N Rapport
Biographic Data
| ID | 11168 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Rapport |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Rapport |
| SIGNATURE | RAPPORT N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2803-0212 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 139 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 348 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 137 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Moments of Willing
Will' might be a term for the energy that moves individual lives forward. 'Wilfulness' references character: how exercises of will characterise an individual's life. 'Intention' focuses on the aim of an act of willing - while not everything one wills is what one intends - and 'desire' refers to the wish for something - but not necessarily something one either wills or intends to happen. 'Motivation' describes the reason behind a particular act of…
‘I am Here’, Abraham Said
Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical work on ‘the Other’ offers a challenge to the discipline of anthropology that claims knowledge of the human. For Levinas, the ‘secrecy’ of subjectivity – a fundamental facet of the human condition – demands an ethics of ignorance and not-knowing; the mystery of otherness is only to be approached through ‘inspiration’. Can anthropology meet a Levinasian challenge if it would define itself as a science as well as a …
Chapter 1. Cosmopolitan Anthropology
Hurt geography
Hurt geography'As concerned postgraduate anthropology students at the University of St Andrews, we feel compelled to raise three questions regarding Nigel Rapport's 'Hurt geography' narrative in AT 40(3):1. Has Rapport's personal experience with Israel influenced his interpretation of historical events?For instance, his usage of 'first settled' regarding the foundation of Kibbutz Ya'sur (p.19) could be seen as implying a condoning of colonialism,…
Israel, As Hurt-Geography
In this autobiographical narrative, Nigel Rapport recounts how his time as a volunteer at Kibbutz Yas'ur in Israel in 1975 profoundly affected his identity and sparked a deep emotional connection to the country. Despite initial reluctance to visit Israel and engage with his Jewish heritage, Rapport's experiences living and working on the kibbutz - including labouring in the citrus groves, bonding with the kibbutz youth and being embraced by the c…
Life is Individual
Cosmopolitanism concerns the relation between the most general and the most particular aspects of the human condition. On the one hand there is the human species, representing the universals of human life or ‘cosmos’. On the other hand, there is the human individual, embodying all that is unique in time and space: ‘polis’. To comprehend the human, according to cosmopolitanism is to see these polar realities always in relation. The human species i…
Cosmopolitan Moment, Cosmopolitan Method
The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science
An anthropological investigation of cruelty and its contrasts
In liberal political philosophy, from Michel de Montaigne to Judith Shklar, cruelty – the wilful inflicting of pain on another in order to cause anguish and fear – has been singled out as ‘the most evil of all evils’ and as unjustifiable: the ultimate vice. An unconditional rejection and negation of cruelty is taken to be programmatic within a liberal paradigm. In this contribution, two anthropologists triangulate cruelty as a concept with tortur…
Worlding Anthropology
Thinking Through Sociality
As issues and circumstances investigated by anthropologists are becoming ever more diverse, the need to address social affiliation in contemporary situations of mobility, urbanity, transnational connections, individuation, media, and capital flows, has never been greater. Thinking Through Sociality combines a review of classical theories with recent theoretical innovations across a wide range of issues, locales, situations and domains. In this bo…
Human Nature as Capacity
What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "the human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature - "To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel …
Tracing the density of human being
For Emmanuel Levinas, to study human nature is to 'liberate human beings from the categories adapted uniquely for things'. This, paradoxically, is to occupy a standpoint where the human 'no longer offers itself to our powers': to go beyond the category-thinking of cultural construction and to put what one consciously supposes - Self, Society, Culture, Nature - into question. The 'liberation' of human nature is an unconscious process that does not…
Coming Home to a Dream
Since its creation, in 1948, the modern-day State of Israel, for purposes of defence as well as development, has functioned as a highly centralized organism. Not least amongst its concerns has been language: the language of its citizens; the language of its self-descriptions. Established by government statute rather than arising out of local demand, they were largely financed from the national development budget. Since, they have been remote-cont…
Home and Movement
