MANCHESTER

ANTHROPOLOGY
WORKING
PAPERS

Social Anthropology
School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
M13 9PL
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SOCIETY OR SOCIALITY?
Stphane Breton
ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES, PARIS



paper read at the Department of Anthropology
University of Manchester
Monday 22 march 2004


This paper is a constructive critique of Marilyn Stratherns concept of
sociality as developed in The Gender of the Gift. I will do that through an
enquiry into the idea of normativity.
I will sometimes take language as an exemple. Why should I do so? Do I
not risk to loose sight of the specificity of social action by reducing it to
language? I think on the contrary that while reducing and displacing the
question language shows it in a more abstract and simple light:
(1) Language is a custom among others, it is no less a social meaningful
practice than ritual or a Trobriand harvest gift;
(2) This custom or social practice is used to provide justifications and
explanations for other social practices. So it is a meta-practice as well as a
simple practice. It is a practice that serves to describe practice, a form of
sociality privileged to be a reflexive vehicle of sociality. If something is true
of language, to a large extant it is true of sociality as well.
I want to stress that in many respects I am very much a proponent of
Marilyn Stratherns work, and that my observations will be aimed not at her
analysis of Melanesian facts, that as a Melanesianist myself, having done
fieldwork in West Papua, I find extremely convincing and productive, but at
the underlying social theory.
This theory is expressed in the first pages of The Gender of the Gift,
namely, that we should dispense with the concept of society because, I
stress this, the concept of individual is inapplicable in the Melanesian
context.
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There is at this point a theoretical paradox.
The French school of sociology, after Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and
Louis Dumont, stressed the importance of the concept of society, precisely
because the modern notion of the individual, i.e. the autonomous,
independant agent as an ultimate moral value, is an historical creature, a
normative western social construct.
Marilyn Strathern, however, defines the individual whose universality she
denies not exactly in Tocquevilles or Dumonts terms, as autonomous and
independent, i.e. self-normative, but rather as the owner of both himself
and his property (Strathern 1988: 103). She focuses on property, and
shes right, but she lets aside self-normativity, as if she wanted to preserve
it in any case. This is were difficulties will arise.
We are encouraged by Dumont to make a distinction between the
individual in the weak sense, as an empirical agent, present in all
societies, and the individual sociologically speaking, i.e. the normative
subject of modern societies.
In this theoretical perspective, for the modern individual to exist at all there
has to be such a thing as society: the individual, in the sociological sense,
does not invent himself spontaneously, he is a cultural artefact, a social
norm.
The normative and cultural environment that makes this move possible
and intelligible must be taken into consideration; lets call it society.
I would like to stress that the French school of sociology, for this reason, is
extremely reluctant to accept the distinction established by Radcliffe-
Brown between culture and society, and to reduce society to social
morphology. Society is not in this view just a visible, empirical set of
institutions, it is made of a common understanding, of norms and of
culture.
Marilyn Strathern refutes both notions, of the individual and society, as
irremediably ethnocentric. She is led to this by two considerations:
(1) First, the notion of the individual doesnt fit the Melanesian data.
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On more general terms, people are made out of social relations, she
argues, they are not atoms that preexist these relations and must conform
to them.
As a matter of fact, this critique of the ideology of the universal individual,
of the ideology of the agent of political economy, was already Durkheims
against Herbert Spencer. It was later developped by Marcel Mauss,
Maurice Leenhardt and Louis Dumont.
So, interestingly enough, Marilyn Stratherns very critique of the individual
was initially put forth by the theoretical proponents of the idea of society.
(2) Secondly, Melanesia shows something like a weak sociality and in
many cases the absence not only of corporate groups but also of the
overall, encompassing institutions or framework that we would call society.
The looseness of melanesian social morphology entices Marilyn Strathern
to get rid of the hierarchical concept of a society that would constrain
people from without into doing things.
If in Melanesia there are no discrete, normative individuals as we know
them in modern societies, and no social container either in which they can
be kept, as if in a box, then we should speak instead of sociality, she
argues, that is, of a social capacity working at the level of agents. It is
expressed in the Melanesian idiom of gender and exchange.
However, the question arises as to where this sociality comes from. Is it
spontaneous, immanent to agents, in other words do they just need to act
in order for their acts to have social meaning, or is this sociality normative
and conventional, that is, common and public? This is not clear at all in
The Gender of the Gift, and I think this confusion does not happen by
chance.
I want to suggest that the difficulty comes from the fact that she rejects
rightfully the wrong concept of society, a concept that the proponents of
the sociological viewpoint (for instance Mauss and Dumont) have argued
against themselves, while at the same time she fails to adopt the proper
concept that would allow to account for social conventions and normativity.
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The concept of society she rejects is an individualistic one. So it is
certainly wise to get rid of it. However, it is just a straw-man, and what I
want to look at is why she does not go beyond that.
In short, I want to argue that, strange as it may seem, she does not give
the proper conceptual weight to social relations when she lets them float in
the spontaneous ether of sociality.

