[Fredrik Barth] Process and Form in Social Life S

International Library of AnthropologyRoutledge & Kegan Paul

Editor: Adam Kuper, University of Leiden

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Process and form in social lifeSelected essays of Fredrik Barth:

Volume I

Routledge & Kegall PaulLondon, BosI"n and HCllley

Process and fonn in social life

First published in 1981by RUUl/edge & Kegan Paul Ltd39 Store Street,Lundun WCIE 7DD.9 Park Street,Buston, Mass. 02108. USA andBroadway House,Newtuwn Road,Henley-on-Thames,OxonRG9IENSet in lOon 12 ptIBM Press Roman byAcademic Typing Service. Ge"ards Cross, Bucksand printed in Great Britain byBilling & Suns LimitedGUi/dford, London, Oxford and Worcester Fredrik Barth 1981No part uf this book may be reproduced inany form without permission from thepublisher, except for the quotation ofbriefpassages in criticism

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Barth, FredrikScJected essays uf Fredrik Barth. - (Internationallibrary ufanthrupulogy). Vol. I: Prucess and fonnin social lifeI. t:thnulogyI. Series306 GN325 80-41283

ISBN 9710007205

Contents

Introduction II Anthropological models and social reality 142 Models of social organization I

Introduction 32The analytical importance of transaction 33

3 Models of social organization IIProcesses of integratiun in cllioire 48

4 Models of social organization IIIThe prublem ofcomparison 61

5 'Models' reconsidered 766 On the study of social change 1057 Analytical dimensions in the comparison of

social organizations I 198 Descent and marriage reconsidered 1389 Economic spheres in Darfu r 157

10 Competition and symbiosis in orth East Baluchistan 17911 A general perspective on nomad-sedentary relations in

the Middle East 18712 Ethnic groups and boundaries 198Notes 228Bibliography 232Index 239

Introduction

These essays were written during the period 1955-72 (,'xeept furchapter 5. Volume I and chapter 7. Volume II. which were especiallyprepared for this collection). as steps in my own development as ananthropologist. They are panly my response to thc thoug.hts of otheranthropologists: but mainly they arc my response - aided and en-cumbered by such thoughts - to various glimpscs inlO the realities ofother people's lives and social relations that I have obtained throughfieldwork. As I understand my own work, in other words. my in tdlce-lUal biography would focus mainly on the various fieldwork I havedone, and not on the books I have read or the SdlllOls where I havestudied and taught. The major results of such fieldwork have heenpresented in a succession of monographs (see Bibliography). whkhcontain my main anthropological contributions. both substantive andanalytical. In the lectures and anicles republished here. I sought 10extract some of the more general positions and understanding.s atwhich I had arrived, prescnting them together with smaller fragmentsof data which I judged particularly enlightening for my analyticalargument.

Argument, polemical or otherwise, is central to moSI of the essays;and they inevitably address issues as these appeared to me:1I a particular time. One might tJlink that they therefore echo old battles longforgotten. If they were to be written loday, they would have beendesigned somewhat differently in responsc to contemporary debatesand arenas. But I regard their essential thrust and content as stillcurrent and vatid, since I find thai the viewpoints Ihey contain areproductive for my continuing work and have only been incompletelyutilized and accepted by otJlers, and that the views I challenge are suchas persist or reappear in only slightly varying fonns in the thinking ofanthropological colleagues. For these reasons, though the Ihemes andissues that engage me today are partly different (see Bibliography), itis also true to say that I 'stand for' views as argued in these texts.

2 /nrrodUClion

TIle essays may be usefully juxtaposed, since they are related asdevelopments of a few fundamen tal themes and so supplement oneanother. But I do not imagine that they add up to a complete andunified theory of culture and/or society. On the contrary, they wereintended to enter into the wider corpus of social anthropology toinnuence and modify its development on a few fronts and therebyto contribute 10 the collective endeavour that is our discipline, ratherthan erect a personal memorial or a sectarian Grand Theory. In otherwords, although my work has sometimes been interpreted this way, Ihave never wished to join or delineate any particular '-ism' in anthropo-logical analysis.

The anthropology which J met in the 1950s was, however, in myjudgment seriously crippled by an inattention to fundamental aspectsof people's lives. Most particularly, I felt the need to acknowledge theplace of the individual, and the discongruity between varying interestsand various levels of collectivity. Much of my writing in the ensuingyears has consequently focused on the task of developing a perspectiveon the subjective and goal-pursuing actor. This has entailed taking upthe questions of what place considerations of value and utility have incanalizing the behaviour of persons; the variation exhibited in be-haviour and the factors generating this variation; and what it is thatpropels and constrains individual actors and thus shapes their behaviourand Iheir lives. I believe that a conceptual apparatus which can treatthese topics and integrale Ihem wilh other major anthropologicalconcepts is an indispensable component in any theoretical systemfor social anthropology. All the essays collected here relate, in oneway or another, 10 this theme.

There are several alternative vocabularies with which to discuss thecircumstances and consequences of these aspects of intentionality, goalorientation, and rationality. I do not think that social anthropologyshould adopt any particular one of them and thereby the custom-madeepistemology which it enlails. We who study the different epistemo-logies and differing praxis of different cultural traditions should ratherengage aclively to design our own procedures and positions withrespect to such fundamental questions. To do so we need to be awareof the formulations and debates that are current in other disciplines,but not fight shy of assuming the arrogance needed to reshape themaccording to our own needs. That we have so far done this only littleand weakly is no reason nol to embrace it as a programme.

My own position on these central issues of epistemology and theory

Introduction 3

is only occasionally taken up in an explicit way in these essays, butis given a brief presentation in chapter I, I hold that we must a.:know-ledge that most of the phenomena we study are shaped by human .:on-sciousness and purpose. Since social acts are tllus not simply 'caused'but 'intended', we must consider these intentions and understandingsof actors if we wish to capture the esscntial contexts of acts. I seelittle possibility, and no desirability, in defining our object of study soas to eliminate by exclusion this subjectivity of human actors. WhereI seem 10 part ways with most of the transcendental philosophies, andwith anthropological colleagues who tend to follow them, is in Clll-phasizing the need to understand behaviour Sil1lll/ranevlIs!v in two,differently constituted, contexts. O!!e is the semiotic onc, wherestrings of events are shaped by actors so as to embody meanings andtransmit messages and thus rel1ect the rules and constraints of codifica-tion. But the same events also enter into the material world of causesand effects, both because acts have consequences and because personsmust relate to others who also cause things to happen. This latter con-text forces actors 10 consider the instrumentality of acts, in ways whichrel1ect both the constraints of knowledge and value, and the pragmaticsof cooperation and competition. Fi!lilly, I see a dialectic - albeitbetween entities on conceptually distinct macro- and micro-Ievels-between these codes values, and knowlcdge on tile one hand andhuman acts on the other. Not only do the former provide premisesIand constraints for particular acts, but acts also affect codes, values

. and knowledge by increments and so can change and modify theirown preconditions.

Within this comprehensive perspective, most of my discussion Inthe period covered by these essays has focused on actors' stratcgiesof instrumentality and the aggregate social consequences of suchstrategies. In quite another connection, Bateson (1972: 490-3) hascharacterized as a fundamental epistemologica1 fallacy the Westerntendency to th.ink and act in terms of the wrong units: in terms ofseparate individua1s rather than systems of interacting persons andobjects, or in terms of human groups and populations rather than thesein interaction with their environment. Systems theory has taught us(recently) instead to follow the pathways along which information andeffects now, and see these whole circuits or loops as the unit - notthe severed chunks which we produce by cutting across these conncc-tions of interrelationship. I contend, however. that this fallacy is notlimited to Western thought, but is prevalent in many contexts in many

4 lnrroducrion

other cultures as well. In such cases the logic by which actors operate -predicated by their subjective understanding of the situation andtheir own interests in it - is often at odds with the aggregate system ofinterdependencies within which they are acting. In societies with lesspowerful technologies this is not as ecologically suicidal as it may bein our case, but it is certainly pervasively consequen tial in shapingsociety and culture. The focus in the following essays on the strategiesof actors provides a methodology for exploring the consequences ofsuch egocentric epistemologies on the part of actors, inherent as I seeit in the inescapable directed ness of consciousness towards 'something'distinguished from the subject who is exercising the consciousness(Slagslad, 1976; Skjervheim, 1959).

My perspective, and my production over the years, have beenshaped by the effort to introduce these considerations in opposition,as an alternative or as a supplement, to conceptual habits that aredeeply entrenched in anthropological thinking and keep assertingthemselves in various guises and combinations. What I see as mostdistinctive to my approach is perhaps most vividly expressed in contrastto these other, in many ways more orthodox, perspectives.