Quite a long time ago now, Gregory Bateson put it like this: the human brain thinks in terms of relationships. Things and events are secondary, epiphenomena: 'all knowledge of external events is derived from the relationship between them': from the relationships that the brain conceives between them. Even if the actors were nomads, their myths were regarded anthropologically as making of the environment through which they passed a known place, an…
The Topic and the Book
'Migrants of identity' was the phrase that Theodore Schwartz used in the mid-1970s to describe the continual search by American youth for an identity that they found 'acceptable and authentic'. Individual identity was always and everywhere dynamic, Schwartz suggested, always something 'problematic', something calling for a resolution that was never wholly acquired, because it was through the search that the individual per se came to be defined. A…
‘Criminals by Instinct’
Leach would depict the creative violation of present social structures as ‘the very essence of being a human being’. Nihilistic violence breaches the surface of civil exchange, breaks the shared forms of behaviour, such that orientation towards it by others, and their development of stable expectations with regard to it, is prevented. Individuals can organise themselves, integrate their behaviours into reliable and joint systems, without developi…
Dialogue
LJ: I am grateful to Nigel Rapport who first mooted the idea of a dialogue as a fitting conclusion to this volume. Before the dialogue got underway, Marilyn Strathern suggested that we table a 'position' statement on knowledge exchange as a medium of (scholarly) writing. Not having thought of this question in explicit terms before, I quickly put together the 'position' below. I hasten to add that it is mine alone, serving as a heuristic that star…
Encountering, explaining and refuting essentialism
Essentialism manifests itself in a diversity of forms and is used in multiple ways. Yet it is always potentially dangerous - even when it is mobilised strategically and in apparently worthy forms for purposes of overcoming oppressive structures. As the first in a collection of articles focused on various manifestations of essentialism, this article offers a brief historical outline of how social anthropology deployed essentialist thinking, even a…
Britain and Brexit
In his analysis of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet control, Georges Devereux argued that social movements exist not because members exhibit attitudinal uniformity but because in the “same” collective act individuals serendipitously find a socially acceptable expression for their worldviews. Any number of individual meanings and motivations come to be “accidentally” actualised alike. Devereux’s insights are pertinent regarding the elect…
The grey zone, distortion and the ownership of causation
I am grateful (once more) for the attention Don Gardner has paid to my work, in particular to arguments pertaining to individuality and its relation to the aspirations of the social sciences. Let me begin with overlaps he sees between us: (a) prevailing images of what anthropology needed to be, historically (in order to be an adequate science) have led to too great an emphasis on developing taxonomies of cultural variation, along with the general…
The nature of a cosmopolitan anthropology and the nature of human difference
Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in his incisive and fair-minded insight to 'what is European about European anthropology' by advocating its cosmopolitanism. Anthropology that is cosmopolitan might go beyond hierarchies of language, country and institution, he urges; might provide the friction between different traditions that sparks a global intellectual exchange; and might bring global insights to bear, comparatively, on local issues of political …
Anthropology through Levinas (Further Reflections)
The philosophy of Levinas poses a challenge to anthropology. For Levinas, the 'secrecy of subjectivity', the absolute incomprehensibility of one individual to another, is the fundamental fact of human being. It is also the foundation of morality, and ethical system, acknowledging the irreducible mystery and integrity of individuality as preceding any claim to knowledge, any legislation of culturo-symbolic construction. This article outlines some …
The action and inaction of care
While ‘later life sees care emerge in ways that are new’ (Dawson and Goodwin‐Hawkins), this article argues that there is a general form to ethical care that pertains to all individual citizens in a liberal or democratic society. The form is one of balance: between engagement and inclusion on the one hand, and a preservation of autonomy and personal sovereignty on the other; between action and inaction. ‘Cosmopolitan politesse’ is introduced as a …
Being Inside and Outside Social Relations
It is a special responsibility to incur individual readings of one’s work from colleagues. I hope the following line of thought does them justice. Nay Rather, an essay by Anne Carson (a translator and poet as well as a classical scholar), begins with an account of the trial of Joan of Arc. Caught in battle against the English and their Burgundian allies on 23 May 1430, a year after she had assisted a French army in lifting the English siege of Or…
Transcendent Individual
