Worldview, Society, Culture

“Worldview” is the common English translation of the German word Weltanschauung, meaning overarching philosophy or outlook. Worldview describes fundamental conceptions of the world, conceptions that ramify into thought and feeling, and conceptions that give rise to how individuals behave in the world. William James spoke of “the mind’s conversations with itself” (1890, 239). Not necessarily fixed or jointed or coherent, possibly rambling, whimsical, elastic, fluid—hence a “stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life”—there was nonetheless a singularity to the inner voice of consciousness: it was an emanation from one creative source, however refracted into different moments, moods, and situations, even different personae or selves. Worldview comprises the sum of expressions in the mind’s conversation with itself. It includes will and intentionality; rational and irrational engagements with the world; emotional reactions and aspirations; sensations of pain, touch, and smell; discernments of worth; moral choices; loves and hates.

Worldview can also be defined as that being-in-the-world that precedes expression. The word implies a theorizing of causation and of sequence such that behavior is not seen as automatic or meaningless—unintentioned, purely reactive—nor as necessarily explicit, a “face” value. Rather, behavior is the translation of worldview into expressive forms, such that, as the Latin adage has it, “Si bis faciunt idem, non est idem” (If two people do the same thing, it is not the same thing) (Devereux 1978, 125–127). Individuals might meet in interaction while at the same time executing moves, achieving positions, proclaiming successes, and so on, in private and possibly very different game plans. Indeed, the worldviews of each individual—the “ideoverse” (Schwartz 1978, 429) of thought and affect, values, plans, techniques, people, and things—will likely be unique. Each individual is likely to possess a complex cognitive system of interrelated objects that amounts to a private world, rarely if ever achieving “cognitive communality” with another. Rather, human beings organize themselves, integrating their behaviors into reliable and joint systems—social structures—not by possessing uniform cognitive maps or even having equivalent motives but by learning that under certain circumstances others’ behavior is predictable and can be confidently interrelated with certain actions of their own. A social system comprises sets of “equivalent behavioral expectancies,” as Anthony Wallace termed it (1970, 24–33), individuals regularly engaging in routine interactions with one another because they have developed a capacity for mutual prediction. The “members” of these interactions will not be found “threaded like beads on a string of common motives” (24). They will likely interact in a stable and mutually rewarding fashion—maintaining institutions and social structures—and they organize themselves culturally into communities and traditions in spite of having radically different interests, habits, personalities, and customs, and despite there being no one cognitive or emotional or evaluational map that members share.

The synthesizing processes by which the individuals come together and engage in interaction entail the habitual exchange of sets of shared symbols. These “habituses” perdure to the extent that individuals agree to go on recognizing the symbols’ existence and how, conventionally, they might expect to see them exchanged. Beyond this, however, social systems have no life. Society and culture may not be construed as things-in-themselves, possessing their own interests, needs, functions, or agency, for the symbolic forms (words, things, rituals, institutions) are empty and inert when not animated by individual intentionalities. At best the symbolic forms of social systems come to “enjoy” inertia; they are the remnants of past practice (dictionaries, roads, interactional routines) from whose bricolage individuals mine the resources—physical, emotional, political—to express new meanings and promote new life-projects. Societies may exist without consisting of replications of cognitive uniformity, and cultures need not represent standards, norms, practices, rules, views, or beliefs that are shared alike by their members.

This is not an argument for solipsism, or for sociocultural milieux being understood as idealistic manifestations of individual desires. Law and institutionalism, discrimination and violence, exploitation and enslavement are components of real experience, but one does not misconstrue how these become real. An exchange of symbolic forms between individuals gives rise to sociocultural normativities, continually and routinely, but not as things-in-themselves. Law and institutionalism, discrimination and violence, exploitation and enslavement continue to depend on their being inhabited by individual actors and animated by their meaning and purpose. This is not an argument in denial of pattern or structure in social life. Rather it is to say that while traditions of cultural symbology that come to characterize particular sociocultural milieux may formally synthesize individuals into societal “members,” living in alignment with others does not translate as living with, through, or by virtue of others. Social milieux remain sites where distinct individual interpretations, worldviews, and life-projects—the aims, plans, and end points to which individuals would have their actions lead—aggregate and abut against one another in complex, even chaotic, ways (Rapport 2003).

