Breaking the Frames

CHAPTER 6

Retreat of the Social? Where to?

AbstractBruce Kapferer, and contributors to his edited volumeRetreat
of the Social, sees a danger for anthropology in an emphasis on individual
agencies rather than social processes. Such an emphasis he sees as reduc-
tionist. He includes neoliberalism here, pointing out that it is used as an
ideology. Other contributors to this volume include: Christopher Taylor,
who discusses the cosmological power of Rwandan kings; Roger Just, who
notes that foregrounding the individual raises the problem of what to do
with society and culture, suggesting that we should focus on creativity;
and Thomas Ernst, who again warns against reducing social life to indivi-
dual action. However, the individual and the social should not be seen in
closed dichotomous terms, but as open and mutually constituting
relationships.

KeywordsBruce Kapferer
Creativity
Individual
Neoliberalism

Reductionism
Rwanda

Bruce Kapferer, in his Introduction to the volumeThe Retreat of the Social
( 2005 ), puts a problem squarely: he sees an individualist and subjectivist
turn in anthropology, which for him, and others, means a turning away
from institutional structures and social processes in favor of concentrating
on individual agencies and strategies (Kapferer 2005 :2). Kapferer sees in
these moves a trend of“the vacating of the social”(p. 3), and an opening

© The Author(s) 2017
P.J. Stewart, A.J. Strathern,Breaking the Frames,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47127-3_6

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