, and will (mil union

with God), and we cannot attain that goal unless we are aware of

ourselves and have these aspects convened by Jesus' Spirit. Thus,

I understand the "illuminative" way to involve individuation.

29. See C. G. Jung, "Transformation Symbols in the Mass,"

Collected Works, no. 391. Notes on his lectures on the Spiritual

Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola are in Modem Psychology, 2d

edition (1959), vol. 4. Jung says in Lecture VIII, p. 214: "If you

translate this ("man is created to praise God") in psychological

language it means that Ignatius recommended an unconditional submission

to the unconscious mind." In Lecture IX, p. 171, Jung

criticizes Ignatius' vision of Jesus at La Storta of God, saying, "I

will be favourable to you in Rome," as "not authentic." "It is in

accordance with dogmatic expectation....He must have learned how

to project his own thoughts." On the other hand, "visions" of the

snake or luminosity are unconscious products, and authentic. Jung

uses his psychology to evaluate Ignatius' religious visions exactly

the reverse of how Ignatius would evaluate them.

30. Whether Jesus had a shadow side or only the potential for

one is open to question. He did snow the typical Jewish prejudice

against the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark 7:24-30), but

transcended it by seeing her faith. His view of God included all,

and his human limits were quickly transformed by it.

31. See Jung, Answer to Job, sect. VII.

19

Only here or much beyond

The dualities of this world are many. One of them is between materialism and spiritualism. Some claim materialism or what is perceivable by the senses is the only reality. Others that there is meaning beyond what is apparent. In some sense to think that there is nothing more than thh material sort of diminishes the meaning of life. It is even not possible to detach ourselves of the accultured non materialism or beyond materialism just as it is impossible to completely detach ourselves from the material world. In any case the material world is the basis of human existence to even think beyond the material one needs the material world to stand and think. Or ist it the other way around ?! IMy own personal observation is the one based on Koestler's idea that the human brain has a capacity much much much beyond what is required for a survival value. Which means either there is something more or that everything beyond the material is an offshoot and anemanation form such overcapacity.Here is an article about the material part of it by Daniel MIller.





Materiality: An Introduction



Daniel Miller


INTRODUCTION

There is an underlying principle to be found in most of the religions that dominate recorded history. Wisdom has been accredited to those who claim that materiality represents the merely apparent behind which lies that which is real. Perhaps the most systematic development of this belief arose over two millennium within South Asia. For religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, theology has been centred upon the critique of materiality. At its simplest Hinduism, for example, rests upon the concept of maya, which proclaims the illusory nature of the material world. The aim of life is to transcend the apparently obvious; the stone we stub our toe against, or the body as the core of our sensuous existence. Truth comes from our apprehension that this is mere illusion. Nevertheless, paradoxically, material culture has been of considerable consequence as the means of expressing this conviction. The merely vestigial forms at the centre of a temple may be contrasted with the massive gates at the periphery. The faded pastels of an elderly woman are in stark contrast with the bright and sensual colours of the bride precisely in order to express in material form the goal of transcending our attachment to material life[i].

But the history of South Asia is not just the history of its religions. There is a parallel history, which tells of the endless struggle of cosmology with practice. This is the history of accumulation, taxation, wars and looting, empire and excess. It culminates in the integration of this region within a global political economy in which politics is increasingly subservient to an economics whose premise with respect to materiality could hardly be more different. In economic thought the accumulation of material commodities is itself the source of our extended capacity as humanity[ii] Poverty is defined as the critical limit to our ability to realise ourselves as persons, consequent upon a lack of commodities. The focus upon materiality, though here in the form of accumulation, is therefore just as strong in economics as it is in Hinduism. For a discipline such as anthropology, that is concerned with what it is to be human, we need to therefore start our discussion of this issue with an acknowledgment that the definition of humanity has often become almost synonymous with the position taken on the question of materiality. Furthermore this has been a highly normative quest, closely linked to the question of what morality is, in the society or period in question.

Even within the most secular and self consciously modern systems of belief the issue of materiality remains foundational to most people’s stance to the world. The first major secular theory of humanity that seemed capable of dominating the world, Marxism, rested upon a philosophy of praxis, whose foundation also lies in its stance to materiality. Humanity is viewed as the product of its capacity to transform the material world in production, in the mirror of which we create ourselves. Capitalism is condemned above all for interrupting this virtuous cycle by which we create the objects that in turn create our understanding of who we can be. Instead commodities are fetishised and come to oppress those who made them. Contemporary critiques, such as Naomi Klein’s (2001) No Logo, whether expressed as environmentalism, or anti-globalism, may be cruder in their philosophical underpinnings, but seem to be just as focused upon the issue of materiality, for instance a loss of humanity in the face of commodities and brands, as is the neo-classical economics they confront. The centrality of materiality to the way we understand ourselves may equally well emerge from topics as diverse as love[iii] or science[iv] and associated beliefs such as the epistemology of positivism.

This constant return to the same issue demonstrates why we need to engage with the issue of materiality as far more than a mere footnote or esoteric extra to the study of anthropology. The stance to materiality also remains the driving force behind humanity’s attempts to transform the world in order to make it accord with beliefs as to how the world should be. Hindusim and Economics are not just beliefs about the world, but vast institutional forces that try to ensure that people live according to their tenets through priesthoods or through structural adjustment programmes. In this respect capitalism and religion are equal and analogous. Chapters in this volume will attest to this foundational relationship between the stance to materiality and the stance to humanity through case-studies ranging from ancient to contemporary practices and based around topics as diverse as theology, technology, finance, politics and art.

This introduction will begin with two attempts to theorise materiality. The first a vulgar theory of mere things as artefacts and the second a theory that claims to entirely transcend the dualism of subjects and objects. It will then engage with theories associated with Bruno Latour and Alfred Gell that seek to follow a similar path, but with a greater emphasis upon the nature of agency. This is followed by a consideration of materiality and power, including claims to transcend materiality, and a consideration of the relativity of materiality where some things and some people are seen as more material than others, leading finally to an exploration of the plurality of forms of materiality. In turn, three case-studies of finance and religion are used to explore the plurality of immateriality and the relationship between materiality and immateriality.

Throughout these discussions two issues emerge which are then considered in their own right. The first is the tendency to reduce all such concerns with materiality through a reification of ourselves, defined variously as the subject, as social relations or as society. In opposition to this social anthropology several chapters critique definitions of humanity as purely social or indeed as homo sapiens, and critique approaches which view material culture as merely the semiotic representation of some bedrock of social relations. This culminates in a section on the `tyranny of the subject’ which seeks to bury society and the subject as the privileged premise for a discipline called Anthropology. Finally in the conclusion we return to a meta-commentary upon the whole. It will become evident that we can indeed resolve the dualism of subjects and objects through philosophy. But, these `resolutions’ are so dependent upon the abstract nature of philosophy that in and of themselves they may be of only limited benefit to anthropology. What anthropology offers, by contrast, is not just philosophical solutions or definitions, but a means to employ these understandings within forms of engagement that yield analytical insight, but which must be realised again and again with respect to each situation, because we live in a changing and varied world of practice.

WHAT IS MATERIALITY?

A volume that spans topics as diverse as cosmology and finance cannot afford to rest upon any simplistic definition of what we mean by the word material. It needs to encompass both colloquial and philosophical uses of this term. We may want to refute the very possibility of calling anything immaterial. We may want to refuse a vulgar reduction of materialism to simply the quantity of objects. But we cannot deny that such colloquial uses of the term materiality are common. The standard critiques of materialism found in newspapers and everyday discussions, take their stand against the apparently endless proliferation of artefacts, what Simmel (1972: 448) termed the increase in material culture. An anthropological volume devoted to materiality should not ignore this colloquial usage and I will, for this reason, start this investigation with a theory of the most obvious and most mundane expression of what the term material might convey – artefacts. But this soon breaks down as we move on to consider the large compass of materiality, the ephemeral, the imaginary, the biological and the theoretical; all that which would have been external to the simple definition of an artefact. So the second theory of materiality to be introduced here will be the most encompassing, and will situate material culture within a larger conceptualisation of culture.

CAN WE HAVE A THEORY OF THINGS?

Can one have a theory of things where `things’ stand for the most evident category of artefacts as both tangible and lasting? Certainly I confess that when I first took up a post as a professional academic in the field of material culture studies in 1981, this seemed to be the limit to the ambition of those studies. At that time I employed two sources in this quest. The first was the book Frame Theory in which the sociologist Goffman (1975) argued that much of our behaviour is cued by expectations which are determined by the frames which constitute the context of action. We don’t charge up on stage to rescue an actress in apparent distress, since there are many elements of theatre which proclaim this as `enacted’ as against `real’ violence. We look for signs by which people distance themselves from the social roles they are playing. Are they being ironic, or wanting to be taken `at face value’? We take note, usually unconsciously, of the place in which the action is set, or the clothes they wear, to give us clues. If a lecturer suddenly started a private conversation with a student in the middle of a lecture, everyone would become acutely aware of the underlying norms of lectures as a genre.

My second source was The Sense of Order by the art historian Gombrich (1979). Unlike all his other books, this focused not upon the art work, but the frame in which the art work was set. Gombrich argued that when a frame is appropriate we simply don’t see it, because it seamlessly conveys to us the appropriate mode by which we should encounter that which it frames. It is mainly when it is inappropriate (a Titian framed in perspex, a Picasso in baroque gilt) that we are suddenly aware that there is indeed a frame. A more radical version of Gombrich’s thesis could argue that art exists only in as much as frames such as art galleries or the category of `art’ itself ensure that we pay particular respect, or pay particular money, for that which is contained within such frames. It is the frame rather than any quality independently manifested by the art work, that elicits the special response we give it as art. Between them, these ideas of Goffman and Gombrich constituted an argument for what I called `the humility of things’ (Miller 1987: 85-108). The surprising conclusion is that objects are important, not because they are evident and physically constrain or enable, but often precisely because we do not `see’ them. The less we are aware of them the more powerfully they can determine our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behaviour, without being open to challenge. They determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so.

Such a perspective seems properly described as `material culture’ since it implies that much of what we are, exists not through our consciousness or body, but as an exterior environment that habituates and prompts us. This somewhat unexpected capacity of objects to fade out of focus and remain peripheral to our vision and yet determinant of our behaviour and identity had another important result. It helped explain why so many anthropologists looked down upon material culture studies as somehow either trivial or missing the point. The objects had managed to obscure their role and appear inconsequential. At a time when material culture studies had an extremely low status within the discipline, it seemed that objects had been very successful in achieving this humility, at least within anthropology.