(1) First, she refutes the concept of a society hierarchical by nature,
working above the individuals, coercing them into action while leaving
them as unique, independent monads (Strathern 1988: 12, 94).
(2) Second, she refutes a concept of society that is inherently plural,
constituted as a group of many individuals. She stresses the fact that
sociality is not necessarily collective, that it can take place within a single
pair of persons (Strathern 1988: 70, 320-322).
In other words, she opposes the idea that society is an aggregate of pre-
existing individuals.
Well, this is exactly Durkheims argument. If there is such a thing as
society, it cannot be a collection of elements, understood in the
perspective of an individualistic ontology (for instance : a sand heap), but
as Dumont will later argue, a totality made of normative relations between
parts, that is, where the level of individuation is not specified once and for
all and where functional parts may very well happen to be pairs of agents,
rather than individuals.
This view satisfies some important prerequisites of Marilyn Strathern, but
she does not endorse it. Why? Because it is normative, that is, it
explains social action by common values and norms.

Now, her rejection of a normative, non-individualistic concept of society is
grounded on the normative pluralism of feminism (Strathern 1988: 23, 36).
In this view, society is composed of a plurality of competing, irreconciliable
interests (Strathern 1988: 29).
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Any attempt to unify them under a common heading is but the disguise of
hegemony.
The argument goes this way: she rejects a collective concept of society
(and confuses it with a holistic concept) because in Melanesia there are
not only collective relations but also dual, particular ones. Right. Then, as
only men do entertain collective relations and form groups, she concludes
that society is but the artefact of male domination (Strathern 1988: 35).
But this would be true only if we wanted to equate society with social
morphology, with corporate groups: with the public, visible institutions and
rituals of social life.
Well, there are several difficulties here.
(1) First, in a move that contains a contradiction with regard to the premiss
of pluralism and the existence of conflicts, we are led to postulate a
homogeneous class of interests, that of men as men and women as
women.
But it is certainly conceivable that such classes be internally differenciated.
Then, homogeneity and heterogeneity may exist, although at different
levels.
If this is so, then why wouldnt it be acceptable that together with conflicts
at a certain level, commonalities exist at another? In other words, we have
to differentiate and hierarchize levels of observation.
For instance, we can imagine that while men and women have diverging
interests in some respect they also live together, if I remember things
correctly.
It seems to be the case, and it is Marilyn Strathern herself who says that in
Melanesia there is no such thing as male dominance, except in specific
cases when men act as a collective class (women do not have the
opportunity to act in such collective fashion).
So my purpose here is not to deny the existence of power, but that conflict
could ever be a ground for social life. Rather, I think conflict presuposses
sociality. Conflict is a litmus test for sociality.
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(2) Secondly, as a consequence, if the confrontation between parts is
structural, it can very well be accounted for by a global concept of society,
the only one, it seems, able to explain, e.g. dual societies, where moieties
are articulated by an equalitarian opposition and thus structurally
presuppose each other (I think of the Kayapo of Amazonia described by
Terence Turner).
In denying the relevance of the whole in the name of the different parts,
she does not do justice to the idea that a whole, precisely, is made of
parts, not of elements or individuals.
What is presupposed here is that a whole, from a logical standpoint,
should be uniform in order to be a whole. But this is simply inaccurate. The
idea of a homogeneous whole is a contradiction in terms, it just boils down
to the individualistic description of an ensemble composed of equal,
indifferent elements. This has to be rejected.
This conception betrays on her part an underlying theory according to
which real things must be individual things, and that if there are no such
things, then there is nothing at all. This is the individualistic philosophy of
logical atomism for instance. That is not exactly her view because she
stresses that there are relations out there, not only terms. But I see here a
complex, contradictory mixture of perspectives.
My argument is simple: if there are competing interests, there is a common
level of intelligibility, i.e. principles of legitimacy. If there is no debate about
legitimacy, there is no competition but absolute hegemony.
Lets take the example of language. We know there are different social
idioms. But they are mutually intelligible and do not have entirely different
grammars. They rest on a common ground. This is not to say there are no
variations nor that the common grammar was forced down the throat of
one social category by another. The levels of competing interests and of
common understanding cannot be the same.
Moreover, one cannot explain the sociolinguistic variations of the English
language if one doesnt have a concept of the English language.
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So it is on such a level that common norms and values must rest if they
are to have any meaning at all. This is the proper level were sociology tries
to locate society, society not as a thing, not as a monument, not as a cop
with a stick, but as a shared grammar of norms.

