Evaluating Culture

Well-Being, Institutions and Circumstance

M. Johnson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230296565
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313799
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

From which evaluative base should we develop policies designed to promote wellbeing among different cultural groups in varying circumstances? This book engages with needs and capabilities to advance normative functionalist assessment of the success with which cultural institutions promote eudaemonic wellbeing in given, determinate circumstances.

1

The Case Against Cultural Evaluation: Relativism, Culturalism and Romanticism

Introduction

In order to develop a universal account of enduring, immanent human interests upon which to mount a case against cultural sources of injury, it is necessary to overcome a series of ‘relativist’ claims regarding the nature of the human condition. My aim in this chapter is to unpack these claims and, by examining elements of the work of John Gray, to suggest means by which to overcome them. To do this, I outline, first, the empirical case against universalism and, second, the epistemological and methodological basis of the anti-universalist paradigms – social constructivism. I then identify three different, and to varying degrees incompatible, schematic claims. The first, anti-foundationalist, schema holds that there can be no objective basis for any form of evaluation as all matrices are pure, subjective constructs. The second, culturalist approach, departs normatively, if not analytically, from this position, arguing that matrices of evaluation do have validity but only within particular cultural-linguistic spheres. The third, romantic form is not relativistic at all, holding that the interests of humans lie in pre-modern societies with close ties to nature, and employing relativism instrumentally to check the advance of Western, industrial culture. Having detailed these positions, I then provide brief exegesis of one possible means of responding to their challenges – elements of the thought of John Gray. Gray’s pluralist perfectionist defence of objective, universal values and categories of well-being together with deployment of circumstance as an evaluative parameter, serve as a bridge to the remaining chapters of the book, in which I examine more fully ideas to which Gray refers only cursorily. I begin by discussing the historical development of contemporary, anthropological invocations of relativism.

The empirical case against universals

Relativism has a long history, being present in much pre-Socratic thought such as that of the Sophists. Its most vehement contemporary proponents have, however, been found in the field of anthropology. That the discipline should come to adopt relativism methodologically and epistemologically lies in contradiction to its own origins in the advancement of nineteenth-century imperialism. The bureaucratic and strategic need for information on native groups and their ‘primitive’ mores, and a scientific or cultural need to investigate (and, perhaps, imply the inferiority of) such peoples, led to the emergence of scholars whose sole aim was the study of difference in colonial outposts. This complicity with imperialism (see Gardner and Lewis 1996, 26–49) was, however, short-lived. Encountering difference led not, as the philosophers of the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century imperialists had found, to belief in the cultural or even racial superiority of the West but, rather, to the growing conviction that ‘native’ ways were not necessarily inferior and that ‘universal’ or ‘natural’ concepts were anything but. The ‘experience of anthropology’ (Hastrup 1995, 50) was deemed incapable of supporting ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘ethnocentric’ suppositions of human nature or the singular ‘good’ when faced with the ‘fact’ of cultural plurality. Contrary to Enlightenment principle, human interests did not lie, intrinsically, necessarily or fundamentally, in modernization, industrialization, individualism or other apparent components of Western life.

At the forefront of anthropological critique of elements of Enlightenment thought was Bronislaw Malinowski (2001), who sought to examine the purported universality of the Freudian Oedipus complex. For the psychoanalysts, the drive to patricide and incestuous maternal relations – as epitomized by the actions of King Oedipus of Thebes – was presumed inherent in men, regardless of geographical or cultural origin. Travelling to the South Sea Trobriand Islands, Malinowski tested the assumption using the ethnographic method of cultural submersion and observation. His research led him to conclude that the Oedipus complex:

corresponds essentially to our patrilineal Aryan family with the developed patria potestas, buttressed by Roman law and Christian morals, and accentuated by the modern economic conditions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie. Yet this complex is assumed to exist in every savage or barbarous society. This certainly cannot be correct. (Malinowski 2001, 6)

For Malinowski, complexes differed according to the particular histories, values and ends of particular groups. Where the social conditions differed, so too would the complex (Malinowski 2001, 5–7, 64–65). The islanders possessed their own, culturally particular, complex which resulted from the matrilineal social organization in which men were raised. This complex centred upon sexual desire towards female siblings – from whom men were separated almost completely from infancy – and the impulse to murder the maternal uncle who served as guardian and mentor in place of the father (Malinowski 2001, esp. 59–65).