Stanley Spencer and Distortion

The Beatitudes of Love strikes me as a pathological series of pictures, hideous of subject and flatly painted. Yet when I look at them one after another, I cannot help laughing at their preposterous solemnity.… These sex fancies floating above any possible reality in the end provoke merriment rather than disgust. But I am now safe from him. That makes all the difference.

This is Patricia Preece (quoted in Collis 1972, 109), dictating an account of her time in the 1930s as Spencer’s second wife. Preece went on:

I thought the figures caricatures, willfully distorted and made ugly for the fun of it. Many other critics agreed with my opinion. Such stuff couldn’t be taken seriously, they said. It was too grotesque. (105)

Also:

It was to be many years before the public would readily accept his figure compositions. They were generally considered willfully distorted, caricatures and hideous. No one understood their significance vis-à-vis his private life. Indeed, they were so frank an expression of his perverse joy in the degraded and humiliating that their meaning could hardly have been made plain. (64)

Preece’s marriage to Spencer was not an enduring one. But nor was her dismissive opinion of Spencer’s “distorted” compositions particular to her, as indicated by the reactions in the newspapers of the day cited earlier. The president of the Royal Academy in London, Alfred Munnings, urged a police prosecution of Spencer on grounds of obscenity and pornography. Winston Churchill deplored the “incorrect articulation” of the bodies: “If Mr Spencer’s work represents enlightenment, then we should be grateful for our present obscurity”; rather than “resurrection” in a Spencerian world, he, for one, would prefer “eternal sleep” (quoted in Rothenstein 1970, 133–134).

My main concern, notwithstanding (in the expanse of this chapter), is with how Spencer himself understood his paintings, and the place of distortion in them in particular. “I shall never forget Eddie Marsh confronted with them. It fogged his monocle; he had to keep wiping it and having another go. ‘Oh Stanley, are people really like that?’ I said: ‘What’s the matter with them? They’re all right aren’t they?’ ‘Terrible, terrible, Stanley!’ Poor Eddie.” This is Spencer recalling with some amusement the reaction of one of his early supporters and patrons to being shown The Beatitudes of Love (quoted in M. Collis 1962, 144). “Poor Eddie” nicely captures something of Spencer’s self-belief, his confidence in what he was doing. This is not to say, however, that Spencer set out to depart from natural appearances and proportions. This “was not intended or deliberate or wished for,” Spencer explained to another acquaintance; indeed, it “caused consternation in me when after I had done it I realized ‘the mistake’ ” (quoted in Bell 2001, 153). But nor was correcting the “mistake” to be undertaken either, for this would be to “ruin the design.” Furthermore, Spencer considered, was it not the case that if you took the average person and you stripped them of their surface coverings, and how convention and politeness deemed that the human figure ought to look, their true forms would resemble those in The Beatitudes of Love? These are serious and authentic portrayals, Spencer insisted: he was neither “poking fun” nor “being Rabelaisian” or “horrible.” To the contrary: “I clearly say in my pictures that I think these people are nice” (Tate Gallery Archive Microfiche 16B).

Spencer returned repeatedly to the matter of his distortions in his writings. But it was also the case that he came to no single or even consistent conclusion as to why he distorted the human figure and why he retained this distortion as a final effect. Rather, four very different perspectives on the matter can be identified. They might be named “distortion from design,” “from emotion,” “from spirit,” and “from divinity,” and I outline each in turn.

