Anthropology Beyond Culture

Richard G. Fox, Barbara J. King

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781859735244
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Culture is a vexed concept within anthropology. From their earliest studies, anthropologists have often noted the emotional attachment of people to their customs, even in cases where this loyalty can make for problems. Do anthropologists now suffer the same kind of disability with respect to their continuing emotional attachment to the concept of culture? This book considers the state of the culture concept in anthropology and finds fault with a 'love it or leave it' attitude. Rather than pledging undying allegiance or summarily dismissing it, the volume argues that anthropology can continue with or without a concept of culture, depending on the research questions being asked, and, furthermore, that when culture is retained, no single definition of it is practical or necessary.Offering sensible solutions to a topic of hot debate, this book will be essential reading for anyone seeking to learn what a concept of culture can offer anthropology, and what anthropology can offer the concept of culture.

Part 1
Leaving Culture Worry Behind

one
Toward a Richer Description and Analysis of Cultural Phenomena

Fredrik Barth

To clear the way for taking on new tasks with the concept of culture, we need to review old uses and their weaknesses and then construct an alternative so compelling that people will be forced to adopt it and discontinue their old ways of thinking. Given the currency of the concept in a wide range of disciplines outside of anthropology and in various areas of public discourse, we are left little space to pursue this task within an isolated and protected anthropological discourse. Anthropologists no longer have the influence to determine the “proper” definitions and uses of the term “culture”, and any usages practiced by others will continually reinvade our own writing and thinking. Yet if we wish to repair culture as an analytical concept, we have no alternative but to build on our own disciplinary experience and strengths and try to improve its power, rigor, and consistency as best we can.

In this chapter, I focus on the present construction of culture as a category and discuss its complexity and some unfortunate forms of reasoning to which it leads, before moving on to what might be done about it. Clifford Geertz recently commented that because of the way anthropology’s concept of culture was taught in the 1940s and 1950s, “we were condemned, it seemed, to working with a logic and a language in which concept, cause, form and outcome had the same name” (Geertz 2000: 13)—echoing his previous critique of this same “theoretical diffusion” (Geertz 1973: 4). I submit that the diffusion is still with us, despite Geertz’s efforts to develop a semiotic perspective on culture. Even in his own writings, as in those of others, a holistic template of culture still serves both to represent and to explain human behavior—it is both a “model of” and a “model for”, in the thought of the anthropologist as in our accounts of the natives.

To this critique I wish to add a discussion of two further flaws: the logical errors that the present form of the concept invites and its failure to take variation into account. By these steps I aim to stimulate our rethinking and retooling of anthropology’s theoretical position, which might enhance both the clarity of our reasoning and the naturalism of our descriptions of what we regard as culture.

I will not duplicate the received wisdom under which we have labored so long: that what we need is a better objectivist definition of culture. It is our reasoning and our practices that we need to change. I assume, however, that we can agree that recent and contemporary uses of the culture concept have helpfully converged upon an emphasis on the ideational, as in the definition “a picture of the ideational world of a people” (Keesing 1976: 184) or “essentially a matter of ideas and values, a collective cast of mind” (Kuper 1999: 227). We are thus speaking not of “material culture” or “human behavior” but about the ideas behind such events and manifestations. This may already have been foreshad-owed in E. B. Tylor’s famous definition, in which the term embraces “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as member of society” (Tylor 1871).

The Avoidance of Logical Errors

Unfortunately, the movement from Tylor’s concrete list of the institutions and behaviors of human life to an explicit focus on the ideas behind them has not much reduced the omnibus character of what is included in the category of culture. A number of perennial frustrations and confusions arise in anthropology from this inclusiveness. Most painful and perplexing are the paradoxes that appear when one tries to make generalizations or theoretical statements about the “nature of culture” as conceptualized in this omnibus usage. A number of statements appear repeatedly in our introductory lectures and our textbooks—and presumably in our reasoning—that sometimes seem mutually contradictory. For example:

Culture is a received tradition; culture is emergent, constantly innovated and in flux.

Culture is shared within a society; culture is distributed among the members of society.

Distinct cultures are associated with distinct societies or groups; culture shows continuous variation and cannot be empirically partitioned and socially or geographically bounded.

Culture is a complex whole; culture is a thing of shreds and patches formed through borrowing and hybridization.

Culture is a depiction of a lifeway; culture is a directive force on human action.

Such paradoxes are a direct result of the diversity of phenomena that we include in our category of culture. Thus, of the ideas encompassed by the mainstream anthropological concept of culture:

Some are ideas that people validate by tradition; others are embraced because they are new or compelling.

Some ideas are widely embraced in a population; others represent specialized knowledge or values held by only a few.

Some ideas are used as emblems by states and groups to mark their social boundaries; others circulate in wider fields of communication, unconstrained by such boundaries.

Some ideas embody or conform to pervasively accepted premises in a group; others are discrepant and may be actively contrapuntal, or separately and individually validated, or derived from recent, extraneous sources.

Some ideas represent outcomes and states of the world; others motivate and shape the actions of people who embrace them.

