Culture and Art

Selected Writings, Volume 1

Zygmunt Bauman, Dariusz Brzezinski, Mark Davis, Jack Palmer, Tom Campbell, Katarzyna Bartoszynska

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509545469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

The sociological imagination and the artistic imagination have been historically intertwined, at once reciprocal and conflicting, complementary and tensional. This connection is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. His conception and practice of sociology were always infused with a literary and artistic sensibility. He wrote extensively on the relationship between sociology and the arts, and especially on sociology and literature; he frequently drew on literary writers in his exploration and elucidation of sociological problems; and he was an avid and passionate consumer and practitioner of art, especially film and photography.

This volume brings together hitherto unknown or rare pieces by Bauman on the themes of culture and art, including previously unpublished material from the Bauman Archive at the University of Leeds. A substantial introduction by the editors provides readers with a lucid guide through this material and develops connections to Bauman's other works.

The first volume in a series of books that will make available the lesser-known writings of one of the most influential social thinkers of our time, Culture and Art will be of interest to students and scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences, and to a wider readership.

1
Culture and Society: Semantic and Genetic Connections (1966)
Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

‘CULTURE’ OR ‘CULTURES’

The concept of ‘culture’ is used in the social sciences today in two different contexts. In one context, the word ‘culture’ appears without adjectives, or with adjectives that do not serve as spatio-temporal indicators. In both cases, culture is understood as an attribute of humankind in general, typically an essential one; the kind of attribute that is meant is detailed by numerous definitions currently in circulation, be it White’s ‘ability to use symbols and bestow meaning’,¹ ‘an ability to teach and learn’ delineated by Ashley Montagu, or simply the ability people have to create things and ideas that would not exist if humans did not – but this attribute is always thought of as a feature of humans in general, as something that distinguishes ‘humans’ from ‘not-humans’. Adjectives added in this context to the word ‘culture’ are intended to indicate the ingredients of this ubiquitous attribute, which are just as ubiquitous and absolutely human as the attribute itself: culture – be it material, spiritual, artistic, etc. – is the product of a classification of a collection of elements, demarcated as an attribute of humanity through the term ‘culture’; which are also products whose presence can be detected in any arbitrarily chosen portion of the human species, at any time or place. For lack of a better term, we can name the concept of culture that appears in these contexts as the idea of ‘culture in the attributive sense’.

There is also another context in which the word ‘culture’ is used. This is the use encountered most often in archaeological and ethnographic studies, in the kinds of studies that pertain to an object that is definitively located within time and space – indeed, that may even consider the work of locating it as their primary research objective. In these contexts, the researcher is not interested in culture without adjectives, and it always appears in this research with an adjective that locates it within time or a particular geographic region or society, or in both at once. Archaeologists speak of Zarubinets or Przeworsk culture, a Paleolithic or Neolithic Stone Age culture, a ceramic culture of coil pots or pots thrown on the wheel, a culture of Yamnaya or Funnelbeaker graves. Ethnographers or anthropologists (in Anglo-Saxon countries, the idea of ‘anthropology’ encompasses the elsewhere differentiated ideas of ethnography as a descriptive science, and ethnology as theoretical knowledge) speak of the culture of the Andaman or Navajo, or more broadly of the culture of herders or farmers. Sociologists tend to speak of rural (as opposed to urban) culture, about the medical culture or workers’ culture, decidedly less than archaeologists and ethnographers, who are sensitive to the role of time and space, but even when they do not explicitly say so, they frequently locate phenomena within the rubrics emerging from contemporary, highly developed industrial society, which is the only real object of their inquiries. And in the other contexts, the concept of culture does not indicate what is common to all people and comprises their major attribute, differentiating humans from all that is not human – but what differentiates one group of people from another. We can, then – again, for lack of a better term – describe this as the idea of ‘culture in a distributive sense’.