The work that had established such ideas as foundational to Anthropology, and to my mind still one of the premier publications within Anthropology was `Outline of a Theory of Practice’ by Pierre Bourdieu (1977). In this book Bourdieu showed how the same ability of objects to implicitly condition human actors becomes the primary means by which people are socialised as social beings. The foundation of these ideas came from Levi-Strauss who played Hegel to Bourdieu’s Marx, in the sense that Levi-Strauss demonstrated at an intellectual level how anthropologists needed to abandon the study of entities and consider things only as defined by the relationships that constituted them. But while for Levi-Strauss this became a rather grand ordering implying, if not a cognitive, at least a largely intellectual foundation, with myth as philosophy, Bourdieu turned this into a much more contextualised theory of practice. Structuralism was turned into both a material, and a much more fluid and less deterministic engagement with the world. We are brought up with the expectations characteristic of our particular social group largely through what we learn in our engagement with the relationships found between everyday things. Bourdieu emphasised the categories, orders and the placements of objects, for example, spatial oppositions in the home, of the relationship between agricultural implements and the seasons. Each order was argued to be homologous with other orders such as gender, or social hierarchy, and thus the less tangible was grounded in the more tangible. These became habitual ways of being in the world and in their underlying order emerged as second nature or habitus. This combined Marx’s emphasis on material practice with the phenomenological insights of figures such as Merleau-Ponty (1989) into our fundamental `orientation’ to the world.

For Bourdieu, who wore another cap as a theorist of education, it was these practical taxonomies, these orders of everyday life, that stored up the power of social reproduction, since they in effect educated people into the normative orders and expectations of their society. What we now attempt to inculcate in children through explicit pedagogic teaching, based largely in language, had previously been inculcated largely through material culture. As habitus this become the social equivalent to Kant’s system of categories. On analogy with space, time or mathematics, there exist for each social group certain underlying parameters by which they come to apprehend the world, an order they come to assume and expect in any new set of objects they encounter. So this was a theory of objects, but not as lame, sole, artefacts. Material Culture as a network of homologous orders emerged as the powerful foundation for more or less everything that constitutes a given society. This theory also helps account for the initial observation that even within a religion such as Hinduism, a belief in the ultimate truth as a form of immateriality is still commonly expressed through material forms and practices, such as temple architecture or yogic control over bodies.

What this example hopefully demonstrate is that, yes, it is entirely possible to have a theory of objects as artefacts. Indeed there are likely to be many of these. A particularly influential example in anthropology was that created by Appadurai’s (1986) book The Social Life of Things in which the editor’s introduction in combination with the chapter by Kopytoff (1986) re-considered objects in respect to a core anthropological dualism between the gift and the commodity. It plotted a trajectory for things in their ability to move in and out of different conditions of identification and alienation. Just as Bourdieu softened and made more applicable the harder structuralism of Levi-Strauss, Appadurai’s work had the virtue of softening the dualistic frame in to which this debate about gifts and commodities had become lodged and helping to ease its application to the analysis of exchange and indeed the larger social life of things.

OBJECTIFICATION

As already noted, while it is possible to have theories of things, any such theory seems to ignore the evident lack of any defensible definition of thingness. All may be condemned as `vulgar’ because they adopt a common-sense, rather than an academic presupposition of what we mean by the word `thing’. Is an ephemeral image, a moment in a streaming video, a thing? Or if the image is frozen as a `still,’ is it now a thing? Is a dream, a city, a sensation, a derivative, an ideology, a landscape, a decay, a kiss? I havn’t the least idea. But the questions that are left begging indicate that in practice a theory of material culture will tend to stand as a subset of some more general theory of culture. But the term culture when put into the spotlight may be at least as problematic as the term material culture. Indeed it is probably the single most criticised concept within contemporary anthropology. It too seems to be best understood as a pragmatic limitation upon some still larger understanding of the world. So the temptation is to start instead from the top, from the most encompassing and definitive definition of our object of understanding and then to work downwards.

I would argue that this philosophical encompassment was first achieved through the work of Hegel, and that some of his presumption in seeing his own contribution as constituting `the end of philosophy’ was warranted. The system of thought he developed does, at the highest level, resolve many of the major issues of philosophy including that of materiality. In his Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel (1977) suggests that there can be no fundamental separation between humanity and materiality. That everything that we are and do arises out of the reflection upon ourselves given by the mirror image of the process by which we create form and are created by this same process. To take Bourdieu’s (1970) best known example of the Kabyle house. The house is not some natural emanation. It is created by artisans of greater or lesser skill to become the cultural object within which these same artisans see their own identity as Kabyle reflected and understood. We cannot comprehend anything, including ourselves, except as a form, a body, a category, even a dream. As such forms develop in their sophistication we are able to see more complex possibilities for ourselves in them. As we create law, we understand ourselves as people with rights and limitations. As we create art we may see ourselves as a genius, or as unsophisticated. We cannot know who we are, or become what we are, except by looking in a material mirror, which is the historical world created by those who lived before us and confronts us as material culture, and that continues to evolve through us.

For Hegel this circular process had a particular sequential form. The fundamental process of objectification (Miller 1987: 19-33). Everything that we create, has by virtue of that act the potential, both to appear, and to become, alien to us. We may not recognise them as the creation of history or ourselves. They may take on their own interest and trajectory. A social order, such as a hierarchy, may come to us as immutable and one that situates us as oppressed. It does not appear to have been created by people, it is experienced as sui generis. Even a dream may be attributed to some other agency and literally `haunt’ us. But once we appreciate that these things are created in history or in imaginations we can start to understand the very process which accounts for our own specificity, and this understanding changes us into a new kind of person, one who can potentially act upon that understanding. As Rowlands notes in his contribution, the critical point about a dialectical theory such as objectification, is that this is not a theory of the mutual constitution of prior forms, such as subjects and objects. It is entirely distinct from any theory of representation. In objectification all we have is a process in time by which the very act of creating form creates consciousness or capacity such as skill and thereby transforms both form and the self-consciousness of that which has consciousness, or the capacity of that which now has skill.

A society may gradually develop a system of education. By going to school a member of that society gains the ability to reproduce accumulated understandings from the generations. As such education may correspond to an element of our `reason’ and in The Philosophy of Right Hegel (1967) argues that such an educational system corresponds to what may be called `real’ education i.e. one that fulfils the reason behind the idea of education, which is to enhance the capacities of those who are educated. A person is created through such a process. It is not that education happened to them. We can’t separate out the bit of them that is constituted as educated from some other bit that is not (Miller 2001: 176-183).

But every form we produce will tend to its own self-aggrandisement and interests. Education may become institutionalised as a system increasingly geared to its own interests. It may become an oppressive single sex boarding school whose sadistic staff cripple rather than build the capacity of its pupils. As such it detracts from, rather than expands, who we may be. For Hegel this would no longer be `real’ education, rather it would be a form of alienation. A similar argument may be made, for law, religion, art or indeed any human practice. Law may be the instrument of the justice it is supposed to represent, or it can become merely the self-aggrandizement and income generation of lawyers. Dialectically we both produce and are the products of these historical processes. On the one hand we produce religion or finance, on the other, the existence of religion and finance produces our specificity as a priest in Ancient Egypt, or as a Japanese derivatives trader. So our humanity is not prior to what it creates. What is prior is the process of objectification that gives form and that produces in its wake what appear to us as both autonomous subjects and autonomous objects, which leads us to think in terms of a person using an object or an institution.

So there is a level of philosophy at which it is wrong to talk about subjects and objects. These are merely appearances that we see emerging in the wake of the process of objectification as it proceeds as a historical process. All that can properly be privileged at this philosophical level is the process of objectification itself. As anthropologists, however, we will have at some point to descend from this place of ultimate revelation at the mountain’s peak. We will have to return to the mass populations who consider themselves to be, in fact, people using objects. It is important therefore to explicitly map the downwards path back to ethnography. I prefer to see this as a series of steps leading to the particular place of material culture that I would wish to reside in. In the philosophy of objectification Hegel provides much more than a theory of culture. His primary concern was with the nature of logic and reason. But a subset of this theory may indeed be used as a theory of culture; those forms that are of interest because they produce the capacities of particular peoples in particular space and time. Simmel and Marx in their different ways strive for a dialectical theory of culture, as indeed have others such as Sartre (1976), or to take a recent example, the human geographer Harvey (1996). In turn a theory of material culture may be formulated as a vulgarised sub-set of such a theory of culture. This brings us back down, with a bump, to a site not a million miles from Bourdieu, who took a parallel but recognisable route. In coming down the mountain we need not jettison that which has been given us. There was a reason for going up there in the first place. We now appreciate that whether we are dealing with mundane artefacts such as clothes or statues, or with more complex images and institutions such as dreams or law, there is nothing without objectification. There are no pre-objectified forms, and any romantic claims by, for example, art, primitivism, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology or others that imply such a possibility can be safely rejected. But dialectical theory is by no means the only source of this experience of transcendence. There are plenty of other people who claim to have invented the wheel that rescues anthropology from the simplistic duality of subjects and objects.

AGENCY

The two most recent influential additions to a potential theory of material culture and materiality come from the work of Bruno Latour and Alfred Gell, and conveniently both focus upon the term agency. As several chapters in this volume make clear Latour is equally concerned to lift anthropology to a height above that of the conventional distinctions of society and its objects. His primary critique has been aimed at the way this dualism has been expressed in the apparently absolute distinction between science and society. By means of a scholarly investigation into the practice of science he has been able to demonstrate that it actually bears little relation to its own dominant representation. That the reality of the world consists almost entirely of a hybridity within which it is impossible to disaggregate that which is natural and law like and unchangeable and that which is human, interpretive and at times capricious[v].

Latour regards us as engaged in a constant and somewhat deluded practice of `purification’. In our society science routinely ignores the evidence for the hybrid character of practice, and strives to enhance its own status, by a form of self-representation that renders it unequivocally objective and determined. The corollary of this lies in the degree to which the status of our humanity is enhanced by rendering us cleansed of any such deterministic or mechanistic quality. One of his most influential strategies in the war against purification has been to take the concept of agency, once sacralised as the essential and defining property of persons, and apply this concept to the non-human world, whether this be organisms such as bacteria or putative transport systems for Paris. Where material forms have consequences for people that are autonomous from human agency, they may be said to possess the agency that causes these effects. A computer that crashes, preventing a form from being submitted in time, an illness that kills us, a plant that `refuses’ to grow the way we meant it to when we planted it, are the agents behind what subsequently happens. In a partial throwback to structuralism, what matters may often not be the entities themselves, human or otherwise, but rather the network of agents and the relationships between them. `the prime mover of an action becomes a new, distributed, and nested set of practices whose sum may be possible to add up but only if we respect the mediating role of all the actants mobilized in the series’ (Latour 1999: 181). Men do not fly, nor does a B52 bomber fly, but the US airforce does.

To make this point Latour needs to be as firm in his critique of `social’ anthropology as in his critique of science. His comments on Durkheim are always to the effect that social science privileges society and regards objects largely as projected representations of society, bracketing culture in opposition to nature. The hybridity that social anthropology recognises as central to pre-modern societies is not applied to the analysis of modern societies such as our own, defined as those which fetishise science, nature and society. He chastises this Durkheimian tradition for missing the profusion of non humans, and the effects of their agency. By contrast, he emphasises the agency of this non-human world such as microbes or machines, which cannot be reduced to a mere epiphenomenona of the social.