Distortion from Design

Spencer wrote, “I should say that my pictures are uncannily coherent, that that is what is so interesting about them” (quoted in Glew 2001, 144–145). The reason distortion occurred was that the things represented in these “remarkable” compositions were present not only for their own sake but for the sake of a larger design of which they are part: “Everything has a number of jobs to do in a picture and often a distortion occurs when something happens to have so much to express” (Spencer quoted in MacCarthy 1997, 136). Each picture consisted of an extraordinary number of different kinds of relationships existing between its parts, each of which, Spencer was happy to say, had been perfectly conceived and clearly expressed:

My pictures consist of a number of shapes but the whole picture is a shape—the whole picture makes one form, one being. A human being consists of a number of different shapes and altogether they constitute one shape, one form—a human being. Therefore a figure in a picture has also to be a part of the being that the picture is: it has got to be, so to speak, not just itself but itself as part of the being or form of something it belongs to, and it has got to show how it belongs and to what part it belongs. There is a sort of spiritual articulation throughout composition. (Tate Gallery Archive Microfiche 16B)

In short, a design is a thing-in-itself. In an extended example, Spencer imagines designing a monogram:

The reason for distortion occurring in my figure paintings is, as far as I can see, as follows: Suppose you were to take the letter A and tried to make it as clear as possible to a child or someone who’d never seen it. You would choose the most “A-like” example of that letter you could find. But if you were told to make a monogram of the letters A, B and C, you would have to conceal the likeness of the A in order to make it subservient to what you were actually making. What is it you are making? Is it only the letter A, or is it A, B and C? No: you are making something out of the three letters: you are making a monogram or a design and, as a design should be, it is a new thing. Now, in making something that has the distinction of being a thing in itself—that will, if analyzed, prove to be the three letters yet something else besides—it will be a thing itself considered independently of what it is made; in other words, it will be a design. (Tate Gallery Archive Microfiche 16B)

And if one were to replace the monogram analogy with something more painterly: “Well then, if instead of a letter you take a human being, and there are three of them, you cannot think of one in particular, and its shape, but only that there are three, and each belongs to the other, and is contributing a solution to the whole” (Spencer quoted in Sorrell 1954, 34).

Artistry is a natural process, and painting a human body is equivalent to the formation of the body itself in the womb. There is a natural coziness, then, Spencer suggested, to the way that the couple in The Beatitudes of Love: Knowing (figure 1) appear as two parts of one body, insinuating themselves against each other: “They seem to find their place of rest where they can best serve each other in the same way as a liver will adapt itself to the shape of a stomach and so on.” Each human being “belongs” to the other “members” of the composition, part of a “solution” to a supervening issue of design: “A thing in a picture may be one thing but, in view of what it is doing as part of the composition, it is a hundred things” (Tate Gallery Archive Microfiche 16B).

Distortion from Emotion

A second and different way that Spencer explained his having distorted the contents of his paintings concerned their subject matter. In the pictures that mattered to him—the visionary figure paintings—the subject matter was “all feeling.” Spencer was painting an emotional insight rather than a physical sight: “I have tried to express … all my spiritual love—the love of my happy home, my happy childhood, all the people I have loved. If I could marry those emotions of love with the normal forms of human beings, I should have a perfect picture. But the shapes that mean those emotions to me do not happen to be the shapes of ordinary humans” (quoted in Daily Express 1950). Achieving a near likeness was not the issue uppermost in his mind (or body) so much as being in the right “spiritual atmosphere” for painting and conceiving of a composition when “ripe to do so” (quoted in Glew 2001:144–145).

In 1937–1938, at the time of The Beatitudes of Love series, Spencer wrote a long essay to himself entitled “Distortion,” referring again to the “deformation” of how the husband and wife are represented in The Beatitudes of Love: Knowing. Here is an extract from the essay:

What really happens is this—your emotion of pleasure tells you there are some letters or some things in your mind, and you also know that the emotion is a kind of structure that can hold, support and assist in the process of becoming expressed, without in any way distorting or destroying what finally proves to be the letters or things which have gone to make it. The sense of desire and anticipation of something good is the same as with a midwife who knows what to do without knowing any more than that something is going to be born.