What is the trouble? A minimum of reflection suggests that the trouble must spring from a weakness in the present construction of our whole category of culture, as well as from the diversity of tasks for which we employ it. Generalizations about a category are valid only in regard to those features that members of the category have in common. But ideas—the stuff of culture—may share little in common, since they are variably related to the world, to social groups, and to social action. Thus, attempts to make generalized statements about all members of such a category—that is, about culture—will turn out to be true for some cases and untrue for others. We need to reason more carefully, with a clear awareness of just what we can claim our whole category of culture, as currently used in anthropology, predicates.

A glance back at Tylor’s definition shows us—more clearly there than in later formulations, but in common with them—that the category of culture is indeed an aggregate construction, covering and combining many diverse phenomena. It thus seems to exemplify what George Lakoff (1987: 145–148) called a “complex category.” In agreement with prototype theory, a complex category may well lack any single distinguishing common property or distinctive feature (as would be required by the classical, Aristotelian theory of categories). To explicate a complex category, one must look for a structure of central and peripheral members, or chains of linkage where the linking feature varies throughout the chain, or evocation through mere co-occurrence within a large experiential domain, or even construction as an “other” category of “everything else” (for concrete examples, see Lakoff’s analysis of Dyirbal categories, 1987: 92–105).

Tylor’s definition, however, does seem to contain one candidate for a “distinctive feature”, namely, in the phrase “acquired by man as a member of society.” But as in the case of his unmarked singular Culture, there is no indication that he meant the acquisition of culture by a member of any particular society: the reference is simply to culture’s social acquisition, presumably in contrast to other modes of acquisition, such as biological inheritance. Considering the arbitrariness of our practice in delimiting “a society” (discussed, for example, in Barth 1992), there is every reason to give Tylor the benefit of the doubt on this issue.

The mode-of-acquisition clause recurs in later anthropological definitions in the specification of culture as “learned behavior” or even “ideas transmitted through symbols.” There is no doubt that this definition addressed a fundamental issue in our understanding of human evolution. But since we frankly lack procedures by which to identify post hoc how most ideas must have been acquired, this seems to be a sleeping clause in our operational definition for distinguishing culture and not-culture in the empirical world of human ethnography—and we are poorly equipped in the way of any general theory of learning to do much about it. We may thus have legitimate doubts about how much can be achieved, generally and theoretically, in the study of human lifeways by thinking along lines of the question, which distinctive features of ideas might be entailed by the fact that ideas are “learned”?

A first step toward clarifying how the complex category of culture is in fact used as an analytical concept might be to look for a prototype or central member within the category: presumably, when we reason with culture as a concept, we will usually have the prototype in mind. Some of the nebulousness of culture may derive from a situation in which different users of the term envision different prototypes—that is, where the prototype image varies among different speakers and different contexts. For a senior generation of anthropologists, I believe “custom” may often constitute such a prototype—rather too simple and old-fashioned to mention in print nowadays, but supplying a best-example image with which to think. I note, for example, that Meyer Fortes, in his classic article on unilineal descent groups, talked explicitly about culture as “the facts of custom—the standardized ways of doing, knowing, thinking, and feeling—universally obligatory and valued in a given group of people at a given time” (Fortes 1953: 21). In commercial life, on the other hand, what is referred to as the “culture” of a corporation typically is the ambience generated by practices of authority, incentives, and attitudes toward change. In the discourse of multiculturalism, the stress seems to be on claims to traditional wellsprings of culture and on culture’s direct significance for—indeed, claim to indelible determination of—social identity. For a younger generation of anthropologists, the stress might be on otherness, producing again a very different order of concept, more akin to that expressed in purely relative (deictic) words such as “there” and “here.” Those and probably other prototypes may at various times shape the reasoning and general discourses we read and participate in. As a result, culture not only may mean different things to different authors but may unheedingly refer to different things in the different paragraphs of any one author.

Unless these various constructions of culture are clearly distinguished and consistently embraced or avoided during a conversation or in a chain of reasoning, bizarre confusions and conclusions will be produced. More generally stated, complex categories invite the logical error of inappropriate reasoning from particular examples, parts, or features to the category as a whole. I return to Lakoff for a general formulation of the problem: “Metonymy is one of the basic characteristics of cognition. It is extremely common for people to take one well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect of something and use it to stand for the thing as a whole or for some other aspect or part of it” (Lakoff 1987: 77).

The Importance of Variation

The most insidious and deceptive consequences of our present conceptualization of culture, however, arise from the way in which it affects our data through the methodology it encourages. The ethnographer is exposed during fieldwork to a “blooming, buzzing confusion” of different events: a near chaos of actions and utterances and constellations of circumstances. No two events will be identical: we are surrounded by variation, and we know it. Our concepts help us to grope toward some degree of imagined order and pattern.