Latour would never describe himself as a dialectical thinker. Perhaps (I am guessing) because of the strident critique of dialectics as `grand narrative’ by postmodern French philosophy, or the association of agency with personhood in the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who viewed himself as a dialectical thinker. So `the Hegelian dialectic, according to Latour, expands the abyss between the poles of subject and object that it aims to fill’ (Dosse 1999: 99). This is more or less the exact opposite of what I have just suggested. But I see no merit in a dispute where academics influenced by Latour accuse dialectical thinkers of retaining the dualism of subjects and objects they claim to have transcended, and dialectical thinkers make the same accusation of the followers of Latour. In either case we benefit most from those who have used these philosophical ideals to produce ethnography that demonstrates the gains made by a refusal to reduce to subjects and objects. Much of the beauty of Latour’s writing comes when he is carefully tracing through the stages of mediation between these two (e.g. Latour 1999: 24-79). Nevertheless by placing the emphasis on objects of science, rather than on artefacts, we do lose something of that quality of the artefact redolent with prior historical creativity. It is the artefact which is the focus of habitus and indeed much of recent material culture studies.

Artefacts are also very much to the fore within the other major contribution in recent years to a theory of object agency, that of Gell (1998) in his book Art and Agency. Essentially Gell’s book is a refutation of an aesthetic theory of art, which is replaced by a theory of the effects that art has achieved as the distributed agency of some subjects upon other subjects. Central to this is a theory of abduction. This is not a theory of causal inference, but rather a theory of inferred intentionality. In short he argues that we naturally tend to imagine there must have been some kind of social agency whenever we encounter an effect. We seem to have a love of imputing agency to other persons and to things. For example, we happily anthropomorphise objects as agents, such as when we accuse a car of treachery if it breaks down when we need it. Webb Keane (1997) has contributed an entire ethnography based on much the same argument. In Keane’s book a cloth does not `tear’ merely by accident, someone must have caused this. So we need to attribute the agency that is assumed to lie behind the event. This strikes me as remarkably close to the logic expressed in the newspapers I read everyday. No matter how complex our institutions, no news occurs without the assumption that there must be blame attached, in the form of intentional action. The only difference is that in contemporary journalism we insist the blame must be attached to persons, while other societies would be prepared to blame evil spirits of some kind. So Gell's is a theory of natural anthropomorphism, where our primary reference point is to people and their intentionality behind the world of artefacts. In his final chapter he argues that this provides a theory of the work of art. In effect the creative products of a person or people become their `distributed mind’ which turns their agency into their effects, as influences upon the minds of others. I like to think of his book as a prime example of his theory. Tragically Alfred Gell died before it was published, but the book as an artifact or art work remains as his distributed mind, and continues to create effects that we properly in this case attribute to his wisdom and often his wit.

Gell (1998: 20-1) and Latour (1999: 176-180) have similar discussions of the agency of guns and landmines as against those that fire or plant them, in order to make their points about the centrality of agency. But while Latour is looking for the non-humans below the level of human agency, Gell is looking through objects to the embedded human agency we infer that they contain. In this sense Gell is closer to the core of recent British social anthropology, which seems to have gravitated around an axis that leads from Durkheim to Mauss. For Strathern (1986) the form of objectification that dominates in Melanesia is that of personification, where it is a person that become the object through which people read the prior agency that created them.

To conclude this discussion of the philosophical resolution of materiality I want to suggest its limitations. It seems as though all theorists of materiality are doomed to reinvent a particular philosophical wheel. This wheel consists of the circular process at which level we cannot differentiate either subjects per. se. or objects per. se. There exists therefore in philosophy a `solution’ to the problem of materiality, which consists of the dissolution of our `common-sense’ dualism in which objects and subjects are viewed as separate and in relationship to each other. This was evidently the conclusion of dialectical theory and was also found in the work of Bruno Latour. An alternative which I have not chosen to discuss here might have been phenomenology. Obviously such philosophical debates never really end, and many of the contributions to this volume may be seen as trying to put various spokes into this wheel or remove various spokes from this philosophical wheel.

While it is possible to thereby transcend the vulgarity of our dualistic apprehension of the world through engaging with it only at the heightened and abstract levels given us in philosophy, I would argue that this can never fully constitute an anthropological approach to materiality. Anthropology always incorporates an engagement that starts from the opposite position to that of philosophy. A position taken from its empathetic encounter with the least abstracted and most fully engaged practices of the various peoples of the world. In this encounter we come down from the philosophical heights and strive for the very vulgarity that philosophy necessarily eschews. We may often find ourselves conducting research among people for whom `common-sense’ consists of a clear distinction between subjects and objects defined by their opposition. They may regard any attempt to transcend this distinction as mystificatory and obfuscating. As part of our own engagement we will necessarily attempt to empathise with these views. Furthermore we will strive to include within our analysis the social consequences of conceptualising the world as divided in this way. For example, we might find that those who strive for more abstract resolutions such as in philosophy, tend to denigrate others as deluded, vulgar or simplistic in their preference for more pragmatic and less abstract perspectives. Philosophy can become simply a tool for describing others as false or stupid.

So our role is one of mediators. Firstly we take these common-sense apprehensions and draw analytical and theoretical conclusions from the particular places they hold in particular worlds. We try to recognise that in a given time and place there will be a link between the practical engagement with materiality and the beliefs or philosophy that emerged at that time. A wonderful example comes from Davidson’s (1998) success in linking the modes of consumption, such as the eating of fish, in fifth century BC Athens, with the rise of a certain political and philosophical systems of thought. So having acknowledged this linkage, we mediate between the poles of philosophy and practice. At the same time that we have shown it is possible in philosophy to transcend the dualism of subjects and objects, we need as anthropologists, to be aware of whose interests are served by making this claim. As Habermas (1972) argued in Knowledge and Human Interests, we cannot, in anthropology, separate our stance on the veracity of such representations from our study of the consequences of those representations. Having shown we can be philosophers, we need the courage to refuse this ambition and return to ethnographic empathy and ordinary language[vi]. I will return to this theme at the end of the chapter.

MATERIALITY AND POWER

I began with the observation that the search for immateriality has dominated the engagement between cosmology and materiality. This is demonstrated in the first two chapters of this volume. They also provide a useful contrast with respect to the use of material culture itself as the instrument for expressing this engagement. Our continued fascination with ancient Egypt, rests in no small measure upon its monumentality. These people were so successful in their obsessive concern with preserving themselves for the afterlife that their remains permeate our own lives. . We remain entranced by the trilogy of mummies, statues and pyramids. What Meskell forces us to acknowledge, is that this encounter immediately implicates two stances towards the nature of materiality itself: that of the people who created these forms, and that of our apprehension of these forms. Through her investigation of the sources Meskell reveals how each of this trilogy of fascinating objects was founded upon a set of beliefs about materiality including particular philosophical assumptions about preservation, scale and mimesis. They required an imagination of what precise material form is appropriate for a deity, or for the soul in its afterlife. For the Gods, the correct form of statue was actually life-giving. For the living much of their time on earth could be spent in trying to secure their subsequent preservation through constructing the materiality of the afterlife as mummies. Sheer materiality expressed as one of the great pyramids gave the very sense of `being’ a precise shape and form.

Along with Hinduism or Christianity this cosmology rested upon a belief in the inherent superiority of the immaterial world. But it was their faith in the potential of monumentality to express immateriality that has created their legacy as a material presence in our own world. We continue to be enthralled by statues, mummies and pyramids because of the very exuberant faith that the Egyptians put into the process of materialisation as a means for securing their own immortal transubstantiation. They thereby created amongst the first monuments to humanity’s search for a means to transcend our own materiality. The very scale and temporality of Ancient Egypt seems to diminish us as mere individuals in much the same way it was intended to diminish the population that built it. The central paradox continues within modern consumerism where the pyramid stands both as a symbol of massive consumerism (the pyramid of a Las Vegas casino) and as a key sign (or as often, key ring) of that New Age spirituality which imagines itself in opposition to this consumerism.

Central to Meskell’s analysis is the evidence that through monumentality the divine could be apprehended and both society and nature controlled. The issue of monumentality thereby foregrounds humanities attempt to control the degrees of materiality. With monuments some things seem more material than others, and their very massivity and gravity becomes their source of power. This point can be generalised well beyond the case of monuments as demonstrated in the next chapter by Rowlands, for whom the key distinction in materialism must not be between `readymade’ subjects and but between relative materiality. That is the degree to which some persons and things may be seen as more material than others. Appropriate metaphors abound - some persons and objects are seen as weighty with gravitas, others are superficial and slight. Some people loom large, even when we had rather they didn’t. Others, however hard they try to gain our attention, we manage to leave at the periphery of our vision

In his key example, one particular person, the Fon, (a chief in Cameroon) and all those objects that are understood to emanate from his presence, have considerable density. Materiality is gained by substances through the process of circulating through his body and presence, so, for example, his spit is itself efficacious in changing the order of things. By contrast, his subjects strive to have a presence as persons, but they simply do not possess the reality granted to the body of the Fon. All other bodies are mere shadows of the one real body. While Meskell indicates the extraordinary gulf between the God like and ordinary in death, Rowlands draws our attention to the assertion of such distinctions in life.

Rowlands uses the example of the Fon, to indicate why, for Marx, the stance to materiality was central to both his philosophy and his politics. Here we are trying to recognise the materiality of persons in order to prevent their reification into a subject - purified of objects. But under the lens provided us by Marx this takes on a particular nuance. For Marx the proletariat under capitalism was reduced to a mere thing, stripped of their personhood. But this was NOT based on a dualist separation – subjects with personhood and objects with materiality. Quite the contrary. For Marx, the dialectical philosopher, the workers lost their humanity precisely because what was denied them was their material being as people who made themselves through their own labour, in their transformation of nature. Under capitalism nature itself was alienated as private property. So in dialectical thought, proper materialism is one that recognises the irreducible relation of culture, which through production (I would add consumption) creates a person in and through their materiality. Capitalism splits these apart into commodities separated from their intrinsic person making capacities, and the illusion of pure humanism outside of materiality. For Marx, materialism is an acknowledgment of the consequences of materiality. Owners of private property could, as could the Fon, have greater consequences as a result of their extended presence in the material world, that renders those who do not possess property, insubstantial as people by comparison. Colonialism, for Rowlands, becomes the larger instance of this same point. The colonial powers took upon themselves the ownership of most of the world as property, such that persons and things now existed differentially. Substance resided in those or that which possesses what colonialism recognised as form, or quite often literally as `forms’ that had to be filled out for one to be `recognised’. Some people had access to this acknowledged materiality and thus to themselves, others were alienated from both. They were estranged from their own materiality and thus rendered insubstantial. The implication of Rowland’s chapter is that we need to have much greater sensitivity to relative materiality.

