The Institutions of Meaning: A Defense of Anthropological Holism by Vincent Descombes (review)

A still room where one hears the clock ticking, a quiet voice speaking with great clarity. A sense of privilege accompanied my reading Descombes, a sense that I was being invited to share something rather rare and fine—and the translator's exquisite rendition of this text, first published in Paris in 1996, must be part of that impression. A nonphilosopher reading the book is reminded of the virtues of scrupulous analytic reasoning; an anthropologist, of anthropology's enduring premise about the contextualizing power of social life. How to account for what we take for granted when people apparently understand one another? Given the endless argumentation surrounding this question and its variants, there is much to consider and much to dispose of. The author does raise his voice at times, of course, as for example when dissipating the mirage of social totalities imagined as indivisible collections of elements—as collectivities that are more than the individuals who compose them. Descombes instead favors the complexity of structural holism (following in the path of Louis Dumont), which requires a specification of relations and their logic. Thus, one of Descombes's excursions takes in "the gift" and the fallacy of rendering interaction as a question of dyadic relations. Without the third term of an institution or law of giving, there could be no gift. The realism of triadic relations is a holism, he writes, reducible neither to the positivism of dyadic relations nor to the atomism of monadic terms. Anyone writing the history of British social anthropology might wonder what the effect of this argument might have been had this book appeared in English in (say) 1956 or 1966. But then, that was the very time when Dumont's writing was gathering force, and for myself I take from Descombes the thought that Dumont's criticism of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's British legacy (collective representations and dyadic relations alike) deserves reappraisal. The hands of the clock keep coming around to the same hour; this book is highly pertinent to the way much anthropology is still being written.