Freud’s assertion of the universality of the Oedipus complex was, in fact, nothing more nor less than the self-expression of an individual from a group grounded in a particular form of existence. For the concept to be retained as universal in light of Malinowski’s work, its proponents would have, perversely, to claim that the islanders were not, to some degree, human or, at least, not ‘normal’. If this were true of the Oedipus complex, which formed the ‘objective’ foundation for psychoanalytical prescription, then the absence of other supposedly universal features – such as reason, political egalitarianism and recognition of individuals as a unit of moral concern – would further demonstrate the unacknowledged subjectivity of Enlightenment thought and its related evaluative schemes. This conclusion led many anthropologists, among others, to suggest that not only such claims of universality or truth but all aspects of human thought are ‘social constructs’.

The social construction of truth, the determinacy of culture and the contribution of anthropology

The notion of social construction has come to form the methodological and epistemological basis of much anthropological enquiry. The approach holds that symbols, actions and language are utilized to explain and give meaning to life (Jerome 1998, 9) within the ‘moral space’ of each human group (Benedict 1989, 2–3, 249–250; Hastrup 1995, 11; Hollis and Lukes 1982, 2–3). In this view, language, rather than enduring human interests, determines the conceptions of well-being and rationality held by different groups. For many anthropologists, the feelings of bemusement and/or superiority felt by the Enlightenment thinkers when faced by the ‘backwardness’ of non-Western/non-modern societies resulted not from recognition of an objective cultural deficit but, rather, from traversing moral spaces and discovering the absence of similar moral categories (see Levi-Strauss 1992, 7–8, 28; Sperber 1982, 179–180). This is what Rorty (1991, 200) seeks to express in his claim that ‘Nations or churches or movements are . . . shining historical examples not because they reflect rays emanating from a higher source, but because of contrast-effects – comparisons with other, worse communities’.

These arguments have led many to conclude that the evaluation of societies through (self-purportedly) ‘objective’ categories cannot be acceptable if such categories are absent, inapplicable or of little value in particular cultural forms. For the likes of Hastrup (1995, 6), therefore, evaluative schemes are, in fact, culturally ‘particular analytical perspective[s]’ which assess the value of cultures according to how closely the subjects correspond to the norms of those formulating the categories (see Benedict 1989, esp. 237; Bourguignon 1978, 491–494; Geertz 2000b, 68–88; Levi-Strauss 1992, esp. 1–36;). In this view, modern man, through Enlightenment philosophy, has made the error of assuming ‘equivalence of human nature and his own cultural standards’ (Benedict 1989, 6) when, in fact, there are ‘no means of making judgments across cultures except with loaded dice’ (Herskovits cited in Hatch 1983, 369).

If informed by this notion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand the behaviour and belief of others without first understanding the cultural constructions under which people operate. Sperber (1982, 155–156) illustrates the difficulties of comprehending alien spheres of language, explanation and belief by citing an example of the confusion created by his encounter with a man requesting that he kill a dragon. What this demonstrates is that ‘Other minds, other cultures, other languages and other theoretical schemes call for understanding from within. Seen from within, they make us doubt whether there is anything universal under the sun’ (Hollis and Lukes 1982, 1). Hence, the task forms of anthropology set themselves is to understand people as they are found – on, and in, their ‘own terms’ – according to the categories, understandings and meanings that they themselves have created.