This in turn leads us to the central point in Myers chapter, which takes us from an insistence upon relative materiality, to that of plural materialities. Because in his chapter there are at least three different ideological dimensions, each of which would contest this attribution of substance to persons and things. Firstly, there are the ideological underpinnings of what has become the conventional conceptualisation of art. Art is founded in the Kantian aesthetic, which attributes greater material presence to some images than others. While our consciousness (or indeed unconsciousness) can quickly assimilate and dismiss mere ordinary objects, a work of art is said to resist any such easy or quick apprehension. It forces itself upon our attention. This is seen as universal, a property of the image, irrespective of who produced it. An art work is defined by its density, an opacity we cannot simply gaze through without seeing. Art is the image that returns the investment of our gaze with interest.

But Myers then introduces a second ideology, that which generates the law of private property, which is invoked by concerns over copyright and the rights over images created by Aboriginal artists. Private property introduces a distinct legalistic form that insists that if an object has a relationship to a particular person or corporation, that relationship gives it fixity and solidity. It gives them the right to claim the image as an instrument in their own self-creation and may deny that right to others. These laws can be used to protect the rights of creators but only to the degree that the authority and principles that lie behind such a law is accepted. The problem faced by Myers is not that the Aboriginal people do not have a system of aesthetics and law, but precisely - as evident in all Myers previous work (1986, 2003) - that they do. So the first two ideologies interact with a third. For these painters, some things have always been more material than others. Some have considerable solidity, power, ritual authority, and identity as collective property, while others do not. As with any society, some things matter more than others. So at the heart of Myers paper is the potential for conflict between three systems, each of which would hierarchise some images as more material than others. The universality of art, the universality of property law and the universality of Aboriginal cosmology (what Myers calls the revelatory system of value), are all contending for the same field of practice. Power relations may cause a movement from one register, which determines how solid a thing is, to another.

Many approaches to power acknowledge the ways in which certain forms are privileged as categories, or indeed discourses, while others are neglected as detritus. Not for nothing did Foucault choose titles such as the Order of Things (2001) and Archaeology of Knowledge (2002), for books which documented historical shifts in the way people have thought about materiality and allocated certain orders and objects this or that way accordingly. These juxtapositions are often fortuitous rather than deliberate. Often what anthropologists such as Myers encounter is simply the struggle to make sense of, and some kind of consistency between, these different registers of materiality, within particular conditions of power. The responsibility of the ethnographer is to document the way these seem to pan out in practice. So the study of material culture often becomes an effective way to understand power, not as some abstraction, but as the mode by which certain forms or people become realised, often at the expense of others. While Rowland’s chapter demonstrates how materiality, in general, is relative to power, Myers’s chapter complements this by showing how materiality is relative to specific regimes, each of which attempts to command our apprehension of this relative materiality.

At the beginning of this introduction two primary linkages between materiality and humanity were noted. The first associated with the religious repudiation of mere materiality as a façade that masks reality, and the second, associated with an economics that sees humanity as a capacity that is developed by its possession of commodities. The former leads to the concerns in Rowlands and Myers chapters with the plural forms of materiality and their relative degree. But anthropology has also been deeply engaged with the implications of the latter for the study of power. This has arisen partly from its critique of an increase in possessions per, se. being used as a sufficient measure of welfare. At least since Sahlins’ (1974) essay on `The original affluent society’ anthropologists have insisted upon a more relativistic notion of human welfare. Typically anthropologists insist that it is not merely the possession of objects that determines well-being but the capacity for self-creation by a society or individual that is created through their appropriation[vii] A focus upon persons and their capacities could easily have led from a crude materialism to a crude humanism. Instead anthropologists and some economists work with a wider sense of capacity.

This perspective can be re-incorporated within the more general concern for power found in the chapters of Rowlands and Myers. It is ethnographic encounters in Central Australia and the Cameroonian grasslands that demonstrate just why we need to replace simplistic `measures’ of welfare. It is also often when dealing with such development organisations and other bureaucracies that the contradictions of materiality emerge more clearly. The ethnographer sees how the agency of persons becomes mostly an expression, rather than a source, of the aesthetics and structures of those institutions. People in institutions such as bureaucracy appear mostly as the product of the sheer density and authority constituted by institutionalised materiality. That is as subjected to forms, regulations, conventions and procedures (e.g. Riles 2001, Miller 2003, but also Rose 1990 and others influenced by Foucault). It is at this institutional level that the general point becomes remarkably clear: that power is amongst other things, a property of materiality.

IMMATERIALITY

A recently completed PhD student of mine, Kaori O’Connor wrote her thesis (2003) on immaterial culture. Many studies within material culture reveal the way groups come to understand themselves and become what they are through their appropriation of goods, for example sub-cultures use of motorscooters and clothing styles. She argued that the cohort of baby boomers might have been similarly transformed into a more appropriate identity than merely that of `faded youth’, if there had been goods through which such a self-transformation could have been conducted. But the appropriate goods do not exist and therefore they remain baby-boomers. Her question was why these goods do not exist. In contrast to most historical research, her perspective is that of a counter factual history to explore immateriality as the absence of material culture. It is not simply a case of market failure to produce the goods that this group wanted; it is rather the absence of a coming into being of both producers and consumers through a failure in objectification, which only becomes evident when we trace through what otherwise might have happened. This is one of several ways in which immaterial culture as the other side of the coin to materiality can be productive. Buchli (Buchli and Lucas 2001), for example, consider the premises of archaeology as based on speculation on what materials have not survived and what objects have not been left behind.

A theory of objectification leaves very little space to a concept of the immaterial, since even to conceptualise is to give form and to create consciousness. At the most we can recognise that people regard some things as less tangible or more abstract. Nevertheless as we come down from that philosophical peak we meet many different dualisms which oppose the material to the immaterial. To return to my initial example, in Hinduism the route to immateriality takes many `forms’. In India we find a hierarchy from the mass of small and disparate images of regional spirits and divinities who have been incorporated into the larger pantheon of Hindu deities. These deities are in turn often viewed as `avatars,’ expressive manifestations of the major deities such as Siva and Vishnu. The major deities in turn are seen by some as aspects of the one supreme deity. At higher philosophical levels the idea of a deity is seen as itself a vulgar rendition of a more transcendent sense of enlightenment for those whose consciousness can achieve such heights. So one can correctly label Hinduism as polytheistic, monotheistic and even atheistic, partly because each is seen as appropriate to the capacity of certain kinds of people to apprehend the `reality’ behind mere materiality. In turn these different understandings of immateriality become expressed through material forms. Consider how in Buddhism enlightenment is indicated by icons ranging from aspects of the Buddha to the impression of his feet. As a primary example of what Latour (2002) calls Iconoclash, the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, but as Frodon (Frodon: 2002: 223) notes they thereby in a sense betrayed themselves, because thereby they `also did politics with images’. For this reason Latour (2002) argues for a greater acknowledgement of the materiality implicit in the technology by which images are created and destroyed.

If there is an inherent cultural trajectory towards immateriality implicated in most religious belief and practice, then it is not surprising that from time to time we see this break free to become a dominant imperative of particular religious groups. The chapter by Engelke concerns a population that seem to exist in large part in order to clarify the logic of this position. The original break between Protestantism and Catholicism contained some fascinating debates about the materiality of religion. Ever since then there have been movements within Protestantism that have tended towards iconoclasm and asceticism as attempts to foreground the importance of immateriality to spirituality. The Masowe apostolics studied by Engelke take this to its logical conclusion in several respects. In Engelke (2004) the importance of repudiating the bible as a material book is found to be central to this mission towards immateriality. In his chapter we see this extended to their repudiation of the church as a building, and to their preference for objects whose mundane form, such as unexceptional stones picked from the ground, are selected in order to repudiate the symbolic legacy of specific material objects within pre-Christian religious life. Most anthropological analyses seeks to link such communities, even instances of rupture (Sahlins 1985), with the rich or dense symbolic contexts given by their history and cosmology. But this is exactly what these people systematically attempt to repudiate.

Once again the very clarity within this mission towards immateriality brings out the inherent contradiction that follows from the impossibility of ever transcending the process of objectification itself. Just as there is no pre-objectified culture there is no post-objectified transcendence. So the passion for immateriality puts even greater pressure upon the precise symbolic and efficacious potential of whatever material form remains as the expression of spiritual power. Thus Engelke notes the ambiguity surrounding honey and the temptation to use this lapse of immaterialism as a conduit that as it were brings spiritual power back down to our instrumental earth. The temptation is to turn the honey into something more like the amulets studied by Tambiah (1984) in Buddhist Thailand, where again asceticism and immaterialism becomes a resource for capturing spiritual power than can then be transmuted through material forms such as amulets into temporal efficacy.

There is, however, more than one cultural logic leading to immateriality in religion. In Meskell’s chapter we have seen monumentality employed as a resource in this regard. In Islam and Judaism there seems to be a sense that the transmateriality of the deity is such that that the superficiality of mere human reproduction would be a slight upon them, a failure to properly grasp what they are, reducing them to mere idol as fetish. This produces a radical immateriality which in turn informs Maurer’s chapter. Maurer seems to me to be embarking upon an important project which could be termed the study of comparative immateriality. His starting point is that there is more than one reason why form itself might be refused, avoided or transcended. Set alongside his other recent papers which focus upon equivalence and upon rhetorical aspects of finance (Maurer 2002, 2003), this chapter, which lays stress on substitutability rather than abstraction and representation, has combined with them to set out an array of such processes. Abstraction, substitutability, equivalence and rhetoric are all processes that are employed within the larger project of relating the material to the immaterial.

The premise of Maurer’s paper is that we almost always respond to money as a project of abstraction in which the key question is whether money as material form is adequate to its task in representation. We hierarchies the relationship such that money as the more abstract and immaterial seem to look down upon the mere material assets it represents. He argues this perspective misses the critical point of Islamic finance where the issue is not one of what he calls adequation, but rather of forms of substitution whose ultimate aim is sometimes theological, not pragmatic. Some were (and are) ultimately much more concerned with ways of objectifying and thus coming to understand the oneness of creation, here reflected in the substitutability of its various elements. Others have a far less a problem with abstraction. As such their theological arguments reflect our current academic arguments which may turn towards abstraction, or towards alternative logics of immateriality, or towards ways of avoiding such debates altogether.

In the early caliphate a consequence of the replacement of the Caliph’s head by Qur’anic inscriptions on coins is the subordination of the issue of representation in coinage to that of the technologies for the imagination of the divine. The way a coin faces both sides, upwards to the transcendent and downwards to functionalism is utilised to give words themselves (as in calligraphy) a role in objectification. The coin helps the believer to conceive of this Janus-faced relationship, through giving the process of the emptying out of form itself a form – (compare Coleman 2003 and Keane 1997a, 1997b on the word in Protestantism). We are no longer just concerned with whether coins are adequate to their role in representing assets. Rather if there is an issue of what he calls adequation it is whether they are capable of capturing the subtly of these theological debates. Maurer argues that the effect of the new coinage is to bring down the issue of how one understands the deity to the somewhat safer question of how one understands the coinage. At the same time this secures the authority of coinage, since in their attempt to do what Maurer calls `hedging’ this issue of divine representation, they thereby `leveraged’ their coinage as value by giving it divine authority. By removing the face the coin is actually `countenanced’ by the word[viii].

