A CRITIQUE OF THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE PART TWO

A.    Wilmsen’s Critique of Lee

Wilmsen’s critique operates at a number of different levels. The broadest or most encompassing level is his invocation and adaptation of the notion of world systems advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein and others, mostly in the context of debates about Third World underdevelopment. There had been a tendency among economists and historians, and of course very much more markedly among anthropologists, to conceive third world nations or regions [and, within anthropology, primitive peoples] as autarchic - as isolated, self-sufficient social systems whose principal characteristics could be, indeed had to be, explained by appeal to internal features. The interactions of these independent systems with advanced industrial capitalist nations [I am deliberately using the language in which these theses were advanced - you must read my discourse ironically] were understood as secondary, externally imposed deformations, rather than as partially constitutive of the societies themselves. Wallerstein et al. argued, in effect, that it was no more reasonable to construe Latin America or Southeast Asia or Africa in this way than it would be to construe the working class of a capitalist economy and society as an independent social formation defined and determined independently of its relation to the capitalist class. Instead, they said, we must understand the entire world economy as a single system, in which, for example, the depressing of the prices of primary products relative to manufactured goods on the world market plays the same role as the depressing of wages within a market economy, and so forth.

Anthropologists have typically understood "their tribes" as isolated, complete social units, at most standing in some on-going interaction with other tribes in the vicinity. Adapting Wallerstein, Wilmsen argues that the Zhu can only be properly understood as thoroughly integrated into a larger economic system encompassing not only the rest of Southern Africa, but also Europe, Asia, Northern Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. They must be seen both as occupying a class position in that larger system, and as exhibiting an internal class structure based upon differential access to and control of land and water. If Wilmsen can make this case, then he has effectively refuted the theoretical classification of the Zhu as pre-historic hunter-gatherers.

In support of his counter-claim, Wilmsen presents three bodies of detailed evidence:

1. Historical materials drawn from government archives in Botswana and other sources dealing with the events of the past two to three centuries in Southern Africa. From these materials, Wilmsen draws three lessons. First, the region of the Kalahari in which the Zhu are found is not an Outback or backwater, but has historically been intersected by trade routes linking the Kalahari with the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and beyond. Second, the Zhu were in relatively recent times herders of cattle and farmers, so that it is unjustified to construe their present foraging as the continuation, unbroken, of pre-historic modes of survival. And Third, the Zhu who now live in the Kalahari and were the objects of Lee's investigations are in fact an underclass who have, within the past century and a bit more, been driven off their cattle posts and lands, deprived of their lucrative trade activities, and consigned to a meagre, marginal existence at the bottom of the class hierarchy. In effect - this is my analogy, not Wilmsen's - it is as though Lee were to come to New York, observe homeless men and women living on the streets and grubbing in garbage cans, and were to fail to notice that they are the underclass of a capitalist economy, construing them instead as traditional hunter-gatherers. [This analogy is a bit harsh, of course]

2. Archeological materials drawn from his and other people's digs, showing that cattle herding, farming, and large-scale trade had flourished in the Kalahari for at least two thousand years. Wilmsen is able to draw some rather elegant inferences, from such unlikely data as statistical counts of animal bones, concerning the existence of an elaborate class structure at an earlier time.

3. Direct observation and interpretation of present-day Zhu, designed to demonstrate, among other things: First, that the Zhu do in fact have a clearly defined class structure [and hence, you see, a history - that is the point of proving this], based principally upon property rights in available water sources, so that it is incorrect to understand their various practices, such as the nomadic movement from water hole to water hole, purely as a species adaptation to the environment, unmediated by differential class interests;[1] and Second, that for the Zhu, kinship relations are not a mechanically enacted system of rigid rules, but are a flexible structure within which individuals find political advantages and disadvantages, for example by interpreting kinship relations so as to favor or disfavor marriages that will in turn advance or frustrate their economic interests.

This last point is rather subtle, and in my opinion very important. European historians, for example of eighteenth century England [such as Lewis Namier], have taught us to understand extended family relationships, especially of those in the ruling circles, as matrices within which individuals pursue political ends by manipulating kinship ties in flexible ways. One need merely consult the novels of Jane Austen to see how this was done in practice.

Anthropological accounts of kinship relations subtly shift the explanatory balance, representing the structural relationships as primary and the participants in them as secondary instantiations of them.

