A CRITIQUE OF THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE PART THREE

       A Theoretical Analysis of the Concept of Culture

Let me begin at a quite general level with some remarks about the formation of human personality, for it is through the process by which the individual develops a recognizable personality that what we call culture is transmitted from generation to generation. Human beings, apparently alone among the animals, are radically genetically underdetermined. That is to say, the developmental information carried by the human infant in its genes is thoroughly inadequate to determine a growth path leading to healthy, functional adulthood.

Rear a wolf or elephant or shrew or cat in captivity, separated from other members of its species, and either completely or to a quite considerable extent it will grow into a recognizably coherent, appropriately graceful, mature instance of its species. What is more, rear such an animal taken from one population of its species, and it will, when released, become a functional member of whatever other population of its species it is placed in. [This claim is a trifle overstated, for emphasis, and no doubt it fails to take into account some marvelous traits of dolphins, but the point, nevertheless, is, I believe, essentially correct.]

Rear a human infant in isolation from members of its species, on the other hand, and it does not grow into a recognizably coherent, appropriately graceful, mature instance of humanity. Instead, what apparently develops is a feral child incapable of functioning efficiently. Such a creature does not have an organized, stable personality; it does not interact successfully with its environment; it lacks entirely that dignity, if I may use an odd term, that characterizes healthy, mature instances of any animal species.

A feral child has not been socialized, we say. It lacks language, it exhibits no style of bodily movements, of the sort that enables us immediately to distinguish an upper class Englishman from a Japanese warlord, a Pennsylvania miner from a French boulevardier. One cannot make successful eye contact with a feral child, it lacks a repertoire of characteristic facial gestures; in short, it lacks culture. In human beings, but apparently in no other species, the genetic deficit is made up by a rich, complex, and almost endlessly variable set of structures that in the individual constitute personality and in the society as a whole constitute culture. That is why the shrews or elephants or wolves in one population are, even to very close observers, much like the shrews, elephants, or wolves in any other population; and equally, it is why one population of human beings is, in significant ways, so unlike other populations of humans.[1]

It is difficult to imagine the evolutionary pathway by which this curious, and immensely fruitful, genetic underdetermination came about, for it would seem, speaking rather speculatively, that in its first stages, it would be a hindrance rather than an aid to reproduction. Quite possibly, it began as a fortunate by-product of some other more immediately useful variation. But however it got started, this striking feature of human beings is now firmly established in our make-up.

Socialization takes the place of heredity in the transformation of the new-born infant into a fully developed adult. As the infant interacts with people in its immediate environment, imitation, identification, and internalization shape the instinctual energies and primary thought processes into a socialized personality. The child learns to speak, it learns to control its excretory processes, it comes to identify itself as gendered - all in whatever fashion it is taught to do so by its parents or significant others.[2]

When we easily and unreflectively classify someone as French or Chinese, as an aristocrat or an arriviste, we are responding to manifold sensory cues that identify the organization of emotional energies, of large and small muscles, of habits of behavior and patterns of interaction out of which the individual's distinctive personality has been formed. As ethnographers have shown us by generations of imaginative observation and interpretation, these patterns regulate everything from the political order of the state to the precise way in which individuals arrange their limbs when they are walking, resting, sleeping, or eating. The most intimate details of my innermost personality, which I am prone to cherish [or to despise] as most distinctively myself, are revealed by suitably trained observers to be routine repetitions of cultural forms predictably characteristic of my society and utterly foreign to other societies.

The meaning-encoded patterns into which the child is socialized, and by the internalization of which it becomes truly a person, are of course the collective creations of earlier generations of people. Neither nature nor God has hard-wired anyone to speak American late-twentieth century English, or to sit in the definitive fashion of modern Japanese, or to identify mothers' brothers as the significant men in early life. Each of the elements of our social life was invented, created, made up, tried out, stumbled upon, by one or many people.

But that is not how the elements of culture present themselves to the child. The child experiences these complex meaningful structures as existing independently of the self, hence objectively, and as possessing the same natural inevitability as the properties of physical objects. To most of us, social roles and structures seem more objective, more necessary, more intractable to change than even the laws of physical nature. I can more easily imagine a fictional world in which the law of gravity has been suspended than one in which there are people who are neither male nor female. All of us experience social roles and patterns as objectively real structures into which we fit ourselves, and through adoption of which we define ourselves, even though it is of course the case that each of them is a human invention, and could have been constructed quite differently.

