how anthropologists have sometimes managed to ignore the point or have
claimed that in some remote part of the world (remote, that is, from the
anthropologist’s experience) such conflicts do not occur because‘the
culture’does not include the idea of conflict between individual and
group, is an interesting problem. We can only suggest that this and
other tendencies derive from‘cultural determinism’, the idea that humans
are somehow both mentally and socially imprisoned in frameworks which
nevertheless are human-made, even if they are claimed to be divinely
sanctioned. Cohen points to an extreme example of this trend in the
thought of Louis Dumont who argued that concern with the individual
is an ethnocentric western notion, to be contrasted to the Indian concept
of hierarchy. This, as Cohen notes, is also an extreme case of the dichot-
omizing tendency in social theory (we would add, primitive vs. civilized).
Cohen’sreflections are at all points mindful. He is quick to say that he is
not reinventing the 1960s wheel of methodological individualism, and to
disavow any idea that he wishes to dispense altogether with the ideas of
community and sociality. Rather, he is attempting to restore a balance in
analysis in which the issue of individual/society interaction is not glossed
over but built thoughtfully into ethnography. Incidentally, his remarks
here indicate the swings of fashion in anthropology. A term that at one
time may be a rally slogan for a particular viewpoint, such as methodolo-
gical individualism, later falls out of fashion and an analyst with things to
say that in part do converge with it has to categorically deny it. If we go
back to I. C. Jarvie’s effort to bring this approach in, we willfind that his
purpose was to focus on the individual effects of prophets as charismatic
leaders in‘cargo cults’as a way of explaining the genesis and trajectory of
these movements. Detailed work by Andrew Lattas (Lattas 2010 ) has, at a
later point in time, strengthened this idea. But although the leaders Lattas
studied are certainly very idiosyncratic individuals, they owe their influence
to an ability to refashion motifs from folklore and tradition to suit their
millennial messages. Without thisfield of tradition to work on, they could
not exercise power over people’s imaginations. Jarvie’s approach on pro-
phets was fruitful but insufficient on its own. So, as he employed the term,
methodological individualism was a justifiable tack. It was abandoned later
because it was interpreted as a grandiose total approach to phenomena,
and so it could be used as a term of abuse to reject it. It is a disease of
thought to elevate one’s tools of analysis into total explanations. Theory is
fine, as long as it does not turn into a tyranny and dogma, or as a ready to
wear brand of clothing to place on top of any set of data. It often occurs
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