The present difficulty is compounded by the way the distinction between
collective and non-collective sociality is articulated by Marilyn Strathern.
She says that the so-called particular Melanesian sociality is not collective,
but then the argument reveals a confusion between common and
collective.
This betrays again, it seems, an underlying, unobserved individualistic,
atomistic philosophical perspective.
A normative form can be common without being necessarily collective. For
instance, Robinson Crusoe can speak English alone on his island. He
doesnt need to have someone in front of him to do that. The grammar he
uses is common to other speakers of the same language, even when his
words are not uttered in a collective context. What he says could be
understood by an Englishman, but he is unfortunately alone.
However, as Wittgenstein showed very convincingly in his refutation of
private language, Robinson Crusoe could not have invented the language
describing his private feelings or thoughts in a situation of ontological
solipsism.
He could not have been able to do so, not because he would not have had
the opportunity to communicate with someone elsethis is an entirely
contingent argument, but because he would have been deprived of
public, independent criteria allowing him to be able to say the same thing
on different occasions, that is, to use words.
What he would need, in effect, are criteria of the identity of signs and
criteria of their correct use.
According to Wittgenstein, a private language is impossible because the
use of signs is normative, and normativity is necessarily independent of
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the agent or the speaker, i.e. it must rest on public and common ground.
In the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953: 268), he gives a
very interesting comparison: it is no more possible to give in private a
name to a sensation than it is for my right hand to make a gift to my left
hand and then for my left hand to acknowledge receipt of it. In the case of
the private language, the operation of name giving has not produced any
effect. Nothing has been imposed. The private ostensive definition has not
established a rule of use for future occurrences of the name. The lack of
such a rule has deprived the name of any meaning. Nothing has been
named.
Language presupposes a social word, not as an empirical fact but as a
logical precondition. There is no such thing as a sign or a socially
intelligible way of applying a rule if the rule is not public.
Normativity is necessarily and logically public because one needs to have
independent criteria of correctness, otherwise there would be no difference
between following a rule and believing one is following a rule (Wittgenstein
1953: 202), between uttering English sentences and uttering gibberish.
One doesnt happen to speak English just because one wants to or has
such an intention, but because one applies the norms of this language in
the proper context.
So if Robinson Crusoe is able to speak English alone on his island, its not
because the grammar of the English language is particular, non-collective,
as Marilyn Strathern says of a mode of sociality, but simply because it is
normative, common to a community of speakers. This is why it can be
taught and learned.
The possibility of teaching and learning is the expression of the normative
nature of social practice.
When Marilyn Strathern says that some forms of sociality are not
collective (which she confuses with not common), she reproduces the
confusion of the private language argument at the level of social forms.
She thinks social forms can be immanent, intrinsic, particular, private in a
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word, as in the case of the pregnant mother who entertains with her child
the same type of relationship men entertain between themselves within
their collective association, their political group (Strathern 1988: 325-337).
In such a case, she says, we are dealing with a form of sociality that is
immanent to the point of being non-communicational (Strathern 1988:
320).

