Guest Editorial For A Poetics of Social Life

GUEST EDITORIAL
For a Poetics of Social Life

Michael Herzfeld
(This Guest Editorial first appeared in 1987)
One of the burning issues in modern anthropology concerns the relationship between the
individual and the larger society. Is society a kind of metallic grid that we all have to move
through in lockstep? How many of us feel that it is? And yet how many of us have not felt that
there were not simply limitations on what we may or may not do, but also outer edges that we
could explore, tease, distort (bending the rules)? Just as a poem takes the language of ordinary
discourse and makes it the object of its own attention, so a socially creative person can make
something interesting out of ordinary conventions by pushing them to the very edge of violation,
but no farther.
Indeed, this is what a poetics of social interaction must imply. The celebrated linguist Roman
Jakobson defined the poetic functionthe quality that we all recognize in poetry and in highly
expressive proseas an orientation toward the message as such. A poem is a poem because it
draws the readers attention to its own form, which often exploits the peculiarities of everyday
language and makes them the object of its linguistic playpuns, metaphors, rhymes, odd word
orders, and so onall of them suggesting a multiplicity of messages, none of them ultimately
reducible to a single, clear-cut meaning.
That kind of play on form is also crucial to social life. Social life is marked by a high degree of
indeterminacy and by a set of conventions, which seem both to set limits to that fluid quality and
also themselves to shift shape and content all the time. People who play with social form are
seeking a special position for themselves, and at the same time helping to fashionor
refashionthe norms and values that the society lives by.
In the Cretan village where I worked, men steal sheep to make friendsin other words, to
impress others with their prowess so much that the latter would seek them as allies in the tough,
competitive world of the highland pastures. But just stealing a sheep is not enough. You must do
it in an original way, just within the bounds of the normalstealing from a much older and
tougher shepherd, getting your rival or a policeman to eat the meat of an animal you have just
stolen, capturing the animals by some trick (such as setting fire to the brushwood around the
sheepfold). And when you tell the story, you add pepper to it, making the tale as tasty as stolen
meat. If you are a dull narrator, you are probably a dull thief, and if you are a dull thief, you are
not worth the trouble of turning into an ally. Think of the exaggerations of normalcy required of
someone who wants to be a regular person, especially populartwo phrases that imply being
so conventional that you really are not literally conventional (or regular!) at all. One must be a
poet of ones own social person in order to stand out in society, but one should not stand out so
far as to become unacceptable. Social skill consists in negotiating this delicate balance.
Thus, there are rules, but they become visible when skilled social actors bend them. Not
everyone can do this well enough, of course, and most societies have misfits whose major
misfortune lies in their inability to know when to stop. A man in the Cretan village who came
from a poor, weak patrigroup but who liked to shout loudly in arguments over cards and politics
simply attracted more and more scorn. But those who do know what they are doing use their
social comportment as a kind of rhetoricnot, that is, just in the form of elegant words, but as a
means of persuasion that includes gestures, social manners, generosity, and a great deal more in
addition to the verbal skills that make a person persuasive.
All social life has this rhetorical quality. Some anthropologists, following both their colleague
the late Victor Turner and the philosopher Kenneth Burke, have also suggested that social life be
seen as a kind of drama. These approaches do not necessarily mean that we should avoid talking
about social structure, which has long been a staple concept in the discipline. They do imply that
social structure exists by virtue of its being constantly reproduced, and this then gives rise to a
whole set, infinitely extendable in theory, of parallel structures in art, poetry, music, and
architecture.
Architecture is an interesting case in point; after all, we do talk about social structure. In many
cultures, houses are divided into male and female zones, each with its distinctive equipment, and
each invested with a meaning that depends on the other part (what in symbolic studies is called
complementary opposition). In some cultures, the outside of the house is regarded as male,
public, and expressive of the culture of the official polity or state, while the inside of the house is
female, private, and full of familiar items that have little historical significance in the larger
society. But we should not assume that people passively accept these divisions; the very threat
that one might violate them is a source of real power, though not of official power. Once again,
we see that the certainties of social and cultural life turn out, on closer inspection, to be
manipulable elements in a larger social rhetoric, one that uses cultural forms to lay claim to
legitimacy and authority.
Nowadays, it is often a nation-state government that makes these claims on the most inclusive
level. But at all levels of social life the possibility that a social performance will somehow
undermine a collective representation is always a threat. To manage ones social life well means
knowing just how far to let the performance go in subverting the generally accepted orderor it
may (to borrow a term from linguistic philosophy) constitute that order. Just as a jury, in
pronouncing the suspect guilty, establishes guilt in a social frame regardless of who actually
committed the deed, so every social action constitutes new links, new perceptions, and new
possibilities. When a poor male villager on the island of Rhodes, Greece, makes good by dint
of hard work, he may feel he now has the right to treat the powerful members of the community
as his equals. He tests this by clowning a little more than they, to see whether he gets their
amused admirationin which case he has successfully constituted his new status-or their covert
but poisonous jeers.
Scholars have a poetics of social life too. Watch them vying with one another as each tries to
achieve more impressive forms of pomposity, more honorable status, more titles and respect.
Some play it well, others play it less well. The more they try to formalize their actions, the more
likely they are to find their bluff called, and the more they make modest disclaimers and tell one
another how provisional their work is, the more they may be hoping to score a hit. Watch yourself and your friends do the same things too. This is a good exercise in reflexivity, the analysis of
ones own role in what one studies. We are all in it together, because we are all participants in a
social world.

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GUEST EDITORIAL

For a Poetics of Social Life

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