If culture is a real thing….

That “if” is a critical word here, together with “a real thing.” The Biden and Bagby approach sounds like an assertion that the elephant is both the elephant itself and the blind men’s impressions of it, when the existence of the elephant per se is purely hypothetical.

The claim that

we (most of us) don’t doubt its existence even if we can’t see all of it at once.

has no more (or less) standing as evidence for an independent reality than my Taiwanese informants’ claims that gods, ghosts and ancestors exist, albeit in the yin world (invisible to us who live in the yang world).

In the case of literary texts, it’s easy for someone with an evolutionary psychology mindset to look at the stories and see biology all over the place. “Boy meets girl” is a pretty common story, and it surely is biological. At the same time, a literary critic can look at the same body of work and see culture all over the place. This middle way talk is fine as theoretical talk, but, in itself, it’s not much use in practical analysis. It doesn’t tell you what to look for, how to describe it, analyze it, and explain it.

Even considering the theoretical talk, I wonder about the sort of “imagery” one might marshall to support the concept — here I’m thinking of the sorts of things cognitive linguists have been doing with metaphor and blending. Think of the biology-culture interaction in terms of a jigsaw puzzle. One way of doing this would be to imagine that some puzzle pieces are contributed by biology, others by culture. All we’ve got to do is sort them out. But what if each and every piece bears the stamp of both culture and biology, now how do we sort them out?

*Published here:
http://www.entelechyjournal.com/billbenzon.html

I’m thinking of the so-called Realist view of culture articulated by theoretical anthropologists like David Bidney and historian Philip Bagby, who stated that culture is both a concept and a reality. Bagby argues that culture is an abstraction in the sense that neither it, nor its constituent patterns can be observed in their entirety. All the members of a culture are rarely in the same place at the same time so that an anthropologist could take in the cultural pattern at a glance. But while we can never observe simultaneously the orbits of the planets around the sun, we don’t doubt the existence of the solar system. Why not treat culture in the same way? Culture is a construct in that we never see all of it at once, but it’s real in that we (most of us) don’t doubt its existence even if we can’t see all of it at once. Whether we agree of not on how to define and understand it in its specifics, we agree that it is real.

It seems to me that it’s one thing to talk about cultural practices and attitudes, etc., and to observe that they are pervasive, and highly variable among human groups. It’s a bit different to talk about such entities as “Norwegian culture,” “Tibetan Culture,” “African culture,” “Western culture,” and so forth.

This is a very astute remark. The beginning of wisdom in cultural analysis is to stop treating “Culture” or “cultures” as what Dan Foss (over on Anthro-L) calls a “thingie,” a reified, bounded entity. That said, to continue with,

I don’t see them as serious terms for cultural analysis, howsever important they may be to people’s sense of themselves.

seems to me wrongheaded. Why not say, following Ozma’s suggestion, that “culture” is a shifter, in fact, an identifier, a way of pointing to a category of people—important precisely because the people in question see themselves as an “us” with distinctive rights, privileges, customs and habits compared to “them.” (This suggestion is, by the way, taken from sociologist Everett Hughes via Howard Becker’s Tricks of the Trade:How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing It, p. 2, as follows,

An ethnic group is not one because of the degree of measurable or observable difference from other groups; it is an ethnic group, on the contrary, because the people in and the people out of it know that it is one; because both the ins and the outs talk, feel, and act as if it were a separate group.)

It is, of course, precisely when the separateness of the group is taken to be grounds for rights, privileges, customs, habits, beliefs, whatever, seen as worth fighting for that “culture” becomes an issue. The issue may become acute when members of the group are embedded in other groups or otherwise thrust into encounters with them. In some cases, however, which cultural identity to choose may be optional (the Shan and Kachin described by Edmund Leach in Political Systems of Highland Burma come to mind); in others the identity in question may intersect with or be subsumed by others (to be a member of the Red Sox Nation frequently though not necessarily intersects with being a Bostonian, a citizen of Massachusetts, a New Englander, or a citizen of the USA). In sum, what “culture” invariably points to is some collection of attributes that people claiming an identity see as essential to it, especially, as Hughes remarks, when both the ins and the outs agree on what they are.

