A CRITIQUE OF THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE PART ONE

Thirty years ago, I wrote a lengthy essay based in part on what I had learned from a book by Edwin Wilmsen called LAND FILLED WITH FLIES.  I have broken it down into three parts of roughly equal length and over the next several days will post it here on this blog. I would be very interested in any responses that readers have to it.

A Critique of the Concept of Culture

Introduction

             These reflections had their origin in an advanced graduate seminar on “Ideological Critique” in the Philosophy Department of the University of Massachusetts taught during September to December, 1991. Late in the term, I made a quick trip to South Africa, where I presented a talk on the concept of culture to a small, rather unappreciative audience at Fort Hare University, and then to a larger and very responsive group at The University of Durban-Westville, including many of you here today. My students at the University of Massachusetts were extremely excited to learn that their seminar discussions had made contact with thoughtful men and women half way around the world, and they enthusiastically endorsed my proposal to send copies of some of their final essays to Prem Singh, for circulation among interested parties at UDW. Out of these exchanges and discussions emerged the idea for a more formal, extended collective consideration of the issues raised and debated during that November visit. Accordingly, I have assembled a set of background readings, on which we can draw during our conversations, and, to initiate the discussion, I have written this paper.

Let me begin by stating the thesis of this paper, so that you know where I am headed. I maintain that the concept of culture, as it has come to be used in Anthropological writings, in theoretical treatments of contemporary social questions, and in popular discussions of such issues as multi-culturalism [in the United States] and the formation of a national culture [in South Africa], is fundamentally confused. It obscures rather reveals the truth about social formations, and works ideologically to conceal from view the political and economic interests of relatively powerless or disadvantaged sectors of society. Hence, I argue, the term "culture" is theoretically misleading and political reactionary. It should be replaced, in our vocabulary, by such terms as "class" and "politics." If I am correct, then we ought not to embrace proposals for "cultural autonomy," for "multi-cultural education," or for the creation of a "national culture of liberation," even when these are advanced by spokespersons of manifestly oppressed groups who experience their own political or economic oppression as a denial of their traditional and authentic culture.

Your first reaction to this thesis may be that it is surely too bold to be true! How can a concept employed so widely and with such evident conviction be so completely lacking in theoretical legitimacy? Leaving to one side the obvious rejoinder, namely that the corresponding thesis is manifestly true for every system of religious concepts, let me somewhat reassure you by saying that there is, of course, a legitimate and quite non-tendentious sense of "culture" that suffers none of the ideological disabilities that I am trying to expose. But, as I shall try to show you a bit later on, it has proved fatally easy to slide from that unproblematic notion of culture to the highly problematic, ideologically charged notion.

So much for where I am going. Let me start where I started nine months ago in my graduate seminar, with Land Filled With Flies, Edwin Wilmsen's critique of the ethnographic work of the American anthropologist Richard Lee. I shall try to lead you, step by step, along the path l myself took, until finally I am able to formulate and argue for my thesis in a suitably general way.

I should say, by way of explanation, that my decision to begin with a lengthy discussion of a text devoted to a quite specific and limited subject matter is deliberate, and reflects my long-held conviction that the best theoretical generalizations arise out of, and must remain rooted in, substantive, factually rich analyses of specific social or historical situations. I reject completely the sort of abstract, programmatic writing that proceeds at a level so elevated and rarefied that one quickly loses all sense of what is really at stake - writing in which "post-modern," "intertextual," "inscribed," and "discourse" are repeated talismanically, and in which a passing reference to Western Civilization is considered grubbing with the data.

I might have come to my conclusions about the concept of culture in any of a dozen ways, but the fact is that I arrived at them by reading and thinking about Wilmsen's book, and that is therefore where I have chosen to begin.

 

1.      Wilmen’s Critique of Richard Lee

In Land Filled With Flies, Wilmsen argues that a large group of very sophisticated and professionally highly regarded anthropologists are in the grip of an ideologically distorting conception of human history and society that has thoroughly blinded them to the plain evidence in front of their faces, with the consequence that they have substituted, for accurate description and analysis, a fable of the Primitive Hunter-Gatherer - a fable that they have projected onto a group of people living at the current time in a portion of the Northern Kalahari. According to Wilmsen, these anthropologists - Richard Lee and his associates - have misconstrued the history, the political economy, the social structure, and even the sheer biology of the people in question, despite the fact that they have carried out extensive and broad-based field observations over a period of several decades. Wilmsen further believes that this ideological distortion has led Lee and his associates to embrace substantive policy proposals that are oppressive of, and unjust to, the people in question.