The effect, both literary and theoretical, is to represent the upper classes of England as having a politics, but to deny that the people of "primitive tribes" do. In this way, the Zhu are figured as not like us - perhaps superior, perhaps inferior, but inescapably other. Wilmsen's analyses of property relations as mediated by kinship seek to alter this conception.

Once again, an example drawn from popular entertainment may make the point more successfully than an abstract characterization. Everyone who has spent much time, as I have, watching westerns and explorer movies like King Solomon's Mines grows accustomed to Red Indians and African savages who speak an odd pigeon English even when they are supposedly speaking to one another in their native tongue! "White man speak with forked tongue, Little Bear." "Yes, Running Fox, but great chief wise, find truth in white man's words." That sort of thing. Now, when you think about it, every human being is a native speaker of some language, and in your own linguistic community, what you say and what is said to you sounds, to your ear, perfectly normal and without accent. It is only out siders and foreigners who talk funny. The popular representations of "primitive" peoples portray them, by this simple linguistic device, as inherently simple-minded. This elementary fact was brought home to me some while ago by watching a television production in the United States of a several-part history of Shaka, the Zulu king. Far and away the most extraordinary feature of the production was the fact that Shaka and his principal minister engaged in perfectly grammatical, rather sophisticated discussions of political strategy, much as two characters in one of Shakespeare's history plays might have. The effect on the audience, I can testify, was to make Shaka and his minister seem like effective, intelligent politicians, which is presumably what they were.

Wilmsen makes very much the same point directly, in reporting several conversations with a man named Halengisi. Here are the passages, taken from pages 251 and 268:

Halengisi insists that the past was better than the present - he once said to me, with a wave of his hand at the herds around us, "Gumisi ka kwarra kwinki": ''There are no cattle here now." He made this remark while we were standing together near the CaeCae wells surrounded by about a third of the more than six hundred cattle kept here; we were, in fact, leaning against his magnificent bull, in which he took justifiable pride. He was of course speaking rhetorically and went on to say that in recent years his homestead had suffered substantial losses due to the poisonous plant mai. [251]

Lee relates conversations with two Kaos at Dobe who appear to suggest that Zhu ridicule the notion of Zhu headmen. In fact, many do so. But they do so with irony ... Just as with Halengisi's rhetorical dismissal of the cattle standing around him, it is mistaken to take these anecdotes at face value. [268]

I would suggest that the ability to recognize ironic communication from someone is a very important mark of one's conceptualization of that person as like oneself.

Finally, there is the most astonishing argument in the entire book, namely Wilmsen's claim that Lee et al. have not even been able to describe the gross physical characteristics of the Zhu correctly! Wilmsen actually argues that they are not genetically small; they are just hungry! I hope you can appreciate just how insulting this is to Lee. It is as though a revisionist historian were to say to one of the most prominent students of medieval Europe, “Did you perhaps fail to notice that the documents on which you base your research were written in Latin, and not English as you appear to have thought?" It is scarcely any wonder that Lee has not been amused.

Although Wilmsen's critique focuses in detail on the techniques and conclusions of Lee's research, the remark quoted earlier about the end of ethnography makes it clear that his real target is the fundamental presupposition underlying all such anthropological work, no matter how well carried out. Wilmsen seeks to call into question the very existence of the object that ethnography studies, namely culture. Everything in the critique turns on this point, so we must try to get as clear as we can about the concept of culture in its ethnographic usages.

1.      The Ethnographic Concept of Culture

The term "culture," like its cognates in other European languages is, as Raymond Williams notes, extremely complex and problematical, with root meanings both of tending crops and of honoring through religious ceremonies. The former sense gives rise to the familiar notion of culture, or cultivation, as a special development of talents and sensibilities, particularly in relation to aesthetic productions, as when we speak of a person as cultivated, or of the high culture of a civilization. The clear implication is that culture is something the upper classes have, the middle classes aspire to, and the lower classes lack.

These meanings play a familiar role in seventeenth and eighteenth century satires of bourgeois pretensions and social climbing. The upper classes need not acquire culture; they have it [like the upper crust Boston lady, who, when asked by an arriviste where she bought her hats, replied, "We do not buy our hats; we have our hats."] The middle classes, born without culture, desperately seek to acquire it, through dancing schools, grand tours of the continent, and lavish endowments of ballet or opera, all in a comic, but of course ultimately unsuccessful, effort to pass as upper class. The working class is too coarse even to acquire the patina of culture. At best, they have folkways, which are a natural subject for humor.