The most dominant and most indispensable of them is sTructural-ism. ( believe it to be fundamental to the conceptualization of anykind of complex reality. But the way it has been adapted to anthropo-logical materials has entailed a predominant focus on 'systems ofthought', even when avowedly speaking about the connections ofsocial interaction and people's relationship to their environment.It has also focussed strongly on the macro-level of forms, institutionsand customs, ignoring the micro-level of the distribution and inter-connections of concrete acts and activities; or else it has confoundedthe two as if the acts of individuals were a simple homologue or 'expres-sion', of collective macro-structures. As a method, it has tended toachieve clarity - indeed often brilliance - in the depiction of patternsby a high degree of selectivity: by backgrounding and eliminatingvariation and abstracting the norm, thereby ignoring increasinglyrnore of what seems to me real and vital in people's lives (on the opera-tion of backgrounding in the construction of shared understandings,see Douglas, 1975: 3-4, and elsewhere). In these ways, structuralismhas developed in social anthropology in directions which ever reduceour universe of observation. The culturally and humanly rich occasionswhen people cOllie together in the creative act of shaping collectiveunderstandings and cosmologies are reduced to tex ts, to be distilled

lnrroducrion 5

into a series of abstract binary oppos.itions: eating together is depictedin the ciphers of conventional patterns of dishes: and the multiplexphenomena of being and changing iden tity become principles of recruil-ment. There are undeniable insights in these abslractil'l1s. but theycapture only very few sides to life: what is more. I mistrust them forbeing flawed even wilhin their restricted focus. Thus. I expt'ct there isusually a deeply systematic difference between people's reilectivegeneralizations about macro-features of tlteir world and society, andtheir conceptualization of their socbl and physical environment seenas an opportunity s.iluation for action. To search for the reflectionof tlle fonner in the cases and patterns of social behaviour is there-fore unduly simpListic. no matter how sophistic'lted the analysis ofthese collective representa tiuns may be. lllere is much perhaps pro-saic but truly illuminating groundwork III he done with a f:lr hroaderperspective and sense of the problem before one can hop(' to rcpresentthe premises of meaning for acts with such rigour and logic - if in-deed valid representations of tllese mailers can ever achieve suchsimplicity.

The following essays try to do parts of tllis groundwork. In theirway, they may also go too far in seeking to achieve a degree of con-ceptual clarity by oversimplifying and obliterating parts of reality.[ feel attracted bOtll to the 'thick description' of Geertz (Geertz, 1973)whereby the layers of meaning and context arc elaborately exploredand exhibited, and to a methodology of 'watching and wondering'in the gentler tradition of the naturalist (Tinbergen, 1951). But I shouldnot let polemics against a narrow structuralism tempt me 10 negale myown basic ideal: the analytic virtues of seeking to construct tight andsimple models on limited premises. I expect such models to be par-ticularly illuminating, however, if they seek 10 identify and depicIempirical processes ra ther than perfolln the arbit rary opera Iions ofsynthesizing and backgrounding. Thereby they should also avoidthe illusory timelessness of these other forms of structuralism, andarticulate with the irreversibility of praxis (cL Bourdieu, 1977) andthus the realities of people's lives. Furthermore, hy insisting on eventsand interaction as central features of our object of study, we arecompelled to confront a far broader and more diverse segment ofreality. And finally, the virtue of developing models more rigorouslyand ruthlessly lies not in believing them to be the only and wholeIruth, but in the occasion it provides to discover their implications,and what they can and cannot do.

6 Introduction

Anothet deeply entrenched mode of explanation in anthropologyis historical, whether sweepingly evolutionary or more modestly con-cerned with particular sequences and developments. I have consistentlyrejected this as the major focus of my anthropology for three majorreasons:

I It has a depressive effect on the anthropological endeavour toadopt the view that social facts are the results of (previous) criticalevents rather than being themselves critical: it is more productive toassume until proved wrong that everything influencing the shape ofan event must be there asserting itself at the moment of the event.This realization was in my view the greatest achievement of functional-ism, and we are ever in danger of losing its benefits under the influ-ence of the linear, causal, and development-oriented modality thatdominates our traditional thinking.

2 A method that seeks to explain that which one can know muchabout (the present) by means of that which one must be content toknow less about (the past) is topsy-turvy and ever in danger of pro-ducing spurious insight.

3 A historical perspective easily encourages the misrepresentationinvolved in lightly transforming typological series into developmentalsequences.

These considerations need not and should not lead one into asynchronic dogmatism and the rejection of a time perspective. Anyoneinterested in discovering processes must be alert to sequences overtime - though not be prepared to confuse any and every sequence ofchange in aggregate form with a process, as is frequently done (cr. ch.5, pp. 77 -9). A certain amount of early training in palaeontology andbiology made me conscious of how much more productive is the searchfor the mechanisms of change rather than composing descriptions ofits phylogenetic course, even in the rigorous sense that such coursesare identified from the fossil record (cr. ch. 6). I therefore judge it tobe particularly useful to study variation with meticulous attention toco-variation, bOlh regionally and through time, as I have done in con-nection with each of my field studies (cL for example, Vol. II chs. 1,2and 6). But the alternative to a structuralistic indifference to particularevents of change is not to mystify change by vesting it with moral ormetaphysical propcrties, as anthropological evolutionists and marxiststcnd to do. We must struggle to ascertain the dynamics of cultures andsocictics in timc as ongoing systems and through time as emergentscqucnccs. But this we do best by establishing the facts of the past

Introduction 7

where possible. and not by conjectural interpretations based on preestablished schemas or by pursuing the craft of historiography. nomatter how competently. Data from the past are analytically usefulwhen they can surprise us and falsify our hypotheses: otherwise. I seeno reason why they should receive privileged interest.

The third dominant mode of thought in anthropology which weneed constantly to challenge is filllcriotlalism. In anthropologicaltheory this viewpoint has mainly nourished through the inappropriateapplication of considerations of purpose and utility to tile macro-level of aggregate systems, rather than the micro-level of dccisionmaking units where it belongs. But it is also nourished by the anthropo-logist's recurrent experience during fieldwork of Ihe covert fitnessand felicity of customs which had initially struck us as arbilrary andsenseless.

The essays that follow are concerned to pursue questions of purposeand utility systematically where persons and groups making dccisionscan be observed, and rigorously avoid them where they provide onlyinappropriate metaphor or unsupportable teleology. I think we cando better anthropology that way: and it should not be difficult to main-tain a broad and meticulous attention 10 contexl in thc fieldworksituation, as taught by Malinowski, without embracing the holisticand functionalistic axioms by which he justified it. In ils vulgar form.a functionalist stance seems 10 assert that the mere existence of a pattern in a culture other than our own is proof of its functional fit, whichagain serves as the explanation of its existence. At the same time thisimage of other, functionally integrated cultures has served anthropologists as a foil against which to condemn our own culture and lifesituation where we experience a disparity between our own desiresand ideals, and the prevailing (aggregate) patterns and circumstances.Surely, these are frustrations which people in aU cultures experience,in the disparity between desire and circumstance, what is and whatmight have been; and only a gross insensitivity to Ihe actual life situalion of real people in other cultures could lead one to think otherwise?Nor can I find a priori justification, or empirical validation, for a harmony model of culture and society, or culture and environment. eithergenerally or in any particular case. Indeed, even where an approximation of such functional harmony is found, it does not provide in itselfany explanation for the existence of the cultural patterns in queslionunless the processes whereby this degree of harmony arises can be rigorously explicated.

8 Introduction

The inadequacies of each of the three main viewpoints I have hereattacked so summarily arise in each case from the simplicity of one oranother aspect of their implicit constituting premises. How could onehope to develop an alternative viewpoint which does not contain analo-gous naws of its own? 0 statement in the following essays is intendedto claim that I know of such an alternative; and indeed I have no trustin our ability ever to construct a theoretical framework capable ofquestioning its own constituting premises. It is in the way that we relatetheory to the reality which it seeks to depict that we can hope to createthis possibility of falsification and correction of assumptions about thatreality. Perhaps it is in my ideals - and hopefully my praxis - on thispoint that I feel I differ most from a number of my colleagues: I wantto work in a discipline in which theory and empirical data are confronted at a diversity of levels.

It is in the very nature of our object of study that difficulties shouldarise in performing such confrontation with reality with sufficientrigour to achieve anything approaching the operations of testing and'proof' in the sciences (cL ch. I). The anthropologist in studying humanbehaviour is faced with such a diversity and near infinity of potentialdata, even for the most modest encounter (cL e.g. the records ofkinesics, as in Birdwhistle, 1970, or the problems of constructing ajournal of observations, as in Pittenger et al., 1960). We are consequently ever in danger of having our own selectivity become the mainsource of patterning in our data. What is more, our methodology ofcomparison, so fundamental to the theoretical constitution of socialanthropology, suffers in comparison with the biological sciences: we donot compare specimens and cadavers, only synthetic descriptions of ourobjects of study. Above all, the symbolic and social construction ofpeople's realities entail the necessity of comprehending interpersonalevents by interpreting them, on many simultaneous levels of meaningand significance, by means of the codes and keys employed in theirown cullure as well as analysing them by canons which we can acceptas objectively, materially adequate. Nor can I, as noted above, see anyway of escaping these difficulties by a methodology which restrictsour data to forms and topics where a greater rigour can be achieved(whether by social survey techniques or New Ethnographies), sincethese procedures only force more of what may be essentials of humanlife into the inaccessible void of the unrecorded, and thereby unknowable.