As such, forms of anthropological enquiry have both strengthened the power of ‘culture’ as a unit of agency and determinacy, and undermined claims of objective universality. If it is culture which makes us (and which we perpetuate in turn), then it is culture and ‘moral space’, and not (as in the Enlightenment model) notions of ‘human nature’ or ‘nonhuman’ law, that we should study (Hastrup 1995, 50). Geertz (2000a, 5) articulates such a position succinctly in the following passage:

[M]an is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical.

Such a stance has made the evolutionism of the Enlightenment ontologically untenable and removed the quantitative basis of the evaluative schema of Marx et al. (Eriksen 2001, 138; Herzfeld 2001, 3; Levi-Strauss 1992, 9–11). ‘Cultures’ are seen to exist, not on a quantitative continuum of human progress from backward tradition to humanistic modernity but, rather, in various qualitatively distinct and incommensurable forms. Belief in the determinacy of culture – the notion that it is ‘not inherited biologically, but learned, acquired, even borrowed’ (Kuper 1999, 379) – and emphasis upon the qualitative difference between cultures have ensured that different cultural groups are seen almost as individual ‘species’ (Boaz 1989, xix), ‘in opposition to biology’, because it is ‘culture that mark[s] human beings off from other animals, and nations from other nations’. Spiro (1978, 353) explains this stance thus:

Given that human beings are born without instincts, the gratification of human ‘needs’ depends on learning. Given, moreover, that they are born entirely helpless, they are wholly dependent on adults for the acquisition of the means for their gratification. Given, finally, that they live in social groups, these means must be shared, and, therefore, prescribed, i.e., they must be cultural. Thus, the properties of the organism, interacting with those of the social environment, require that a human existence be a culturally constituted existence. In short, if other animals adapt by means of species-specific biological specializations, human adaptation is achieved by means of a species-specific nonbiological specialization, viz., culture. If this is the case, then, for a human primate to be classified as man – i.e., to be characterized as more than a bipedal, big-brained, primate – it is not enough that he have those biological characteristics a zoologist would designate as the distinguishing features of Homo Sapiens. It is also necessary that he have those characteristics – socially shared and transmitted symbols, values, rules, and so on – that an anthropologist would designate as the distinguishing features of a cultural mode of adaptation.

The rejection of instinct and inherent knowledge means that the only species-specific quality humans possess is culture. What distinguishes our species is that it relies upon culture to determine its interests and conceive of well-being. Humans can be constructed in any number of ways. Western humans are only one version of the species, and their conception of well-being is limited in scope to their particular moral sphere. This basic, social constructivist thesis is seen to form the basis of ‘relativist’ opposition to the idea of enduring human interests and the possibility of cross-cultural evaluation. However, as I shall now demonstrate, this thesis has been analytically and normatively interpreted, in a range of different, and often incompatible, ways, producing a series of different obstacles to cross-cultural evaluation. The first, ‘anti-representationalist/anti-foundationalist’ position denies any possibility of objectivity in schemes of evaluation.

Anti-foundationalism

The core tenet of those who believe in universal human interests and objective forms of well-being – such as Aristotle and, more recently, Nussbaum (2000) – is that there is a Platonic/Aristotelian dualism of eternal, natural truth and fallible, human perception. In this view, language is a means of representing reality. Linguistic representation can be graded in terms of accuracy, such that:

the reason why physicists have come to use ‘atom’ as we do is that there really are atoms out there which have caused themselves to be represented more or less accurately – caused us to have words which refer to them and to engage in the social practice called microstructural physical explanation. The reason why such explanation meets with more success than, say, astrological explanation, is that there are no planetary influences out there, whereas there really are atoms out there. (Rorty 1991, 5)

Proponents of this position believe that humans have ‘an unchanging, ahistorical human nature’ (Rorty 1999, xvi) and interests which are independent of their consciousness. Belief in the distinction between truth and perception enables philosophical realists to argue that they have the necessary ‘rational’ insight into the well-being of humans to create cross-cultural evaluative matrices which represent foundational reality. Thinkers with ‘rational’ insights into the enduring nature and interests of human beings can identify cultural deficits, or misrepresentations of reality, of which group members themselves may be unaware (Rorty 1993, 118).

