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TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE WILL
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6887-0
Chapter One
WILLING CONTOURS Locating Volition in Anthropological Theory
Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Throop
There is a longstanding tradition in Americanist anthropology to engage in psychologically oriented research in efforts to expand our understanding of the cultural and personal patterning of subjective experience. From dreaming to reasoning, desiring to thinking, motivation to internalization, psychological anthropologists have interrogated the nuanced nature of subjective life as a means for destabilizing many taken-for-granted assumptions about what it means to experience the world as social actors. At the core of this enterprise sits a motivated interest to question what psychologists, philosophers, and other human scientists view to be the basic faculties, processes, and contents of subjective life (cf. Biehl, Good, and Kleinman 2007). Somewhat paradoxically, however, when engaging the problem of culture and subjective life, it is still largely the case that psychological anthropology, and the discipline of anthropology more generally, has often relied (at least tacitly) upon an analytical model, inherited from philosophy, that partitions human behavior into three main categories: cognition (which encompasses knowledge), emotion (which includes feelings, moods, and affects), and volition (including desires, choices, and proclivities to act-cf. D'Andrade 1987).
Also quite perplexing is the fact that although most anthropologists are comfortable discussing the relationship between culture and cognition and culture and emotion (in the various ways these aspects of subjective experience are understood), it seems that we have not yet explicitly and systematically set our sights (or our sites) on how culture and volition are, broadly speaking, interconnected. The impetus for this volume thus stems directly from what we perceive as a need to better foreground and engage a comparatively under-examined aspect of subjective life in cultural context, what we in Anglophone academic traditions label the "will."
To be sure, in highlighting the fact that volition has not yet been singled out for explicit and systematic discussion by psychological anthropologists does not mean to imply that psychological anthropology, nor anthropology more broadly, has entirely ignored the topic. Perhaps anthropologists and other social scientists have indeed concerned themselves with volition all along-even if only tangentially-describing both the most fundamental and most esoteric qualities of human will, but using a different vocabulary. When psychological anthropologists discuss subjectivity, desire, motivation, action, consciousness, and self; when linguistic anthropologists talk about agency and intentionality; and even in some cases when sociocultural anthropologists discuss embodiment, power, resistance, and struggle, we are all probably indirectly touching upon, or even outright addressing, the act and experience of willing-perhaps without characterizing it as such. Indeed, within the anthropological literature a significant web of inquiry seems to surround the will, its constituents, and its effects that is translucent enough to see something caught inside, but still too opaque to sharply reveal its formal contours.
Most anthropological research that has addressed topics related to volition can fit into one of two broad categories. The first approach can be called "culture as a barrier to volition." According to this perspective, culture-in the form of cultural models, norms, values, and crucially, language and linguistic structure-is, in a sense, imposed on the free will of individuals, constraining not necessarily the topics they choose to talk about, think about, and care about, but certainly the ways in which those topics are able to infiltrate everyday actions. Just as speakers are largely restricted to expressing themselves via the grammatical structures implicit in a shared language, so too can individuals only act within culturally sanctioned parameters. In other words, like language, culture is impervious to the will of ordinary people-and, it follows, will is always tethered to culture.
The second, more flexible approach, what William James would term "soft determinism," can be called the "culture as a sculptor of volition" perspective. Adherents to this point of view treat culture as influencing or facilitating how we think about, and more important for the current discussion, how we actually behave toward the world around us. Individuals are not necessarily limited by cultural structures, but instead operate most comfortably within them in a largely taken-for-granted manner. Culture gives us some of the categories with which we make sense of our environments, and we tend to behave primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, according to them.
However, what we offer with this volume is something different. All of the authors have abandoned-or at least bracketed off-exploring volition strictly within such traditional frameworks. Instead, most of the authors have refocused their studies on how culturally specific understandings of will interact with, and are often constituted by, a range of other phenomena that, though they may be universally or near-universally present, all accrue their own culturally relevant elaborations. What has emerged from these studies is an emphasis not on how volition relates broadly to culture (and its general tendency to restrict or otherwise impinge upon courses of action in everyday life), but instead on how volition is inextricably linked to local understandings of such categories as temporality, narrative, and responsibility. Moreover, several cases presented in this volume highlight the significance of will for individuals navigating between the world of everyday social relations and space- and time-shifted states of irrealis, such as imagination and dreaming.
Our goals for this volume are modest. We are pushing for a closer examination of the concept of will within a specifically anthropological frame work. We urge more explicitness with terminology. Perhaps agency and intentionality do the work of will well enough, and we are squeezing into an already over-crowded field. However, what we are attempting to do here is test whether more rigorous forays into theorizing the will can benefit our anthropological endeavors. The chapters in this volume all approach the will in different ways with very different kinds of data and questions. What emerges from all of them, however, is a series of challenging questions for all of us to consider: Is the will a useful anthropological concept? What forms does it take? Can it be said to be a universal? Where is it located? How is willing experienced? How does it relate to emotion and cognition? How is imagination implicated in acts of willing? What is the connection between morality, virtue, and willing? Can there be specified pathologies of the will?