TIle essential problem of any anthropological endeavour is perhaps

Introduction 9

most simply described as adopting procedures of thought and observa-tion whereby the anthropologist can transcend his own categlJries andpremises, and thus make discoveries of any degree of profundity. andexperience surprises that will afTect his preconceptions about cultures,societies and human life.

When the issue is put this way, it becomes apparent that we in facthave a number of procedures at our disposal though these have rarelybeen used in concert or given proper recognition as the essential under-pinnings of a methodology for social anthropology. (What followsassumes the practice of the cluster of techniques summarized under thecaption 'participant observation', needed to allow us to be in an ade-quate observer position at all.) Being essentially ways of relating theo-retical constructions and reality, these procedures describe perhapsmost succinctly my own ideal of what anthropology should be about.

I We need to adopt the naturalist's stance of 'watching and wonder-ing'. This involves the construction of extensive and meticulous descrip-tions, but presented with an economy of words and dimensions. There-fore, it entails model-building - but models constructed for the pur-pose of more thorough, comprehensive, and economical description.The emphasis on 'watching' entails a recognition of the essentialseparation of rhree levels: (a) theories, explanations, and other con-structions; (b) observations, data; and (c) reality ou t there. 'Wa tching'means trying to capture chunks of this reality by transforming them toobservations by procedures that entail tlle least possible selection orconstruction in terms of whatever theory is at issue, so tllat falsifyingconfrontations of theory and observations become possible.

2 We should construct gel1er'UiYe mo.dcJs (eL chapters 2 and 5)rather than attempt to distil re'presen~tjQDaI models from complexdata. Thereby, we are led to search for the empirical processes behindobservable regularities in the material, and to depict these processesin the operations, or transformation rules which we employ in ourgenerative models. What is more. such models can be used inductively,and the patterns they produce can be confronted wilh data collectedindependently of the model's premises. Thereby the procedures forfalsification are strengthened drastically.

3 We should capitalize on our unique advantage: that our 'object ofstudy' can help us actively to transcend our categories by leaching liStheir own. This means recognizing that the actors' categories providea way to understand reality. as well as being part of that reality. Inpractice, probably most of the productivity of the anthropologist

10 lntroducrion

derives from this source, even though his arrogance as a professionalacademic, and his defensiveness when his own reality is being threat-ened by the enchanted world of another culture, both militate againstsuch learning.

4 We should expose our scholarship to the demands of practicalaction so that its incompleteness and unworkable ness can be revealed.I see such experiences in applied anthropology as immensely stimulat-ing and chaUenging episodes in any academic career and have experienced them as such myself. Applied activities raise other and difficultissues, however. The colonial and imperialist involvements of someprevious and contemporary coUeagues give cause for misgivings. like-wise, our exposure to the insensitive complacency of internationalorganizatiuns, or disillusionment with the independent governmentsof new nations, may repel. One also becomes less confident of one'sown ideological standards when one recognizes the confident idealismwith which errors have previously been perpetrated by thoughtfulanthropologists. Yet unless we are to commit ourselves to completesocial passivity in this world as constituted, there is no alternativeto acting while enquiring carefully into whose interests we serve byaction, and whether the act to which we become party is in itselfdefensible, in respect of alternatives. The intricacy and agony of thesequestions are as inducive to realism in our anthropology as the moreexternal ascertainment of the consequences of practical action.

S We should focus our observations on real people in real life situa-tions, with a curiosity as to what an investigation into their situationmay bring - rather than pursue highly abstracted and demarcated topicsof investigation according to predetermined methods. The latter alter-native is more suitable for the construction of good grant applicationsthan for the pursuit of innovative scholarship. Both topic and methodmust be allowed to develop in response to the concrete situation offieldwork and the findings that accumulate.

6 We should espouse the ideal - though not the realism - of cumula-tive mapping to produce an ethnographic Whole World Catalogue. Adiscussion of the 'crisis of anthropology' in terms of the disappearanceof its subject ma tier can only arise from an academic practice of con-ceptual 'backgrounding' to the point of subjective blindness. Realityis entirely different: social anthropology has as its object an immenseand still, in many essentials, truly uncharted world. The urgent tasksof anthropology - the recording of swiftly disappearing cultural andsocial forms which embody the results of millenia of cultural creativity

fnrroducrion II

in countless distinctive traditions - are far more numerous and complexthan we can solve with available resources. What is more. the publicizeJperfonnance of these tasks may in its direct and indirect consequcnasperhaps also be the most powerful way of resisting the tragic and s,'nse-less destruction of ways of life cherished by other people. some clf themperhaps happier than ourselves. But on the even hroader ,-anva, lklln,'lIby the life situations of people. there are manifestly nHlIr pc,,'pk inthe world today than ever. cullurally and sorially mor,' intric"ately inter-dependent than ever before. II seems to me a shllCking rellection "f thc'scholasticism of some of our colleagues that this hould Iwt be IIniwr-sally recognized to constitute an inexhaustible field f(l' anthropc'logic:tlinvestiga tion.

The essays republished below reflect this conception of our objectof study and seek to achieve such a relationship between concept andtheory and the empirical object. Thus, the theoretical t1evelopmentsthey contain are motivated by - or perhaps more correctly. their neces-sity has seemed to me to have arisen from - the substantive events that( observed. Anyone who has ever attempted serious fieldwork willrecognize that events have a sheer mass and diversity far greater Ihanmy total published corpus; I have never subscribed to the illusion thatit is fruitful to publish materials outside of the areas that have been atleast provisionally grasped by a conceptual framework. These essays.much more singlemindedly than my main writings in monograph form,focus primarily on such frameworks: on various ways of conceptualiz-ing which may enable us to build models suitable for fundamentallydescriptive purposes: models that enable us 10 provide coherent,reflective accounts of the interconnections that obtain between wideand varied sets of observations. I see our task in developing theory asan unending struggle to increase the comprehensiveness of materialwhich we can thereby cover, and the elegance and completeness of ourcoverage.

The various issues and contributions with which I have struggledinterweave, reappear and are restated and modified in these variousessays. I should like only briefly to point to tJlOse which I myself, atthe present time, see as the most important:

ri-An emphasis on The concrete life situation or opportunity situa-tion of the actor as the essential and significant context for his act. Itis not by moving directly to the more rarified levels of norm and pat-tern, and derivative conceptualizations of deviance or structure, thatwe can identify the actor's point of view and thus the factors that

12 Inrroducn'on

impinge directly on - or more correctly, are an inherent part of - hisact. First of all, our understanding of what he is doing must be solidlygrounded in a knowledge of that particular actor's resources andassets, his alters and significant others, his manifold commitmentsand interests, and his environmental and communicative options.

2 A persisten t effort to develop and clarify our main conceptualvehicle for describing social systems and institutionalized behaviourviz the concept of status. This theme seems to me to receive entirelyinadequate attention by most colleagues, even though the inadequaciesof textbook definitions are widely recognized.

3 The dynamic interconnection between macro- and micro-phe-nomena (particularly the concepts of aggregation and consrraint) ,which may provide the most fruitful ways to articulate the centralquestions of choice, freedom, history and the ontology of society andculture.

4 The relationship between social and cultural phenomena and theirenvironment, particularly their preconditions and consequences in thatenvironment. For this purpose I have sought to utilize an ecologicalperspective without submerging the anthropological task in it. Con-sequently, despite my early and fairly comprehensive efforts to intro-duce ecological thinking in to our discipline, I have reservations againstsome of the major currents and trends in this sub-field, as will beapparent from a reading of the relevant articles.

5 An interest in developing concepts to analyse the process ofexchange in in teraction - not so as to apply a market model to sociallife but on the contrary to study the implications of exchange as oneof the basic forms of constraints whereby the behaviours of two ormore actors are constituted as systems, and thereby to contribute toa general theory of social systems.

6 The rela tionship between codification and praxis, or how formsof understanding arise from experience, and reciprocally how behaviourand experience are predicated by collective representations. This isonly partly articulated in the present collection (see particularly chap-ter 8) but has been developed further in a separate monograph (Barth,1975). I believe there is a possibility of integrating much of my pre-vious theoretical' work in a broad kind of sociology of knowledge treat-ing this cen tral theme.

TIlere is a temptation in writing an introduction to one's ownold articles to repeat, refonnulate, and construct ever more cryptic

III rroduction 13

and speculative meta-statements over the same themes. R:llher thancontinue. it would probably be wiser to let the various texts speak forthemselves.

