Mukesh Williams
The interrogation of alien cultures from the standpoint of the west was further aided by the rise of symbolic anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Symbolic anthropology significantly influenced cultural poetics which later came to be known as new historicism. American anthropologist and liberal humanist Clifford Geertz simultaneously confronted the data collecting approach in social sciences and the universalizing discourses of Marxism. He explained culture as symbolic "patterns of meaning" that men and women employ to communicate and develop "attitudes toward life." His ethnographic model employed "thick description" to explain social expressions of an alien culture that were somewhat confusing and enigmatical to the Western mind.
In the opening essay, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture," Geertz remarks, "Analysis is sorting out the structures of signification--what Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary critic--and determining their social ground and import"(p. 9). This statement had a great impact upon the method and procedures of both anthropologists and literary critics in the middle of 1970s (Geertz, 1973 9).
Geertz in After the Fact elaborates upon the post-positivist critique of empirical realism, which questioned the traditional theories of truth and knowledge and introduced an indefinite "quest" after the fact in anthropology (Geertz, 1996 168). In the beginning symbolic anthropology was "suspected as European, literary, or worse, philosophical." And to quite an extent these suspicions were well founded. In an attempt to restructure anthropology and formulate graduate programs in it, anthropologists overhauled curricula driven beyond the boundaries of their discipline into an area of new intellectual practices arising out of a combination of "the linguistic, the interpretative, the social constructionist, the new historicist, the rhetorical, or the semiotic"(Geertz 1996 114).
Now the ethnographer's task was not only to re-conceptualize his discipline but to adapt the new methodologies to his discipline. In Available Light, Geertz explores issues in political philosophy, religion and psychology through a postmodernist and multi-cultural perspective. Here he brings to the surface the symbolic significance of the concepts of nation, country, identity or self and how their unstable meanings change through time and place. But he makes an interesting remark in the beginning of the book, which would gladden the hearts of literary critics. Geertz wrote,
A lot of people don't quite know where they are going, I suppose; but I don't even know, for certain, where I have been. But all right already. I've tried virtually every other literary genre at one time or another. I might as well try Bildungsroman (Geertz, 2000 3).
Geertz's light-hearted statement of becoming a novelist and writing a bildungsroman has far-reaching implication both for anthropology and literature. A bildungsroman narrates the story of the psychological development and moral education of its protagonist, and now anthropology is called upon to do the same. The thin margin that once separated the imaginative text of a writer and the scientific text of an anthropologist has almost disappeared by now.
The interpretative and exhaustive method of anthropology was quickly appropriated by cultural historians, and subsequently by literary critics, more as a narrating practice than as a cultural theory. Literary critics particularly employed the interpretative narrative technique of this ethnographic model to understand literary culture and the literary ethos. Interestingly Geertz's interpretative ethnography was criticized within the field of anthropology by fellow anthropologists as reducing economic and material conflicts in society to impressionistic understanding of local cultures. His use of thick description failed to relate "cultural texts" to a larger tradition of literary, economic and social change.
The Geertzian method of finding indigenous cultural significance to the exclusion of social laws has drawn criticism from critics such as Roger Keesing, Dominick La Capra, Vincent Pecora and Aletta Biersack (Pecora, 1989 243-276). These critics point out that culture can be both mazes of "mystification" or streets of signification. It all depends on who constructs cultural meaning and interprets culture; and what are his ulterior motives.
Naturally new historicist practices have also come under attack. Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse sees literary conventions and linguistic constraints impacting on the writing of history (White, 1978; 1987). The historical discourse now becomes a narrative prose discourse that represents past structures as models in order to explain their meaning. In Metahistory, White sees the historian functioning as a chronicler of events that happened in the past and constructing a story from it (White, 1973). The controversy about the new methodology continues. The linguistic turn towards culture in history, sociology and anthropology has been dealt with exhaustively in Beyond the Cultural Turn which analyses different aspects of the narrative mode and offers a postmodernist critique of knowledge seeing the body and self as important sites intersecting culture and society (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999). Walter Cohen sees the new historicist reliance on "arbitrary connectedness" between different aspects of social reality as a significant lack of an "organizing principle" (Cohen, 1987 34).