The only thing that will guarantee this most complex image of my mind being finally landed, so to speak, in the form of a picture in its purest, most undestroyed, and most “untampered with” form is this very “remote-from-being-born-as-a-picture” emotion which I experience in the earliest stages of a picture’s production. So you can see that, in this early stage, there is very little apparently to go on—in fact one wonders if there is anything there at all. One therefore has to carry this impression across a vast region where endless doubts arise. Why? Because, during this whole period, the image in the mind is only very dimly perceived and one must make no mistake as to its identity; in my case, the least flicker of distrust in the first outset of the thing would completely destroy the meaning.…

Well now, suppose I see that one of these bits of structure has made some miscalculation as to the space needed for some such item as a girl’s arm, the miscalculation arises in this way: the girl is the wife, say, of a very broadly shaped man and she has passed her arm across to her husband’s waistcoat-buttons and rests her hand there. When I look, I see that the gesture is absolutely right: the design and the design relationship are right. I can also see that the arm is too long. That being the case, I can only come to the conclusion that the strength of my emotion and wish has not been quite strong or pure enough to be able to project the image sufficiently far into the earlier stage of “cage” making where it would have been possible to make the fact conform to the shape of the carrier and vice versa. The arm is part of the entire form of the picture and is perfectly placed and an integral part of the whole composition. It is not a question of altering the arm and making it the right length; it is a question of the degree of feeling in the first instance.… Then what can be done? One might attempt to get back to those realms of thought and feeling in which the picture was first conceived and try to re-awaken the emotions one felt—a difficult matter. Then once again you start to formulate the picture and, this time when you look at the result, you find that you have not rectified the faulty arm-length too successfully and, on the other hand, you may have lost other important points of character or made further distortions. (Tate Gallery Archive Microfiche 16B)

This is a complex and revealing piece of writing: Spencer coming to terms with his own creative process. Different parts of his mind or body are involved at different stages in an embodied process. An emotion must find a form. Distortion occurred when the emotion was not “strong” or “pure” enough to “project” a perfect image into the framework or “cage” that carried the design: the emotion and the framework do not conform perfectly to each other.

Spencer was quite exercised by the idea that he might be confused with “modern painters”—Pablo Picasso and the cubists in Paris or George Grosz and Otto Dix of the German Neue Sachlichkeit. His distortions were not a deliberate stylistic ploy, an affectation or satirical conceit, but something that emerged as a result of the emotion of creation. If he were to make an arm, say, “miles longer than an actual human being’s arm,” then—completely different from the “Continentals”—he had made a mistake. But it nevertheless represented him operating at the “fullest extent of my inspirational powers at the time of the conception,” immersed in the emotions that inspired (quoted in Bell 2001, 153).

Distortion from Spirit

A third way that Spencer construed distortion in his figure pictures arose through his painting a heavenly “love-scheme.” His pictures were a perfect representation of things’ identity and of their proper (“beloved”) relations in God’s Creation: “I think it is wonderful how men are a part of the spirit, the same as the corner in the wall or the slope of the land is part of it” (quoted in Carline 1978, 91).

The desire and love that he felt identified the world and its contents and revealed their essential harmony—and this was what Spencer painted. “Every thing every item is looking to be unified into one special thing which thing will give to it & reveal, its essential meaning. Until then things are things without their daddys and mummies” (Tate Gallery Archive 8419.2.4). Love and desire moved the artist nearer to the true identification of objects seen as naturally belonging to the single body of Creation.

It was also the case, however, that even while he aimed at normal appearance, his realizing of this heavenly love-scheme would commonly take Spencer beyond the “normal.” His paintings, he explained, were the product of a powerful inner need “that is not covered by any immediate object I see”; the existence of the need or “longing” was “proof of the existence of what I long for”—that there was something out there to be longed for and made into a representation—but finding it would take Spencer beyond the apparent objectivity of the world. That was why his visionary figure paintings were “something akin to what it would be like to perform a miracle” (Spencer quoted in Bell 2001, 153). In other words, his visionary conceptions must be understood as miraculous transformations of the world, miraculous communings with the world that overcame all barriers of convention:

