14 Interactionist Theories and Transactionalism

Neha Tiwari

Contents

1.      Introduction

2.      History of Transactionalism/ Interactionalism

3.      What is exchanged in Transactionalism/ Interactionalism?

4.      Can Inequality be consensual?

5.      Processual Theory

6.      Contribution of Bailey in Transactionalism/ Interactionalism

7.      Social Events as Process

8.      Conclusion

Learning outcomes:

This module will help

• to gain insights into the interactionalist theory of anthropology
• to understand the motto behind the actions of the individuals living in a society
• to make a clear cut understanding of the concept of Transactionalism/ Interactionalism

1.    Introduction

The transactionalist/interactionalist perspective in anthropology was an attempt to overcome the limitations of the traditional structure-functionalism by reviewing the perspective of seeing an individual as the basic unit of social life, as featured by Malinowski, Radcliffe – Brown and Durkheimian social structure . Transactionalism/interactionalism is also referred as “methodological individualism” and also it shares resemblance with symbolic-internationalism. Transactionalism mainly focuses on the decision making strategies adopted by the individuals living in a particular political “arenas”. This perspective mainly flourished between the late 1950s and 1970s, as a result of influence of Norwegian anthropologist Fredrick Barth and another prominent figure F.G Bailey. Transactionalism considers social behavior as a series of exchanges between individuals who are pursuing their self-interest, which was in contrast with the view of structure-functionalism. According to Radcliffe-Brown, “society was a group of people sharing a moral consensus”. But for Barth, no such moral consensus exists among people but they are state of agreement with society’s expectations. In terms of action people are guided much less by the needs of society than by their individual desires. Society was considered to be the sum total of exchanges and interaction between individuals who mostly seek their self-interest. According to Barth, this view of behavior would allow anthropologist to view and analyze those areas which structural functionalism could not. Through transactionalism one can understand the variability in people’s behavior i.e., under what circumstance people manipulate, redefine and even break cultural rules rather than following them blindly. Transactionalists recognized that intra-cultural variation was much more common than structural – functionalists acknowledged. In other words, “deviance” was really the norm according to Durkheim and Radcliffe Brown. Transactionalism provides an insight in to change, people for their self interest and benefit redefine and modify social rules and develop new set rules. According to transactionalists’ view society is in a dynamic state, which arises from the innovative, strategic behavior of its members.

2.    History of Transactionalism

Prior to Barth’s work Marcel Mauss in 1950 had said that gifting is not free to its recipients as contains expectations of return. Gifting is basically establishing reciprocal relationships. All the behavioral interactions include some kind of exchange between people, but the goal of exchange is different from society to society. In small-scale societies the exchange cements social relationships for example the Malinowski’s study of Kula ring exchange, in this the exchange is beyond the economic and material aspect it extends up to the strengthening of social relations. In Industrialized societies, goods are no longer the means to an end, but often become the end in themselves and, indeed, a social relationship may be compromised or violated in order to get something of value from another party (negative reciprocity). Mauss admitted that this is not always the case in industrialized societies, especially where close social ties exists between people.

Barth during his study at University of Chicago in 1950s met Goffman and was influenced with his views of social interaction. Goffman argued that almost all social interaction entails individuals trying to influence others in order to obtain their goals. Interpersonal behavior involves “impression management” designed to shape others’ perceptions of you. People use stealth and ‘false advertising’ when they interact with others to further their careers, romances or other objectives. We all play part in the drama of everyday life, according to Goffman, with all our actions divided between our “onstage” behavior, in which we enact those roles that we want others to witness, and our “backstage” behavior, which represents our “real selves”. Goffman’s view was completely different from that of Emile Durkheim and Radcliffe –Brown. Goffman’s view did not include any kind of solidarity and value consensus.