A sophisticated observer will be able to tell at a glance whether someone is truly cultivated or a mere imposter. [This conception, after undergoing a variety of transformations, resurfaces in the odd Victorian literary conceit that an Englishman can pass himself off as Indian or Arab merely by darkening his skin, donning the appropriate clothes, and studying the local dialects, whereas a member of a lower order, such as an Indian, will make himself into a buffoon should he attempt to acquire English culture. See Kipling's Kim, for example. The apotheosis of this nutty notion can be found in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, in which a titled English nobleman, Lord Greystoke, orphaned in Africa as a baby and raised by apes, teaches himself how to speak English by looking at a primer left by his dead parents! Apparently not only courage, nobility, and refinement, but even spoken English, are encoded in the genetic materials of the English upper classes.]

In the nineteenth century, the aristocratic notion of culture undergoes a transformation that is both democratic and scientific. Rather like Moliere's bourgeois gentilhomme, M. Jourdain, who discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life, anthropologists discovered that not merely the upper classes, but every human group, possessed a culture. And this culture could become the object of systematic, scientific investigation. The new understanding of the concept received its first and most influential articulation in a classic early work by E. B. Tylor, entitled Primitive Culture.

Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society. The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action.

We find here the core idea on which modern ethnography is based: Each human group-tribe, clan, nation, society, civilization - has or exhibits a culture that defines its social nature and makes its members what they are: Medes, Persians, Ashanti, Iroquois, French, Chinese, Yoruba, or Zhu. To understand a people is thus to form an adequate concept of its culture. To know the Trobriand Islanders is to have a coherent, complete, abstract idea of Trobriand culture - not a tasteful appreciation of Trobriand Island food, wine, and music, but an organized insight into the collectively shared and reproduced forms of life that make the Trobriand Islanders what they are.

This truly is an instance of that much over-worked term of analysis and opprobrium, "essentialism." Culture, as ethnographers understand it, is not a mere aggregation of traits, practices, verbal behaviors, beliefs, and institutions, identified piecemeal by careful observation and recorded in open-ended lists. The culture of a people is construed by anthropologists as a stable, organically interrelated, homeostatic whole in which individuals more or less fully participate, and in virtue of which participation they can properly be identified as Ashanti, Trobriand, or Zhu. The several components of a culture are connected with one another in such a fashion that to understand one requires understanding the whole. Disturb one component - by introducing foreign influences through the very presence of the ethnographer, for example - and the whole will strive to readjust and reassert itself so as to preserve its coherent unity.

The culture of a people, thus conceived by ethnography, is a collective human product, stable over time and shared more or less fully by all the members of the society. Like Durkheim's "collective unconscious," the culture of a people is an independent object of investigation, expressed in the behavior of the members of the society but not consisting merely of the aggregative sum of those behaviors.

Like all appeals to essential form, this concept of culture is implicitly evaluative. To say that it is part of the culture of Germans to conform rigidly to bureaucratic regulations is, unavoidably, to say that someone careless of rules cannot be a true German. To say that the Zhu share their meat with the entire circle of persons in their band is to say that a Zhu who refuses to share, as a consequence, perhaps, of a stay in the South African army is losing his Zhu-ishness, ceasing to be truly Zhu. It is then a very small step to the conclusion that we, as anthropologists, should do whatever we can to preserve the Zhu way of life, even over the objections of the individual himself, who may prefer not to continue to share his meat.

Many of you are familiar with one variant of this conception of culture as an essential form. I am speaking, of course, of the theory of intuited cultural unities that underlies Fundamental Pedagogics. In that version, the notion of culture finds its way into the theory of Christian National Education on which the Bantu educational system is grounded, as well as into the official rationale for Apartheid. This South African incarnation of the theory can be traced to twentieth century Dutch philosophers who were themselves influenced by Edmund Husserl's theories of phenomenology.

What is implicit in ethnography is made explicit in Fundamental Pedagogics, namely that human beings can be understood to be divided into discrete groups (nations, or tribes, or peoples), each of which instantiates an essential cultural form whose inner coherence, unity, and independence is a matter of objective fact, cognizable by a rational intuition or grasping of essences. A core element of this essential form is a common language, which, as the bearer of the folkways, customs, and peculiar genius of the people, must be preserved if the essence is to be preserved.