Building on this critique, Wilmsen suggests that the fault lies not with Lee, but with ethnography itself. In the Introduction to Land Filled With Flies, he writes: ''This book is ... not an ethnography. One of its major premises is that the ethnographic era of anthropology, an era marked by the excision of societies from their historical contexts, is behind us - we may hope never to return." [p. xii]

To see the connection between this attack on ethnography and the concept of culture, we can remind ourselves of Emile Durkheim's methodological justification of sociology as an autonomous discipline. "Indubitably for sociology to be possible," he writes in Suicide, "it must above all have an object all its own. It must take cognizance of a reality that is not in the domain of the other sciences. But if no reality exists outside of individual consciousness, it wholly lacks any material of its own. In that case, the only possible subject of observation is the mental states of the individual, since nothing else exists.... [T]here can be no sociology unless societies exist, and ... societies cannot exist if there are only individuals. [Preface, emphasis in the original.]

Culture is to ethnography what Society is to sociology. It is the autonomous object of study, not reducible to objects in the domain of any other discipline, the existence of which legitimates ethnography as an authentic independent discipline. When Wilmsen denies that his work is an ethnography, and expresses the deliberately provocative hope that the ethnographic era of anthropology has ended, never to return, he can only be understood as implicitly asserting that the concept of culture, on which ethnography is founded, is irretrievably flawed. Wilmsen's disclaimer thus has powerful and far-reaching implications.

A.    The Theoretical Background

        First, we must set the scene with some background remarks about the development of anthropology and the theoretical framework within which Lee conceived himself to be working. Then we must take a look at Wilmsen's critique of Lee's work on the Zhu. Only then will we be ready to confront directly the ethnographic concept of culture and subject it to what I hope will be a terminal critique. And only after we have completed that critique will we finally be able to address directly the question that obviously motivates this entire effort, namely: If the concept of culture, and the associated discipline of ethnography, is the wrong way to understand human affairs, what then is the correct way, and what are its implications for our politics?

As anthropology came into existence as an organized discipline in the nineteenth century, it replaced the early credulous retailing of golden age myths and accounts of weird and wonderful peoples and practices with more disciplined accounts. [Although the notion lingered of anthropologists as sophisticated, highly educated representatives of advanced western society who make long, difficult, taxing, but exciting adventures to far away places -which is to say, places far away from western Europe or the United States- where they encounter and study primitive peoples.] The original notion of the primitive as the Edenic stage of natural ma was replaced by an evolutionary account of the development of Homo Sapiens from "lower" life forms.

The historical account of human civilization, based on investigations into ancient documents, inscriptions on clay tablets or stones, and archeological cross-checking of Biblical or Epic narratives, established something like a continuous narrative that takes us back perhaps ten thousand years. But archeological excavations and modern techniques of the dating of organic materials revealed that Homo Sapiens, as a biological species, had existed in unaltered physical, and hence presumably unaltered genetic, form for at least a hundred thousand years. Excavations of pre-historic sites made it extremely likely that groups of biological humans had long bad socially transmitted religious and other practices, and probably language as well.

Excavations of sites 6,000 to 10,000 years old produced the remains of what can only be construed as cities, the size, complexity, and manner of construction of which compel us to posit a rather elaborate social and political structure capable of mobilizing the labor of large numbers of people performing differentiated and integrated functions [stone masons, hauling-sled designers and builders, quarriers, builders and sailors of ships]. Such labor in turn presupposes a division of function that assigns to some people the task of producing more food than they need for themselves, the remainder being used to feed those who are doing the labor of city building, and so forth. The archeological evidence suggests strongly that the economic key to the emergence of cities is the domestication of animals and the initiation of large-scale farming - what anthropologists call the Neolithic Revolution.