Listen to the way A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, teacher of the generation of structural-functionalist anthropologists, spoke: “If in the Australian tribe I observe in a number if instances the behaviour towards one another of mother’s brother and sister’s son, it is in order that I may be able to record as precisely as possible the general or normal form of this relationship, abstracted from the variations of particular instances, though taking account of these variations” (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 192). In the rush toward culture (which Radcliffe-Brown preferred to call social structure), the variation that is observed is quietly elided from the account, in favor of stereotyped pattern descriptions such as “sister’s son privilege” or “mother-in-law avoidance.” These are then claimed to be the objects of observation. The particular events that were actually observed might be used as illustrations to enrich the description of the stereotype, but they are otherwise trivialized into irrelevancy.

As a result of such practices, the link between observation and data becomes highly ambiguous: a gap is interposed between the events observed and the “general or normal” feature of the interpreted datum. It is also circular in its imputation of social sharing within a group: if I, a white European, am observed taking advantage of my uncle or avoiding my mother-in-law, the behavior is not noted as an example of a custom (of sister’s son privilege or mother-in-law avoidance) as it would if an Australian Aborigine were seen doing the same. And the cultural aspect of events, as it is conceived in this construction, seems to be visible only as a “pattern” in a carefully selected aggregate of events. A record of observed variation among those events is somehow made irrelevant. But what is it, then, that we can claim to have observed?

Or to put it differently: a fieldworker attuned to recording culture is encouraged stealthily to introduce, or beg, the fundamental assumption: that an ideal form of custom exists as the primary social fact and that people’s acts are merely imperfect performances of it. Only such a Platonic assumption could justify writing the stereotype in as the field datum while writing the observation of variation out.

Is an effective counter to my argument perhaps found in a particular version of the ideational view of culture—a claim that since culture is made up of ideas, then our data on these ideas should come directly from the persons who embrace the culture, and not from (objectivist?) observations of events? If so, then sister’s son privilege and mother-inlaw avoidance are ideas only—ideas about concepts and rules that are named, identified, and embraced by Australian Aborigines but not necessarily embodied in their physical acts. In that case, observation should not be seen as the source of our data at all. Perhaps only the “new ethnography” procedures of the ethnomethodologists, whereby the ethnographer systematically elicits the words and ideas of informants, provide the means to record (ideational) culture—while participant observation of people acting in the world and vis-à-vis each other becomes irrelevant. Following ethnomethodological procedures, do we obtain our cultural data from people who are more knowledgeable than even the best participant anthropologist about the ideas, and arguably even the practices, of local people?

I think not. If ideas made up a world apart from actions, then we would be living in a bizarre world indeed, and one in which I would be much less interested in people’s ideas than challenged to make sense of their having ideas at all. If ideas have effects on people’s actions, on the other hand, then we must make ourselves responsible for studying the effects by observing them in people’s acts. Eliciting verbal data from informants with a view to recording their culture “directly”, we may indeed obtain their ideas about knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs, and other capabilities and habits, ordered in conceptual domains. But we will not arrive at data on how these ideas are made manifest, used, and deployed in the activities and interactions of people acting on the world and creating their experienced world. There is every reason to believe that other people perform the same stereotyping and pattern seeking that we have done with our conventional concept of culture, so that by eliciting the natives’ accounts, we will end up with the same gap between our elicited data and the events of action in the world that we find when we perform our own cultural stereotyping. We may obtain an account more closely in accord with local sensibilities, but the theoretical frame remains the same: an extracted summary of pattern without data on events of action and on empirical variations among actions.

But what justifies my concern for a more attentive recording of variation? It is that its elision, as authorized by a selective search for the second-order data of pattern and culture, impoverishes our data and prefigures the theoretical questions that will, and indeed can, be raised. Taking the discovered fact of variation seriously, on the other hand, induces a radical ontological shift: variation is recognized as a pervasive feature and thus a property of human ideas and human actions, and any attempt to understand ideas, actions, or both must acknowledge this fundamental feature of them. And why does variation deserve this position as a fundamental property of ideas and actions? Because, I argue, it appears empirically to be ubiquitous, and it poses a general theoretical challenge to any and every account of meaning and social action.

First to its empirical ubiquity. I know from field experience—see, for example, my trail of monographs from New Guinea (1975, 1987), Oman (1983), and Bali (1993)—that if one allows oneself to take systematic note of variation, then variation becomes an incessant discovery and at some level an analytically obsessive concern. But of course, you might object, no two individuals are identical in their ideas or in anything else, yet surely their cultural institutions, because these are collective social facts, will be shared and identical within a group—for example, in the Balinese villages I describe. The observation that individual persons may hold somewhat different ideas about these collective institutions could be dismissed as quite secondary and would not make the institutions themselves variable in any significant sense.

So, indeed, one could argue for a number of the cultural manifestations one might discover in a Balinese village. For example, the rules governing the pura desa (village temple) and the pura dalem (death temple) might...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Participants at the 2000 Wenner-Gren Symposium
• Foreword
• Introduction: Beyond Culture Worry
• Part 1: Leaving Culture Worry Behind
• Part 2: Emergent Sociality
• Part 3: Patterns and Continuities
• Part 4: The Politics of Culture
• References
• Index