Showing posts with label Cultures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cultures. Show all posts
Monday, June 28, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Global Cultures and Civilizations
Archaeology of Cultures and Civilizations
The terms culture and civilization are the two most debated words in modern thought and practice and have been used by nations, communities and individuals as notions to create histories, identities and hegemonies. Are the terms culture and civilization residual essences, literary and philosophical discourses cultural anthropology or graspable artifacts? There is no clear agreement amongst scholars as to what these two terms imply and the battle which began in the Anglo-American world even before the 1940s, and heated up in the 1950s, still lumbers on (Geertz, 2000 12-19). Old stalwarts like Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski and Edward Sapir have given way to Arif Dirlik , Arjun Appadurai, James Clifford, Sidney Mintz, George Marcus, Eric Wolf and Michael Taussig, Philip Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. But we cannot ignore the twin notions of culture and civilization nor can we jump out or over them. We need to interrogate these concepts as best as we can and once again in the light of new advances in critical theory and philosophy make some sense of both.
In recent times there has been an emphasis on “thick description” of culture and civilization which forces us to believe that cultures and civilizations are not essences floating in the air but directly rooted in geography and socially established codes. As such they encompass the political and religious conflicts of the times and are increasingly given to incommensurability relativism and perspectivism. But cultures, languages, civilizations and traditions are not self-contained entities but always interacting with each other, crisscrossing, extending beyond and overlapping. Languages too are not complete air-tight units but open and permeable. Since people speaking different languages interact amongst themselves, languages come in close proximity and tend to borrow from each other. The belief in sealed entities or “windowless monads” gives us a false picture of concepts that can hold us “captive” and prevent us from “get[ing] outside it” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001 115). Karl Popper warns us that we must not fall a prey to “the myth of the framework” and become deluded (Popper, 1996).
Culture has been generally understood as progress in art and science that has helped mankind to develop their faculties and character. But with the rise of eugenics and later anthropology, culture became linked to the study of language, customs, beliefs, consciousness, ideas and practices of the non-European ‘Other’. Based on this assumption E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class redefined the concept of class as involving “human relationships” and not just economic and occupational indices (Thompson, 1963). He further argued in the “Preface” to the aforementioned book that,
By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and consciousness. I emphasise that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a ‘structure’, not even as a ‘category’. But as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships (Thompson, 1963 9).
According to Thompson class is not only historical in nature but constitutes a web of human relationships over an extended period of time.
Some of the early anthropologists such as E B. Tylor believed in the power of scientific inquiry and cultural evolution to unravel the mystery of the development of civilizations. The Indian understanding of culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was guided by Darwinism positive science methodologies. It was therefore largely influenced by Tylor who advocated the study of ethnography and anthropology in understanding human cultures. Tylor used the terms culture and civilization interchangeably and saw culture referring to beliefs, laws and customs of the people. He wrote in 1871 that,
Not merely as a matter of curious research, but as an important practical guide to the understanding of the present and the shaping of the future, the investigation of the early development of civilization must be pushed on zealously. Every possible avenue of knowledge must be explored, every door tried to see if it is open. No kind of evidence need be left untouched on the score of remoteness or complexity, of minuteness or triviality. The tendency of modern enquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere. To despair of what a conscientious collection and study of facts may lead to, and to declare any problem insoluble because difficult and far off, is distinctly to be on the wrong side in science; and he who will choose a hopeless task may set himself to discover the limits of discovery (Tylor 1924 24).
His passionate plea for scientific investigation and for collecting ‘facts’ reminds us of Charles Dickens’s opening schoolroom scene in Hard Times (1853) where Mr. Gradgrind tells his class “Now what I want is facts.” The Benthamite utilitarianism became an important part of the scientific investigation.
There has been an overwhelming dependence on science and logic to understand culture and the human psyche. Edward Hall laments the debilitating and chaotic power of Western logic to understand and examine the world. In Beyond Culture he argues that,
Two widely divergent but interrelated experiences, psychoanalysis and work as an anthropologist, have led me to the belief that in his strivings for order, Western man has created chaos by denying that part of his self that integrates while enshrining the parts that fragment experience. These examinations of man’s psyche have also convinced me that: the natural act of thinking is greatly modified by culture; Western man uses only a small fraction of his mental capabilities; there are many different and legitimate ways of thinking; we in the West value one of these ways above all others—the one we call ‘logic,’ a linear system that has been with us since Socrates. Western man sees his system of logic as synonymous with the truth (Hall, 1976 9).