More recent fieldwork and theoretical reinterpretations have somewhat blurred the distinction between the foraging stage of human development and the stage characterized by domestication of animals and farming, but it remains the case that anyone looking backward from the present day sees the following picture: a very long period, perhaps 100,000 years or more, during which there is little or no evidence of any major change in the way Homo Sapiens live, followed by a rather brief period of historical time during which there is ever more rapid technological, social, intellectual, and political change, bringing us by dint of an explosion of material changes in the past two centuries to our present situation.

This reconstruction poses two very difficult questions: First, and most obviously, what explains the rapid change of the past ten millennia, particularly of the past two centuries? And Second, not so obviously, but more fundamentally, what explains the total absence of change in the period ten times as long before that?

The most powerful and influential answer to the first question - that of Karl Marx - is that the locus of historical change is the class structure of a society. Taking over Hegel's notion of historical periodization, Marx early in his life put forward the thesis that the story of human history is essentially the story of progressively more advanced division of labor, with the consequent class struggles between those who control, and those who do not control, the means of production. For historians, this has proved to be a very successful hypothesis, with whose use they can organize a great deal of historical data and work out explanations of a wide variety of important historical events - the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the development of medieval feudalism, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and so on.

But to an ethnographer, this hypothesis seems to imply a rather striking answer to the second question concerning the apparent lack of change in the pre-history of the human species. Human groups in that earlier time - tribes, bands, clans, or whatever one wishes to call them - must have exhibited no internal division of labor, nor any class structure based upon differential ownership of the means of production.

Non-human animals live and reproduce in more or less successful adaptive relation to their environment. As the environment changes - water becomes more or less available, food sources vary, climate changes - those species adapt in ways that come, over very long periods of time, to become encoded in their genetic make-up.

But in human groups, social structure substitutes for species adaptation as the mediating element between individuals and nature. Men and women produce their conditions of existence by purposeful action, and we must appeal to the social fact of differential ownership of the means of production to explain how, and how well, they do this. The social comes to interpose itself between the psychological and the natural as a third, autonomous category of existence. And - for rather complex reasons about which 1 shall have a good deal to say a bit later on - this interposition of social structure between the individual and nature carries with it necessarily, inevitably, the historicity of the human condition. Elephants do not have a history; neither do dolphins, so far as we know. But humans do, because they produce and reproduce the class structures that organize their production, in the process of becoming human and living out their lives.

Thus, the reconstructed story of a lengthy ahistorical period of changeless repetitive reproduction followed by a relatively short burst of unilinear historical development is explained by postulating a long period of human band or group adaptation to the natural environment unmediated by internal class structure, followed by an as yet unexplained emergence of property relations and class structure, giving rise to history.

This part of the story is marked by a rather arcane, but important, debate over the concept of labor in the writings of Marx. The debate turns on the distinction between subjects and instruments of labor. Briefly, from the point of view of a twentieth century European or American anthropologist who drives up to his research site in a Land Rover, unpacks his lightweight Nylon tent, sets up his camp stove, and prepares to do a little high-tech camping while recording his ethnographic observations on film, tape, and Laptop, it must appear that the Zhu are in virtually unmediated contact with their natural surroundings, foraging for food in much the same directly adaptive manner that the higher mammals of the Serengeti do. To be sure, they have a few pots and arrows, and bits and snatches of clothing, but material nature seems to serve them as the mere subject of their labor, that on which their labor operates. There do not seem to be instruments of labor that are interposed between them and nature, by the deployment and use of which they transform nature so as to serve their needs. They range across their territory, picking up nuts or berries as they find them, just as monkeys do; they run down Gemsbok in packs, following the wounded animals for days until they drop, rather than building brakes and pens, or cultivating them, as the Lapps do with their reindeer, for example.

Wilmsen completely rejects this view. In the form of a debate about the proper interpretation of several passages in Capital, he argues against distinguishing the productive efforts of foragers from those of herdsmen or farmers. After several pages of textual exegesis, Wilmsen writes:

Finally, it seems clear to me that - if the reading of Marx's placement of Paleolithic peoples I offer above us accepted - Marx included forager relations to instruments of production and to land among those of other humans.... From this formulation it seems to me inescapable that to segregate a foraging mode of production on the basis of land as a subject of labor is to deny full humanity to modern "foragers," a nineteenth-century notion subscribed to neither by Marx nor by any of the modern proponents of such a mode of production. On these ontological grounds, it appears that current constructions of a forager mode of production are irretrievably flawed and must be abandoned. [Wilmsen, p. 49]

So the historical change of the past ten millennia or so is explained by Marx as resulting from the inner workings of the conflicts that arise, within the processes of production and distribution, over control of the product, and most particularly of the surplus product over and above what is required simply to keep the production process going from cycle to cycle and generation to generation. And anthropologists like Lee conclude that pre-historic human beings must have lacked any class structure mediating the process of production and reproduction.