The implication of this becomes clearer in Maurer’s second example of the securitization of Islam. Once again securitization would seem to us a problem of increasing abstraction. In securitization some lower form of asset such as the medical fees for hospitals, or the future profit stream from household mortgages, or the risk involved in currency transactions, are re-conceptualised as a financial instrument. A trader turns this future profit stream into a `package’ which can be traded. At least this is how I would have understood such processes. As such one can see how this could become a problem within Islamic theology, since it might be viewed as representing both an entry point for forbidden principles of increase. These higher level packages might appear to facilitate illicit forms of increase by coming `over the top’ of simpler financial instruments which can more easily be controlled. But for Maurer this is once again to focus upon the wrong end of this particular stick. Since for some the concern is not to find theological justifications for secular practice, but to use financial practice as a means to objectify and thus come to understand theology. So securitization is here used as a means to think through analytical issues of substitutability, and its virtue as practice is that it shows how this come be done. In both these case-studies Maurer reveals how what we reduce to a single trajectory leading to immateriality can be the product of alternative logics or debates about their relative probity. Along with his other publications he has opened up the issue of immateriality to this pluralism. So in the previous section the chapters by Meskell, Rowlands and Myers demonstrated the variety of different forms of materiality, each with their own consequences for power. In this section Maurer’s research on finance acclimatizes us to the idea of plural immaterialities, again each with their own consequences for power, but also for analysis. By showing how the internal debate within Islamic banking itself questions the logic of representational adequacy for analysis Maurer also begins a critique that will be taken up later by Keane.

Although Maurer is concerned with the theological concerns that lead to a quite different logic and imagination of immateriality, when considered in terms of the consequences of these logics, these various routes towards immateriality still end up having to contend with the issues raised by their specific materiality. As was the case for Engelke, the greater the emphasis upon immateriality the more finessed becomes the exploitation of the specificities of the form of materiality by which that immateriality is expressed. The significance of this observation has been clarified by a series of recent ethnographic studies of finance in practice. Zaloom (2003) shows that while we talk in terms of a rather general concept of `economic rationality’, financial practice may be conditioned by a very immediate set of objects. By comparing screen based trading to the `pit’ of human traders we find that it is the very specific aspects of these particular materialities, by which numbers appear and are expressed, that actually dominates activity. It is the precise nuance of voice and call in the pit, and the way screens appear and can be read, that becomes the relevant skills. Within global financial trading (see Hasselstrom 2003) we find a triangle made up of the propensities of the new technologies, the ways people find to exploit their strengths and weaknesses and the social relations that thereby arise. Several other chapters within Garsten and Wulff (2003) reveal a fourth factor, the discrepancies between the practice of technology and those ideals it was intended to express.

An examination of the precise relationship between materiality and immateriality leads us to Miyazaki’s contribution to this volume; a focus upon the material effects of theory. More specifically he shows how finance seeks out ways of making the materialisation of theory productive. Money is made by exploiting a critical relationship between the increasingly immaterial conceptualisation of what’s being traded and the quasi-material forms by which this is expressed. So, for example, a common contemporary financial practice is arbitrage. This is a technique whereby traders exploit any discrepancy they can identify between an actual price and what a price `should’ be. The normative implication of the word `should’ is a property of theories about how perfect markets determine proper price. These are theories which as Maurer (2002), MacKenzie (2001) and others have shows try to reach up to the highest abstractions of theoretical physics, and which appeal because of their purity. In the unsullied world of pure probability is found the `real’ market, which is the source of their models. As in all attempts to adhere to the project of immateriality, the real is equated with that which transcends the merely actual. For these traders the real market is not the sullied version they trade in, but the pure version they model. They import mathematicians and engineers in order to learn finance theory. All of this is fundamental to arbitrage trading which operates in the momentary discrepancy between the theoretical price given by these models and the actual price. But by identifying and exploiting such discrepancies it also removes them from the financial system. So it is also a corrective mechanism that makes money at the same time that it makes the market appear to fulfil this ideal about itself - `the act of arbitrage reduces arbitrage opportunities’ (Miyazaki 2003: 256). It brings the mere reality of financial practice closer to the perfection of the `real’ market in which there could be no arbitrage because there would be no imperfections to exploit.

Miyazaki stresses the utopianism to these beliefs. Everything in the world ought to accord with this virtualist (as in Miller 1998b) conception arising out of theory. In one respect what Miyazaki describes is instantly recognisable because it is so quintessentially academic. And as with most academics there is a strong belief by traders in their disciplinary legitimacy and underlying epistemology. So after the financial crash in Japan, these traders wrote papers defending arbitrage as legitimate market activity. Clearly they did not see themselves as only exploiting the weakness, that is the materiality of trade. Rather they saw themselves as exposing that weakness and making it accord with its `real’ form which is its higher immaterial theoretical form. This is why for them the discovery of a discrepancy is just that - a scientific discovery, and their utilization of this discovery ought properly to be `risk-free’. What the public see as theory or as immaterial for them is the site of reality, the holy grail of the true market. These Japanese traders actually work on fixed salaries, their delight is in the refinement of economic theory backed by the belief that like scientists, this brings the world closer to a higher truth.

What Miyazaki sees as utopianism is no doubt for the traders simply evident in the fabulous productivity of applied financial theory. Finance is a dialectical process of imagination followed by its realisation. Key processes in contemporary finance, such as securitization and leverage, start with re-conceptualisation. Once the initial stage of securitization is secured, the next stage becomes the creation of derivatives. If securitization turns a potential future profit stream into something that can be traded, then a derivative may be formed by trading the risk involved in speculating on what that profit stream will be. A new way of conceiving something as tradable becomes a new form of value. Similarly in leverage a smaller financial asset is used as a kind of collateral to bring to bear much larger sums, as in buying out a company. In both cases theory can be incredibly productive. In securitization and leverage trading on the `as though they existed’ is sufficient to make them exist. A million units can thereby be traded as a billion units. Well more actually.. ` by June 2000 the total notional amounts of derivatives contracts outstanding worldwide was $108 trillion, the equivalent of $18,000 for every human being on earth’ (MacKenzie and Millo forthcoming). Pryke and Allen (2000) suggest that derivatives may be thought of as a new form of money based on a new conception of incredibly fast space-time, which as Miyazaki argues elsewhere makes arbitrage essentially a sensitivity to a particular form of temporality (2003). Anthropologists should not really have a hard time in understanding such activities. Because this dialectic between the development of the immaterial and its dependence upon materiality, may be viewed as an expansion of what we have already learnt about the potential expansion of space-time in Munn’s (1986) analysis of fame or Simmel’s (1972) Philosophy of Money. Theory here is an example of culture as process, something that expands our space time. Theory/cosmology creates a kind of super fame/money that now has materiality, at least sufficient materiality to be traded. We don’t need to understand the more exoteric modelling that produces this effect. We need only see that is can be realised as something we certainly do recognise – loads of money. The subsequent life-style of financiers thereby confirms another side to this dialectic, the material productivity of this expanded immaterial or theoretical work.

Maurer’s and Miyazaki’s observations show why the world of finance is such an integral part of this volume as a whole. Finance is the contemporary version of the same phenomenon that is being tackled by other chapters using mainly historical and religious examples – indeed Maurer’s paper combines the two. Humanity constantly returns to vast projects devoted to immateriality, whether as religion, as philosophy, or for Miyazaki, theory as the practice of finance. But all of these rest upon the same paradox - that immateriality can only be expressed through materiality. In each case its theologians, or theorists as financial experts, become intensely skilled in the finessing of this relationship. For them immateriality is power. In arbitrage the theories have the authority of the belief in the market and so the legitimacy to punish/make money out of those who fail to accord with market principles. This is analogous to the way during the Protestant reformation, populations were slaughtered because of debates over whether the bread and wine in communion was actually the body and blood of the Christian messiah. In both cases the assumption was that material practice should always accord with the proper vision of the immaterial, the market/the divine, which was its source of authority. The reason it is useful to bracket the paper by Engelke with those on finance is that both attest to what happens when groups such as Masowe apostolics or institutions such as derivatives traders are committed to following through this logic of immateriality with its consequences for residual materiality.

So we approach a kind of general rule: the more humanity reaches towards the conceptualisation of the immaterial the more important the specific form of its materialisation. This is appropriate to a wide range of other areas. Modern art depends on a very similar strategy. The more esoteric the conceptualised the more value its performance. The more we come to believe that art is actually transcendent, the more its material form is worth in dollars. Similarly in the field of religion, the more we feel the deity is beyond our comprehension and representation, the more valuable the medium of our objectification, whether sacrifice or prayer. Religions such as Islam and Judaism which are stridently resistant to representation, become stridently legalistic about practice. In all such cases what makes materiality so important is very often the systematic cultivation of immateriality[ix]. Humanity proceeds as though the most effective means to create value is that of immaterialty.

This conclusion begs (at least) three further questions. The first is that since these are dialectical processes they are always subject to potential reification, what I would call `virtualism’ (see Miller 1998b[x]). Indeed for the sceptic they amount to nothing more than evidence for actual reification. They claim to reveal reality, but actually mask it. This is the way the secular sees all religion, the way the `philistine’ regards the cult of modern art, and the way most of us regard, not just the dot.com fiasco as a stock market bubble (Cassidy 2002), but quite possibly (following Marx and to an extent Keynes), the whole phenomenon of the stock market. The second issue, which is the subject of the next section, is the relationship between these levels of representation as theorised in semiotics. The third issue, which is the subject of the final section of this introduction, focuses upon the single most privileged moment in this allocation of relative materiality, the assumption that objects represent people, what I will refer to as the tyranny of the subject.

WHY THE CLOTHES HAVE NO EMPEROR

Having debated the pluralism of materiality and the pluralism of immateriality, there is not surprisingly also a plurality to their relationship. One example of the relationship between materiality and immateriality is evident in a common technique of representation. We often assume that a material form makes manifest some underlying presence which accounts for that which is apparent. The classic anthropological portrait is of the shaman. An individual who faced with a body suffering from illness or witchcraft, finds an object such as a stone and draws it out, thereby making the cause of the affliction manifest. The appearance of the object demonstrates that which must have been responsible for its existence. There are echoes of this in Strathern’s (1986) analysis of Melanesian society. Strathern argued that in Melanesia persons are the manifestation of a prior cause, their presence gives account of what must have taken place for them to be the consequence. As objects they make manifest what otherwise might be hidden or obscure.

Not surprisingly, there are equivalents within our own society. Psychoanalysts often take a problematic symptom, such as a debilitating or compulsive habit, to be evidence for some underlying cause, which has so far remained hidden. The process of analysis brings forth language as a complementary manifestation. This has the merit, when revealed by the analyst, of providing a fuller account of the hidden cause. So a `proper’ manifestation replaces an improper one. In what is probably the fastest growing religion of our time, that of Pentecostalism, the externalisation of `The Word’ is the evidence for the proper and prior internalisation of God’s word (Coleman 2000: 171). So for a wide spectrum of cultural practices, from shamans and psychoanalysts to Melanesians and the Pentecostals, making manifest is itself the practice of explanation which becomes tantamount to cure or to being saved.