You are all familiar with the political conclusions drawn from this theory by academic and state defenders of the system of Apartheid. I shall return to that subject near the end of my remarks. But it may perhaps not have occurred to you consciously that the discipline of ethnography rests on the same premises about the existence of cultural forms as does the theory of Apartheid. What is more, you may have overlooked the fact that in contemporary discussions on the left about cultural oppression, cultural resistance, cultural liberation, multi-culturalism, and the role of culture in the struggle against tyranny, very much the same concept of culture is at work. I am shamelessly playing on your aversion to Apartheid and to its rationale in the theory of Fundamental Pedagogics as a way of getting you to rethink the apparently politically acceptable version of the concept of culture.

In addition to providing the object of inquiry that legitimates ethnography as an autonomous discipline, the notion of an essential cultural form also solves certain very practical problems of research that troubled ethnographers in the early part of this century. The problems are obvious enough: The researcher is working with an unfamiliar language for which there are neither dictionaries nor written texts, and whose syntax may be dramatically unlike that of any language he or she already knows; the ethnographer brings along a great deal of conceptual baggage to the field, and may suffer the same ethnocentric blindness that had so obviously afflicted missionaries, explorers, and other precursors; and even as lengthy a field trip as two years hardly seems enough to become intimately familiar with a people whose customs and social relationships bear very little resemblance to those of the ethnographer. These problems threatened to invalidate the work of the early ethnographers, to reduce their accounts to nothing more than interesting anecdotes about mostly naked people.

The concept of culture, suitably elaborated, provided the solution. In a widely-read essay entitled "On Ethnographic Authority," James Clifford has summarized the assumptions that rationalized the practices of ethnographic field-workers.

In the 1920's the new fieldworker-theorist brought to completion a powerful new scientific and literary genre, the ethnography, a synthetic cultural description based on participant observation. The new style of representation depended on institutional and methodological innovations circumventing the obstacles to rapid knowledge of other cultures that had preoccupied the best representatives of [R.H.] Codrington's generation [the late nineteenth century.]

Clifford identifies six innovations of the new ethnography. Note, by the way, that his primary interest is in the implications of these innovations for the literary form of ethnographic writing - not the focus of my remarks.

1.         ''The persona of the fieldworker was validated" as professional, heroic, scientifically trained, and possessed of a suitably non-colonial cultural relativism;

2.         "[I]t was tacitly agreed that the new-style ethnographer, whose sojourn in the field seldom exceeded two years, and frequently was much shorter, could efficiently 'use' native languages without 'mastering' them;"

3.         ''The new ethnography was marked by an increased emphasis on the power of observation;"

4.         A general theoretical understanding of culture would permit the trained ethnographer to get to the heart of a culture without a time-consuming inventory of native customs and a thorough mastery of the local language;

5.         The conception of culture as an organic unity made it possible to study the whole through a suitably insightful understanding of a single part, such as a religious rite, a gift-giving practice, or the life cycle of a single individual; and

6.         ''The wholes thus represented tended to be synchronic, products of short-term research activity."

It would be too easy to construe these assumptions as the self-serving rationalizations of anthropologists caught between the constraints of their undertaking and the genuine prerequisites of a successful ethnography. Philosophers like myself, for whom research consists of consulting several of the books on my shelves, find it hard to appreciate the commitment of time, energy, and inner personal resources required to live for several years in a thoroughly unfamiliar physical and social environment, to learn from scratch, without primers or dictionaries, a language bearing no recognizable relationship to one's own, to eat strange food, and witness or participate in alien rituals, all the while attempting to grasp in a coherent, organized manner the folkways and lifeways of a culturally distant people. Any man or woman who actually makes that effort and commits that time cannot help but believe that it constitutes an adequate basis for some sort of scientifically legitimate account.

Put baldly, Clifford's second assumption, about the usability of limited language skills, seems transparently self-serving. But imagine having actually spent that two years "in the bush," able finally to speak to the Zhu, the Trobriand Islanders, the Nuer, however haltingly! Imagine, as well, that you are writing for an audience that has never even heard of the Nuer or Zhu before you present them with your results. Wouldn't any of us believe that even a limited linguistic competence gave us some access to the culture of "our tribe," particularly when supplemented by a theoretical framework extracted from a wide-ranging cross-cultural survey of the folkways of dozens of peoples from every corner of the globe?

The exotic character of most ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest, gets in the way of our thinking intelligently about the theoretical presuppositions on which it is based. As I read, for example, I fleetingly form certain of the words in the text sublingually with the muscles that would be activated were I reading aloud. When I read Lee's or Wilmsen's account of the Zhu, I find my throat constricting from the unsuccessful effort to make the click sounds represented in the text by a variety of exclamation marks, backslashes, and implausibly placed consonants. That physical reaction, always lurking at the edge of my awareness when I read about the Zhu, is enough to guarantee that I will experience any account of them as alien, exotic, and hence impervious to certain sorts of theoretical critiques. I cannot help but believe that someone who has mastered the language of the Zhu must understand what they are really like.