Later in the 1930s and 1940s Malinowski also developed his scientific functional approach to understand culture based on human needs. He divided anthropology into two parts—physical anthropology dealing with physiological structure and cultural anthropology relating to heritage, artifacts and values (Malinowski, 1944; 1931 621-23). In the 1970s American anthropologist Clifford Geertz elaborated upon the symbolic aspect of culture arguing that culture interprets the web of cultural meaning rather than lays down scientific laws (Geertz, 1973 5). His understanding greatly influenced the construction of culture n subsequent decades. Recently Geertz has retracted some of his earlier statements. In his book Available Light admits that the fieldwork of an anthropologist lacks a scientific base and is no different from the craft of the novelist writing a bildungsroman (Geertz, 2000).
The Rhizome and the Tree Structure
In the late 1990s new perspectives in the archeology of knowledge further destabilized the scientific and functional understanding of culture. Western knowledge and categories have been constituted along a Hegelian hierarchy; a pattern symbolized by the tree structure with trunk and branches. Giles Deleuze introduced the concept of the rhizome such as a potato that “ceaselessly establish [es] connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances” and like a “tuber agglomerating very diverse acts” (Deleuze, 1993 30). If we sketch a rhizomic map of the world today it would highlight demographic concentrations of relationships controlled by a privileged few who imagine the rhizome as a hierarchical tree. It is not that a rhizome has replaced the tree but seemingly the tree controls the rhizome. However the rhizome also breaks free of such controls in its characteristic fashion as can be seen in cultural dissent and demand for political concession based on culture and ethnicity. The rhizomic view of a hyphenated world united by fast food culture may be good for business but it is not good for immigration. Developed countries seek to open borders for their French fries and electronics but do not welcome a reverse flow of migratory labor. The rhizome does not compete with the tree or is subsumed by it but fights with it for more economic and political space.
The terms culture and civilization are the two most debated words in modern thought and practice and have been used by nations, communities and individuals as notions to create histories, identities and hegemonies. Are the terms culture and civilization residual essences, literary and philosophical discourses cultural anthropology or graspable artifacts? There is no clear agreement amongst scholars as to what these two terms imply and the battle which began in the Anglo-American world even before the 1940s, and heated up in the 1950s, still lumbers on (Geertz, 2000 12-19). Old stalwarts like Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski and Edward Sapir have given way to Arif Dirlik , Arjun Appadurai, James Clifford, Sidney Mintz, George Marcus, Eric Wolf and Michael Taussig, Philip Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. But we cannot ignore the twin notions of culture and civilization nor can we jump out or over them. We need to interrogate these concepts as best as we can and once again in the light of new advances in critical theory and philosophy make some sense of both.
In recent times there has been an emphasis on “thick description” of culture and civilization which forces us to believe that cultures and civilizations are not essences floating in the air but directly rooted in geography and socially established codes. As such they encompass the political and religious conflicts of the times and are increasingly given to incommensurability relativism and perspectivism. But cultures, languages, civilizations and traditions are not self-contained entities but always interacting with each other, crisscrossing, extending beyond and overlapping. Languages too are not complete air-tight units but open and permeable. Since people speaking different languages interact amongst themselves, languages come in close proximity and tend to borrow from each other. The belief in sealed entities or “windowless monads” gives us a false picture of concepts that can hold us “captive” and prevent us from “get[ing] outside it” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001 115). Karl Popper warns us that we must not fall a prey to “the myth of the framework” and become deluded (Popper, 1996).
Culture has been generally understood as progress in art and science that has helped mankind to develop their faculties and character. But with the rise of eugenics and later anthropology, culture became linked to the study of language, customs, beliefs, consciousness, ideas and practices of the non-European ‘Other’. Based on this assumption E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class redefined the concept of class as involving “human relationships” and not just economic and occupational indices (Thompson, 1963). He further argued in the “Preface” to the aforementioned book that,
By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and consciousness. I emphasise that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a ‘structure’, not even as a ‘category’. But as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships (Thompson, 1963 9).