Transcendent Individual argues for a reappraisal of the place of the individual in anthropolgical theory and ethnographic writing. A wealth of voices illustrate and inform the text, showing ways in which individuals creatively 'write', narrate and animate cultural and social life. This is an anthropology imbued with a liberal morality which is willing to make value judgements over and against culture in favour of individuality.Rapport draws widel…
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Social and Cultural Anthropology: the Key Concepts is an easy to use A-Z guide to the central concepts that students are likely to encounter in this field. Now fully updated, this third edition includes entries on: Material Culture Environment Human Rights Hybridity Alterity Cosmopolitanism Ethnography Applied Anthropology Gender Cybernetics With full cross-referencing and revised further reading to point students towards the latest writings in S…
Anthropology through Levinas
An anthropological commonplace since Evans-Pritchard has been that ethnographic subjects will have their rationality circumscribed by the discursive opportunities made available by a "culture." Hence, social science comes to terms with the "internal" nature of judgements (Winch). Ultimately, the relativist nature of both Winch's and Evans-Pritchard's conclusion has its source in Wittgenstein's philosophy. For Wittgenstein, "the limits of my langu…
Gratuitousness
Interiority—an individual's inner consciousness, the continual conversation one has with oneself–remains an anthropological terra incognita . Literature has been less circumspect in this regard; fiction might be said to be ‘truer’ than social science in its efforts and intent to deal with how individual consciousness feels in the everyday and is immanent in social life. In this article I argue for recognising interiority as a crucial focus of ant…
An Outline for Cosmopolitan Study
The history of anthropology, according to George Stocking, represents an argument between Enlightenment and Romantic impulses: on the one hand the universalism of anthropos, on the other the diversitarianism of ethnos. In its structural and relativist emphases, the latter impulse has tended to predominate in social and cultural anthropology. A case can be made for the importance of emphasizing a continuing Enlightenment heritage in social-scienti…
Anthropology and Literature
Encountering, explaining and refuting essentialism
Essentialism manifests itself in a diversity of forms and is used in multiple ways. Yet it is always potentially dangerous - even when it is mobilised strategically and in apparently worthy forms for purposes of overcoming oppressive structures. As the first in a collection of articles focused on various manifestations of essentialism, this article offers a brief historical outline of how social anthropology deployed essentialist thinking, even a…
Anthropology through Levinas (Further Reflections)
The philosophy of Levinas poses a challenge to anthropology. For Levinas, the 'secrecy of subjectivity', the absolute incomprehensibility of one individual to another, is the fundamental fact of human being. It is also the foundation of morality, and ethical system, acknowledging the irreducible mystery and integrity of individuality as preceding any claim to knowledge, any legislation of culturo-symbolic construction. This article outlines some …
Apprehending Anyone
This article argues that the individual, as an actor with an identity over and above his or her membership in social groupings and cultural traditions, exists universally as an ontological reality. The recognition of this figure in anthropology is both an empirical and a moral necessity. The article gives the moniker ‘ Anyone ’ to the transcendent individual figure. The course of the article, after the introduction of Anyone , is to survey the cr…
An Anthropology of Reading
An Anthropology of Reading II. ReadingOs Work III. The Exegetical Demonstration IV. Problems of Reading V. The Naturally Analyzable Text VI. Order Terms and Competent Systems VII. The Deeply Reasoned Text VIII. The Instructed Reading IX. The Cultural Object X. A Family Romance XI. An Alchemy of Practice XII. The Technologies and Politics of Reading Notes Index of Examples
The Ethics of Apology
■ On 13 February 2008, the Australian government apologized to the 'stolen generations': those children of Aboriginal descent who were removed from their parents (usually their Aboriginal mothers) to be raised in white foster-homes and institutions administered by government and Christian churches - a practice that lasted from before the First World War to the early 1970s. This apology was significant, in the words of Rudd, for the 'healing' of t…
The 'Contrarieties' of Israel
Cet article specule sur la place de la contradiction dans la construction symbolique du monde. En contraste avec un travail extensif en anthropologie sur l'ubiquite de la classification symbolique dans les societes et les cultures humaines, une attention insuffisante a ete portee sur la contradiction comme atout cognitif: sur le fait que les acteurs jouent sur les classifications symboliques, et les rejettent en meme temps qu'ils les assument. Pa…
The Politics of Ethnographic Reading and Writing
The Liberal Treatment of Difference
John Stuart Mill's liberal vision included a notion of "civil advancement" whereby the free expression of a diversity of opinion would result not only in an initial collision of difference but also in an eventual consolidation as truth. The work of this article is to explore the ways and extents in which such liberalism can translate into a cosmopolitan anthropology. Is toleration of difference the appropriate anthropological ethic, or can one hy…
