The Trouble with Community , livre ebook

THE TROUBLE WITH COMMUNITY
Anthropology, Culture and Society
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THE TROUBLE WITH COMMUNITY
Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity
V ERED A MIT AND N IGEL R APPORT
First published 2002 by PLUTO PRESS 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport 2002
The right of Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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CONTENTS Prologue: The Book’s Questions Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit   PART I   AN ANTHROPOLOGY WITHOUT COMMUNITY? Vered Amit    1 .   Anthropology and Community: Some Opening Notes    2 .   Embracing Disjunction    3 .   The Trouble with Community Notes References   PART II   THE TRUTH OF MOVEMENT, THE TRUTH AS MOVEMENT: POST-CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND NARRATIONAL IDENTITY Nigel Rapport Preamble    4 .   Introduction: A Theory of Movement    5 .   Incommensurability: Politics or Law?    6 .   Educating for Liberal Democracy    7 .   The Ironization of Liberal Democracy    8 .   Human Rights and Liberal Democracy    9 .   Universalism and Relativism in the Global Ecumene 10 .   Existential Anthropology 11 .   Existential Politics Notes References   PART III   DIALOGUE: MOVEMENT, IDENTITY AND COLLECTIVITY Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport 12 .   Vered Amit Responds to Nigel Rapport 13 .   Nigel Rapport Responds to Vered Amit References Index
to Aiden and to Callum, our nascent migrants of identity
PROLOGUE: THE BOOK’S QUESTIONS
Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit
This book is a dialogue between two anthropologists; it concerns the conceptualization, the ideology and the practice of community in the contemporary world. All three of these dimensions of community involve a tension between efforts to fix social and political relations in communal frames and the considerable pressures toward individuation and fragmentation which regularly undo these efforts, but may also be constrained by them. The book offers a review and a reassessment of community as a political, legal, theoretical and ethnographic concept within anthropology.
As the new century begins, politico-economic restructuring continues further to embed local economies, economic networks and polities within global systems of production and labour and within transnational systems of law and political identity. The relation between work, place and family is reconfigured, new forms of mobility within and across state borders are precipitated, and new discourses concerning international relations – ‘subsidiarity’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘human rights’ – are construed. These processes have frequently dislocated the conventional connections between individuals and taken-for-granted institutions and collectivities. Yet we also see in many parts of the world, popular and intellectual discourses of identity that insist on the political and ontological primacy of various forms of community. While capital moves with ever greater speed and freedom across state borders, while international law expands its translocal remit, migrants frequently face renewed barriers to their own movements. While the ‘postmodern turn’ in anthropology has rejected the fixity of expertise, place and boundaries, this does not appear to have dislodged a conventional expectation that the construction of community and culture – of ‘cultural community’ – will continue to situate both the ethnographic enterprise and its ethnographic subjects, perhaps all the more so when these are no longer fixed conveniently in singular places.
Our efforts as co-authors, as two anthropologists of modernity, is to grapple with these complexities in this book; in the process we bring to bear a range of ethnographic expertise and a variety of theoretical perspectives. We do not expect to provide a single answer or one way of properly looking at the issues involved. Rather, we propose an authorial dialogue that engages multiple vantage-points and brings into juxtaposition the different ways in which we have sought to situate and adjust our anthropological fieldwork, analyses and broader moral gaze to the unstable contrivances of community in a world of movement.
The dialogue is organized around a set of questions which, in their separate sections of the book and in their different ways, both authors set out to address: 1. How do people conceive of community and work towards effecting its continued existence – to the extent that they do – in a world of movement? 2. Given that ‘fieldwork’ and ‘the field’ have been traditionally conceived of in anthropology as pertaining to places fixed in time and/or space, how should anthropology reconceptualize its data, reconceptualize the conditions of being of its informants, in a world of migrant identities? 3. Given the history of ‘community’ as an analytical construct, and the political valency it currently enjoys under the aegis of ‘communitarianism’ (of ‘identity polities’), how should anthropology employ the term in future? 4. Inasmuch as ‘society’ and ‘culture’ and the processes, practices, institutions, forces and structures which they have been seen to embody, were traditionally conceived of as fixing individuals, their behaviours and cognitions, within certain systems of signification, classification and identity, how is anthropology theoretically to approach a world characterized by plurality, transgression and irony concerning socio-cultural identities? 5. Inasmuch as a world of movement brings together a plurality and diversity of identities – and, more precisely, their individual proponents – what has anthropology to say, pragmatically, politically and morally, concerning the way in which a civil society might hope to accommodate, and constitute a secure environment for, the ongoing construction and the rightful expression of such identities? 6. In the wake of a postmodern critique of objective knowledge – a calling into question of rationality, of technical expertise, of disinterested language, of knowledge with any claims to singular authority and transcendence – how should anthropology now situate and conceive of its project: as merely one kind of narrative, evolving discourse or rhetoric, situated among a host of contesting kinds in the world, or still as a something more – a science of the human condition?

In fine, this book provides an investigation into the ways in which anthropology might engage, theoretically, ethnographically, politically, morally, with what might be described as its perennial theme – individuals vis-à-vis communities – in a world of movement which calls into question the erstwhile seeming fixities of its disciplinary identity: ‘culture’ and ‘society’.
ACCORDING TO VERED AMIT
Part I of the book is entitled ‘An Anthropology without Community?’. In recent years, Amit observes, anthropologists have been increasingly willing to accept the ‘loss of place as a dominant metaphor for culture’ (Olwig and Hastrup, 1996: 7). But would they prove as willing to give up the anchorage o