This is very obscure. She doesnt provide a satisfactory explanation of
what a social convention is, if it is not common and public, that is,
communicational. There is a confusion as to whether the forms of
Melanesian sociality are or are not conventional and normative.
She stresses in a very convincing fashion, however, that gender and
exchange provide what anyone would readily call the norms of Melanesian
social action.
Gender, for instance, does not stem from instrinsic attributes, it is not, as
she says, what men and women do, or what men and women are, but it
provides the autonomous grammar of action and exchange.
This is why sociality is articulated by a contrast between same-sex and
cross-sex relations, not between male and female terms.
Exchange, in the same way, is the form of the relations taking place
between genderized terms.
All this is a brilliant and entirely convincing ethnographic synthesis. But
lets look more closely at the link between these forms of sociality and a
concept of normativity.
How would we describe an exchange between two partners, for instance in
the Trobriands between a wifes brother and a sisters husband, the former
giving the harvest gift to the latter.
This sociality, she argues, is particular, not common, not collective.
But then the question arises as to the normative status of this form. Are the
conventions of exchange invented on the spot by exchange partners? Do
the wifes brother in the Trobriands give a harvest gift to his sisters
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husband just because he feels like it? That is, does the meaning of the
transaction stem from its mere operation (rather than being a preliminary
to it?)
If we thought it were the case, we would side with the neo-liberal
theoretical premiss according to which the contractual transaction between
agents, taking place in a non-normative environment called the market,
creates its ad hoc rules of understanding.
But as Peirce (Peirce 1931: 1.175-176, 1.475) showed, a transaction
cannot provide its proper context of intelligibility. If we want to be able to
make a distinction between a gift and a mere changing of hands of the
object, we have to refer the act to the normative institution of the gift.
As Durkheim noticed in De la division du travail social, there is something
non-contractual in the contract, and that is the social institution of the
contract. There is a third party, as it were, in the transaction between the
two partners, and that is the normative category that establishes the
meaning of their transaction.
An example: in his brilliant ethnography of the Kula, Frederick Damon
shows that any transaction between two partners is but the abstraction of a
systemic relationship between at least three partners.
When A hands a shell to B, his name goes down while the others goes up.
But while the same thing happens when B hands it to C, then As name
goes up again.
This shows that the dyadic transaction is deprived of its complete meaning
if it is not encompassed in the wider network. In other words, agents
belong to an intelligible, normative totality, they do not operate on their
own.
In this case, the Strathernian concept of elicitation looses its strength: the
transaction does not operate at the sole level of the actual transactors, it
has a wider relevance.

The normative category of common understanding is referred to by people
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in the field in very simple terms, that the anthropologist most often fails to
take at face value: people say, we do it that way because thats how we
do it. This is not a non-answer, this is the ultimate normative answer, as
Peter Winch rightly saw in The Idea of a Social Science. Normativity
doesnt bring any other justification. To do things differently would just be
meaningless. Meaning does not have to be justified, it is purely normative.
To put it in Wittgensteinian terms: grammar precedes truth.
Meaning stems from the rule of the game. Either you play chess, either
you dont, theres no in-between. If you rook with your queen, thats not
another way of playing chess, it is nothing at all because youre supposed
to play chess.
For instance, if in the Trobriands the wifes brother were to give his yams
to a by-stander, his gift would be deprived of any intelligibility for people
expecting him to make a customary harvest gift. His fellows would tell him
that he was wrong. He could either answer that he made a mistake, or that
he didnt care. In such case, he would stand outside of the common
sociality.
This is precisely at the level of normative intelligibility, I suggest, that we
should locate society, and not at the empirical level of social morphology
or concrete institutions (like court, jail, parliament, police, legislation,
although these may contribute to the common practice of social action).
When Marilyn Strathern notes that society as a formal and objective
institution never shows itself nor plays any role in Melanesia (Strathern
1988: 213), she betrays the fact that in her mind society must be found on
the plane of social morphology if it is to exist at all.
Then, as such institutions sometimes do not exist in Melanesia, she
concludes that society does not exist and that Melanesian sociality is not
normative. That is the heart of her argument.
But in dispensing with a normative concept of society she makes it
impossible to take account of the preliminary and mutual intelligibility of
social acts.
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It is as if one would wand to describe the meaning of words as stemming
from their actual, idiosyncratic occurrence, and not from the public
grammar of their use.
On the contrary, we use words in a certain way when we expect to be
understood by others, but nobody forces us to do so. Grammar is not a
constraint from without, its a shared understanding. Moreover, if there
were no common norms for the correct use of signs, there would be no
language at all, not just a different grammar, as Wittgenstein stresses.