The main inspiration behind Goffman’s such perspective of social behavior as self-interested exchange was the classical economic theory of Adam Smith and also Barth’s transactionalist theory was influenced by Adam Smith (1723-1790) a Scottish social philosopher and economist. In his famous volume The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith had clearly mentioned about the self benefitted and self interested motto of individuals behind the economic behavior. According to economic theory of Smith three critical assumptions about human behavior are there which were in turn adopted by Barth also. The three assumptions are as follows:

• People are free to make choices between various choices.
• People in all spheres try to maximize their self-interest.
• People are rational i.e., people can clearly calculate the costs and benefits of a particular course of action.

A critical assumption that is carried over from economic theory to transactionalism is that exchanges between the individuals result in social harmony. That is, Barth, like Smith assumed that interactions takes place among the people who are getting equivalent value from their interaction.

3.    What is exchanged in Transactionalism?

Marcel Mauss has coined and used a term “prestation” in his book The Gift (1950), to refer to any social or material reward given by a person to another person. Barth has used the same word “prestation” to define the object of interaction between people. This could be things such as praise, respect, honor, support, or help of any kind like moral support, monetary help or can be any kind of help. According to Barth, we all want maximum possible benefit out of every social relationship. We try to get as much benefit out of any social relation as what we invest into it. Barth in his Models of Social Organization (1966), has postulated that if any one offers any kind of prestation such as praise, respect, honor, support, or help to the other person then he/she whether the prestation giver or the prestation taker thinks to take out the maximum benefit out of it. Both of the persons consider themselves to be the maximum profitable one. They think their profit to be much more than the investment in the relationship established, if this condition is not present then there exists no long term social relationship between the two persons. The main idea here is that all the social relations are reciprocal: people receive either equal or more from what they give by themselves to others. Here people are not exchanging same things mostly. Always there exists a feeling of pro quo (something for something).

4.    Can Inequality be consensual?

In Barth’s Political Leadership in Swat Pathans (1959), the central issue is can inequality be consensual and also this book is a classic of post-functionalist political anthropology. Swat is an autonomous state which is presently a part of northern Pakistan. The people of this region are mainly Islam oriented but there are influences of Hinduism in terms of caste system. The state is under the leadership of prince known as Wali. Yet the Wali has relatively little sway in the rural areas. This is a feudal society in which the landlords hold main power. As per data of Barth the main land holders belong to Pakhtun castes, who are only 5-10% of the total Swat population and rest of the population depend up on these land holders for their survival. There is also a class of sharecroppers who pay 80% of their harvests to the Khans as rent. In this type of group of tenant farmers are completely dominated by their landlords, and they also have no other choice in this system. But Barth argues otherwise. According to his theory of transactionalism, both the tenant farmers and the landlords make choices about their political allegiance, not unlike choices made by the consumers in the market. Tenants and Khans have implicit contracts in which they seek something of value from the other. Also these relationships can be entered into or broken off as per circumstances. The peasants need Khans for economic benefit and the Khans need peasants for their political loyalty. The Khans are always in state of competence among each other, they always quarrel over land issues and the peasants in exchange of food express their political loyalty to the Khans. A Khan for his political survival needs large political following, which will be provided by the peasants. Barth says that for this reason the powerful khan has to give certain flexibility or benefits to the peasants in lieu of the support of the seemingly powerless peasants. According to Barth anyone in this system can switch his alliance from one khan to another depending upon the kind of deal that he is able to negotiate. Here there is a symbiotic relation where both the groups are mutually benefitted but from the outsider’s view the perspective will be entirely different as he/she will think the peasants as the sufferers and the Khans to be the main profit takers and powerful group. According to Barth the economic and political contracts are independent of each other.

From the above discussion it can be concluded that social relations are always based on the concept of exchange or benefit gained from the relation established. Barth’s work clearly mentions about that social forms like kinship groups, economic institutions and political alliances are generated by the actions and strategies of the individuals deployed against a context of social constraints. By observing how people interact with each other, an insight could be gained into the nature of the competition, values and principles that govern individuals or choices, and also the way resources are allocated in society.

