of the door to reductionism. He instances‘economism’as an example,
theory that relates everything in the world to economic notions of a
certain kind. We would add here‘neoliberalism’, a version of economism
that relates all actions in late capitalist society to individualistic profit-
seeking. Kapferer adds other categories, for example, ‘gender’,asan
abstraction removed from the particularities of process and action. He
hits out at the ignorance of history that may lie behind reductionist
generalizations (p. 5). Basically, he is opposed to any forms of reduction
that ignore complexity. He suggests that the theory of neoliberalism itself
opens the way to all forms of reductionist thinking, usefully appropriated
for their own purposes by state authorities. We may cite here one example
from University practices.‘Going green’or paperless is trumpeted as a
great improvement, yet often it is not, because the individual academics
may have to print out on paper which they themselves buy documents that
are sent digitally by the University authorities. So going green is cheap for
some, expensive for others.
Kapferer is hitting at numbers of targets here. His general argument is
that an inappropriate stress on individual action lends itself to reductionist
explanations amid the emptying out of the category of the social. We see
here a number of points. First, the observation about abstractions such as
neoliberalism taking the place of more complex social processes as expla-
nations is well taken. It is high time such pretenses at explanation were
thrown out and a genuine attempt to restore complexity to analysis was set
in hand. But Kapferer goes further and shrewdly points to the fact that
states, which are institutions not individuals, adopt the theory of neoliber-
alism for their own purposes. This means, in effect, that he is saying there
is a social process of adopting the ideology of neoliberalism for institu-
tional advantages. Neoliberalism then does not explain anything, because
it itself is used as an instrument for social action. Kapferer has thus found
his own way out of the impasse he describes, because neoliberalism is now
not an analytical explanation but is an ideological phenomenon embedded
in structures that require other means of explanation. Scholars who
attempt to put it forward as a form of explanation are suffering from
misrecognition in Bourdieu’s terms.
The other point we wish to make here is that not all ideas of the individual
give the individual autonomy as against the realm of the social. Our own
concept of the relational–individual (see above in this book) situates the
individual in a complex web of autonomy versus relationality. Hence,
Kapferer’s own argument addresses only one extreme case of emphasis on
56 BREAKING THE FRAMES