So how does Marilyn Strathern stands with regard to the normativity of
social action? Her statements are ambiguous.
First, she remarks that sociality is either collective or particular (e.g.
ceremonial exchange or harvest gift), that an agent can act only one way
or the other (Strathern 1988: 93). In this sense, the forms of sociality are of
course conventions, conventions typically Melanesian.
But sociality, she then says, is immanent to these forms (Strathern 1988:
188).
This is unclear. One can speak of the internal relation between a given rule
and its correct application, between a given mode of sociality and the
typical exchange that goes with it, but not between sociality at large and
these forms in general, because this would imply people necessarily act in
a socially meaningful way whatever they do, which is nonsense. If the
wifes brother gave the harvest gift to someone who was not his sisters
husband, he would make a mistake, period. So the rule of this particular
sociality is not immanent. It is simply conventional.
Now she goes on to say that the conventional character of the convention
is not apparent (Strathern 1988: 298).
Well, is the convention apparent as such for a speaker of any language?
Maybe not, if it has to be in reflexive terms, but the speaker of this
language would be able to notice the wrongful use of expressions and
words, as you obviously did several times while listening to me, who is not
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a native speaker of English.
The existence of conventions is not proven by conceptual definitions but
by correct application.
Marilyn Strathern then goes on to say that the conditions of the intelligibility
of social action lie in the context of action (Strathern 1988: 102).
But thats just another way to make the norm appear immanent to action,
and to obfuscate the fact that it is rather a preliminary to it.
It is as if one said that the meaning of a word was determined entirely by
its context. No, that is too restrictive. The meaning of a word is determined
by its grammar in a certain context. The context doesnt invent the
meaning of a word out of nothing, even though it is of course related to it.
When an orthodox economist looks at the market, he tends to believe that
things happen by themselves, that exchanges are made necessary in an
immanent way, just by virtue of the encounter. But what the economist
then fails to see is that there must be social and normative preconditions
for the exchange to take place: for instance, the institution of currency, that
preexists the market and is not produced by it.
This is shown by some neo-liberal theorists like Friedrich Hayek who think
that money should be privatized, that it should become a true commodity
in order to prevent it from corrupting the free flow of the marketbecause,
precisely, money is a foreign body in the free market, it is the sign of its
being encompassed in outside social norms.
In the same way as the social institution of money is the non-economic
prerequisite to the exchange of commodities on the market, particular
norms of sociality are the prerequisites, for instance, to the actual
exchange between brothers-in-law. This exchange does not take place by
itself, just because people want to indulge in it, but because it is
meaningful, i.e. commonly agreed upon.