There is no question of barriers.… One has not only got to perceive the identity of a person or a bush, but the identity of the person and bush considered together, joined together to make some new identity, just as if an arm and a leg had been found and the finder was one who did not know of the existence of arms and legs joined to a body and could only therefore arrive at any further identification of their nature by approaching nearer to essential harmony when through love and desire it might discover the further identifying factors of its nature in their both belong[ing] to one body. (Spencer quoted in Nesbitt 1992, 16)

The most whole, true, or “religious” enjoyment of nature took one beyond what one thought one knew and who one thought one was to a new knowledge of the world: to God’s heavenly Creation. However “amazing and wonderful” his figurations would ever be unacceptable. Second, even for Spencer—for any human being—straining toward God’s true composition of the world was necessarily going to result in imperfection: “With me the strain of trying to affect a recovery of this spiritual eyesight has been so great that it has necessitated my temporarily neglecting the physical eyesight: not deliberately doing so, but finding it to be the case where & when one of these two experiences had overtaken the other where the spiritual eyesight has distorted normal appearance it has been meaningful & where the physical eye has claimed too much ascendency it has been meaningless” (quoted in Glew 2001, 229).

The difficulty was an absolute one. Unlike God, a human being had the disadvantage of being trapped in one body and positioned always in one physical space, whereas, in order to see “lovingly,” truly, as one Creation, the artist should ideally incorporate the world, as God does, join with it, and have all the world become his self.

His (Spencerian) “love-scheme” was the scheming—the training, the habitual practice, the freeing himself to see—by virtue of which the artist puts himself in a position to know the world for what it truly is and comes to a realization of what God’s scheme for Creation was: the essential and meaningful harmony of the world and all its contents. The design of a painting should ideally reflect and make manifest the design of Creation; the different parts in a painting “consort” with one another for the purpose of “praising” God’s Creation, “all fused and all one” (quoted in Glew 2001:230). Instinctively Spencer knew that “fusion”—between himself and the world, and between one thing in the world and everything else—was necessary, was fulfilling, and was true. He knew of his own covetousness—his envy concerning every thing, every relationship, and every person who was not (yet) himself—and he knew of the strength of his love, strong enough to absorb anything into its scheme: “The design element in my pictures is the shape of my love. I am wanting & hoping for a time when I can have my jaws reticulated so that I can swallow a human being whole without it having to be mis-shaped in order to fit into my design, fit into my love scheme” (Tate Gallery Archive 733.2.422). In his pictorial designs, Spencer tried to make this fusion manifest so that the “shape of [his] love” reflected the shape of God’s Creation. Inevitably there was distortion, however, because even the artist was not God.

To bring separate things together through love fulfilled each thing’s identity and proved each thing’s existence. The effort to bring about fusion between what was you and what was outside you was worth any effort because of the ecstasy of meaningfulness and joy that might result. To effect a fusion and reveal what all the parts together meant was to walk with God. Spencer did his best to avoid an arm being too long, say, because this was an indication of fusion not having been perfectly effected, but then it was the human condition ultimately to fall short.

Distortion from Divinity

The final reason that Spencer found for distortion occurring in his paintings concerned the divine nature of art as a phenomenon: “Art is one of the many things God made besides trees, tigers, human beings etc. Art is a thing which has its identity established in every bit the same way & to the same degree as has the tree or the egg. Art is not the expression of something else. Art does not express nature. They are two separate things.… Art is not an illustration. An illustration throws light on something not itself.… Art is created by God and revealed to us either by our own power of perception or some other” (Tate Gallery Archive 825.22).

While the “birth” of his artworks was something he came to anticipate—and to rejoice in in the anticipation—their “conception” remained “secret & imperceptible” (Tate Gallery Archive 825.22). This imperceptibility, Spencer reckoned, showed how art itself was a phenomenon—part of the natural world, part of divine Creation—since the ultimate conceptions of nature (the birth of the universe and so on) were similarly secret. When he painted, Spencer was not so much representing or displaying Creation as immersing himself in it. To paint was to examine the identity of Art, as he might a tree or egg. Art was a thing-in-itself: it had its own nature, distinct from everything else. To practice art was to perceive a given part of the universe.