For Richard Rorty, this is philosophically unsustainable. The recognition of the determinacy of language and moral spaces means that a dichotomy of objective, universal interests and fallible perception is false. He denies ‘that it is explanatorily useful to pick and choose among the contents of our minds or our language and say that this or that item “corresponds to” or “represents” the environment in a way that some item does not’ (Rorty 1991a, 5). In order to represent things, we have to be able to find neutral standpoints or ‘God’s-eye’ points of view by which accurately to view the world. Rorty, developing the Wittgensteinian tradition, argues that this is impossible. Truth, in this case in relation to well-being, is not something to be discovered, represented and reflected by words and thoughts, but something historically and circumstantially contingent (e.g. Rorty 1991a, 197–210; 1991b, 66–67), created by words and thoughts by individuals who possess no universal human nature and no ‘unconditional, transcultural moral obligations’ (Rorty 1999, xvi). ‘Analytically’, therefore, ‘we would benefit . . . from treating “objective truth” [as] no more and no less than the best idea we currently have about how to explain what is going on’ (Rorty 1980, 385) and ‘true beliefs as reliable guides to human action, rather than as accurate representations of something nonhuman’ (Rorty 1999, 268).

This anti-representational relativism asserts ‘the view that nothing is really [objectively] either right or wrong, or that there are no moral principles with a reasonable claim to legitimacy’ (Hatch 1983, 369). All moral or evaluative claims are relative to the particular moral space in which they develop. They are not derived from objective – i.e. immanent or natural – principles or sources. They are thoroughly inter-subjective – i.e. derived from the interaction of subjective beings. Accordingly, for anti-foundationalists, the simple fact that Enlightenment philosophers find hierarchical organicism, female genital mutilation or headhunting offensive does not mean that the practices are, inherently, repugnant. The fact that those in different moral spheres regard the practices as perfectly acceptable aspects of their particular conception of the good means that the objection is simply a culturally constituted preference.

One logical conclusion of this argument is that, while there is nothing objectively good or right about the use of systems of cultural evaluation, there is also nothing objectively wrong about it either. This tenet suggests that, not only are there no enduring interests, there is also no objective reason to grant value to interests once they are culturally constructed. This position cannot logically hold that the transformation of one culture into another entails any universal contradiction of the good or net loss of well-being or even a form of progress (which is, of course, seen to be culturally constituted). It suggests merely that humans would be subject to new conceptions of the good and new sources of meaning – both of which are commensurable only according to ethnocentric criteria. As Gellner (1982, 181) puts it, ‘If truth has many faces, then not one of them deserves trust or respect’, at least not inherently.

For Rorty, trust and respect emerge not from the identification of objective bases for evaluation and prescription, but from historical conversations and feelings. He defends an avowedly ethnocentric scheme of evaluation, claiming that we should appraise those – predominantly liberal, Western – cultures which contain ‘splits which supply toeholds for new initiatives . . . and tensions which make people listen to unfamiliar ideas’ on the grounds not that they provide us with a God’s-eyed view of truth, but that they enable our minds gradually to grow ‘larger and stronger and more interesting by the addition of new options – new candidates for belief and desire, phrased in new vocabularies’ (Rorty 1991, 13–14). For Rorty, this ethnocentric form of evaluation is grounded in his own cultural constitution, through the various conversations and int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 The Case Against Cultural Evaluation: Relativism, Culturalism and Romanticism
• 2 Needs, Goods and Self-Actualization
• 3 Capabilities, Zero-Sum Choices, Equality and Scope
• 4 What Is Culture? What Does It Do? What Should It Do?
• 5 Circumstance, Materialism and Possibilism
• 6 Applying the Theory: Sources of Harm in Aboriginal Australian Communities
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index