What is more, because these patterns of behavior and feeling are experienced by the child as objective, they are also experienced as universal rather than particular. Not only I, but others as well, become who we are by internalizing, in some form or other, the same repertoire of social forms. When I reflect on my adult self, and set myself in comparison to others around me, it is natural for me to perceive all of us as instances of a type, instantiations of a universal form the nature and existence of which is prior to and hence independent of any one of us.

Another personal story, to illustrate this idea. Twenty-five years ago, when I was in a full-scale Freudian psychoanalysis in New York City, I happened to talk during one session about Uncle Ben, Aunt Fanny, Cousin Cora and Cousin Tony, my Italian relatives. My analyst was a rather orthodox Freudian, and hence tended to say very little, but this was a bit too much even for him. Very quietly and tentatively, he said, "But I thought you were Jewish." Well, of course, I am Jewish, but until that moment, I had always thought of Ben, Fan, Cora, and Tony as Italian. The reasons were simple enough: they were all overweight, they were very loud, and whenever they arrived at a gathering they immediately started singing and dancing and playing musical instruments. They were utterly unlike the rest of my family. Obviously they were Italian! But my analyst was correct. They really are New York Jews, just like everyone else in my father's family. If my father, and his older brother and younger sister were New York Jews, and if Ben grew up in the same household, how could he possibly be Italian? Being Italian is not like having red hair - something recessive that crops up from time to time in even the most Jewish of families!

It would appear, therefore, that the ethnographers are correct in their supposition that one can understand a people by grasping the essential structure of its culture, for that essence, though of course not independent of human existence in general, really is independent of the existence -and nature of any particular human being. So, if we want to understand Zhu, or Americans, how can we possibly do better than to identify, describe in suitably general terms, and exhibit in some theoretical arrangement, the socially transmitted structures of habit, behavior, and meaning that constitute their culture as a people?

To be sure, in carrying out this project, we must be careful to recognize the enormous variability of culture, the multiplicity of the ways in which that genetic underdetermination can be filled in by socialization. But ethnographers need no such caution! Indeed, it is they who have taught us just how various are the ways that human groups have invented to complete the determination of personality.

This, or something like it, is the best case I can think of for the ethnographic concept of culture as an objectively existing essential form that finds its instantiation in the practices, institutions, social arrangements, art, religion, and language of identifiably unified groups of people.

2.      A Critique of the Concept of Culture

There is an important element of truth in this account of human personality and society, but I believe it is fundamentally flawed, in ways that lead, as I shall suggest shortly, to a reactionary form of ideological obfuscation. The central inadequacy of this model of personality formation and cultural transmission is that it construes the individual as the passive recipient of a socializing process in which certain general forms of behavior, thought, and feeling are impressed on the partially determined matrix of infantile mentality. The individual is seen as the bearer of these patterns, a place-holder who reenacts the meaningful rule-governed scenarios of kinship, gender, religion, or art that constitute his or her culture. The degree of integration of the individual personality is thought of as a reflection of the degree of formal or ideal unity of the ensemble of cultural elements. Thus, a coherent, well-integrated person, this theory tells us, is a person who fully and successfully embodies a coherent, well-integrated culture. Inner psychic disharmony or dysfunctionality is then taken to be a sign of a conflict of cultures, or the breakdown of cultural unity.

Society, thus understood, is ahistorical in the sense that the passage of time bears no essential relationship to the organization of the society. The kinship relationships, religious rituals, or practices of food production of one generation are as much, or as little, an expression of the universal cultural patterns of the society as those of any other generation. Social change, when it occurs, is either accidental or externally determined, as when changes in the availability of water or food, natural disasters, or encounters with other human groups produce internal cultural shifts. And because the passage of time is, on this understanding, accidental, not essential, the society is conceived - by ethnographers or others - as having no history. I do not mean simply that it has no written history. Rather, I mean that the self-understanding of the people who make up the society is conceived to involve no historical sense of the internal conflicts, struggles, ambitions, projects, or frustrations of which genuine human history is composed.

I think we can now see more clearly the significance of Wilmsen's remarks about Halengisi. On Wilmsen's account - which strikes me as intrinsically plausible, though I am obviously quite unqualified to form an independent judgment - Halengisi has an historical understanding of the relationship between his present situation and the events of the previous two generations or so. It is that understanding - indeed, that self-understanding - that allows him to speak ironically, contrasting the present appearance - which is that he has cattle, since he is standing in the midst of some and leaning up against one - with the historical reality, which is that there has been a drastic and devastating decline in the role of cattle herding in the economy of the Zhu.