Pre-historic human beings, they speculated, could only be thought of as living in a symbiotic relationship with their environment - not productively transforming it, but living off it, as impala or elephant have on the Serengeti Plain for hundreds of thousands of years. Small bands of humans, they postulated, hunted wild animals and gathered such foods as grew naturally. They were, in short, Hunter-Gatherers.

[It is worth pointing out, by way of illustrating the extent to which ideological considerations shape scientific theories, that the "hunter-gatherer" model is a politically correct revision of the original "patriarchal" theoretical construct of Man the Hunter. The first construction of the pre-historic, post-hominid stage of human development assigned productive functions - hunting - to the men, and reproductive functions - bearing and rearing children - to the women. Anthropologists explained, in suitably scientific fashion, that the long maturation stage of the human infant made it impossible for women to participate in the economic activities of the primitive horde. All of this was tricked out with elaborate stories about the adaptive monogamous mating strategies of the primitive male, who was portrayed as a loving, caring, bread-winning pater familias, roughly along the lines of a middle-class Victorian husband. This unacceptable bit of sexist science gave way to the more appropriate model of the two-wage-earner family in which women were construed as gatherers of nuts and berries, and men as hunters of wild animals. Hence "hunter- gatherer."]

Now then: All of this was in the nature of a purely theoretical reconstruction, buttressed by archeological evidence derived from the excavation of campsites, burial grounds, caves, and such like.

Imagine the extraordinary excitement that anthropologists experienced when they heard that there were still groups of human beings living TODAY in this same pre-historic fashion! Primitive hunter-gatherers living out the age-old patterns, far away in remote corners of the world so removed from modern settlements, trade routes, and even voyages of exploration that somehow they have been left behind by history! In the Outback of Australia, in the farthest reaches of the Kalahari, in the depths of the Amazon rain forest, the reports came back of the last remnants of extremely primitive peoples who neither domesticated animals nor farmed, but lived by ranging over their environment like herds of mammals, hunting and gathering.

To study such peoples, one can easily imagine oneself thinking, would be, in effect, to travel back in time, for if the practices of such peoples had not changed from 100,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago, or from 50,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, perhaps they had also not changed from 10,000 years ago to the present. Perhaps, we can imagine them thinking, if we pack up our gear and hurry to the Outback or the Kalahari, we can actually see people indistinguishable from their unimaginably ancient ancestors. Perhaps we can learn their languages, capture them on film and tape, study their tools and techniques, and thus acquire, through direct observation and access, a firm foundation for a complete theory of human history, by ascertaining the condition of the human race before the march of history began.

This, more or less explicitly, was the motivation for the massive efforts by Lee and his associates to study the living daylights out of the people whom they call the Dobe !Kung before assimilation had completely wiped out the last traces of pre-history.

Since my exposition of their theoretical perspective can hardly be called neutral, let me say a word in defense of Lee and his coworkers before turning to Wilmsen's critique. They are not fools, nor are they at all unimaginative. They were aware from the very first that the Zhu stood in rather extensive social, economic, and even political relationships with other peoples in their region, including the Herero, various European colonial powers, and the South African government. Indeed, it was this awareness that lent urgency to their work, for they could see these interactions - which they conceived as outside influences - almost daily diminishing the purity, and hence the significance to them, of the pristine hunter-gatherer mode of life among the Zhu.

We should also note that Lee conceived himself to be taking a politically progressive position with regard to the treatment of the Zhu by the governments of Botswana and South Africa. In the context of American politics, he was in theory and in practice very far to the left. The dispute between Wilmsen and Lee is not a standard fight between left and right, by any means. This by way of a warning not to read too simple-minded an interpretation into the dispute.