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160 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
This level corresponds to what Cooley and Calhoun call ‘secondary
relationships’.
‘Disembodied integration is the level at which the constraints of
embodiment, for example being in one place at one time, can be overcome
by means of technological extension – broadcasting, networking or tele-
phoning, to name only a few’ (111). This level corresponds to Thompson’s
mediated interaction and mediated quasi-interaction.
James and Carkeek go on to clarify that ‘each of these levels is more
abstract than the level “prior” to it, and each is implicated quite differently
in the ways we live the relationship between nature and culture, and the
ways we live our bodies and the “presence” of others’ (111).
As posited by the Arena perspective, levels of integration are not
empirical forms, however, but are ‘ideal-type’ social forms, which are also
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capable of co-presence within a given societal form. In tribal societies it is
face-to-face meetings which are the most important, whilst abstraction at
the level of religion is very much in terms of the totemization of the body
and of the land. In agency-extended society, the greatest importance is
attributed to manual craft and networks of actors consolidated in institu-
tions. In more abstract, information societies, on the other hand, it is the
intellect which is ritualized in the fetish of high-technology and ultimately
the use of technologies which presuppose the analytic dismembering or
displacement of the natural world.
However, ‘less abstract’ is not equated with underdeveloped, nor is
‘abstract’ equated with developed. Most literature is framed by such a
linear model of the succession of forms of mediation, but in the Arena model,
even though new levels of abstraction keep emerging on an historical basis,
they do so in tension with established forms, which they intersect with
rather than simply supersede. Thus, Arena authors claim not to argue for
a return to close-knit parochial communities which rest on face-to-face
relations but, rather, that the tension between levels is enriching ‘as long
as any one level does not come to constitute the dominating mode of living-
in-the-world, and so does not thin out prior levels of human interrelation’
(James and Carkeek, 1997: 111).
For James and Carkeek, these different levels intersect in complex
ways. Each level may ‘contradict, qualify, dominate or be “thinned out”
by other levels of integration’ (111). In particular circumstances, one of
these levels may become dominant throughout a societal form. However,
it is older forms of integration which are vulnerable to annulment by
newer forms, rather than the reverse. In tribal societies, face-to-face inte-
gration is generally dominant, but seldom comes into tension with agency-
extended or disembodied integration. What is of interest in this situation
is the way in which a tribal, status-bound culture might take up disem-
bodied forms of communication. In this circumstance what is important is
that persons are bound to each other even when the self and the other are
not engaged in immediate and embodied interaction. Therefore the point of