The occurrence of seeming distortion, therefore, was simply the natural shape of artfulness. It might seem as if the artwork was “about” human beings whose forms and proportions had been distorted, but actually the artwork was manifesting another part of God’s Creation: “art-beings.” Hence, “good art” was “just saying ‘ta’ to God,” the miraculous, blessed, joyful act of being able to give perfect praise through divine practice (Spencer quoted in Rothenstein 1970, 50).

Stanley Spencer’s Worldviews

Spencer reached no single conclusion about the appearance of distortion in his painting of the human figure. Instead he constructed four different perspectives on the matter (at least), amounting, I would say, to reason from within four different worldviews. His foregoing reflections represent four very different constructions of the world, and the place of art, human beings, the artist, and the divine and heavenly within it, including the design of his own artistic compositions and Spencer himself. Nor is there consistency among these perspectives. Reasoning from design to emotion to spirit to divinity does not give on to a coherent version of the nature of distortion, nor of its origin. When Spencer reasons from design, then, it leads him to a conception of the painting as a thing-in-itself, its composition having its own aesthetic and amounting to a relational whole. When he reasons from emotion, he focuses on the process of inspiration as its own thing, natural yet opaque: feelings give on to forms that may or may not embody a perfect ratio between the physical and the emotional. When he reasons from spirit, he accepts the figuration to be a phenomenon emerging from the practice of loving the world so as to incorporate God’s harmonious whole, his scheme, possibly in transfiguration of the merely superficial appearance of reality. But then reasoning from divinity, Spencer recognizes that the practicing of art is a distinct thing that God has created, with its own phenomenology; art cannot be expected to resemble or recall anything else.

Nor did Spencer reach consistent conclusions concerning how distortion in his paintings was to be evaluated. Distortion was sometimes something to welcome and sometimes to regret. When reasoning from design or emotion, Spencer reckons distortion as something for which he was responsible, even culpable, while reasoning from spirit or divinity causes distortion to seem inevitable, a worldly condition. Distortion is something Spencer can anticipate occurring in his artworks when reasoning from spirit or design; while it is unanticipated and its occurrence a surprise when reasoning from divinity or emotion. From one perspective, the possible imperfection of his painting is not to be denied, Spencer’s inability always to achieve a perfect ratio between physicality and spirituality:

People who are not painters never see how complicated nature is, a group of moving people, for example. I want to express certain ideas, certain feelings I have about people, or about places. If I could express myself clearly and forcefully without any distortion of nature I would do so, but to do that I have to draw as well as Michelangelo. It’s too bad that I don’t draw as well as Michelangelo, because it means that in order to say what I want I have sometimes to pull and push nature this way and that. (Spencer quoted in Rothenstein 1984, 117)

From another perspective, however, distortion is a nonissue: this was how people actually looked and how they were lovable. He did not distort the world; he painted the true heavenly nature of God’s Creation.

It is striking, too, that these distinct perspectives and reasonings are not related to particular aspects of his biography according to Spencer. It is not that he reckons distortion to pertain to one part of his life—such as the 1930s when The Beatitudes of Love series was painted—or one set of circumstances more than another. Spencer continually wrote, read, and rewrote his thoughts, cataloged and recataloged his notes, and the foregoing perspectives perdured: distinct lifelong constructions of his environment and his places within it. In no expression, moreover, no worldview, does Spencer deny the authenticity or integrity of his vision—disown, specifically, the seriousness and importance of The Beatitudes of Love. To paint is simply to express different varieties of love: “Let me point out that the love I have for [the people in my pictures] is not to be confused with the special love I feel towards a picture in seeing how each item takes its place. This latter love is a delight one feels in being able to express an idea eloquently through several items in the picture.… But both these loves are very near each other nevertheless” (Tate Gallery Archive Microfiche 16B).