FreJrik BarthOslo. June \1)7

1 Anthropological modelsand social reality

In trying to show you the character of social an thropology as anacademic discipline, I migh t try to sketch some substantive and perhapsintriguing findings in the field, or the history of its development, orsome of its major inte ect~~ problems tQSl~ . I have chosen the last ofthese alternatives, because by showing the general problems we aregrappling with I hope to reveal to you, in part no doubt inadvertently,the ways that anthropologists think, and also how our difficulties inpart arise from the character of the social reality itself, which weconfront and try to understand.

The fundamental questions which social anthropology asks areabout the forms, the nature, and the extent of order in human social /'life, as it can be observed in the different parts of the world. Thereis no need to prejudge the extent of this order; as members of onesociety we know how unpredictable social life can be. But concretely,human life varies greatly around the world, and it seems possible tocharacterize its forms to some extent. We seek means systematicallyto discover, record and understand these forms.

I wish to emphasize this fundamentally empirical view: we di .;.... cover and record .~ do not comment and evaluate. The fundamental

approach is thus that'at: jici

Anthropological models and social reali(\' 15models - models in the broad sense that they are represelltationsof an interrelated set of assumed faclOrs Illat determine or 'expbin'the phenomena we observe.

But there is one circumstance that makes our discipline differentfrom the natural sciences. From our own life, we feel that it is un-deniable and true that human behaviour is prominently shaped byconsciousness and purpose. Anthropologists are thereforc prepared tospeak about things like beliefS, obliga~ons, and values, not just L1ll ,mediate, overt behaviour. T11is also means that an cxplanalmy Illodclf 'our can be different from the models used in nalural scicnce.Human beh~~ia'uT) is 'explained' if we show (a) the utility of its con-sequences in terms of values held by the aClOr. and (b) the awarenesson the part of the actor of the conneclion between an act and its speci-fic results. This is what has been called the SJ,IbjeCliPe vjewpoinl. or byMax Weber 'Verstehend!:LSoziologie'. Indeed, most anthropologistsseem to feel that unless the actor's point of view can be made under,standable in such cognitive and valuational temls, his behaviour cannotbe-explained. On the other hand, the psychological mechanism behindsuch 'purposeful action' constitutes a different field of inquiry whichdoes not concern us: our interest is not 10 refine our underslanding ofit. Our concern is to understand the different societies and cultures Ithat are based on Ihis mechanism by relating social behaviour 10 theconceptual and valuational syslems of the actors. I

This view, however, has methodological implications for how we goabout finding the causes or determinants of behaviour. To take afrequently used example: traffic stops at a red ligh!. Can we point toa red stop-light as the 'cause' of auto-drivers stopping Iheir cars, inview of the fact that occasionally a driver will not stop at a red light?If one contrary case does not prove us wrong, holV many cases wouldit take before this explanatory model was falsified?

There is a sense in which this argument misses the poinl by nulunderstanding what kind of claims to adequacy we make for ourmodels. To find out if cases of not-stopping challenge our model, wewould want 10 know (a) can they be understood - and dismissed - ascases of inattentiveness? That is, was it the actor's immmediate percep-tion that failed in this situation, though Ihe cognitive rule that redmeans 'stop' still holds true? Or (b) can these exceptions be dismissedas cases of atypical utilities?The evaluation which makes people stop iscompounded of the danger of accidents and the probabilily of sanc-tions by the police. If a man has some uniquely urgenl reason to travel

16 Anthropological models and social reality

fast, the utility of arriving quickly might outweigh the risks of notstopping. Only if both these interpretations fail can such an event betruly regarded as a 'con trary case'. Sta tistics on the overt behaviourof populations do not readily supply a test of the explanation. Theycertainly do not challenge or confirm statements such as 'red meansstop' - and such statements constitute some of our major discoveries inthe analysis of exotic societies. One might be tempted to say that afrequent discrepancy between the observed and the predicted behaviourreduces the relevance, but not necessarily the validity, of such models.Yet we do wish to falsify our models by confronting them with empiri-cal facts, and this involves methodological problems to which I shallreturn shortly.

The empirical bent in anthropology takes a form which is reminiscent)'--of natural history. Indeed, it has sprung directly from that academic

tradition. In this anthropology differs from most of the behaviouralsciences, which to greater extent have their roots in philosophy andthe humanities. An thropologists tend to seek the strange and theexotic, approaching such matters with the naturalist's curiosity. Theeffect of such an approach is that one exposes oneself to the greatestpossible variety and mass of impressions. The immediate purpose ofthis is, of course, to collect and cross-check information. But it alsocolours the anthropologist's theoretical orientation by encouragingeclectic model-building: th_e anth!opologisLis concerned abouLthedirect relevance of theories to empirical facts, because of his con-stant neeoto order a diversity of such facts. This does not mean that,temperamentally, many social anthropologists may not wish to protecttheir orthodoxy from uncongenial facts, or to work deductively froma basic theory of society. But the situation that they place themselvesin, surrounded by the strangeness of a foreign society, is one thatmakes this maximally difficult. In this they differ for example fromthe economist, who works deductively at his desk and seeks to falsifyhis constructs against a limited range of data. Among us, the term'armchair anthropologist' has been a standard term of abuse. Butperhaps I am merely saying that to the extent social anthropology isa science, it is a very primitive science?

Let me practise this natural history concreteness by taking youbriefly to one of the classical loci of British social anthropology, toillustrate the confrontation of anthropological models and socialreality. The place is one or another of the communities in the Suddswamps of the Sudan, inhabited by the Nuer people, made famous

Anthropological models and social reality 17

through the writings of Professor EvansPritchard.111ese people live in shifting camps in periodically inundated ~ountry.

They practise agriculture. though they are more interested in theirherds of cattle. In the wet season. the period of lloods. they congregatein villages of 50 to 200 persons. Around ovember they disperseth.rough the country in small cattle camps. until increasing desiccationdrives them together around permanent sources of water in large dryseason camps of 100 to 1000 members.

Of the various kinds of order which one may search for in such communities, let us first concentrate our attention on the relations of communities to each other, and to larger territories - what might be calledlitical lif'e:) We find a situation where, in disputes and battle. thepeople who are allied at one moment, over one issue, are opposed toeach other the next moment. There are no chiefs or. apparently, stableleaders of any kind. The problem migh t seem to be one of finding anykind of order at all. It was one of EvansPritchard's conlributions toshow how a political or(!er is maintained in this society without theinstitution of chiefs and stable authority, through the operation of aframework of kinship relations of a scale quite unmatched ill our ownsociety.

Let me frrst try to depict this order aN system of jural rules govern-ing member~h!1Lin gr.o!,!ps and the institutional relevance of tllesegroups; Nuer men identify themselves as members of tribes and theirlocal segments, down to the level of the local community. 111is identi-fication refers to residence, and to political duties of a kind whichimplies or produces a political corporation. The duties are relevant forbehaviour in daily life and at ritual occasions, and they are especiallydrama tically manifested in feud, when groups of warriors wreak collec-tive vengeance.

In all this activity there is a characteristic rela!"' of groups. Thusif a tribe were divided into two local segmen _ and B, each with sub-divisions I and 2, the people of B2 will haVe pnm obligations toeach other and unite against the men of BI; but if a man in BI isharmed by a man in AI or A2, they will all combine as B's, holding allthe A's collectively responsible. There is thus a pattern of situationalfusion and fission of groups, depending on the relative positions ofthe original parties to the dispute within a hierarchy of segments.

Furthermore, each such tribal territory or segment is identifiedwith a clan or lineage within the clan. Clan and lineage membershipis ascribed by atrilineal descent - namely, determined by the father's


position. The Nuer can thus!!resent an agnatic genealogy that corres--ponds to the hlerarcQy of ern! r~~nts..:. the tribe is identifiedwith a deceased ancestor, each of its primary subdivisions with oneof his sons, etc. In that way, the duties between co-members of a com-munity and those between agnatic kinsmen become one

This whole pallern can b~ represented as a set o?jur~' ~~Therules are jural, although there is no formal system of courts and lawenforcement, both in that they are. embraced b the Nuer as moraland n t, andm -lilat they _are sanctioned - compliancelSpra1SeCl

and supported, breaches are criticized and punished by public opinion.A jural rule model of the system depicts the regularity of behaviourin terms of group structure: a set of rules regulating the mode ofrecruitment to groups, and the duties that group membership entails.

