Thanks, Hearthstone.

Thanks, Hearthstone.

A scarce moment of recognition to me reading your post was that you start practice with communication (-styles), as ‘communication’ at my corner of the anthroworld (means my university) contemporarily is central in the concept of culture.

I’m following this with lots of interest. I described it to some of my students (I’m TAing our second-year intro to cultural anth, which is about 500 students, of which I have about 90) and they thought it sounded fantastic. I was wondering, given that there are going to be multiple posts on the topic and that there is a lot of interest in it, if perhaps Savage Minds could add a “World Simulation” tag/category? I’d like to be able to link to all of the posts together, without the intervening ones that might come up if I linked to one of the present categories listed.

I am not sure Rex’s suggestion would lead to a way around evironmental determinism by itself. It seems to apply only to cases of migration or colonialism (which may already be built into the structure of the world-sim) – where a group of people whose culture came about in one place are transcribed to another, whereupon they try to map the old world onto the new one (like trying to farm sheep in Outback Australia), but inevitably ‘ripen’ under new conditions ( = Aussie farming culture). Now, an environmental determinist would say they changed because of the new environment and we would be back where we started. You might reply by pointing out that the cultural predispositions of Aussie Farmers cause them to behave differently from local Aboriginal people say, and thus ‘essential cultural meanings’ are more/as important. But the environmental determinist would argue that the Farmers actually came from a European environment with its Guns, Germs and Steel, and the affordances of that environment are what has allowed them to behave as they do in Australia. And we could go back and forth forever…

The main problem in this respect is that the course is partly (mostly?) a thought experiment and so relies heavily on the predispositions of theory and knowledge of the students/teachers. In the ‘real world’ people grow within a particular lifeword or umwelt that encompasses environment, other people, and personal bodily experience. You can’t replicate that in class. But what you can do (and presumably do do) is draw attention to the way the student ethnographies require a creative practice that considers the situated nature of culture in an explicit way – and that this ‘creative consideration’ is akin or parallel to real-world cultural practice/human experience. The students writing about religious beliefs or whatever have to do this relationally…drawing on their own creative experience in comparision to other (social and environmental) aspects of their ‘world’. To me that seems the only way to understand the dialectic at work. Presumably, if you put two groups of students into identical environments and let them grow, the two resulting ‘cultures’ would be different but have some structural similarities? The case against environmental determinism would be clear, but the effect of particular constraints and affordances would also be evident.

The whole excercise by the way, sounds f-ing great.

Might be a way to integrate more prehistory (read: archaeology) into your course. Or not.

Plus just think: If you put “Essential Ultimate Cultural Meanings” at the center of your course, you can make them read more of The Minor Works Of Rodney Needham!