build their own careers on it as a new fashion. With individuals, the problem
is how can their actions result in social order? With dividuals, the opposite
occurs: how can conflict, violence, and social disorder arise? In effect, since
order and disorder alternate or are intermixed, we are left with the likelihood
that the combination of relationality and individuality can easily have a
variety of outcomes, ranging from order to disorder. And this is what we
tend to observe in reality. Hence recognition of the dialectical ontology
implicit in the concept of the relational-individual is what is needed, whether
this can be used for academic advancement or not.
Some anthropologists, per contra, have built their careers on a
defiant insistence on the importance of the individual in society, cul-
ture, and history. One of the most deft exponents of this viewpoint is
Nigel Rapport (see, e.g., Rapport 1997 , 2003 ). In terms of the pro-
duction of knowledge we can trace a direct line from Anthony Cohen
to Nigel Rapport, especially since they have actually collaborated in
their work (e.g., in the volume Questions of Consciousness). In the
work of Cohen that we have noted earlier, we see his reaction against
over-collectivist interpretations of human behavior. Cohen, neverthe-
less, recognized that the main aimof anthropology was not simply to
examine what individuals do but to build understandings of how social
life is achieved. Rapport takes the stance a step further, and dwells on
the importance of the individual in creating, molding, and transform-
ing social life, and he bases his work on the idea that the individual is
in all cases ontologically transcendent and society is an abstraction,
whereas individuals are real. All knowledge and agency is fundamen-
tally held by individuals, so they must be the focus of our study. These
are fighting words. However, society or social groups are notjust
abstractions, and ideas of individuality are themselves in a certain
sense abstractions. We return, then, to the relational–individual as a
unit of description and analysis. This concept represented a refusal to
adopt a dichotomous framing of issues in relation to social person-
hood. It was intended to break a false opposition between individual
and dividual. Underlying this unreal opposition there was a supposi-
tion that ‘individual’ means‘natural’and dividual means ‘cultural’.
The old nature/culture division therefore seems to be lurking at the
base of this debate as well as many others. We will take up this
topic next.
4 INDIVIDUALS 45