In this way – for example – archeology seeks out traces of bygone human activities that are stable, resistant to the flows of time. Such traces are the product of human labour, artificial creations, not existing in ‘pre-human’ nature – such as tools, weapons, ornaments, houses, vehicles, ditches, canals or abandoned mine shafts – or natural things that indirectly attest to human activity – such as, for instance, shells from the Mediterranean that are found in the campsites of mammoth hunters by the river Don or in primitive farming settlements by the Rhine; or deserts stretching across formerly forested terrains, thanks to the influence of a human who, ‘nurtured in the woodlands, has been of old the enemy of trees. He has exploited them, destroyed them … . In the wood and brush lands in which most of mankind has lived over most of its span, the woody cover was progressively thinned and the ground more fully exposed to sun and air.’² All of these things and phenomena, archaeologists organize into ‘types’, abstracting from less important or contingent individual features of every object taken separately, and attempting to deduce stable associations between them, typical of the archaeological finds of a given time or place. When they are able to accomplish this goal, we can speak of culture. ‘Culture’ is what archaeologists call ‘an assemblage of the same types that recurs at several distinct sites’.³ From the very definition, it emerges that archaeologists are dealing with the plenitude of culture; this plenitude can be organized – and essentially organizes itself – according to chronological and spatial criteria, gaining in the process a spatio-temporal map that visualizes its distribution in time and space.

The procedures of ethnographers do not differ logically from those of archaeologists. The difference between the fields of knowledge is more in subject-matter than methodology: where archaeologists examine the fossilized remains of bygone human activities, ethnographers study their activities today. They go on, however, to organize them into ‘types’ – which in ethnography are called ‘cultural models’ – and they determine their stable associations, which they call ‘institutions’, in order to subsequently name the same associations that recur in neighbouring human collectives’ ‘culture’ – obviously, in the distributive sense of the word.

We can say that the difference between culture in an attributive and in a distributive sense is like the difference between what is general and what is particular: when we speak of culture in the former sense, we are interested in what is common to all people; when we contemplate culture (or rather cultures) in the latter sense, we accentuate what reciprocally differentiates particular groups of people. The difference between these concepts is thus primarily a distinction between different research perspectives, which we also find in many other cases – for example, when we examine the anatomical differences between humans and primates, or between people of different races. This difference in research perspectives, obvious to anatomists, is unfortunately not always apparent in studies of culture. For this reason, reasonable claims about ‘culture in general’, culture in the attributive sense, become less meaningful when applied to particular cultures, and vice versa. Mixing the two different research perspectives has, in particular, been the source of many misunderstandings in well-known conflicts about the evolution of culture. It would probably be good, then, if we established different names for these two different senses of the term ‘culture’, analogously to the difference between langue and parole established by linguists. Unfortunately, such a pair of terms has not yet been created in the study of culture, and introducing it at this stage would require a significant, and socially costly, revision of terminology in the vast body of literature on cultural studies.

That which we see today as the difference between two logically valid ways of organizing the same raw materials of experience was, for many years, seen by anthropologists as an unresolvable controversy between truth and falsehood, between science and unscientific fantasy. Since the time that Bronisław Malinowski called for field research and his call was accepted as programmatic for the study of culture – in distinction from ‘armchair philosophy’ – anthropologists have devoted all of their energies to deepening their understanding of individual cultures, in distinction from ‘culture in general’. Researchers were not always conscious of the above juxtaposition. It frequently emerged by happenstance, as an unplanned side effect, from the very method of study: concentrating attention on elements of culture that could be perceived in a relatively small slice of human communities that the researcher was interested in – a slice isolated from other human collectives not so much by geographic or social barriers, but by ignorance or limited interest on the part of researchers. Cut off from its synchronic and diachronic affiliations by the researcher’s own research agenda, the group that the researcher became acquainted with thus appeared before his eyes as a closed set, as a totality that could be understood in isolation. In this way, premises of research were combined with empirical observation, the postulate of studying the culture of every collective as if it were a totality, in the reciprocal interrelationship of its components along with the apparent evidence of its difference and the relative isolation of its culture – what is more, with proof of its internal systematicity and coherence and complementarity. When Malinowski declared his theoretical credo in this matter, he seems to have been convinced that he was formulating ontological claims, and not methodological directives: ‘It [culture – Z. B.] obviously is the integral whole consisting of implements and consumer goods, of constitutional characters for the various social groupings, of human ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs. Whether we consider a very simple or primitive culture or an extremely complex and developed one, we are confronted by a vast apparatus.’⁴ This way of seeing culture as a collection of cultures was already imposed by the essentially partitive research methods that became obligatory in the anthropological world after Malinowski. Representative of his English environment, E. E. Evans-Pritchard introduced the association of both features – the method of study and the cognitive perspective – into the definition of anthropology: ‘The social anthropologist studies primitive societies directly, living among them for months or years … The social anthropologist studies societies as wholes.’⁵ The extreme position of ontologizing methodological directives ultimately led to the denial of ‘human culture as such’ and to ascribing ‘objective existence’ only to particular cultures.