Another cultural logic that connects materiality and immateriality, has emerged in recent work on the concept of fetishism. This explores how societies try and police the boundaries between where and when materiality should be manifest (see Spyer Ed). As Keane (1998) noted colonial authorities saw fetishism as implicit in tribal people’s respect for the autonomy of things, analogous to a sense of objects having `agency’ in the contemporary theories of Gell and Latour. But to call indigenous peoples fetishists was to claim that these were misunderstandings, certainly not to regard them as philosophers blessed by a better appreciation of the agency of things. Foster (1998) notes the desire by colonial authorities to represent the use of money as body decoration by New Guinea highlanders as a kind of naïve misunderstanding of what money properly `is’. Similarly there is our own sense of threat when derivatives traders seem too far removed from recognisable assets, or when we read how Islam creates banks with different principles of interest and accumulation. These all seem to threaten accepted conventions about what is the sign and what is the signified. We want to regard other people’s delineation of the materiality and capacity of money, not as different, but as wrong (Maurer 2003). This leads us in turn to a more general consideration of semiotics, and also to a greater concern with the moral dimension that seems to constantly permeate these assumptions about what is sign and what is signified. We can discern a consistency in these discussions, a desire to protect one particular signified, which is ourselves. It is as though the proper hierarchy of representation needs to be maintained as a semiotic dualism. On the one hand the material sign that gains autonomy as mere representation. On the other hand the human signified that gains authenticity to the degree that it transcends the paltry attempts by objects to signify it.

These issues are brought out with particular clarity by the contributions of Keane and Küchler. Both of them recognise the underlying problem within semiotics itself and the assumptions behind continuing to privilege ourselves as the subject. Fortunately both of them discuss this issue with respect to the same intimate relationship between ourselves and our clothing. Without Keane’s contribution the edifice of argument being constructed by this volume could not be constructed. Because he speaks directly to this issue of implied systems and levels of representation. We cannot escape the dominant relationship between immateriality and materialty being understood as one of representation, where we tend to speak of coins and statues as signs or tokens? But if our very understanding of the nature of representation is such that it privileges the immaterial, it is that much harder to give respect to the nature of human action and history as merely material culture. Fortunately Maurer’s paper has already demonstrated the parochial nature of our treatment of representation, by showing how in Islamic finance there are very different ways in which this relationship is seen. Not as a hierarchy based upon abstraction but more as an alliance between the material and immaterial as means to conceptualise the divine. In a very different but parallel argument Keane suggests it is entirely possible to construct a theory of signification in which materiality is integral, not subservient. Following Peirce he constructs an approach to the sign that takes the tangible and sensual aspect of our engagement with the world and respects its evident centrality to the way we think and practice in the world. He acknowledges the role of materiality in causation whether or not we notice its effects. Often this consists of the co-presence of qualities, that happen to go together in a particular object, like lightness and wood in a canoe, or of what is taken to be a significant resemblance between things. We subsequently have to come to terms with convention that orientates us towards some things and some resemblances and not others, constraining and inviting possible ways of acting. Finally his chapter speaks to the essential historicity of interpretation which takes its orientation from the past and creates a propensity towards the future, often acting through expectation and modes of acceptance. Within this it is what Keane calls the openness of things that makes them so proficient to guiding our futures. So signs cannot be considered immaterial representations of a lower material presence. Rather they are themselves what he calls the semiotic ideologies that guide practice.

To appreciate the significance of these rather abstract ideas, it is worth reflecting upon that common story about the Emperor who has no clothes. Because in many respects the gist of Keane’s argument is that we also need to finally acknowledge that the clothes have no emperor. We assume that to study texture and cloth is by default to study symbols, representations and surfaces of society and subjects. In an older social anthropology clothes are commonly signs of social relations. Anything else would be a fetishism of them as objects. But as he shows, if you strip away the clothing, you find no such `thing’ as society or social relations lurking inside. The clothing did not stand for the person, rather there was an integral phenomenon which was the clothing/person. This same point is then generalised into a critique of what he sees as a misguided rendition of semiotics itself. Just as clothes are not a cover for subjects or society, the `sign’ is not necessarily a vicarious representative of society. In one blow we eliminate not just the emperor but also our status as mere `subjects’. The reason is simple. These material forms constituted and were not just superficial cover for that which they created in part through their enclosing, and giving shape. The subject is the product of the same act of objectification that creates the clothing. A woman who habitually wears saris as compared to one who wears western clothing or a shalwar kamiz, is not just a person wearing a sari. Because the dynamism and demands of the sari may transform everything from the manner in which she encounters other people to her sense of what it is to be modern or rational (Banerjee and Miller 2003). Social relations exist in and through our material worlds that often act in entirely unexpected ways that cannot be traced back to some clear sense of will or intention.

Different people have an extraordinary power to delineate surface and substance differently. I was brought up with a concept of superficiality that denigrates surfaces as against a greater reality. I was taught that `the real person’ was supposed to lie deep within oneself. It is a very common mode of denigration to call something or someone `superficial’ (though see Wigley 1995). But as Strathern (1979) argued for Mount Hagen (see also O’Hanlon 1989) and I have argued for Trinidad (1995) other people simply don’t see the world this way. They may regard the reality of the person as on the surface where it can be seen and kept `honest’ because it is where the person is revealed. By contrast, our depth ontology is viewed as false, since for them it is obvious that deep inside is the place of deception. There are many versions of this cosmology of depth and surface. The Aztecs (Moctezume and Olguin 2002) removed the surfaces of bodies by flaying their victims and gave these to priests to wear as clothing. One person’s skin became another person’s…..skin, expressing mutability in what we deem immutable.

The power of Küchler’s contribution lies in the depth of the wound that she strikes against the apparent unassailability of conventional humanism. Her target is not the superficial materiality of the body and person, but that which is usually held as transcending this, that is thought itself. She strikes at the self-definition of homo sapiens as sentient, that is the thinking being. It is not surprising therefore, that having made her strike deep inside the head, she claims to have landed a mortal blow. As with Keane, she shows that once the emperor humanity lays slain, we can welcome a more modest, but more genuine, representation of our humanity. One that respects rather than denies the materiality of thought. She argues that the significance of new intelligent fabrics, ones that appear in some sense to be able to `think’ for themselves and start to take responsibility for their actions and responses, is that in their light we can see how many precursors already existed with these attributes. Küchler examines clothing that has inscribed upon its surface forms that are simultaneously the sign of what they can do and the means to do it. As such she confirms precisely Keane’s point about transcending any simple representational form of semiotic.

More than this, Küchler forces us to confront not just ordinary thinking of the kind we might undertake in day to day calculations but also the pretensions of the most esoteric forms of thinking: the previously introduced mutual relationship between high art and high mathematics. In, for example, drawing or modelling a Klein bottle we can give form and give mathematical substance to an idea that is otherwise quite difficult to conceive of – something which has neither an end nor a beginning. Not even mathematics can ever transcend the process of objectification which allows it, quite literally, to think and thereby to be. So for Küchler mathematics is as much a product of art as art is the product of mathematics. Both are forms of thought in their concrete aspects, which is essential to all forms of thought. Once again their quest for immateriality exacerbates the importance of their materiality. Curiously, in her chapter, clarity of mind turns out to derive from being tied up in knots, knots which speak to the tactile nature of connection and relation, as well as their necessarily formulaic propensities. For Küchler it thereby makes sense to think in terms of the sapient tool as well as homo sapiens. Between them, Keane and Küchler, through their emphasis on clothing, in particular, make sure that we do not allow a proper consideration of the body and the mind to become a return to the privileging of the purified subject. On the contrary, both body and mind are seen are routes that lead us to the same conclusions as these other studies. Because amongst other things our concern with their materiality both internally as with mind and externally as with the clothed body, forces us to acknowledge the centrality of materiality itself to the constitution of humanity.

Keane and Küchler prepare us for the larger realisation of the extent to which, as Thrift puts it, we have accepted approaches that are falsely `predicated on stable conceptions of what it is to be human and material’. We need to recognise not only the significance of new developments that Thrift then documents in the very possibilities of what it is to be material in the future. But equally, as Mauss helped us to understand, we need to be reminded of the very different understandings other peoples may have of this centrality of materiality to the sense of what it is to be human in the past. Having dethroned the emperors we are in a position to give credence to the increasing impact of sapient materiality (while acknowledging that objects are as plebeian as we are - they are not alternative emperors). This is precisely the purpose of Thrift’s chapter. His chapter follows neatly upon that of Küchler in helping us think through the very concept of sapient objects. He indicates this through a return to a forgotten contribution by the psychophysics. Their theories as to the impact of screens brings us back to a time when it was regarded as much more obvious and pertinent that both consciousness and cognition were bound to the specifics of materiality rather than defined by their opposition to the material world. The specifics of screens matter, a point we have met earlier in the consideration of finance (Zaloom 2003). If psychophysics was concerned with the anticipatory nature of consciousness, then Thrift’s next example, that of software, is concerned with the anticipatory nature of materiality. For software to work properly it has, in effect, to become the material anticipation of its users. Software, for Thrift, is important, as were clothes for Küchler and Keane, in that it does not mesh with our dominant academic concerns over representation. Material forms such as screens and software are best understood, as mediating in our lives through becoming a kind of personal infrastructure. This is quite different from the more simplistic ideas of representation that Keane has also just critiqued. This is why, as Thrift shows, they are often apprehended with analogies and metaphors that are more fundamental and increasingly taken from biology.

Thrift weaves back and forth between the present and the philosophical discussions that generally accompanies the first appearance of some new surface as people try to envisage its future consequences. There seems to be an almost standard sequence. First the material innovation is subject to heated debate, that often makes wild claims of technological determinism and how our essential humanity has now changed forever. Then typically there seems to be a long period of relative lack of regard and theory as the new forms become naturalised as the taken for granted background to our lived experience. Only later do we seem able to once again detach ourselves from our own acceptance of this new world to re-invent these explicit discussions about the consequences of technologies, as more modest acknowledgments of what this subject/object has subsequently become. Perhaps this is consistent with Thrift’s emphasis upon a phenomenological concern with the sensuous nature of these material mediations, their visceral character as becoming ingrained into our feel of the world both as the world and as our apprehension of it. All of which creates what he calls the lyrical and wondrous form of intelligibility today. Thrift shows how Phenomenology needs to look forward as much as backwards. A twenty year old Londoner with a devotion to make up, techno music and multiple orgasms is probably rather more in touch with the world through her body, than was your average Scandinavian peasant chopping logs. We gain nothing from that form of Phenomenology that continues to romanticise a diluted conception of heimat as the only authentic relationship to the world (Ingold 2000, see also Gell 1995)

Thrift ends on larger issues that speak to our capacity to envisage futures. His theme starting with the pyschophysics concerns our ability to predict and apprehend changes in stimuli. His chapter can be read as an attempt to do the same thing intellectually. For example, I feel that the fact that I had to read Brave New World at school, could be seen as a kind of `inoculation’ that helps prepare me for the possible advent of what Thrift predicts as a brave new body of the future. Ideally his chapter help us to steer a course for that future politics of the sensory which Thrift regards as essential.