I spent some time thinking this through with respect to American music and America’s Westernness. I’d read a number of casual assertions about jazz being Western music written by critics of various political persuasions. And I started wondering about that. Yes, jazz originated in the US, a “Western” nation. But, “Western” music, what’s that? Conventionally I believe the term deconnotes the high art tradition that eventuates in Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms and continues on through Stravinsky etc. Well, jazz has some of its devices and techniques from that tradition, but, on the whole, it sounds quite different. Fluency in performing (some kind of) Western music does not translate into fluency in performing (some kind of) jazz, or vice versa. If you think in terms of how the music works, the notion of jazz as Western music is not a plausible one. Nor is it plausible to think of jazz as African music either — as though “African music” were a coherent cultural category.

Further, jazz is but one loose group of music styles among many that are hybrids of the various musical styles in the US that show a very strong influence from West Africa. These styles — call them African-American — have been and remain very important in American culture. But if they are not Western, does that mean that the USofA is not a Western nation. And if the USofA is not a Western nation, does the term mean much of anything?

Not as a term of art in cultural analysis. It’s a geopolitical term, it’s tied up with nationalism, but it’s not much good for serious cultural analysis.

When I wrote “Negotiating with Demons: The Uses of Magical Language”(American Ethnologist, Vo. 22, No. 1, February 1995), I found it useful to go back to the original definition of performatives, which interestingly conforms quite nicely to common notions of how magic works: Someone who is properly qualified (holds the lamp for example) utters certain words (the charm), and then something happens (the genie appears). This sharpening down of the definition then made it possible to elaborate a point first made by Michael Foster in “When Words Become Deeds: An Analysis of Three Iroquois Longhourse Speech Events” (In Baumann and Sherzer, 1974, Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking). That is that, while certain elements in magical texts may appear to mimic performatives, the bulk of such texts and the staging and gestures that surround them functions to establish a context in which a performative would be effective. It was then possible, in the case of the Taiwanese Taoist exorcism I was analyzing to separate out a pragmatic level of analysis in which this set-up can be described in straightforward terms as a negotiation between the healer and the demons who afflict his patient, a dramatic level, on which the logic of the negotiations is brought to life, and a poetic level on which different degrees of formality at different points in the rite signal significant differences in the relation of the healer to the demons, gods and scapegoat to whom he addresses his words.

Are these analytic distinctions useful in other cases? I suggest that they are. Consider, again, the case of a wedding. It makes absolutely no legal difference whatsoever whether the official who utters the performative words “I now pronounce you man and wife” is a justice of the peace performing a civil ceremony or a priest conducting an elaborate religious wedding. This raises all sorts of interesting questions about why it is that some people go for the simpler civil wedding while others choose an elaborate religious ritual, since in both cases the couple are equally married in the eyes of the law and society. It thus demonstrates clearly, for example, that Vic Turner was right to observe that classic structural-functional reductions of ritual to social function miss too much of what’s going on.

But I’ve been going on long enough. The ball is now in everyone’s court.

The trick lies in the authority. I can stand walk up to a couple and declaim “I now pronounce you husband and wife” to no effect, but in the right context, the right person says it and bam! You’re married. As John says, if you don’t believe this is a fact, just ask a lawyer. But let’s say I *am* a minister — well, the utterance still doesn’t do what it does unless a whole bunch of people agree that the context is right, that my qualifications are in order, etc. That is, essentially I am making a claim that you’re married when I say “I now pronounce you…” — whether the statement is “true” or not depends a whole lot on whether other people (witnesses, family, and not least agents of the law) find my performance convincing, which has to do with a lot of stuff external to the performance itself. And here’s another trick — what if I’m lying? What if I *say* “I now pronounce you…” but I don’t really mean it? Can I do that? I can do it with a promise — “I promise I’ll give you a hundred bucks.” There, I just lied. No money for you!

Right about now, you’ve pr’y got a whole bunch of questions. I know I do. Which is about where Austin leaves off — having muddied the waters immensely, he throws up his hands, ends the lectures, and *dies*. No comprehension for you! Which is why you pretty much have to make a sideways leap into Foucault to make any more sense out of Austin (at least, that’s what I’d do if I were you), and since Foucault has been known to cause anaphylactic shock and severe scarring in a certain breed of folk, I must refrain from going there. If you’re certain you’ve had your shots, and have some strong Echinacea tea at hand, you might be able to piece it together on your own.

I like the way these concepts become a research program: (1) Identify terms that figure in heated debates, (2) map, as much as possible, the full range of meanings deployed, (3) sort these into concrete, sensuous realities and abstract normative propositions, then (4) consider how the former evoke and become channels for the emotions that enfuse the latter.