According to Thompson class is not only historical in nature but constitutes a web of human relationships over an extended period of time.
Some of the early anthropologists such as E B. Tylor believed in the power of scientific inquiry and cultural evolution to unravel the mystery of the development of civilizations. The Indian understanding of culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was guided by Darwinism positive science methodologies. It was therefore largely influenced by Tylor who advocated the study of ethnography and anthropology in understanding human cultures. Tylor used the terms culture and civilization interchangeably and saw culture referring to beliefs, laws and customs of the people. He wrote in 1871 that,
Not merely as a matter of curious research, but as an important practical guide to the understanding of the present and the shaping of the future, the investigation of the early development of civilization must be pushed on zealously. Every possible avenue of knowledge must be explored, every door tried to see if it is open. No kind of evidence need be left untouched on the score of remoteness or complexity, of minuteness or triviality. The tendency of modern enquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere. To despair of what a conscientious collection and study of facts may lead to, and to declare any problem insoluble because difficult and far off, is distinctly to be on the wrong side in science; and he who will choose a hopeless task may set himself to discover the limits of discovery (Tylor 1924 24).
His passionate plea for scientific investigation and for collecting ‘facts’ reminds us of Charles Dickens’s opening schoolroom scene in Hard Times (1853) where Mr. Gradgrind tells his class “Now what I want is facts.” The Benthamite utilitarianism became an important part of the scientific investigation.
There has been an overwhelming dependence on science and logic to understand culture and the human psyche. Edward Hall laments the debilitating and chaotic power of Western logic to understand and examine the world. In Beyond Culture he argues that,
Two widely divergent but interrelated experiences, psychoanalysis and work as an anthropologist, have led me to the belief that in his strivings for order, Western man has created chaos by denying that part of his self that integrates while enshrining the parts that fragment experience. These examinations of man’s psyche have also convinced me that: the natural act of thinking is greatly modified by culture; Western man uses only a small fraction of his mental capabilities; there are many different and legitimate ways of thinking; we in the West value one of these ways above all others—the one we call ‘logic,’ a linear system that has been with us since Socrates. Western man sees his system of logic as synonymous with the truth (Hall, 1976 9).
Later in the 1930s and 1940s Malinowski also developed his scientific functional approach to understand culture based on human needs. He divided anthropology into two parts—physical anthropology dealing with physiological structure and cultural anthropology relating to heritage, artifacts and values (Malinowski, 1944; 1931 621-23). In the 1970s American anthropologist Clifford Geertz elaborated upon the symbolic aspect of culture arguing that culture interprets the web of cultural meaning rather than lays down scientific laws (Geertz, 1973 5). His understanding greatly influenced the construction of culture n subsequent decades. Recently Geertz has retracted some of his earlier statements. In his book Available Light admits that the fieldwork of an anthropologist lacks a scientific base and is no different from the craft of the novelist writing a bildungsroman (Geertz, 2000).
The Rhizome and the Tree Structure
In the late 1990s new perspectives in the archeology of knowledge further destabilized the scientific and functional understanding of culture. Western knowledge and categories have been constituted along a Hegelian hierarchy; a pattern symbolized by the tree structure with trunk and branches. Giles Deleuze introduced the concept of the rhizome such as a potato that “ceaselessly establish [es] connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances” and like a “tuber agglomerating very diverse acts” (Deleuze, 1993 30). If we sketch a rhizomic map of the world today it would highlight demographic concentrations of relationships controlled by a privileged few who imagine the rhizome as a hierarchical tree. It is not that a rhizome has replaced the tree but seemingly the tree controls the rhizome. However the rhizome also breaks free of such controls in its characteristic fashion as can be seen in cultural dissent and demand for political concession based on culture and ethnicity. The rhizomic view of a hyphenated world united by fast food culture may be good for business but it is not good for immigration. Developed countries seek to open borders for their French fries and electronics but do not welcome a reverse flow of migratory labor. The rhizome does not compete with the tree or is subsumed by it but fights with it for more economic and political space.
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