Many of the primitive political systems which have been analysedprove to utilize kinship-based criteria of recruitment to political groups.Where the ascri tion .. aI rights and obligatioos is rie.Ll.tD.-O.!le~ of descent either male or female -lInd enealo 'es are remembere


are those of agnatic kinship. Political systems of this type have therefore somelimes been characterized by social antlHopologists as systemswhere politics is cast in the 'idiom' of kinship. If the actors lhemselvesconceptualize political soda1~s groups of brothers. th,')' use aconcept which implies situational disregard l)f collateral distance. andwhich force the representation of relalions betwcen grl'ups intl) asegmentary mould. The characleristics uf siluatiunal fusi,'n and fissiunfollow from this. and the anthropologist can thus und,'rstand regubri. 1ties in the political life by analysing lhe implications of hmv lhc actursconceptualize their political groups - what might bc called the rclevantcognitive structures in their culture. The fact lhat all mcmbers of thecommunity are not brotllers. or even agnales. is nut as problema I ical asit is for the jural rule model: t~.!itorial ~gnlro!;llion is implicit in thi:basic calegories in ~hich political .groups are conceptualized. Thusthe detailed discrepancies become rather unimportant and uninteresting: the reality with which such models should be confronted is thecategory of discourse, of ritual affirmation, etc. (cr., for example.Leach ,1961).

What have been called 'structural' models of societies have tended tocombine features of these two ways of representation: both as juralrules and cognitive categories. This has enabled anthropologists toexhibit the major groups in a society, how they arc interrelated interms of recruitment, and what is their major institutional field ofrelevance.

Nor do such models need 10 ignore alternative pallerns of behaviourand their implica tions for the system. Professor Gluckman, in areanalysis of the Nuer, has specifically emphasized the effects of theintermixture in villages of persons from different lineages and clans.The man living in the territory of a different lineage from his own willhave essentially similar obligations (a) to his distant lineage mates, and(b) to his local neighbours. This may create dilemmas uf cross,cullingloyalties in the case of feud between groups: as a member of a lineagehe may be on one side, as a member of a village identified with anotherlineage he may be on the other side in a conflict. Such a positionboth motivates and qualifies the man to act as gobetween and peacemaker in the feud; so the consequence of the dispersal of personneloutside the territories of their clans is to create both a force and amechanism in the service of maintaining ~~~ over larger regions,and thus paradoxically to maintain the formal pallern w UCh they,individually, have not followed.


This way of arguing exemplifies in its most explicit form anothertraditional feature of anthropological thinking: the society-organismanalogy as a basis for _functionalism, whereby one shows how aspectsof form serve a purpose in maintaining the system as a whole. As a wayof depicting the prerequisites of system maintenance, this representsa different explanation of form from that of rmding the actor's own'purpose' - a circumstance which has occasioned some confusion inanthropology but which has largely been overcome. Most anthropo-logists, however, have chosen not to pursue this view of society furtherand have not adopted a Darwinian perspective.

Structuralist models thus enable us to depict the gross morphologyof societies, and have made it possible to describe and compare agreat diversity of forms. But with an anthropologist's field experience,it is difficult for long to avoid raising, in some form, the questionof why specific actors behave the way they do. Th uctural kind ofmodel emphasizes cognitive cate ories and the ositive ans~ ;- ns 0 u r But living in our Nuer village, we cannot but beimpressed by the 'case stories' around us: why did our neighbourchoose to live with his mother's or his wife's kin? Some cases areeasily explained. Among the Nuer there are a number of small lineagesand clans that have no land of their own and must live interspersedamong others. There are also individuals and lines that have beenadopted from defeated neighbouring tribes. But many others, thoughmembers of clans which have aristocra tic rank in their home territories,yet choose to live elsewhere as foreigners. Why?

To answer such questions, we must go back to the basic view ofbehaviour and utility which served as our initial point of departure.The simplest structural argument would be that there are jural rules,implying sanctions, which support the established patterns; so mostactors acknowledge these and act accordingly, while some deviate fromthe rules in random fashion. Alternatively, we may rmd that the rulesare themselves inconsistent and thus produce variability in behaviour.But rather, we may look more closely at all cases of behaviour and askwhat it is that makes people act the way they do: what goods arepeople after, and how do cognitive categories, rules and sanctions - aswell as the local ecology - constrain their possible courses of action inpursuit of such goods? Though he does not utilize it in constructing hisbasic model of Nuer society, EvansPritchard, the fieldworker, does notfail to recognize such factors. He notes that there are variations inpopulation density throUgll Nuer country, and that it therefore may be


mOte advantageous for a man to live as a foreigner in an area of 3mpleland, water and grazing than as a member of lhe dominant .:1Jn in alloverpopulated area. He also refers to some men's desire for autonL1my:collateral lines are arranged in order of seniority. and members ofjunior lines may sometimes achieve greater autonomy away from lheircollaterals than close to them.

To depict such facts and discover and interrelate such explanatoryfactors systematically, however. we need to build models of a differentk.ind. Regularities in behaviour can be represented as, relative fre::'>

uencle i.e-as....a...kirul.. f order that emerges from the independentactivttie~ of n1J!!!iple


land can be conquered only at someone else's expense; and there is aclear tactical advantage in attackin ates - thereb mobilizingthe smallest ossible 0 osed grOUP, since only those more closelyrelated to the victims than yourself will rise in defence of the owner's,and their own, prior rights to the lands in question. This means thatlineages tend to break up in opposed splinters or fractions. When suchsplinters seek alJies for support against their close collateral rivals. theycan lind them in similar, distantly related splinters of other lineagesegments, by promising mutual support against their respective rivals.In this situation, then, Al and BI tend to form a stable coalitionagainst A2 and B2. The stronger coalition will be victorious in a con-frontation -: which means tbat:l!ie.lC WI _...e a D.nsistenLpLeSSure.-towards the systematization of larger and larger coalHions, culminatingin the forma tion of a two-party syste_m of two large, dispersed politicalblocs.

This system can be simula ted as a game of strategy and coalition-forming by utilizing the Theory of Games (Neumann and Morgenstern,1947). Thereby, a more dgOr.o.US...lllitd.d.can he constructed. based onthe notion of value and utility and showing the tactical constraints onchoice which generate such a political fOJ]11 (Barth, 1959b). We canthus see that a kind of order, in the sense of regular patterns of be-haviour, emerges that cannot be adequately depicted in terms of ruleswith jural sanctions, nor as the direct expression of a cognitive pattern.A jural rule model would show us the structure of lineages with refer-ence to land rights, but would not explain political alignments. Thejural rules governing political relations merely state that a client may'join any patron he likes, and a patron may join any coalition he likes -rules that very imperfectly depict the regularities that may be observed.Nor does the cognitive structure of a two-party system and the partici-pants' awareness of the processes of balance between the parties explainthe regularity of political opposition that divides each lineage. Thegames model thus alJows us to depict some further aspects of politicalorder Whkh the previous models could not readily encompass.

The lineage-politics problems I have sketched above are of courseonly one limited aspect of the social order among the Nuer, as amongother peoples. Anthropologists are equally concerned to study econo-mic or ritual behaviour. But such institutional categories as politicS;or rilual are perhaps best regarded as conveniences of communicationand provisional description: through studying such fields of behaviour,!we seek to arrive at an understanding of a more comprehensive orderl

Anthropological models and social reality 23which can be represented as a social system: a complex system ofsocial posi tions and in terrela lions in terms of which behaviouralregularities in many institCitional fields may be understood and theircongruence and interdependence discovered.

In the previous uffield lecture, Professor olow discussed the problems of micro- and macro-analysis in economics. and pointed out thedifficulties experienced in that discipline in connecting the analyses ofdeterminants of individual behaviour with those of aggregate behaviour.Any study of human behaviour will be concerned Wilh this question;yet you may have noted that I have not treated this as a particularlytroubling problem from the social anthropologist's point of view.Indeed, I would say that it is one of the strengths of amhropologicalanalysis that we are more consistently concerned and able to inter-relate the individual and the aggregate level than most of the behav-ioural sciences, though this is probably achieved at the cost of someelegance in our analyses of both.

In part, the greater unity of the micro- and macfl}level is achievedby our emphasis on understanding the actor's subjective point of viewas our own point of departure, This leads us to try to c laracteriLe theaggregate system, not by operationally sophisticated and well measuredindices, but b the shared cognitive categories and ross values of t1~

1lMJ.i9.~ e s stem, Whether as an interest in a nalive informant's description of 'custom'. a careful attention to native words andconcepts, or an increasingly sophisticated participation in discussions ofthe Realpolitik of a local area, the anLhropologist seeks to form a pic,ture of the macro-system in categories related to those which theparticipants 'hold, t ou 1 without accepting their account of the systemas empirically correct. Also it should be recognized that must anthropo-logists work among groups or are interested in problems for which weare provided no aggregate data by statisticians, We must accumulalethem ourselves through our observations and from informants. andwill thus tend to accumulate them in categories that are those of theindividual actor's cognitive schema and our own intended analysis,producing thereby also an inadvertent congruence between the microand macro-levels.