5. Processual Theory

Processual theory was given by Barth in 1966 in his famous book Models of Social Organization. Barth’s main aim was to explain social forms. And his basic argument was “to explain the form one needs to discover and describe the processes that generate the form”. Hence Barth calls his substantive, explanatory theories ‘generative models’. Barth favored Raymond Firth’s discussion of social organization. Barth has given proper explaination of generative model in his own work the Nomads of South Persia (1961). In this book he has described the life of Basseri tribes of pastoral nomads, who dwells in tents and migrates up to down the Zagros Mountain with their sheep and goats. Basseri nomads belong to a middle class group of their area and make up their living by their own livestock capital and they fulfill their own needs without great difficulty. They are in contrast with the rich, sedentary landowners of the upper class, who live luxurious life on the labor of others. Amongst the Basseri nomads who are mobile residential communities, most families have from about 80-150 sheep in their herd and few if any have less than 80 and more than 200.

Basseri nomads follow the pattern of having limited number of sheeps. This is the main basic point of reaction according to Barth. Barth says that this pattern or social form is not as a result of rules rather it is due to the demand of their community, resource availability and lifestyle; Basseri families would be permitted to stay in camps and migrate with a few animals or even none or with many hundreds or even more. Rather this pattern the restricted range of herd size, result from an aggregate, or totality, of choices made by Basseri as herd owners and managers of household economy. Sometimes due to miss-happenings or calamity the Basseri households are left with only 60 animals. Hence it becomes impossible for them to support their families through the animals. So they are now left with direct dependence on the sheep by selling them and arranging the capital. So the number of animals should not be less than 60 as without minimum number of animals the Basseri people cannot survive. On the other hand the people more number of cattle face different problem. They have everything in surplus but they face problem of labor which makes them to have cattle within the range Basseri limits. When the herds get beyond 200 family labor is usually sufficient to deal with the flocks so non-family labor whether hired hands or other families to take animals into their smaller herds, is required. And non-family labor, even when not purposely stealing products or abusing animals, does not take the same kind of care as does family labor. So even if the number of the animals increases the capital does not increase at the same pace. The animal capital is highly volatile, as the cattle are susceptible to various diseases, weather conditions and predation such as rustling. Here animal loss can be sudden. So for the Basseri shifting to a stable form with reliable income sources is far more attractive and hence they sell the animals and buy agricultural land. And thus they become settled in village community. Among the Basseri, the nature of the families and family herds is based upon the movement and stay of the families. And hence strategic transactions or decisions come into play. Barth thus concludes that the Basseri due to the above discussed reasons try to maintain middle-class identity, which was not easy to discover by viewing the group superficially.

6. Contribution of F.G. Bailey in Transactionalism

F.G. Bailey is amongst the prominent figures of the theory of transactionalism. His work was a great effort in order to understand transactionalism. In early 1950s in the village of Bisipara, in Orissa state, India, there was an ongoing and long conflict between the “clean castes” of the priests, warriors, herdsmen and the ritually polluting “untouchables” Pan caste of the landless agricultural laborers, music makers, beggars and processors of the dead animals, which was recounted by F.G. Bailey. As per the observation of Bailey the Pans were at the bottom of the social scale because of their polluting origin and occupation and were highly restrained from the ritual constraints in their relationship with others. They were in a Raja-Praja or king-subject relationship with the landowners. During the beginning of the 20th century many Pans took up the opportunity to improve themselves through education, government jobs and economic market place. By mid of the century they established themselves as economically independent from the clean castes. Also government had formally outlawed untouchability. But still they were socially low and despised. So they initiated a process of improving their social standing in the caste system. Firstly they on the symbolic front gave up eating of meat of cattle, drinking of alcohol, making of music and begging, women started wearing long sarees like the clean caste women and the men started wearing the sacred thread and building their own temple. On the social front they initiated a series of actions to gain recognition from the clean castes of their claimed higher status.