Person to Person
Person to Person: Fieldwork, Dialogue and the Hermeneutic Method. BARRY P. MICHRINA and CHERYLANNE RICHARDS. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. xiv + 176 pp., appendix, bibliography, Index
Britain and Brexit
In his analysis of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet control, Georges Devereux argued that social movements exist not because members exhibit attitudinal uniformity but because in the “same” collective act individuals serendipitously find a socially acceptable expression for their worldviews. Any number of individual meanings and motivations come to be “accidentally” actualised alike. Devereux’s insights are pertinent regarding the elect…
Anthropology as Cosmopolitan Study
Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture
Culture is no excuse'. Critiquing multicultural essentialism and identifying the anthropological concrete
Loving recognition
The anthropology of love has tended to focus on the romantic, and to explore its universality. In this article I ask a different kind of question of love. How might love be recruited as a moral force and deployed as a public virtue? I conceive of love not solely or principally as a private and domestic virtue but as a public and civil practice: a structuring of social interaction by means of affective appreciation of individual others. I understa…
Distortion and Love
In this ground-breaking book, a theory of ’distortion’ - of the way in which the processes of human life are subject to interference, diversion and transformation - is developed by way of the art of one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century painters and that art’s public reception. Devoted to his native village of Cookham-on-Thames, Stanley Spencer painted not only landscapes and portraits with loving detail but also the ’memory-feelings’ which…
The Embodiment of Learning and Teaching
How people arrive at their convictions, and how they come to change them, remain immensely difficult questions. This article approaches convictions as manifestations of individuals' embodiment, and as allegories of their lives. As well as a rehearsing of moments of his own embodied learning, the main author engages in an email exchange with the second author, pondering how he might answer her questions about an anthropological methodology which m…
Writing on the body
The physical worlds which individuals inhabit are extensions of what they consciously contrive, and in the narratives individuals write in and of their lives one often sees the means by which that consciousness pours itself out into the world, bringing a personal version of the world into effect. Narratives manifest the connection between individuals' outer worlds and their inner consciousnesses. This applies in complex ways also to individuals' …
Questions of Consciousness
Ritual Speaking in a Canadian Suburb
In the context of an expanding suburb on the edge of a Canadian city, this paper explores the ritual of daily conversation, and the role of individual practice in bringing to fruition common cultural texts. It offers a re-working of the Geertzian notion of texts as cultural control mechanisms, and a reappraisal of Giddens' view of the sociology of action as the study of behaviors which may be legitimately divorced from their individual perpetrato…
Damaged Gods; Cults and Heroes Reappraised
Julie Burchill Damaged Gods; Cults and Heroes Reappraised (London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1986). 152 pages
A Policeman's Construction of 'The Truth
Anthropology and Autobiography
Talking Culture
Talking Violence
Ritual Speaking in a Canadian Suburb
In the context of an expanding suburb on the edge of a Canadian city, this paper explores the ritual of daily conversation, and the role of individual practice in bringing to fruition common cultural texts. It offers a re-working of the Geertzian notion of texts as cultural control mechanisms, and a reappraisal of Giddens' view of the sociology of action as the study of behaviors which may be legitimately divorced from their individual perpetrato…
Surely Everything Has Already Been Said About Malinowski's Diary
Writing Fieldnotes
Discourse and Individuality
General/Theoretical Anthropology
Dollar, Dove, and Eagle
The Politics of Ethnographic Reading and Writing
The Ethnography of Reading
Anthropology and Literature
The Very Idea
Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture
The Prose and the Passion
Part 1: prefatory statements - the discursive context of the book, the genres of the book, the method of the book, the ethos of the book, the plan of the book introduction and discoveries, Forster and Wanet - Forster - dates in a life, a discovery of Forster, Clifton College, Polack's house and Ernie, Forster as if an aphorist, Forster as a liberal, Forster as a social novelist, a discovery of Wanet. Part 2: the physicality of community belonging…
Contemporary futures
The Production of Indifference
Sampling Anthropology with a Southern Accent
The Prose and the Passion
The Collected Works of Edward Sapir. 4, Ethnology
Non-Places
Dear Elsie', `Dear Bronio
Questions of Consciousness
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