The non-apparent, seemingly immanent texture of norms of sociality in
Melanesia becomes in Marilyn Stratherns book an argument in favor of
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their aesthetic character (Strathern 1988: 187ff), by which is meant that
there are no norms, no constraints, and that the convention is not
produced by someone to the disadvantage of someone else (Strathern
1988: 119, 324), and that it is, above all, inventive.
(One could easily agree with that, however, if it were to mean that
normativity is implicit, not necessarily written down, and that one
experiences some sort of touch-and-feel familiarity with the proper way of
doing things. But this is not the way the argument goes.)
This argument shows, I think, that the idea of norm is foreign to Marilyn
Strathern because she equates it with conservatism, repression and
domination.
Thats the very point, it seems, where one can locate some sort of survival
of individualistic or atomistic theories in her work. The idea that normativity
is repressive and goes against immanent sociality goes hand in hand with
the idea of the free-willing individual.
However, how could one say that grammar is a constraint upon
expression? This would not make sense. Without signs we would not
express ourselves more freely, we would just remain silent and we would
not be understood either. This reminds one of Kants dove who thought
that it would fly faster if it were not for the air (that slows it down because it
carries it).
For the Melanesians, Marilyn Strathern adds, the problem is not freedom
of action but the way action will be perceived by others (Strathern 1988:
324). This is absolutely correct, but in general terms, not just for
Melanesia.
The normativity of language, for instance, does not lie in the repression of
mistakes. Grammar does not strike wrongdoers with a stick. It has nothing
to do with what modal logic calls repressive norms, but with constitutive
ones. The English language does not force you to speak English correctly,
but if you do not, you can be sure that you may not be understood. The
same happens in the case of Melanesian exchange. If you act in the
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proper, meaningful manner, your act manifests the intention of giving it a
meaning in the sense that you expect other people to understand it. Form
is normative.
Language does not constrain people to be intelligible (that is, it does not
constrain you either not to speak at all or only to speak clearly). It simply
provides a means to be understood. If you do not follow the rules of the
game, you dont play the game, thats all.
It is Marcel Mauss who said in a text (II: 117) about primitive money that,
contrary to what Durkheim initially thought, social norms should not be so
much depicted as coercive than as the very form of mutual understanding.
Social norms constitute a horizon of expectation.
This is exactly how Marilyn Strathern sees Melanesian sociality, while
trying however to figure out a way of describing it in non-normative terms,
exactly in the same way as one would describe language if people who
were not personally acquainted to each other were unable to speak the
same language (this is the argument of the absolute determination of
meaning by context); and as if people could speak a language without
having learned it (this is the argument of immanent intelligibility). Well, it
surely does not happen this way in the real world.
Then, she tries to justify these non-normative conventions, if this means
anything at all, by referring to Roy Wagners opposition (in The Invention of
Culture) of convention and invention (Strathern 1988: 189). Culture, says
Wagner, is invention.
And we learn in The Gender of the Gift that while the West is fascinated
with conventions and society, Melanesia prefers invention and sociality
(Strathern 1988: 175, 177).
This sounds metaphysical. The opposition is meaningless: invention
presupposes convention, it does not exist at the same level. If there were
only unrelated idiosyncratic, particular facts, i.e. if there were no
conventions, no invention would have meaning as such, only new
idiosyncratic facts would be added.
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The concept of invention is internally related to the concept of convention.
It is senseless to say that some culture is inventive and another
conventional. We think that by saying this we are able to describe the
dynamics of Melanesian cultures that seem to deploy their spontaneous
sociality in a normative void, but we are just confused as to the meaning of
the words we use.