That this program will not result in a tidy set of definitions can be taken as given. That it will enrich our understanding of what is going on when the “proper meaning” of terms is being debated is, I believe, highly likely.

perhaps we could view “culture” as a performative (in the Austin sense, not the Butler sense

Perhaps we had better not. Austin’s definition of performative is sharply limited to situations in which (1) the utterance of certain words (2) in the right circumstances (3) by those qualified to do so results in the creation of a new social fact. E.g., the minister says, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” Assuming that the relevant laws have been followed and the ministered is licensed to perform weddings, a marriage has been created. If you don’t believe that is a fact, just ask a divorce lawyer.

Anthropologists have tended to thoroughly muddle “performative” in this strict sense with “performance,” an entirely different animal in which in the performer undertakes to say or do something in a special way that will be judged as done well or poorly using aesthetic criteria. Returning to the example of a wedding, we can see the difference in the contrast between the minister, the effect of whose words is unaffected by whether he croaks them in a drunken whisper, squeaks them in falsetto, or uses his ordinary voice and the organist’s rendition of “Mendelsohn’s Wedding March” which can be either marvelous or “Wasn’t that God-awful!” If conditions (2) and (3) are satisfied, the minister’s words take effect, whatever their aesthetic qualities. The Wedding March may either enhance or ruin the mood of the wedding, but it has nothing to do with whether the couple are truly and legally married.

A reason I enjoy Arjun Appadurai’s essays is his subtle and flexible (a positivist would say wishy-washy) way of talking about meanings and identities. You belong to a community and you don’t. You share notions with your neighbour, but you share other notions with people your age (and class background) from overseas. Etc. His “scapes”, which resemble cultural fields (in my terminology), denote partial sharing of meaning. They make fairly accurate descriptions possible (and if a scape is missing, you can always add one yourself).

The Fadime affair, oneman: Well, I don’t think I mentioned a Muslim human rights activist, but they exist in Scandinavia like elsewhere, and some of them made public statements about the non-Islamic origin of honour killings. In my view, the most interesting reform movement in Islam is that which insist on separating religion from cultural tradition (which Christians have done quite successfully for centuries), thus making it perfectly reasonable to be a modern European Muslim. Tariq Ramadan (in the Francophone world) and Hassan Tibi (in the German-speaking world) are among the main people here.

My own relationship to the culture concept is probably coloured by my training in a Norwegian anthropology which was then (if not now) largely a branch office of UK social anthropology. Like many others, I loved reading Geertz and admired the Sahlins of the Culture and Practical Reason period, but felt that there was nothing like properly unpacked real-life situations for illuminating and developing social theory and theoretical concepts.

There is so much reflexivity around these days. If the appropriate situation arises, I may make a comment like “Sorry, skiing is not part of my culture”, and Norwegians — any Norwegian — immediately get the joke.

gotta go, didn’t read your second post thoroughly at all…

the cultural refers to situated differences, contrasts, and comparisons “that either express, or set the groundwork for, the mobilization of group identities”(1996: 13). Appadurai’s distinction expresses the fluidity of identity associated with diasporic movements.

“The cultural” is intimately tied up with App’s “scapes”, which in turn provide differing contexts for understanding, much the way a shifter pronoun like “I” simultaneously references and constructs its context at the moment of utterance (I confess that my understanding of shifters is shaped more by Jakobson and Benveniste than Silverstein).

Thus, when I say “we”, my interlocutor(s) relies on a range of markers — my gestures, the preceding discussion, my and her/his history, shared assumptions, etc. — to understand just who the “we” is that I’m referring to: is it myself and some others but not her/him, myself and her/him but not the others, myself and her/him *and* the others, or the two of us and some of the others but not *those* others? Likewise, when I refer to “our culture” (or “their culture” or “my culture”), there’s the shifting possessive but also the shifting “culture” that I’m indexing — how else could both of the statements “Christian culture is rooted in notions of neighborly love” and “Christian culture is rooted in violence against their neighbors” both have a kind of truth value?

Just to mudy the waters by borrowing from yet another linguistic theorist, perhaps we could view “culture” as a performative (in the Austin sense, not the Butler sense — though that’s interesting too, it’s just not what I’m talking about here). Saying “culture” is a claim that relies on the author’s (utterer’s) authority to make it, which authority is constructed in any number of ways. Of course, not I’m treading into Foucauldian territory, and that road leads to terror and recriminations, so I’ll stop here.