A common feature of anthropological models is that they presumethe relative stability and maintenance of form and are ncerned wilhexplaining pers~tence rather than chan e. lllis is not to deny the factso c ge, u spnngs rather from a realization of the precariousnature of any semblance of order and continuity in so volatile a mailer


as interpersonal behaviour in a human population. The explanationof relative stability and order is sough t in the permanence of determin-ing or limiting factors. The underlying viewpoint has been expressed inthe axiom that 't.here are no privileged moments' (cf. Gellner, 1958)-that patterns of social form are not rela ted in a uniquely illuminating orerivative way 0 specific events in the past, and thus adequately under-

stood by a historical explanation. Though the axiom in this generalform is probably untrue, it has proved very fruitful in directing investigation towards verifiable constraints in the present rather thanreconstructed events in the past, deduced often from the very factswhich they are called upon to explain. Naturally, this viewpoint isequally adequate as a basis for dynamic models as for social statics-an assertion which is regarded as more debatable among humaniststhan I expect it will be among a group of scientists. Some attempthas. been made to express this viewpoint by means of-a distinctionbetween 'historical' and 'structural' time; mostly it is merely implicitin the kinds of explanations that are sought and the models that arebuilt.

In the manner of a naturalist, then, the anthropologist builds amodel, or a number of loosely connected, partial models, of the societyhe observes around him as an ongoing system. But what are the obser-vations whereby the adequacy or inadequacy of these' odel areested, r documented, by the investigator?

n thropologists are here faced with a great methodological problem:the distance between our concrete sensory impressions of events 'outthere' in a society, and the kind of data one can use to falsify anthropological models. The question at issue is, fundamentally, the nature ofthe 'social reality' with which we can hope to confront our models:what kind of order do we have reason to think that we will fmd?According to the anthropological view there are, in each society...andculture. 'ru!tllraL categories of events - cgnsisting QC~ol;ial ~tatuses!!.!1d '!leanings - whi h--!fe unigue for each system and must be dis-covered; ll!'d the extent of order ,in social life becomes apparent onlywhen observation and description takes place with reference to such

Anlhropologicalmodels and social rea!ily

't~nslate' the meanings of evelllS in a foreign .:ultur


probably even knows that A is a common villager and B a headman.One can therefore judge by context which alternative meaning holds inthis case, and understand that A is expressing his submission under Bby giving tribute. Bu t as observers who wish to demonstrate or falsifythe presumed inequality between A, who is a relatively undistinguishedviUager, and B, who has been identified at ano~asion as a head-man, how does this event help us? We have to translat to give the actits appropriate meaning in the culture, and thisseems to require pre-vious knowledge both of the 'code' and of the social relations.

3 Still one open question remains: were A and B acting in theircapacities as commoner and village headman? These are small andintimate local groups where we observe the same people in what wemust distinguish as different capacities: we see the village headman athome being a father and a mother's brother to various people, we meethim in the fields being a cultivator on his own land.

We also see the same equipment, a spear, used as a kitchen utensilto cut meat, or as a weapon, or as an object of wealth for barter andpayment, or as a sign of rank. How do we break the code so we nolonger talk about naive categories like spears and men, but aboutheadmen, fatheIs...s.igns of rank, items of tribute? Our anthropologicalmodels are not about people and spears, and cannot be falsified by eventhe most exhaustive statistics on the gross activities of people or theuses of spears. Indeed, we can legitimately doubt that such statisticswould reveal very marked regularities at all - certainly most of theorder in social life characterizes other units than these. Events involv-

1ing men and spears need to be translated in terms of what they mean,in a social system and a cultural idiom, before they become data to theanthropologist. '

But once we have performed this translation, have we not 'cooked'our evidence so that it must fit our models - is the operation of trans-lation one that is independent enough of our models so that it can pro-duce data that can falsify these models?

Though some of my colleagues might argue otherwise, I would saythat we have no..l!.~etlc'!!!i: founded methodology whereby we canbreak into this closed circle and start trans a mg.--S-ome -linguisticallyoriented anthropologists in the United Statesare trying to develop sucha methodology (cf., for example, Frake, 1962): the British tradition ismuch weaker in its theory on this point. Its practice, on the otherhand, has been bolll rigorous and successful, involving a nearly totalsubmersion in the foreign culture through the technique of participant

Anthropological models and social reality

observation. The purpose of this technique is 10 creale an oplimallearning situation, and this involves control of Ihe native language. wntinualpresence in the community, disconlinuation of contact wilh membersof one's own sociery, and participation in as wide a range of altivitiesin the native conununity as possible. This is a situation that makesone maximally sensitive to the reactions and conlrols of members inthe foreign society. Not only does it increase one's awareness of what isgoing on in that sociely; it also enhances ils inlportauce to oueself. asthe only source of human companionship and conta,1. It is in Ihissituation, by an imaginative leap into the unknown. tJut one breaksinto the closed circle of the foreign culture and obtains the 'bridge-heads' from which one can begin to work.

It is not too clear what are tJle clues which we use to obtain thisinitial minimal understanding. I have had the experience of Hying toanalyse and edit tJle rich, but unprocessed, field notes of a colleaguewho died during fieldwork, and have experien,ed this frustrating feel-ing of having so much information but no understanding, somehowlacking some part of the key to the significance of the recorded events.I was finally able to go to the area in question, and see the peoplespring to life. Even after that, I am not quite sure whal had been miss-ing and what it was that I observed tJtat suddenly gave meaning to mycolleague's record. But parI of it was the setting, the landscape - notin the poetic sense, but as a place to live. I knew of course tJlat thenotes dealt with a herding people in a mountain desert - but my col-league, living in it, had taken tJle details of this setting for granted;and to understand the significance of acts I needed 10 know, or see,what the feasible alternatives to any particular act were, which aspectsof the fonn of behaviour were connected with the pure necessities ofthe demanding task of living in this environment, and which were arbitrary, reflecting the prejudices of tJle culture and the spiril of the actor.

Some methodology can also be based on the fairly readily observableand objective difference in a social relation between parties who initialea sequence of interaction and those who cannot do so, or those whocan terminate such a sequence of in teraction and those who mustalways respond. Such criteria come closer than anything else to provid-ing an observationally based, culture-free definition of 'authority' (cLChapple and Coon, 1942).

But mostly, I think the clues we use are those that reveal '1!liludesaDd Vaill es by emotional ~i81'18Y.We have assumed provisionally, and sofar without being disproved, that basic reflexes such as laughing, crying,

28 Anthropological models and social realityscreaming, trembling, etc., are released by the same basic attitudes andemotional states in all Homo sapiens. By observing such emotionaldisplay, therefore, we can obtain clues about the significance or meaning of cultural idioms. Thus Bateson (1958) tells how he constructeda provisional interpretation of a transvestite ceremony among a peoplein New Guinea on the basis of second-hand information, and how hisunderstanding of its meaning was suddenly transformed when he saw,during the first complete ceremony he attended, how the males dressedas women were treated as figures of fun and laughed at during the performance, while the females personified arrogant male warriors andwere proud and aggressive.

By thco;c means, the anthropologist in the field catches hold of cluesas 10 Ihe meanings of acts, and progressively builds up a participant'sImp of soda I conventions, of the different social situations, and what isregarded as suitable for persons in different positions in the differentsituations. lie thereby learns 10 differentiate the roles and statuses ofthe social system, and to interpret activities in the contexts th~cuTturaJJy appropri~.~,..!I1..d Ulat define their meaning. Fortunately, allidioms do not, like the example of the transfer of the spear discussed"bove, st"nd for radically opposed meanings in different situations:some turn out to be very unequivoc,,1 and can be used as signpostswherever they appeilr. By aggregating very many diverse facts and,through the successes and embarrilssments of participation, havingthem related and systematized, the fieldworker progressively improvesand expilnds his understanding of the social life around him. Participation also gives opportunities for what has sometimes been called socialdnll11

Anthropological models and social reality

meaning and valuational altitudes exemplified in the various idiomsand forms of behaviour. thereby simplifying the descriptions and'making sense of whole syndromes of activities.

In other words. it is as field worker rather than as analyst that theanthropologist produces data in this 'translated' fonn. TI,e o(>


What is more, the monograph has a classic unity of time and place: itis typically a synchronic study of a small, delimited community. [tthus provides a picture of unity and integration. Even where our actualanalysis fails to show the interdependence, this image of the culture andsociety as a 'whole' remains - a unity of perhaps spurious, but none theless convincing, character.

By these means, we try to collect and systematize observations thatenable us to depict the reality that confronts us: the regularities of lifein human communities. We regard this reality as the resultant of thebehaviour of many actors, separately shaping their own acts accordingto their subjective view of the opportunities offered by their world andtheir society. But what we observe is overt behaviour and the objectiveconsequences of this behaviour - whether sought or unsought by theactors.

Social an thropologists construct models which seek to take thisinto account. We feel we cannot adequately represent, much less under-stand, the forms cf regularity except with reference to their under-lying determinants, and this entails the need to map out the culture,the actor's own categories and meanings, to depict the social system.