Lets go back, in order to conclude, to the opposition between individual
and society Marilyn Strathern started with when she said it was a western
obsession (Strathern 1988: 29). In my mind, such a contrast is irrelevant
for several reasons:
(1) It is somewhat theoretically inconsistent to reject an individualistic
concept of society in order to promote a non-normative sociality. Only a
sociology of the autonomous individual can reject the idea of social norm.
(2) The opposition between individual and society is a grammatical fiction.
These concepts are not located at the same level of abstraction. It is as if
one wanted to oppose grammar and particular sentences.
Placing individuals and society at the same level betrays an atomistic
underlying theory, according to which society is some sort of closed
container full of individuals, full of atoms, of irreducible subjects. To refute
this concept, as Marilyn Strathern does, is certainly wise, but not to go
beyond that proves the atomistic framework still prevails.
(3) The opposition between individual and society is irrelevant because it
is pre-sociological:
(a) If we use the word individual in the sense of the empirical agent, of
the generic human being, then this contrast is dissolved, because we
ought not understand society as an aggregate of many individuals, but
as the locus of their shared language and norms, playing at the level of
the intelligibility of social action, at the level, that is, of social values.
(b) If we use the word individual in the sense of the normative subject,
i.e. the modern, independent, autonomous individual as ultimate value,
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then we know that it is a social and cultural construct, a peculiar, historical
creature.
The contrast individual/society is not only pre-sociological, but also
individualistic, as it confuses the empirical agent present in all societies
with the normative agent of modern societies.
Marilyn Strathern wanted to overcome this contrast individual/society by
finding a third way: that of sociality. But rather than overcoming it, we
should aim at dissolving it, because it is conceptually unclear and
confusing.
Following steps to Roy Wagner, she endorsed the idea of the fractal
person, i.e. a level of singular agency that is identical with the collective,
just on a reduced scale.
Once again were trying to get out of grammatical confusion by means of
another grammatical fiction. We may want to oppose and then reconcile
individuals and groups of individuals. But this is exactly what sociology, in
the days of Durkheim and Mauss, was striving to avoid at all costs.
And now, instead of opposing singularity and plurality, were trying to say,
by means of the fractal myth, that they show the same properties and that
the difference of scale makes no difference (which is wrong from an
ethnographic viewpoint, although the trope of fractality is common in
Melanesia, but not as implying the indistinction of levels). This is sheer
mythology, of the same kind that tried to escape the difficulty of having to
account for social norms by calling them aesthetic conventions.

To recapitulate, Marilyn Strathern refutes the concept of society for two
reasons:
(1) There is no such a thing as society, she says, because there are
conflicts of interest.
But then we should locate the common ground of understanding at another
level, the level of grammar, not of particular sentences.
Moreover, conflict expresses an elaborate, if confusing, form of
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agreement, the one that rests on the idea of justification and legitimacy.
(2) There is no such a thing as society, she says, because it must be
collective ; however, the collective is only masculine, then society cannot
be all-encompassing.
But then we should say that what is at issue is public and common, not
collective.
This is where the good old concept of whole or totality is more productive
than the individualistic notion of aggregate to describe the social
commonality we are talking about.
This concept of totality is comparable to the one provided by grammar. It
doesnt mean at all that its closed, non-evolving, watertight and
undifferentiated. Who would describe grammar in such a way?
As if to prevent the possibility of using such a notion of totality, she
stresses that sociality does not come after the fact, as a superstructural
elaboration of something else (Strathern 1988: 321), viz. social norms or
society.
One could easily agree with this statement if it were to mean that
grammar, for instance, does not come after the fact. Every language has a
grammar, even if it does not have a reflexive, school-like and written
grammar. Its a logical precondition to the meaning of words and
sentences that there are common, public and independent rules for their
use and that incorrect application can be recognized in the language game
as meaningless.
The very fact that we commonly guess the meaning of incorrectly formed
sentences while acknowledging their incorrectness proves that meaning is
not antecedent to correctness (otherwise we could not be aware of wrong
use).
In the same fashion, Melanesian sociality does not express itself
spontaneously in exchange. It is a common norm of action that specific
forms of exchange signify specific forms of relations. This is how things
happen in Melanesia. These rules constitute culture.
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We need to have a concept of shared norms of social action in order to
give meaning to the apparently obvious term of sociality. Sociality is not
creative, contextual, inventive, if it is not first and foremost normative.
I simply suggest, that we speak of society as we speak, taking inspiration
from Wittgenstein, of grammar.

REFERENCES
Durkheim, Emile, La division du travail social, Paris, Presses universitaires de
France, 1998.
Peirce, Charles Sanders, Collected Papers, Cambridge, Harvard University
Press, 1931
Strathern, Marilyn, The Gender of the Gift, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1988.
Wagner, Roy, The Invention of Culture, Englewood Cliffs, Prenctice Hall,
1975.
Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science, London, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1958.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, New York, McMillan, 1953.