solution, he notes, is not to obliterate but at least to sideline culture as a
kind of background or milieu (p. 62). Another, more dynamic, solution is
to recognize, as we ourselves would advocate, that just as organisms
exist in and with their environment, so do persons within their cultural
contexts. Just reminds us (p. 64) of the shadow of functionalism in
anthropology. Functionalism in an extreme form suggested that every
activity contributed to the promotion of the social whole. As this is not
universally true, what are we left with? Just does not provide a forthright
answer, but he offers a glimmer in the distance before us by glancing at the
importance of creativity in social life (p. 65). Certainly, if we recognize this
point, it provides a means of achieving insight into dynamism in social life,
while avoiding the overdetermination of either a totalizing functionalism
or a detotalizing and reductionist evolutionary psychology.
The last of the chapters we will consider here is by Thomas Ernst
( 2005 ). It is a thoughtful piece. Like all the contributors, Ernst is against
something called reductionism, however defined. For the contributors,
reductionism means the reduction of the social to the individual, function
to agency, custom to negotiated meanings. Ernst refers to Marshall
Sahlins’s well-known stance of emphasizing culture as distinct from any
universal“practical reason”(p. 73), and his refusal to reduce culture to
anything but itself. For culture read society or structure in other people’s
formulations. Ernst also sees individuals as always encapsulated in their
cultures, including those individuals who emerge as such in the context of
capitalism. Capitalism is also a culture.
But, whichever way we push for the two supposed oppositions, the
individual or the collective, we will be forced to ignore one side. The frame
that radically separates the category of the individual from the collective,
he says, renders mediation impossible. Curiously, however, all the con-
tributors want to stress‘the social’in this book, and bemoan that it is
being vacated. But none of them actually tackles what it is. They discuss
instead what it is not, i.e., that it is not the individual or a collection of
individuals. (Incidentally, Radcliffe-Brown had no problem with seeing
groups as constituted by individuals.) What is it, then? The impasse comes
from the frame itself. Individual and social or collective or society or group
are not to be defined in themselves or in isolation. They are to be defined
in relational, often dialectical, terms. We return to our concept of the
relational–individual, which attracted almost no notice by contrast with
the borrowed concept of the‘dividual’firmly fastened onto the analysis of
personhood in the New Guinea Highlands societies. The implications of
58 BREAKING THE FRAMES