7. Social Events as Process

In the conflict between the Pans and the clean castes Bailey focus was on something different and new from the structure and function of the early functionalist’s accounts. Bailey does not focuss on the caste system, Varna model or jajmani system etc., but he focused on the social process, i.e., the various acts of the individual from which the social structure is manifested. Bailey also emphasized on the strategic processes by which people hope and try to benefit themselves at the stake of the others. People try to gain more profit even at the cost of loss or harm to the others. Bailey refers social structure as normative rules, which are the set of conventional standards and regulations that differentiates between the right or wrong. People are organized by these normative rules and also these allocates benefit benefits, whatever is valued in the society, such as social support, material wealth, status, power and prestige. According to bailey these benefits are the prizes in the competitive struggle of the members of the society and the pragmatic rules for winning this struggle are different from the normative rules. As in the case of the Pans of the Bisipara, they instead of accepting their conventionally understood normative karma destiny and fulfilling their consequent dharma duty, they engaged in a strategic campaign, using both symbolic social tactics, to raise their ritual status which is impossible to achieve according to normative rules and to thus increase their social prestige. The strategy of the Pans, their attempt to make themselves clean by rejecting all polluting activities such as leaving eating of cattle meat, by wearing sacred thread etc to become equal or equally accepted as cleans was one of the major social processes that made Bisipara village society during the 1950’s.

Bailey’s (1969) book Stratagens and Spoils; Social Anthropology of Politics is one of the one works that brought to full maturity the processual theory and analysis, an approach that had been developing among the anthropologists, especially among the British social anthropologists, throughout the 1940s and 50s. Alongside continuing study of normative rules, social structures and institutions, and the functional relations amongst them, grew an interest in people’s intentions. The options that they believed that they had, the decisions they made, the consequent actions they took, and the resultant, actions of others. There was thus a shift away from thinking of people as acting strictly in terms of their statuses and roles, and if people confirm to the normative rules. Rather, there was increased recognition that all people acted intentionally, that their intentions sometimes went beyond or outside of the normative rules, and the people’s actions could change the structure and institutions within which they lived. The emphasis sees individuals in all societies and cultures as agents of their own actions and has more recently in anthropology been labelled agency.

8. Conclusion

Transactionalism in anthropology was a theory propounded by Frederick Barth to consider social processes and interactions. Barth was critical of earlier functionalist models that favored an overly cohesive and collective picture of society without paying due attention to the roles, relationships, decisions and innovations of the individual. Barth acknowledged that transactionalist models could not be used to explain all kinds of human behavior. Even so, criticism has been leveled at his over-reliance on economic principles, a Western perspective in which individuals are viewed as self-interested actors wishing to get the best value in exchange relationships. Individuals are thereby characterized as autonomous, independent and essentially non-social beings. This model of individualism may be incompatible with other ideas about the person and social practices. It is also important to acknowledge the symbolic, cultural and religious ideas that might govern people’s choices and decisions in their social interactions. It can be pointed out that Barth’s transactionalist models ignore long-term historical processes while some have criticized transactionalist theories for paying insufficient attention to the structures of class and property relations in society.

F.G. Bailey was also a prominent transactionalist whose work is a masterpiece in understanding the theory in appropriate manner. His study on the Pans and the clean class reveals the exact motto of the Pans in making the alterations in their life style and traditional ethos. All these things undergo in a proper process which is called by him processual theory. However, supporters of transactionalism claim it to be a productive tool in social analyses and have adopted transactionalist models to consider the interactions between individuals as manipulations to gain power. This acts to weaken transactionalism’s dependence on economic models, and allows for the investigation into how power is conceived, systematized and gained in particular communities.

References

• Barth, F.1966. Models of social organization. London: Royal Anthropological Institute.
• Barth, F. 1962. Nomads of South-Persia; the Basseri tribe of the Khamseh Confederacy. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget
• Barth, F. 1959. Political leadership among Swat Pathans. London: The Athlone Press
• Bailey, F. G. 1957.Caste and the economic frontier: a village in highland Orissa. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Bailey, F. G. 1960.Tribe, caste, and nation: a study of political activity and political change in highland Orissa. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
• Bailey, F.G.1969. Stratagems and spoils: a social anthropology of politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Bailey, F.G. 1971. Gifts and poison: the politics of reputation. New York: Schocken Books.