Before we proceed in attempting to answer these questions, however, we would like to take some time to explore more thoroughly the ways in which social science-and anthropology specifically-has teased out the "culture as barrier to" and "culture as sculptor of" positions on volition. However, what follows in this introduction is not intended to be an exhaustive archaeology of all the work that has gone into analyzing the form, function, and overall nature of the will or volition in anthropology or the social sciences more generally. It is more moderately intended to open a generative space for future dialogue about the will from an anthropological frame. That said, any dialogue concerning the development of an anthropology of the will cannot be properly undertaken without some shared understanding of the historical and contextual basis for current discussions of will in the social sciences and elsewhere. It is thus toward this goal that we will first turn.
Our first step is to lay out a brief analysis of the etymology of the English term will as a way to highlight possible sedimented assumptions about its meaning in English-speaking North American and European academic communities. Following this we highlight briefly two basic philosophical approaches to the will before examining the will in early modern social theory. We then shift to anthropology proper to explore what we regard to be two of the most generative approaches to willing in contemporary culture theory, namely, practice theoretical and psychocultural variants of anthropology. This chapter then concludes by discussing the contributors' chapters in terms of four recurring themes that are raised throughout the volume.
ACTION AND VOLITION IN HISTORICA L PERSPECTIVE
The Semantic View of Will
The concept of the will is implicated in topics that run the gamut from explorations of subjective experience, desire, and choice to the examination of power, social structure, and resistance. This broad topical range is at least partially attributable to the term's concomitant range of diverse denotative and connotative associations. It may not be too much of a stretch to think that the various everyday definitional associations of will in the English language can be at least partially credited for diluting the development of a concerted focus upon the phenomenon of willing by anthropologists writing and working in English-speaking European and North American contexts.
The noun form of the English word will traces back to at least the Old English form willa, and means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a "desire, wish, longing; liking, inclination, [or] disposition (to do something)," with the additional sense of an "action of willing or choosing to do something; the movement or attitude of the mind which is directed with conscious intention to (and, normally, issues immediately in) some action, physical or mental." A long list representing graded shades of this general definition is also attached to the noun will, but it seems simple enough to acknowledge that the boundaries of its semantic domain are clear, if perforated.
The verb form, however, is more complicated. While the modern English verb "to will" means to "desire, wish for, have a mind to, 'want' (something)," its more common usage is as a simple auxiliary verb used to express the future tense. In both senses there is a certain directedness toward the future, either as a directedness toward acquiring some thing or state of affairs or as an explicit grammatical marker of the future tense. The related Old English verb form is wille, and the tendency for will to serve syntactically as an auxiliary verb (though not necessarily always marking future tense) has been around at least since Anglo-Saxon times and persists in other Germanic languages, such as modern Swedish and German. The difference, however, is the degree to which these languages typically encode "desire" and futurity in the word. Swedish vilja, for example (expressed as vill in the present tense) and German wollen (expressed as an inflected will in the present tense) both have a meaning of "to want" that is more strictly bounded than in English. Much like English, however, these forms have migrated to auxiliary verb status. Although in Swedish and German the semantics of these terms retains an element of directedness in the intentionality inherent in the act of desiring something, in English the unmarked form of will has come to mark mere futurity.
In these other languages, and less commonly in English, future tense is encoded with a different auxiliary verb, variants of the English shall (Old English sceal). Unlike will, which has historically implied an individual's inborn desire to act in the world, shall, until relatively recently, has signaled almost the complete opposite, a sense of assurance that some set of events will take place beyond the control of the speaker. This sense remains in Swedish, for instance, where a future tense shaded in certainty is expressed with skall (ska in everyday speech), and the simple future is generally expressed with the present tense (the same is common in German as well). Note that while this is still possible with the present progressive aspect in English (e.g., "I'm playing baseball tomorrow afternoon"), the strict division of the future tense into different degrees of certainty and control over the outcomes of action was once a much more common element of the language.
Two last points. In other Germanic languages will is related to words for choosing and choice, for instance välja, "to choose" in modern Swedish, and wählen, "to choose" in modern German. Additionally, will also most likely shares a common root with the English "well" (väl in modern Swedish), whose earliest meanings implied a sense of morally correct behavior (cf. Good, Garro, this volume).
What emerges from this constellation of features drawn from the linguistic biography of the word will is a tumultuous path-largely unreckoned by contemporary speakers-of semantic and syntactic shifts that obscure potentially helpful facts that might aid us in understanding the utility of "the will" as a philosophical and anthropological concept. Historically the lexical form will implies choice, it implies an inborn ability to act in the world-as opposed to the lexical form shall, which implies external influences on action-and early on it may also have encoded a feeling that one's voluntary actions are morally weighted. Embedded in these various meanings are notions of futurity, desire, obligation, morality, control, and differing degrees of certainty regarding one's ability to engage in and accomplish a particular act.
This rich semantic field thus includes connotations ranging from inner subjective life to external social dictates. Such various definitions and uses of will in English are certainly suggestive of why the term has proven to hold such a precarious place in contemporary culture theory. That said, even despite this conceptual complexity, there is one dimension of willing suggested in this etymological examination that has proven to captivate the imaginations of anthropologists and other social scientists, namely, past and ongoing debates over personal choice and external determinacy in human action.
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