THE TYRANNY OF THE SUBJECT

The papers by Keane, Küchler and Thrift, between them have cut down the pretensions of both the somatic and the cognitive as constituting a humanity defined in opposition to materiality. They have thereby hammered in what should be the last nails in the coffin whose contents I know propose to consider. Who or what is it exactly that we propose to inter? It is perhaps the most fundamental burial that a discipline called Anthropology could ever contemplate, and one that has considerable implications for our understanding of what the discipline has been and could be. Although I concede things never were quite this simple, for a moment, let us reduce the foundations of contemporary social science to one particular set of ideas: Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life[xi]. The possibility of modern anthropology was at the least secured with the radical secularism that viewed religion as the emanation of the social collective. At the same moment that Durkheim desacralised religion he sacralised the social. The social sciences become devoted to the study of all phenomena that stand for what we now call society, social relations or indeed simply the subject. By whichever name, these are the terms that describe the contents of the coffin we are about to bury.

In a recent volume Kuper (1999) castigated American Anthropology for its reification of the term `culture’. What he entirely missed was the degree to which a parallel tendency to reification exists within British Social Anthropology, but around the twin terms society and social relations, which are just as subject to reification as is the term culture in the US. Even in the heydey of 1970’s structuralist and Marxist approaches to anthropology, writers such as Douglas (1978) insisted that structural analysis must always return to its vicarious role as the order of signs that stand for social relations, and even Althusserian modes of production were seen as only properly grounded in these same `social relations’. This may well explain why, as discussed earlier on, Gell (1998), working within this tradition, permits agency for objects only as a matter of inference not as an inherent property of objects themselves[xii]. It is not surprising then that Durkheim stands as the bete noir of Latourian science studies, a bastion of the dualism he wants to confront, or that Strathern excavates the reification of both society and culture implicit in the concept of `context’ (see also Dilley 1999), or that Hacking (1999) targets its philosophical foundations in his recent The Social Construction of What? ’ In this volume we are concerned with the rites of burial of the subject, and its consequences, but plenty of others have already had a hand in the death. Indeed the term culture, where this means the anthropological study of the normative (rather than a classification of people) could be said to be less naturalised or apparently neutral. We are rather more readily aware that we have constructed culture, than that we are dealing with a constructed subject or society

We can hardly be surprised that a discipline called Anthropology for so long encouraged the social subject to retain a reified position to which all else should be reduced. Behind this may lie an assumption that our ethical stance to the world depends upon retaining some fundamental allegiance to ourselves and our essential humanism. Yet just as the secular believe that the dethronement of the previous essential guarantor of morality, that is the deity, released, rather than suppressed the development of a modern ethical sensibility, so also it could be argued that the dethronement of humanity, or `social relations’ can be the premise for the further development of modern ethics, not its dissolution[xiii]. So if the first revolution consisted of Durkheim enthroning society in the stead of religion, we now look to gain maturity by burying the corpse of our imperial majesty, society. In both cases revolutionary action is premised on a refusal to have our morality gilt-edged by an emperor.

But then who or what climbs up upon the now empty pedestal? It is essential that the pedestal remains empty. As Keane shows the clothes should have no emperor; no emperor society, no emperor culture, no emperor identity, no emperor the subject, and certainly no emperor the object. There could be candidates who would like to seize this throne. For example, some post-feminist vision of a new age `Gaia’, even less sullied by materialism, a vision of earth-mother as `super(ior)-man’, that heals without conventional medicine, cures poverty without industrial agricultural and communicates pure thoughts of caring motherhood. But the future is no more the female subject, than the male subject: the future lies in human modesty about being human. Upon abdication of this throne we can lower our sights and face up to that which created us. That is the processes of objectification which creates our sense of ourselves as subjects and the institutions that constitute society but which are always appropriations of the materiality by which they are constituted. Ultimately as argued at the beginning of this essay, the concepts of subject and object are always failures to acknowledge this process of objectification.

The idea is not to swing the pendulum too far towards materiality either. It would be easy to conflate Thrift’s discussion of screens and software into a return to some kind of technological determinacy, but only by ignoring the much larger picture. Rather I think what Thrift documents is a return to the centrality of materiality that anthropologists have encountered in most societies, but in the form of canoes, landscapes or cultivation. Technology does have an impact, Thrift is indeed asserting that new materialities such as screens and software have consequences, sometimes unprecedented consequences, because they are unprecedented materials, but these consequences are as much a product of our history of self-regard, now viewed as part of the history of our materiality. Thrift’s discussion of software can be compared with Strathern (1990) on artefacts. To be unprecedented does not mean unanticipated, and software in many respects merely makes explicit a common property of artefacts as forming our anticipatory infrastructure. Having de-throned the emperors culture, society and representation there is no virtue in en-throning objects and materialism in their place. The goal of this revolution is to promote equality, a dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction and respect for their mutual origin and mutual dependency.

Sociology and anthropology have usually been strongest and most effective when the emphasis has been on what makes people rather than what people make: on the frames rather than what’s inside of them. Consider Goffman’s various essays on how roles as the identity of persons are constituted by institutions or Bourdieu on socialisation through the practical taxonomies of everyday things. One of the reasons Anthropology still needs to return to writings such as Bourdieu to make this point rather than only to, for example, Latour, is that we need our ethnographies to focus upon how precisely our sense of ourselves as subjects are created. Bourdieu’s sensitivity to the process of socialisation becomes a vital piece in this jigsaw. It is not just that objects can be agents, it is that practices and their relationships create the appearance of both subjects and objects through the dialectics of objectification and we need to be able to document how people internalise and then externalise the normative. In short we need to show how the things that people make, make people.

It is perhaps worth ending this section with an illustration that can help address the obvious question. What does an anthropology that does not privilege social relations as the core to our own authenticity actually look like? In my previous work on modernity in Trinidad (Miller 1994), I argued that the best way to understand kinship in Trinidad was through seeing the way kinship was used to express certain key systems of value that had emerged through a historical process that started with slavery and was now increasingly directed towards the issue of being modern. But I then argued that after the oil boom Trinidadians started to put increasing emphasis upon the more flexible possibilities of mass consumption goods such as cars and clothing as a means to express these contradictions in value, rather than kinship. So, for example, the kinds of freedom that were previously expressed by an antipathy to marriage, which was seen as leading to relationships being `taken for granted’, were now being expressed through a very intense relationship to cars as vehicles for achieving freedom.

Now the obvious reaction to such a trajectory is to see people as losing their authentic sociality as they become more obsessed with material things. But this is to miss certain major advantages of such a shift. It was not just kinship that was used to express values in the absence of consumer goods, so also was ethnicity, class and age. As a result, individual persons had previously been very commonly judged as tokens that embodied those particular values. There was abundant discussion on how `Indians’ are mean, or engage in violent disputes over inheritance, or how `men’ tend to be feckless and unreliable. All such stereotyping derives from the use of social relations and distinctions as a medium for expressing values. As consumer goods started to take over more of the burden for objectifying and thus creating the way values were visualised and understood, there was less of a tendency to use people as, in effect, the objects for objectifying such values. To indicate transience one referred to the unreliability of car parts rather than the unreliability of women. In short, anthropologists tend to forget what might be called the downside of the Maussian equation. That in a society where objects are reduced to their person like qualities, peoples also tend to be reduced to their object like qualities, as vehicles for the expression of values[xiv]. The work of ethnography is to reveal these reductive processes.

All of this argument for a resolution, or republic of mutual respect, between what colloquially are thought of as objects and subjects may appear rather too neat. Which is precisely the point of the final chapter in this collection, that by Pinney.

It seems to me to entirely befit a dialectical perspective that we end with a chapter, part of whose purpose, is to negate this introduction through critique. It is a critique whose principle contention is that this introduction simply does not go far enough. It is clear that Pinney agrees very strongly with the importance of removing the tyranny of the subject. His chapter is in part an assault on what he sees as a continuing tendency to reduce objects to their `social lives’, or the contexts of social relations. Pinney gives full blessing to the Latourian refusal of purification in terms of subjects and objects. He strengthens the case by his excavation of the implicit contextualisations found in the form of temporality that underlies most narrative history. History, he argues, makes assumptions that mere contemporainity is enough to reduce materiality to its position as a representation of its time and, by extension, its social context. His critique of temporality is analogous to that by Keane of semiotics. Both materiality and immateriality do more than simply stand as representations of the social. While the focus of this volume has been on the implications of this observation for anthropology, it may well be, as Pinney suggests, that this critique is even more pertinent when directed against the tradition of historical studies with its reliance upon a simple notion of events in sequence. Pinney is trying to move us away from our assumption that images simply exist within a given sequence of time, to a sense that images by their very materiality, for example recursive nature, may contain within them their own relative temporality (compare Gell 1992).

Where he parts company from my arguments is the conclusion that he draws from this intransigent aspect of the image, which is argued to derive from its multiple temporalities. I suspect we are trading here in implied accusations of romanticism. Pinney sees my emphasis upon resolution and the smoothly turning wheel as a reflection of the romanticism that comes out of the German romantic tradition that strongly influenced Hegel. I would throw this accusation straight back into Pinney’s court. Pinney wants to see more jolts and dislocations in the wheel, but I suspect that the philosophers and cultural theorists he cites want to read into images their own romantic ideal of the image or art object as a work of resistance. What is termed figural excess or `radical exteriority’ becomes celebrated, precisely as radical. Such theorists as Adorno and Bataille and Lyotard had an abiding horror of the merely mundane, and project a radical potential upon the significant image. They celebrate, as does Pinney, the disruptive quality that can put spokes into smoothly turning wheels. But what fascinates me is quite the opposite. I am drawn to the ethnographic experience of the mundane, to the constant encounter with juxtapositions in peoples lives which, for cultural theorists, ought to be incommensurable and contradictory, and yet appear to be lived with and through, accompanied by little more than a shrug of the shoulders. Perhaps things `shouldn’t’ be this smooth. Most ethnography no doubt appears as terribly irritating or even infuriating for such cultural theorists and their attendant artists, but notwithstanding their protests, I contend that for the most part, from the perspective of ethnographic observation, that old wheel just keeps on turning.

CONCLUSION

This volume is intended to contribute to three interrelated projects. The first is to acknowledge the central role played in history by the desire to transcend and repudiate materiality. The second is to consider the consequence of making this acknowledgement and the subsequent acceptance of materiality and to go on to explore the nuances, relativism and plural nature of both materiality and immaterialty. The third is to follow through the most radical of these implications, which leads us to repudiate the privilege accorded to a humanity defined by its opposition to materiality as pure subject or social relations. In addition to these three projects, this introduction has proposed a kind of meta-commentary upon them all. It has been suggested that in order to carry out these projects we are likely to embrace various forms of philosophical resolution to the problematic dualism between persons and things. While this resort to philosophy is essential to our academic purpose, the integrity of anthropology demands another commitment; a promise to betray such philosophical resolutions and to return us to the messy terrain of ethnography.