I have tried to sketch for you the three most common kinds ofmodel which social anthropologists make use of, whereby they depictthe social order:

J A system of ju ral rules, consisting of the basic ideas about inter-personal obligations and rights which are embodied in a culture. Someanthropologists would go further and claim a reality of its own forthis, the 'moral community'.

2 A system of cognitive categories, especially those whereby themembers of a society conceptualize and order their own social statusesand social groups.

3 An interactional system - a model that depicts the constraints onindividual behaviour that arises from the behaviour of others in a socialsystem. Such models assume some fOnTI of 'economizing' or competi-tion or strategy on the part of actors whereby they mutually modifytheir behaviour in respect to the objects that are valued in their culture.

By relying mainly on the first of these fOnTIS of representation, onewill lend 10 construct rather static models of each society as a set ofrules. and one can show a remarkable consistency and integrationbetween various features of order. Less interest centres on actualbehaviour in deviance from these rules, and the timelessness of asynchronic sludy lends to lead to an assertion of stability for such

Anthropological models and social rea/in' 31

systems. [n its naive and ori al fornl. the expbnati

2 Models of social organization I

Introduction

TIlesc essays are an attempt to consolidate and use generative models insocial anthropology. Drawing on concepts and viewpoints which arecurrent in anthropological literature, I delimit and construct a fewsimple models of this type, discuss the way they can be utilized andtheir relation to empirical processes in society, and illustrate theirutility as applied to a few examples. The essays are essentially the textof three lectures presented under the heading 'The explanation ofsocial forms' at the London School of Economics in the winter of1963.

Form in social life is constituted by a series of regularities in a largebody of individual items of behaviour. Much effort in social anthropo-logy has been concentrated on the necessary step of constructingmodels or patterns descriptive of such forms, whereby structural fea- rtures of the society are exhibited. The kind of models which I discusshere are of a different kind. They are not designed to be homologouswith observed social regularities; instead they are designed so that they,by specified operations, can Gellercl.l~ su.cll...ITgylarities or forms. Theyshould be constituted of a limited number of clearly abstracted parts,the magnitude or constellation of which can be varied, so that onemodel can be made to produce a number of different forms. Thus by aseries of logical operations, forms can be generated; these forms may becOI1J.Pared to empirical forms of social systems, and where there iscorrespondence in fonnal features between the two, the empirical fornlmay then be characterized as a particular constellation of lhe variablesin the model.

In these respects the models which I discuss are similar to thosealready in usc in certain fields of anthropology, notably the cornponential models of kinship systems (Goodenough, 1956) and Leach's

First published by the Royal AnUHopological tnstitute of Gre'l Britain andIreland, 1966.

32

Models of social organization I 33topological models (Leach. 1961). "Where I believe I differ fr"11\ these.but follow the example of varillus other dis"plines (llleo), "I' Gamt's.evolutionary genetics. et,.) is in adding a further. ;;ery imp"rtantlimitation: the logical operations whereby fmms are generated sh'Htidmirror actual, empirical processes whkh ,an be identified in the realitywhich is being analysed. This limitation is necessary to mah theoperations significant (cf. eumann and Morgenstern 19-1-1). allli itmakes the modelbuilding activity subservient to the objel'tives llf anempirical science.

Very brieny, I hold that such models can have three important uses:I They provide a kind of understanding and explanati'Hl which amodel of form. however meticulous and adequate. can newr give. Tostudy form it may be sufficient to describe it. To expbin form oneneeds to discover and describe the processes that gent'rale the form.2 11ley provide the means 10 describe and study change in sodal formsas changes in the basic variables that generate the forms.3 Finally, they facilitate comparative analysis as a meth"dol,'gicalequivalent of experiment. Models descriptive of form merely I",nnitone to layout typological series and point to differences and similari-ties, or to specify the logicaLly unrestricting transformations whcrebyone fonn may be converted into another. The adequacy of:1 gcnerativemodel. on the other hand. is tested by its success or failure injtencGlt-ing the observed forms: it contains implicit hypothese about 'possible'and 'i,;PoSsiblc' syslems which may be falsified by comparative data.

11le level of complexity and sophistication reached in these essays isvery low. However, I believe that the study of social anthropology cannot today be advanced much by sophistication and refincment of itscurrent lotal stock of concepts and ideas. Rather. we should make acareful selection among them, and among concepts available in relatedfields, to isolate a minimal set which is logically necessary and empiri-cally defensible. The implications of any such SCi should then be ex-plored and exhausted before further complexity is added. The follow-ing is presented as a first sketch of one such set of concepts, and apreliminary exploration of some of its implications.

The analytical importance of transaction

The validity and utility of the following discussion depends on a par-ticular view of the constitution of social phenomena. Though thisview is neither unorthodox nor susceptible to serious challenge, it is

34 Models ofsocial organization Iimportant to establish it explicitly. For this purpose, one of Radcliffe-Brown's last and perhaps most authoritative statements may be cited:

the concrete reality with which the social anthropologist is con-cerned in observation, description, comparison and classification, isnot any sort of entity, but a process, the process of social life. Theunit of investigation is the social life of some partieur"a-r-re-gJ7"on of theearth during a certain period of time. The process itself consists ofan immense multitude of actions and interrelations of human beings,acting as individuals or in combinations or groups. Amidst thediversity of the particular events there are discoverable regularities,so that it is possible to give statements or descriptions of certaingeneral features of the social life of a selected region. A statement ofsuch significant general features of the process of social life con-stitutes a description of what may be called a[orm o[socigIJife. Myconception of social anthropology is as the comparative theoreticalstudy of forms of social life amongst primitive peoples. (Radcliffe-Brown, 1952: 3-4)

The' neral features', the regularities in social life, thus have to do withthe repetitive nature of acts, which we observe in our investigation of asocial system. Our first descriptive characterization of our fmdings,then, must be one involving frequencies. No matter how crude ourtechniques for registration and counting are, our claim must be that we

1""1 .... t ('J t') l'have discovered some non-ran om frequency distribution in actions.The patterns we report may most realistically be viewed as frequencydistributions around a mode. My argument in the following pages fol-lows from this, and is briefly summed up in the simple statement thatour theoretical models should be designed to explain how the...obsefY-able frequency patterns or re laritie enerated.

TIle most simple and general model available to us is one of an aggre-gate of people exercising choice while influenced by certain constraintsand incentives. In sueh situations, statistical regularities are produced,yet there is no'absolute compulsion or mechanical necessity connectingthe determining factors with the resultant patterns; the connectiondepends on human dispositions to evaluate and anticipate. Nor can thebehaviour of anyone particular person be firmly predicted - suchhuman conditions as inattentiveness, stupidity or contrariness will,for the anthropologist's purposes, be unpredictably distributed in thepopulation. This is also how we subjectively seem to experience our

Models ofsocial organization 1 35own social situation. Indeed, once one admits lhal what we empiri-cally observe is nOI 'customs', but 'cases' of human behaviour. it seems10 me that we cannot escape lhe concept uf choia in ,'ur analysis: "urcentral problem becomes what are the constraints and incentives thatcanalize choices.

The sttucturalist's view has been. as I have understood it. that Iheseconstraints on choices are moral: society is a moral system. nlis viewleads to a type of analysis where regularities in the patlern of bdlaviourare related to a set of moral constraints and incentives which stipulatethe critical features of lhat regularity. Thus for example the regul3ri-ties summarized in a status position are specified as a series of rightsand obligations which summarize all lhe regular aspects of behaviourwhich are associated wilh lhat status.

By lhis transformation, one form, in the sense of a set of regularpatterns of behaviour, is translated into anolher. virtually congruentform, made up of moral injunctions, which are made logically prior tobehaviour. The model does not depict any intervening social processbetween lhe moral injunction and the patlern. nlere is indeed noscience of social life in lhis procedure, no explanation of how actualforms, much less frequency distributions in behaviour come about, be-yond lhe axiomatic: what people do is influenced by moral injunctions.

If a concept of process is to be analytically useful, it must refer tosomething Illat governs and affects activity, something that restrictsand canalizes the possible course of events. nlese restrictions shouldgo beyond what can be contained in static or general kinds of limita-tions, Just as lhe description of a game of cricket is more than a de-scription of its binding rules, so a description of a process of inter-action should contain more lhan a listing of reciprocal obligations.The study of process must be a study of necess,ary or probable inter-dependencies which govern the course of events. We have recently seenhow the variety of forms of domestic unit in a society can be under-stood by a view of family development cycles (Goody, 1958). Thegeneral lesson we may learn is that by a simple analysis of a process wecan understand lhe variety of complex forms which it produces.

This is the kind of understanding and explanation of form whichs1lOuld be sought. Explanation is not achieved by a description of thepatterns of regularity, no matter how meticulous and adequate, nor byreplacing lhis description by olher abstractions congruent with it, butby exhibiting what ~ke_!.Jh~...IDl11ern, i.e. certain processes. To studysocial forms, it is certainly necessary but hardly sufficient to be able

36 Models ofsocial organization Ito describe them. To give an explanation of social forms, it is suf-ficient to describe the processes that generate the form.