Amid these extreme perspectives ontologizing the conflict, we also find very different perspectives. As Robert Lowie expressed, for instance: ‘a specific culture is an abstraction, an arbitrarily selected fragment … . There is only one cultural reality that is not artificial, to wit: the culture of all humanity at all periods and in all places.’⁶

There is a concern that, just as the functionalist reaction to the primitive totalism of nineteenth-century evolutionism stoked tendencies to ontologize perspectives of nominalistic types, in the same way the contemporary reaction to the limitations of functionalist horizons, in conjunction with the burning need to theorize the unexamined plethora of material already collected, will further popularize quasi-realist ontologizations.

The condition to not so much resolve, as to eliminate, the ostensible contradiction between those who write about ‘culture’ and those who believe in ‘cultures’ seems to be, in the first place, de-ontologizing the problem, bringing it to the level on which it essentially began – namely, to the choice of research perspectives and axes systematizing elementary data. That is why I appreciate the perspective that Lévi-Strauss took on the issue: ‘What is called a “culture” is a fragment of humanity which, from the point of view of the research at hand and of the scale on which the latter is carried out, presents significant discontinuities in relation to the rest of humanity.’⁷ Or, elsewhere, ‘anthropologists usually reserve the term “culture” to designate a group of discontinuities which is significant on several of these levels at the same time. That it can never be valid for all levels does not prevent the concept of “culture” from being as fundamental for the anthropologist as that of “isolate” for the demographer.’⁸

The dilemma ‘culture or cultures’ is in some sense analogous to the dilemma ‘species or race’ in biology – and the biological perspective on humans, in particular. The geneticist Dobzhansky described races as ‘populations differing in the incidence of certain genes, but actually exchanging or potentially able to exchange genes across whatever boundaries (usually geographic) separate them’.⁹ Distinguishing races in the totality of the species is always relative, the act of differentiation always contains a dose of arbitrariness: the population that is considered to be a particular race differs from others only by the degree of probability that, among the individuals comprising it, this or that gene appears, which is taken as distinctive of a specific race. The population distinguished as a race because of the particular appearance of Gene A does not have to also be ‘different’ with regards to genes B, C, D, etc. As Dobzhansky and Epling explain, ‘an individual or population might belong to one “race” so far as the gene A is concerned, to a different “race” with respect to the gene B, to a still different “race” with respect to C, etc.’.¹⁰ This notorious multi-dimensionality of ‘mutations’ and generally inexact correlation (if not complete autonomy) create gnoseological lessons for many categorizations that would be equally valid, logically, removing from all of them the merit of absolutism. The degree of correlation between these divisions must be left to empirical study, and not determined by accepting a priori premises, even those that are implicit in arbitrarily chosen research methods.

We have, then, in the positions of ‘culture in an attributive sense’ and ‘culture in a distributive sense’, two logically valid ways of organizing empirical data that are acquired by researchers of culture. In essence, there are other methods as well; if the degree of generality of the concept of culture in the attributive sense is precisely delineated by the di...