Meskell has provided this volume with its ideal first chapter. Her case-study establishes some basic parameters for the whole. The remains of ancient Egypt present us in spectacular form with the initial paradox that the whole volume must contend with. That throughout history there have arisen systems of belief that are founded upon a fundamental desire to define humanity through the transcendence of the merely material, and re-locate us within a divine realm which alone is understood as `real’. Yet in many cases the way this sense of immateriality has had to be expressed is precisely through the efflorescence of the material. Her sensitive analysis of the theologies of practice implicit in these remains are then linked to the degree to which we still today use `pyramids’ both to express the monumentality of commodification in Las Vegas and our increasingly desperate appeals to some transcendent new age spirituality that defines us against the material.

The chapters that follow reveal increasingly complex and nuanced logics by which these contradictions have played themselves out. Rowlands and Myers start to construct an anthropology of first the relativism and then the plurality of materiality. A case study in the field of finance by Maurer and Miyazaki, in conjunction with Engelke on Apostolic repudiations, constitutes an anthropology of the relativism and pluralism of immateriality. Together they present some of the cultural logics that arise from these pluralisms and also the relationship between materiality and imateriality. Whether we are considering Aboriginal artworks or new financial instruments such as arbitrage, it is extraordinary to observe just how much of what actually takes place is based on the creative exploitation of the material expressions of the immaterial ideal.

By exposing the necessity of the material, these chapters lead us to some of the fundamental issues at stake in confronting the underlying contradictions of materiality and immateriality. Above all they reveal a core, or kernel to these entanglements. As Keane Küchler and Thrift reveal, we are not just clothed but we are constituted by our clothing. Getting tied up in knots by the very idea of intelligent fabrics, or Piercian semiotics, or an anticipatory carapace, is precisely where we should seek to be. At the place where we confront the materiality of our own intelligence. At this stage we are doing precisely what has been so uncharacteristic of the approaches to materiality documented here. Our aim is to consider materiality directly, not vicariously through the quest for immateriality. But as these chapters have shown this has important consequences, since it forces us to face up to the very reason why this quest for the immaterial is so driven. To acknowledge materiality amounts to a refusal to retain that reification of ourselves which has sustained anthropology since its inception as the very point (both purpose and pinnacle) of this discipline.

The intention is to create conditions for a mature anthropology that will also provide the impetus to tackle areas where these issues of materiality continue to dominate. If historically it was religion that constituted the most consequential arena of debate, today it is probably economics. As the chapters by Maurer and Miyazaki reveal (and in a different way also that of Myers), anthropology lies in pole position to lead an assault upon an economics where, as Miyazaki suggests, its practice is its precept. Levi-Strauss stressed the materiality of philosophy for `tribal’ peoples. So his heirs today recognise that finance is equally `tribal’ in that it does philosophy through the construction of its own mythic realm which is its own field of practice. Such an anthropology can freely re-engage with a world dominated by mass consumption, poverty and economics without seeing these merely as the forms of diminished sociality.

This is precisely why we cannot follow this trajectory without also taking into account a final project, a meta-commentary upon the others. We recognise that we can indeed resolve many of the issues at stake here, but at some cost. As was stated early on, all approaches to the problem of materiality are to some extent inventing and re-inventing the same wheel. One can follow the writings of Latour, one can take up a dialectical position, one can translate the legacy of phenomenology. All of these will make claims to have finally and fully transcended the dualism of subjects and objects. At the level of philosophical discourse this claim seems tenable. Instead of a dualism, we have an endlessly turning process that spins off what at a lower level take on the appearance of more vulgar forms, that is things and persons. So it should now be apparent what was meant by characterising these chapters as busily putting spokes into (e.g. Pinney) and taking spokes out of (e.g. Küchler) this philosophical wheel.

But a wheel, however finely crafted, is not in and of itself a vehicle. To take us anywhere a wheel must be hitched to some mechanism that does more than just turn in circles. We achieve a philosophical resolution only if we forget the vehicle and its journey and contemplate the turning wheel as an autonomous force. To conduct anthropology we need to hitch the wheel back to a vehicle that returns us to the muddy paths of diverse humanity. Philosophy is therefore not (I hope) what anthropologists want to do, but rather it is our insurance policy against doing what we do want to do, badly. Because a focus on the particular in ethnography sometimes obscures the larger horizons which help us assess wider reasons and consequences of that ethnographic experience. Anthropology in its own practice returns us to the practice of others, to an ethnographic engagement with people who generally think of themselves these days as subjects, living in societies, having culture(s) and employing a variety of objects whose unproblematic materiality is taken for granted. Not always. Every chapter in this volume has documented instances where the issue of materiality is problematic for those being studied as much as for those writing about them. In almost every case we have encountered philosophical engagements with this issue as something practiced or implicit in the ideas and actions of those being studied. But many of these cases also have their own equivalents of the vulgar or colloquial arena, so evident in our own largely secular society, where a dualism of subjects and objects is merely presumed.

So there are times when we directly employ a philosophical argument to prevent the reification of either subjects or objects. While early uses of objectification (as in Marx) concentrated upon production, I would argue that today consumption is at least as important as the practice through which people potentially make themselves. For example, in the intensely nationalistic and normative environment of contemporary Trinidad the individual’s sense of themselves is saturated with the self-consciousness of being `Trini’. But, ethnographic research (Miller and Slater 2001) made clear that `being Trini’ had manifestly changed as a result of the way `being Trini’ could be performed on the internet, a technology Trinidadians took to with particular alacrity. So this could not be a study of the `Trinidadian appropriation of the Internet’, as though it was an encounter between two separate entities, the Trinidadian and The Internet. The very concept of `The Internet’ dissolved from being a given thing, into the specificity of its local consumption. There is no such thing as the internet, it becomes what it is only through its local appropriations. So what we studied was not for us `The Internet,’ nor `Trinidadians’, it was the process of objectification that created what subsequently came to be understood as both contemporary `Trinidadians’ and `The Internet’ in its wake.

It is therefore entirely possible to hitch the philosophical wheel that transcends dualism to an analytical vehicle in order to interpret an ethnographic study. But while this becomes an insurance against reductionism or reification, the point once made, would quickly become tedious if claimed to be the sole point of philosophically informed anthropology. The term `mutually constituted’ is much overused in contemporary anthropology. Furthermore the abstractions required to attach ourselves to this wheel also limit the ability of anthropology to engage with colloquial and empathetic understandings and language. Terms such as culture and society, indeed cultures and societies, can all become entirely justifiable shorthands for our necessary generalisations. But we need to bear in mind that ultimately they are heuristic terms anthropology needs to use, or terms used by those we study. They are not ultimate foundations to which all else can be reduced. Once all such terms are recognised as merely our subjects, and no longer our emperors, they become quite useful vehicles that, with the proper wheels attached, will safely take us somewhere. So in my current research project on poverty and communications in Jamaica, I imagine that I will commonly use terms such as `social relations’, `subjects’ and `objects’ in my analysis. Partly because I want to reflect the way the people I work with think and talk, but also because I will want to find ways to convey my research both to the people I am working amongst and very likely policy related institutions working on issues of poverty and development. Where philosophy and theory makes anthropology too `precious’ or `pure’ it changes from something facilitating understanding, to a force preventing engagement. This should not detract from the intellectual agenda of this introduction. To expose the `tyranny of the subject’ is still important as a bulwark against reification within academic discussion.

So essential to anthropology is a commitment to betrayal. A promise to betray the philosophical understandings we strive for in gaining our intellectual purchase, as we return to the vulgarity of our relativism and our empathy with the world. Philosophy is useful, but necessarily obfuscating and abstract when brought down as tablets of stone to people whose philosophy emerges essentially as a practice. We may want to bake our philosophical cake, but we hope for a much wider commensality, than merely with those few others who would wish to consume it. As long as it is clear that the usage is heuristic or intended to reflect colloquial language, we all need to talk and write in terms of subjects, objects and social relations. None of which I believe gainsays the importance of what the contributors to this volume have tried to do singularly and collectively. At the end of the day we still think we have invented a better wheel.

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ENDNOTES

[i] For example Banerjee and Miller 2003 137-147

[ii] Such levels of generalisation hugely simplify this opposition. Indeed although theology and economics may be in direct opposition as abstractions, in the world of practice, and even within theology itself, each may become the vehicles for the expression of the other, for example in Parry 1994

[iii] Miller,1998a A Theory of Shopping

[iv] See later discussion of Latour

[v] See in particular Latour 1993, 1999 and for a case-study relevant to this volume, Latour 1996.

[vi] There are of course, as many variants of philosophy as of anthropology. Furthermore my working definition is to a degree tautologous, given the point I am making. I take as philosophical that which is both more universal and more abstract, and anthropology as that which is more ethnographically based and specifically engaged. Clearly there are variants of both philosophy and of anthropology for which such assumptions are quite unwarranted.

[vii] Compare Sen (1987, 1999) but also Nussbaum’s (2000, Nussbaum and Sen Eds. 1993) `neo-Aristotelian’ position.

[viii] For other contradictions based on the two sides of coins see Hart 1986, and 2000: 235-256

[ix] Many other examples come to mind, for instance Zelizer’s (1987) work on Pricing the Priceless Child is based on a very similar logic, as is Campbell’s (1986) historical study of why it was that the ethos of Puritans and later Californian hippies became the necessary foundation for what we see today as the most elaborated versions of contemporary commodity materialism. Many times in the history of Christianity it was these same beliefs in the greater reward of asceticism through Christ that allowed the leaders of the church to amass considerable wealth from family inheritance (Goody 1983)

[x] In the theory of virtualism (Miller 1998b) I have tried to produce a more general theory as to the effects of these tendencies to reification, but I have also tried to show why these are extremely important for understanding the particular moment of history we are living through, but I don’t have space to reiterate those points here.

[xi] This is not intended to be so serious a claim as could be subject to argument. If someone would rather latch on to Kant’s universalism, or British ethnography, or Boas, or Vico that’s just fine. Durkheim is simply a representation of the trend I am concerned to excavate.

[xii] A tendency to use the term social relations in a reified or reductionist manner is not to imply that all uses of the term lead in this direction. Indeed one of the bastions of British social anthropology, the study of kinship, has perhaps been one of the least reductionist, as kinship became progressively understood as an idiom or homology of other cultural genres (e.g. Strathern 1992).

[xiii] `It could be argued’… .. i.e. this doesn’t happen to be my own view. I suspect that both humanism and religion itself can thrive on the ethics that is set free by this kind of radical or material doubt – but that, as they say, is another story.

[xiv] i.e. that before one comes to Mauss’s discussion of the Maori hau and taonga in The Gift (1954: 8-10), there is a section on the Samoan tonga, the giving of a child as a piece of property (ibid: 6-8).