Rapport - Transcendent individual : towards a literary and liberal anthropology

This is a book of essays all of which bear on the theme of individualityon the individuals conscious and creative engagement with certain socio-cultural environmentsand the links between individuality and the writing of social science. The essays have an iconoclastic agenda: the writing of social science (in particular socio-cultural anthropology) as imbued with a belief in the transcendent subject. Here is a book of essays intent on a social-scientific appreciation of the individual who makes himself or herself ex nihilo and in an originary fashionwho comes to be, who achieves a consciousness, outwith and beyond the socio-cultural environment in which he or she was born and has been socialised/ enculturated.

A number of keywords might be stated, for later elaboration: Individual, Individuality, Creativity, Consciousness, Writing, Narrative, Discourse, Form, Meaning, Interpretation, Personalisation, Anthropology, Literature.

The individual agenda of these essays is methodological, ontological, aesthetic and moral.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, only by intensifying ones own individuality, through precise consciousness of oneself in a sociocultural environment, can one hope to appreciate the individuality of others and thereby approach an understanding: one must look inward in order to see outward; by looking outward one realises ones inwardness. Here is a necessary and continuous dualism. Far from a narrowly introspective or overly idealistic exercise, then, it is the case that how we conceptually understand ourselves and our lives-in-society, how we validate our claims to self-knowledge, and how we transpose such knowledge into narrative, are all entirely crucial to our project of apprehending otherness, and, indeed, indistinguishable from it (cf. Stanley 1993:50; also Cohen 1994:136). In Wildes words, personality is an element of revelation (1913:156; and cf. Chesterton 1936:170).

Moreover, such an approach is not only methodologically potent but ontologically necessary. For it is in individuality that the roots of the social and cultural lie. Except for the conscious individual, there is no social mover: no possibility of social process or organisation, of structured relations, routinised interactions or institutionalised behaviours. And except for the creative individual, there is no cultural dynamo: no possibility of cultural symbols or norms, of interpretive regimes, classificatory systems or forms of life. In short, to return to Wilde (1913:123), there can be no unity without individuals: no commonality without diversity, no socio-cultural sharing or coming together without individual discreteness (cf. Rapport 1993:169ff.).

For Wilde, again, this makes the individual a source of wonder, a thing of beauty. I find so too, and I celebrate such individuality in these essays. I try to bring to social-scientific account an aesthetic appreciation of the work of the individual in creating the forms of life by which societies operate and in construing the meanings by which cultural symbols are animated.

Finally, this imbues the essays with a moral quest. Here is an attempt to write a liberal social science which feels free to champion the individual and feels constrained to criticise that happenstance and circumstance where individuality is threatened or denied. Here, too, is a defence of liberal theorising in the face of conventional social-scientific depreciation which contends that this theorising does little more than articulate the prejudices of a politically naive Anglo-American intellectual class, and that such theorising is anyway impotent in an age dominated by global communitarianismby resurgent ethnicities, renascent localisms, typifying bureaucracies and militant fundamentalisms.