I wish to persuade you [following Wilmsen] that the entire ethnographic enterprise is fundamentally misguided. The attempt to grasp the cultural essence of a people must fail, not because their language is too difficult, or because their folkways are too different from our own, or because even the most extended field trip is too short a time to accomplish so difficult a task, but because there is no cultural essence to be grasped. As Gertrude Stein is reputed to have said about Oakland, California after encountering its utter lack of urban distinction, ''There is no there there."

The difficulties of unmanageable languages and unfamiliar customs merely distract us from focusing on the real issue, which is whether it is possible to identify, by whatever combination of observation, experiment, and theoretical interpretation, the culture of a people. Lee might have asked himself how a knowledgeable and thoughtful Zhu understands his or her own society, but that would just have compounded the problem, for then he would have had to decide who in a Zhu community fits this description and try, with his uncertain language skills, to understand the account he or she gives. What is more, Lee can never successfully bracket the plain fact that he has arrived from over the horizon in a Land Rover, distributed trinkets, pots, and canned food to win his way into the community, and offered payment in return for the spontaneous ruminations of his chosen informants.

I might seek to circumvent the practical difficulties of ethnographic research by turning my attention to the culture of my own society. I speak the language like a native - indeed, as a native; I have fifty-eight years of on-site experience; I am as familiar with the rituals, practices, body language, and nuances as a lifetime can make me; and I do not generate unintended consequences as a participant observer that might distort my observations.

There are, of course, many literary precedents for such an undertaking. At their best they can be amusing and suggestive. But as soon as one asks whether such literary productions really capture what it is to be an American, one realizes that there is something badly wrong with the question. One can write about the economic, political, or religious activities of Americans; one can inquire into the varieties, and trajectories of change, of American families; one can analyze the structure of an American institution, such as the national army, or the two-year Community College, or the large eleemosynary foundation. But such inquiries do not answer the question that ethnographers seem bent upon investigating, namely, what is the essence of American culture.

What are the boundaries of the object to be investigated. Am I seeking the essence, the cultural form, of Western Civilization, Anglo-American Civilization, North American Civilization, the civilization of the United States, late twentieth century northeastern United States upper middle class urban assimilated Jewish intellectual civilization, or perhaps merely the culture of the Wolff family? No doubt, to a North American anthropologist, all Zhu look alike, but if a Zhu is anything at all like a Jew, then you can be certain that Zhu perceive profound differences, indeed chasms, among themselves that an ethnographer will ignore only at great methodological peril.

Nor can one fall back on the fact that all of the people at the !Dobe water hole speak the same language. The same thing is true of the patrons of a singles bar on the upper East Side of New York City, but it would be a naive student of North American ethnography who would infer the cultural unity of that watering hole.

The central problem here, I think, is that the notion of a cultural essence, looked at one way, is manifestly absurd and rather ominous. But the same notion, looked at slightly differently, seems quite reasonable, usable, and unthreatening. It is time, therefore, for me to attempt some more systematic analysis of the concept of culture, in an effort to identify which elements in it have a legitimate grounding, and which are false and misleading. What follows is unavoidably theoretical, but I hope this very lengthy prelude has sufficiently engaged your interest to sustain all of us through what may be a rather dry patch.

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[1] A number of quite practical debates, even court cases, have occurred in Australia, Botswana, and elsewhere concerning this issue of property rights. Briefly, what happens is that a colonial power moves in and lays claim to certain property [typically, to land], ignoring the rights of the indigenous peoples. Complaints are brought by them, or. in their name, in the law courts of the colonial power, and the question is raised whether the indigenous peoples have a system of property that is recognizable by the colonial legal code - there being, usually, some provision in the colonial law for acknowledging property claims made in systems of law other than itself. At this point, it becomes a matter of very considerable moment whether what we recognize as property rights are part of the culture of the indigenous peoples. Anthropologists from the colonial power's society step in to argue for the rights of the indigenous peoples. And so forth. As you will easily imagine, very tricky and interesting conceptual problems arise concerning what does and what does not count as an indigenous system of property rights. Wilmsen has edited a very interesting book entitled We Arc Herc: Politics of Aboriginal Land Tenure [U. Cal. Press, 1989] that deals with these questions.