Forskning.no skriver om en undersøkelse som hevder at amerikanere og asiater oppfatter bilder (og verden) på en annen måte:

“Amerikanere konsentrerer seg stort sett om tingene eller personene som er hovedfokus i bildet, mens kinesere er opptatt …

Obviously, anarchists who eat shrimp and bacon on Yom Kippur are Jewish — if they weren’t why would that be a significant thing to do at all? The whole point of the idea of cultural patterning or cultural structure is that the same pattern or structure can produce a wide variety of different practices.

How can one talk about meaningful difference without essentializing the terms of the difference? How can cultures be meaningfully different if they are not essentially so?

This is, of course, one of the big problems in the ongoing “anthropological crisis” (which is pushing 40 years old!). I believe this is a problem not so much of recognizing differences but, as Bill says, how we talk about difference — our vocabulary is really not up to the task. Still, I think that ideas like Appadurai’s “the cultural” (vs. “a culture”) and his various “-scapes”, Abu-Lughod’s “Writing Against Culture”, Gilroy’s “hybridity”, and the various work on “transnationalism” are pushing us in the right direction.

One of the issues is the point raised by Hawks in JKerim’s post above: is there such a thing as a “typical” member of a society. When I see somone describing “Western individualism”, as in the Wired article that started this thread, I wonder who these “rugged individuals” were. Certainly not the medieval peasant, the early American farming colonists, the East European Jewish town-dwellers, and so on. Agricultural economies in general militate against the kind of individualism this researcher describes. WHat we do have, though, is a literary individualism that probably describes a reality that did exist among the elites who wrote and read such literature — as well as a post-Industrial Revolution Western/frontier literature that lionizes the highly mobile, have-tools-will-travel, hand-for-hire, squinty-eyed loner who looks awfully like a modern industrial worker for whom giving up strong community ties is the necessary trade-off for the benefits of being free labor (benefits like earning a living).

At the same time, there are, as a result of state power, educational regimes, shared histories and heritages, cultural threads that run through populations — although the importance attached to them and the way they affect behavior may well differ among and between the various strata and divisions within the population. For instance, Jewish culture is shaped at least in part by the myths and commandmanets of the Old Testament, such as the kosher rules — but different Jews may follow those rules to the letter, may arrive at a compromise interpretation (like avoiding shellfish and pork but not worrying about mixing meat and dairy), may ignore those rules, or may (as early 20th c. anarchists did) openly flaunt such rules by feasting on shrimp and bacon (on Yom Kippur, no less!). It may still be meaningful to speak of kosher rules as part of “Jewish culture”, but generalizations about behavior based on this conception of “Jewish culture” are bound to partiality — are those Jews who don’t practice this aspect of “Jewish culture” less Jewish than those who do?

I’ve had this problem when writing about black music and white music in America. The standard way of doing such writing is as I’ve just done, to talk of Black and white music (or African-American and Euro-American). Yet no one who is serious and well-informed about this believes in a culturally homogenous Black American and a culturally homogenous White America. There are internal differences — along class lines, urban-rural lines, ethnic lines — within those groups and they too are important in this dynamic. But over it all there does seem to be a global binary dynamic. It is extraordinarily difficult to frame a discourse that deals with all of this. If you end up qualifying every statement the result is an unintelligible meshwork of equivocal conceptual mush.

Biologists have this problem when they talk about species — for which, I have been told, there are no less than 22 current usages. I believe the way out, more or less, is to talk of populations and the distribution of traits within populations. And still, it’s a difficult business.

Any scholar who thinks that Plato’s theory of Forms is evidence that “the Greeks tended to see stability in the world, whereas the Chinese saw the world as constantly changing,” should be prevented from referring to any Greek philosophy until s/he re-reads the Phaedo, with an eye toward the following exchange (Socrates is speaking with Cebes):

“The latter,” replied Cebes, “they are always in a state of change.”

“And these you can touch and see and perceive with the senses, but the unchanging things you can only perceive with the mind – they are invisible and are not seen?”

“That is very true,” Cebes replied.

“Well, then,” he added, “let us suppose that there are two sorts of existences, one seen, the other unseen. Let us suppose them. The seen is the changing, and the unseen is the unchanging.”

“That may be also supposed,” Cebes said.

One should also contemplate two sayings of the 6th-century BCE philosopher Heraclitus:

No man can cross the same river twice, because neither the man nor the river are the same.

Everything flows, nothing stands still.

Perhaps Heraclitus was actually Chinese?

Americans are not Greeks. Chinese are not Japanese. American graduate students are not typical of Americans in many ways, nor are Chinese graduate students in America necessarily typical of Chinese graduate students in China, much less Chinese non-graduate students. And neither Aristotle nor Archimedes were typical of the Greeks in the first few centuries B.C. To go from an empirical difference in eye movement between 25 American graduate students and 27 Chinese graduate students to inferences about Aristotle and Sun Tsu is more than a bridge too far.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/1934527100v2

I would argue that both Bloom and Pinker misunderstand Sapir-Whorf.

Thus begins the Great Sapir-Whorf Debate of 2005?

Thanks. I was actually going to link to this language log post about “mood” vs. “tense” in the subjunctive, but I figured I was best off sticking to the theme of “translation” which is a methodological problem in both the visual and linguistic studies.

There is a more thorough attack on Bloom in Pinker’s book The Language Instinct. Its been a while since I looked at all this, but I dont’ remember Bloom being much more nuanced than the reporter makes him out to be. Unfortunately, Pinker thinks that Bloom is a good foil for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but I would argue that both Bloom and Pinker misunderstand Sapir-Whorf.

There’s barely a subjunctive in English anymore. Few speakers of American English form present counterfactual statements with the subjunctive—instead of using the subjunctive “were”—”If Gisele were fat, she wouldn’t be a supermodel,” they’re more likely to use the indicative “was”—”If Gisele was fat, she wouldn’t be a supermodel.” In sportscasting, announcers often make counterfactual statements such as: “Now, if you’re Phil Jackson, you want to preserve your final time-out …” where the subjunctive version would be “Now, if you were Phil Jackson, you would want to preserve your final time-out…”

Following the logic of the quote, then, we must conclude that since Americans by and large don’t use the subjunctive, they can’t understand counterfactual statements—just like the Chinese.

[somewhat pedantic point: the subjunctive is a mood, not a tense. This may seem like nitpicking, but mood and tense are independent characteristics. In many languages there are different tenses of the subjunctive, e.g. present subjunctive vs. imperfect subjunctive, and these tenses have different implications in a variety of contexts, including, say, counterfactual statements. It's a bit ridiculous that the writer faults Chinese for lacking a grammatical category that she misidentifies, but this also seems characteristic of this sort of "Whorfian" argument: the writer's understanding of the language they're working with, or of linguistics in general, is not strong. The quote is from a New York Times article, though, so let's hope it's the reporter's error, not Prof. Bloom's.]