Conclusion

It is through Spencer’s words, I have argued, that an audience might hope to approach as closely as possible an explanation of distortion in his visionary depictions: what distortion was, why it occurred, what it meant, why it was retained. Even if it were asserted that individuals’ own creative processes are ultimately beyond their ability to verbalize or even ratiocinate—being embodied practices—I would want to say that it is from within individual worldviews that such creativity emerges. The form of expression and the meaning contained in Spencer’s distortions—the desire, the intentionality, the embodying—owe their nature to the personal worldviews from which they derived.

Interiority—an individual’s stream of consciousness, the continual conversation had with the self—remains something of a terra incognita in social anthropology. Literary fiction has been less circumspect in this regard, with the likes of E. M. Forster claiming such fiction to be therefore “truer” than social science in portraying how consciousness felt and was socially lived and displaying “the hidden life at its source” (1984, 55–56). Notwithstanding, it is in terms of individual interiority that I would urge an anthropological explanation of social interaction (Rapport 2008). More specifically, my argument is that by virtue of personal worldviews, individuals construct, populate, and anticipate the worlds around them and enter into them. Their worldviews furnish them with expectations before interacting with others, with their perspectives during such meetings, and with their conclusions afterward. To “explain” social interaction is to have recourse to the worlds that individual members are inhabiting, sensorially, the life-projects on which they understand themselves to be entrained. It may be objected that this form of explanation precludes sociocultural context. Did not Spencer, for instance, operate in the contexts of “modern art,” newspapers, art galleries, agents, wives, prime ministers, courts of law, discourses of beauty, God, and love, as a white, British, aspirant, upper-working-class, artistic male? Through an appreciation of worldviews, however, another understanding of context is foregrounded. Here, context originates before social situations. It is something that individuals bring to social interactions and deploy within them. Context concerns the situational way in which individuals interpret symbolic forms—relating them to others so as to accrue personal “association nets” of meaning—according to the interior worlds of a personal phenomenology. It is thus that the same personal context may be inhabited in any number of externally different settings, and vice versa: the “same” interactional setting might be personally contextualized in any number of different ways. The foundational determination of context is individual and possibly private (Rapport 1999).

Focusing on worldviews as the primary contexts that individuals inhabit in sociocultural milieux means that the anthropologist is not led to procuring a singular or even coherent account of either social interaction or cultural belonging. Not only do worldviews fail to translate into a set of common-denominational, community-wide perspectives, but this individual diversity refuses to be tied to externally defined or classificatory situations; the logic behind these personal contexts is subjective and particular, embodied and sensory. To explain anthropologically by way of worldviews is not to “corrupt” the ethnographic truth of individuality: not to impose a social or cultural collectivity in the name of structure and system, tradition and belonging. “The will to a system is a lack of integrity,” as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote ([1889] 1979, 25). To attempt an honest account of the human experience is to embrace contrariety and inconsistency—distortion; one respects the integrity of personal worldviews over against the assumption of homogeneous, coherent, mechanistic social or cultural wholes (Rapport 1997). In spite of the distorted picture that may result, it is to the diversity of individual orderings of the world that the anthropologist aspires to do justice.

Plainly put, anthropological explanation entails aligning the worldviews and life-projects of those individuals involved in a milieu at a particular time and place as these worldviews and life-projects find expression in the cultural symbologies and the social structures that are current. It is worldviews and life-projects that inhabit and animate the otherwise-inert symbols and structures with individual will, meaning, and intentionality. It is the inherent ambiguity of the same symbolic and structural forms that enables a diversity of individualities to come together, in alignment, as “a” society, “a” community; it is that ambiguity that enables diversity—within and between individuals—to disguise itself, superficially, as sociocultural pattern. Social structure and cultural tradition—the habitualities of symbolic exchange, the institutionalism of social process—are recast as moments in which an assemblage of individual meanings and motivations find expression, connecting tangentially with one another, colliding and coevolving.

A diversity of worldviews in a social milieu amounts to a possibly chaotic coming-together, a moment-by-moment muddling-through from which the fate and development of societies and cultures ultimately derive.