In the following I wish to explore the extent to which patterns ofsocial form can be explained if we assume that they are the cumulativeresult of a number of separate choices and decisions made by peopleacting vis-a-vis one another. In other words, that the patterns are gener-ated through processes of interaction and in their form renect the con-straints and incentives under which people act. I hold that this trans-formation from constraints and incentives to freqoentative patterns ofbehaviour in a population is complex but has a structure of its own,and that by an understanding of it we shall be able to explain numerousfeatures of ,ocial form. Indeed, as I interpret the above citation fromRadcliffe-Brown, the prucesses which effect that transformation areour main field of study as social an th ropologists.

As the object uf systematic investigation, these processes have beensorely neglected. Even the work which has been heralded as a prototypeof prucessual analysis - that of the development cycle in domesticgroups - focuses on processes which arise not from social facts, butfrom the extraneous biological fact of creeping senescence.

The consetjuences of having overlooked generative problems are per-haps most strikingly revealed in- uOnost-used concept of,Istatus, Intro-duced into the field in a pa' with role, the two concepts togetheretjuip us to analyse the fundamental social process whereby bindingrights and obligations are made relevant in particular social situations.Instead anthropologists chose to concentrate on the static concept ofstatus, and the analytic poSsibilities of the paired concepts have onlyrecently been explored by Goffman (1959). Goffman argues thatagreement on a definition of the situation must -beestablished and-maintained to distinguish which of the participants' many statusesshould form the basis for their interaction. The process of maintainingthis agreement is one of skewed communication: over-communicatingthat whidl confirms the relevant status positions and relationships,and IIl1der-eommunicating that which is discrepant. TIle effect is togenera te stereotyped forms of behaviour in these situations - behaviourwhich is not specified in the rights and obligations comprising thestatus, but which emerges as regular features of the role - becauseof tJlese situationally determined requirements of over- and under-comll1unication which he aptly calls 'impression management'.

We may distinguish two types of problems to which such viewsmay be applied. One concerns the way in which a person completes/

Models ofsocial organization I 37consummates a successful role performance by sele.:ting frl)m his tL)t:l1repertoire those gestures and idioms whkh will servL' his needs fl'r'impression management'. TIl is is where Goffman L"lllKentr:ltes hisdiscussion. TI,e other type of problem. with which WL' arc mainly .:"ncerned in the present connection. is th:1t of institutilmali/ati"n: Iww amultiplicity of individual decisions under thl' influenL"l' "I' l":lnaIiLingfactors can have the cumulative effect of produdng dl'ar p:ltlL'rnS :lndconventions. Goffman's arguments :Ire also :lpplicable here. Thl' s:lmcproblems of impression management arise for all inL"umbents "I' :1status. The punishments and rew:lrds of varying degrees l,f snccess willmake a majority modify tJleir perfl1nnanee in the dirl'eti"n Ill' theoptimum: and tJle n1l1re a cenain Ivpe ,)f helwvil'lIT is statistie:lllyassociated with a status. Ihe mOTe it WIll he rl'inf,'fL"l'd thfllugh s,'r\"ingas an idiom of iuentific:ltion. We ma) Ihus cl'llStrUl"1 a mLldel whl'Tebycomplex and comprehensive p:ltterns "f h

38 Models ofsocial organization Ihehaviour of the other in a progresssional sequence.

The ge.!lera1 notion of reci rocity is of course old and familiar inanthropology; indeed, it seems to be fundamental to our view of socialrelationships. Though its meaning is not frequently made explicit, !should think few will quarrel with one of Leach's formulations: 'In anysuch system of reciprocities one must assume that, overall, both parties... are satisfied with their bargain, and therefore that the exchangeaccount "balances".' (Leach, 1952: 51.) Yet the analytical status of'reciprocity' in social theory is far from clear, but is capable of beingdeveloped in several ways (see esp. Homans, 1958; Stanner, 1959). Inthe present context, it lies at the heart of an analytic concept of trans-action: one may caIJ transactions those sequences of interaction whichare systema tically governed by reciprocity.

Each and every case of interaction does not have these characteris-tics. It is possible to define a relationship of incorporation as an analyti-cal opposition to a transactional relationship - one where a value opti-mum, probably for a restricted range of values, is sought for the sum ofpartners, and not for a single party. Such partnerships can engage asunits in transactions vis-a-vis other persons or groups; internally, theirinteractions will not be systematicalJy governed by reciprocity. Yetthere are limits in most cases to the losses, or inequalities of gains,which people are willing to bear through such incorporation, and theserestrictions on the constitution of relationships of incorporation willbe developed and utilized below (pp. 63-75). FinaIJy, we have all of usseen cases of what we have interpreted as altruism - a kind of funda-mental negation of the transactional relationship. But transactions wehave also seen, and a clear concept of transaction, leads us to a recognition of a very fundamental social process: the process which resultswhere parties in the course of their interactions systematicalJy try toassure that the value gained for them is greater or equal to the valuelost.

Put this way, one may see that transactions have a structure whichpermits analysis by means of a strategic model, as a game of strategy.They cunsist uf a sequence of reciprocal prestations, which representsuccessive moves in the game. There must be a ledger kept of valuegaineu and lost; and each successive action or move affects that ledger.changes the strategic situation, and thus canalizes subsequent choices.Many pussible cuurses of action are ruled out because they are patentlyunsatisfactury. i.e. an actor must expect that value lost be greater thanvalue gaineu. In such a model the incentives and constraints on choice

Models ofsocial organization I 39are effective through the way they detennine what ,'an he gained andlost; and each actor's social adjustment to the other party in the trans-action is depicted in tenns of alter's possible moves. and how they intum affect ego's value gains. The structure depicted in this model isa successional one over tin1e - in other words. it is a model of preess.

The in1portance of process and the analysis of choice has been givenincreased recognition in anthropological writings. particularly throughFirth's important formulation of the distinction between structure andorganization (Firth, 1954). I have elsewhere used some of the formalapparatus of the Theory of Games to analyse political choice (Barth.1959b). The particular formalism of the Theory of Games is not asin1portant for anthropological purposes as is the theory's fundamentalcharacter as a generative model. It can serve as a prototype for a proces-sual model of interaction: and in concentrating on transact;o!l as theanalytic isola Ie in the field of social organization, I am emulating whatI regard as the most crucial aspect of the theory for our purposes. Whatis useful in Ihis view of transactions is that it gives us a logically consis-tent model of an observable social process. It is a model whereby onemay generate forms according to the rules of strategy. given the para'meters of value; and these fom1s generated by the model may then becompared to the empiJical patlerns which one has observed. The logicalanalysis can be rigorously separated from the cumulative presentationof data: and the adequacy of such a model can in each case be judgedby the degree of fit between the patterns which are logically generatedand the patlerns which are observed. We are not committed by anyprejudged 'view of society' - the adequacy of the transactional modelfor any and every particular relationship is continually on trial. Andsince the model c1ain1s to depict actual empirical processes, all its partsand its operations - its exchanges. its value parameters, etc. - may bequestioned and checked.

A measure of the analytic importance of such a concept of transac-tion is the fact that it is implicit in our whole .idea of values. It ismeaningless to say thaI something has value unless people in real lifeseek it, prefer it to something of less value, in other words maximizevalue. This can only be true if they usually act stralegically with respectto it, that is, make it the object of transactions between themselves andothers.

I should emphasize that this does not imply a claim for explanatoryadequacy for all aspects of all behaviour. 0 doubt man has a psychological constitution which affects the way he hehaves. But as a social

40 Models ofsocial organization Ianthropologist I am concerned with exploring the effects of socialdeterminants on human behaviour, and these vary with reference tosuch factors as value and strategy. Furthermore, in real life, men alsoenjoy and consume value, and act with indifference to it. What I amsuggesting is that transactions are of particular analytical importancebecause (a) where systems of evaluation (values) are maintained, trans-actions must be a predominant form of interaction; (b) in lhem therelative evaluations in a culture are revealed; and (c) they are a basicsocial process by means of which we can explain how a variety of socialforms are generated from a much simpler set and distribution of basicvalues.

The first two of these themes will be explored further in the nextchapter; the third I shall now scek to illustrate. The major elements ofthe generative model called for in such an illustration have been pre-sen ted. Transactional behaviour takes place with reference to a set ofvalues which serve as generalized incentives and constraints on choice; italso takes place with reference to a pre-established matrix of statuses,seen as a distribution of values on positions in the form of minimal clus-ters of jurally binding rights. From this point, through the formation ofstatus scts, and the implications and restrictions of transactional rela-tions and impression management within

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[Fredrik Barth] Process and Form in Social Life S

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