The Reproduction of ‘Irrationality’
Ben Killingsworth, University of Melbourne
Anthropology has always been intently interested in the objectification by humans of themselves and the things around them. Amongst the early founding figures of anthropology this engagement was focused on exploring cross-cultural differences in people’s ‘rationalities’. Of late the tenor of this interest has changed markedly. Sensitised to the disempowering effect of past anthropological work on the subject, anthropologists have in recent times tended to eschew concepts of cultural difference and to focus instead on universals of human objectification or ‘rationality’. Lost in this shift of focus, I want to go some way to highlighting in this paper, is an acknowledgement of the different ways in which, or different extents to which, people communicate their objectifications. Lost also, I want to highlight, has been an acknowledgement of the powerful effects such differences can have within people’s lives. In attempting to pursue this point I want to present in this paper some ethnographic material gathered while conducting fieldwork in several playgroups and mothers’ groups around Melbourne, Australia. This material relates to the different manner in which two groups of (roughly) two-year-old children were learning to enact themselves and the different, highly intimate social contexts in which this learning was occurring. In presenting this material I hope to provide one brief account of how non-objectivity, or ‘irrationality’, can emerge, both at the micro level and macro level of social interaction, as a highly effective, disempowering social construct.