REFERENCES

• Bell, K. 2001. Stanley Spencer. London: Phaidon.
• Carline, R. 1978. Stanley Spencer at War. London: Faber and Faber.
• Collis, L. 1972. A Private View of Stanley Spencer. London: Heinemann.
• Collis, M. 1962. Stanley Spencer. London: Harvill.
• Continental Daily Mail. 1935. “Royal Academy Controversy.” April 27, 1935.
• Daily Express. 1950. “Royal Academy’s Prodigal Son,” April 29, 1950.
• Daily Telegraph. 1950. “Resurrection” (a Letter from Lady Dorothy Paterson). July 17, 1950.
• Devereux, G. 1978. Ethnopsychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Forster, E. M. 1984. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
• Glew, A. 2001. Stanley Spencer: Letters and Writing. London: Tate.
• Hauser, K. 2001. Stanley Spencer. London: Tate.
• Hyman, T. 2001. “Stanley Spencer: Angles and Dirt.” In Stanley Spencer, edited by T. Hyman and P. Wright, 10–41. London: Tate.
• James, W. 1890. Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt.
• Levinas, E. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Translated by R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
• MacCarthy, F. 1997. Stanley Spencer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Nesbitt, J. 1992. Stanley Spencer. Liverpool: Tate Gallery Liverpool.
• Nietzsche, F. (1889) 1979. Twilight of the Idols. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
• Rapport, N. 1993. Diverse World-Views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• ______. 1997. “The ‘Contrarieties’ of Israel: An Essay on the Cognitive Importance and the Creative Promise of Both/And.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3 (4): 653–672.
• ______. 1999. “Context as an Act of Personal Externalization: Gregory Bateson and the Harvey Family in the English Village of Wanet.” In The Problem of Context, edited by R. Dilley, 187–211. Oxford: Berghahn.
• ______. 2001. “Communicational Distortion and the Constitution of Society: Indirection as a Form of Life.” In An Anthropology of Indirect Communication, edited by W. Watson and J. Hendry, 19–33. London: Routledge.
• ______. 2003. I Am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge.
• ______. 2008. “Gratuitousness: Notes towards an Anthropology of Interiority.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 19 (3): 331–349.
• ______. 2016. Distortion and Love: An Anthropological Reading of the Art and Life of Stanley Spencer. London: Ashgate.
• ______, ed. 2017. Distortion: Social Processes beyond the Structured and Systemic. London: Routledge.
• Robinson, D. 1976. Introduction to Stanley Spencer, 1891–1959, edited by D. Robinson, 5–7. Glasgow: Arts Council of Great Britain.
• Rothenstein, J. 1970. Stanley Spencer. London: Paul Elec.
• ______. 1984. Modern English Painters. London: Macdonald.
• Schwartz, T. 1978. “Where Is the Culture? Personality as the Distributive Locus of Culture.” In The Making of Psychological Anthropology, edited by G. Spindler, 419–441. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Sorrell, M. 1954. “The Loved World of Stanley Spencer.” Studio 147 (731): 33–39.
• Tate Gallery Archive 733.2.422–4. “Stanley Spencer, three documents, Sept 1948, written by Stanley Spencer consisting of notes about his writings, landscape painting, especially his early ones and notes on Roger Fry’s article in ‘The Nation and Athenaeum,’ 12 March 1927 and a note headed ‘Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative.’ ” [1948].
• Tate Gallery Archive 825.22. “Richard Carline, extracts from lectures by Stanley Spencer in the 1920s, lent by Spencer to Richard Carline who was writing the brochure about Spencer’s work at Burghclere.” [1920s].
• Tate Gallery Archive 8419.2.4. “John Rothenstein, manuscript explaining Stanley Spencer’s view on the Resurrection.” n.d.
• Tate Gallery Archive Microfiche 16B. “Stanley Spencer’s notes, typed, edited and indexed by Dudley Tooth 1942–1946.”
• Wallace, A. 1970. Culture and Personality. New York: Random House.