CHAPTER ONE Individuals and the Aesthetic of Order

A STARTING POINT This volume represents the collective construction of a specifically anthropological approach to a question at the heart of all social science. How should we simultaneously account for both society and for individuals? Unlike most social science books about the individual, this volume is not concerned with individualism nor with the way different societies conceptualise individuals. Because, irrespective of whether people live within a highly individualising or a highly socialised environment, we still have the task of understanding them as individuals. Furthermore Anthropologists, in particular, commonly convey their findings through the presentation of individuals who were encountered during fieldwork. So this volume is not especially concerned with the study of individualism, nor with the growth of individualism. The understanding of the individual is something that should be part and parcel of the domain of anthropology even when we are working in a society which seems almost entirely opposed to individualism. We would repudiate an artificial disciplinary history, that left social science concerned with that aspect of society that transcended its composition by individuals and ceded to psychology the study of the individual per. se. This book creates an approach to people that is no more psychological, and no less anthropological, through a decision to concentrate on the individual as its primary unit of analysis.