The source of the ahistoricity of the ethnographic conception of culture is its failure to take account of the purposive character of human action, and the way in which that purposiveness makes human experience fundamentally historical. Human beings are intelligently purposive. We live by forming ideas of the way in which we wish to transform our world, and then acting collectively to actualize or realize those ideas. That is the central meaning of Marx's famous early discussion of alienation, which was his word for what happens when this process goes wrong.

When we act purposefully, we are oriented forward in time. What is past, because it cannot be changed, has a significance for us different from the significance of what is future. Thus, our position in time is asymmetrical. As we live, what was future, what was the object of our decision and action, what was open to change, to deliberation, to choice, becomes fixed in the past. At first, we conceive it as the settled product of our choices, and then, eventually, we experience it as a part of the unchangeable past - no longer something we did, but merely something that happened to us.

In short, the purposive structure of our interaction with the world makes our lives fundamentally historical.

To be sure, we conceive our alternatives, project our goals, make our choices, within a matrix of habits, patterns, and structures of feeling and behavior that we have internalized as children and experience as objectively given. No matter what I do, I cannot help but act as a late twentieth century New York upper middle class assimilated Jew. But as I act, with the other men and women with whom I am collectively choosing my future, and therefore my history, I alter that matrix, I do not passively reenact it.

Our projects become embodied in our choices, and thereby in our history - even in the very structure of our space and time. And because that structure is determined by human projects, not by merely theoretical or contemplative observation, it is inherently perspectival, interested, engaged. There is no observation post, high above the battle, from which I can gain an objective, neutral, disinterested view of the struggle below. Every position, including that one, is a perspective that embodies some choice, some project.[3]

This last point is central to my argument, and I would like therefore to illustrate it with examples drawn from the American experience. I hope in our discussion that some of you will suggest corresponding examples from your own experience.

In the iconography of official American society, the structure of our historical time is represented as having six defining moments or nodes: The arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620, the Revolutionary War of 1776-1783, the Civil War of 1861-65, the First World War of 1917-18, the Great Depression of the 1930's, starting with the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and the Second World War, starting with the Attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941 and ending with the surrender of the Japanese in 1945. Every event in our history is located by its relation to those nodal moments. An event is either Colonial, which is to say Pre-Revolutionary; or it is ante-bellum or post-bellum, which is to say before or after the Civil War, or it is pre-war, meaning before World War I, or inter-war, or post-war, which is to say after World War II. Events derive their significance, their coloration, from this temporal matrix; it is repeated endlessly in school textbooks, in public speeches, in the organization of sub-disciplines of American History, and in the symbolism of movies, novels, and popular music.

Now, this structure encodes a quite particular evaluative understanding of American history, based on the projects, the norms, the self-understandings, and the political associations of only a portion of the population of the United States. For an African-American, for example, it is the Middle Passage of the Slave Trade, and not the arrival of the Pilgrims, that marks the major demarcation in historical time. Nor is the Revolutionary War an event of any significance to the descendent of slaves, for that war, which liberated the Colonists from the tyranny of King George - or so the story goes - worked no noticeable alteration in the condition of the sizable portion of the population then in bondage.

In recent years, professional historians have witnessed a series of attacks on the established construction of the American past. First, so-called Regional Historians revolted against the tyranny of the New England Colonial Historians by insisting on the independent significance of the historical development of the Southern, South Western, and Far Western regions of the country. Then, a number of radical social historians challenged the hegemony of the monied classes in the pages of history books by researching and writing the history of agricultural laborers, seamen, and other members of the lower orders. These were followed by feminist historians, who undertook to reconstruct the past of that half of the population usually missing from the historical record. And finally, Black historians resurrected the diaries, letters, autobiographies, and fictional writings of slaves and former slaves, again challenging and revising the official temporal organization of the American past.

All of these rewritings of the past are expressions of, and elements in, a politics of the present, grounded in projects, policies, and intentions of groups who constitute themselves through their politics and thereby collectively create their past. Not only would it be impossible to identify the culture of such a group independently of these politics; it would be a mistake to suppose that its culture, indeed its political culture, existed independently of the on-going choices and actions of the group.

The ethnographic concept of culture expresses the ethnographer's search for an observation point that is simultaneously within, and distanced from, the lives of the people under investigation - a standpoint from which the ethnographer can understand his or her subjects without making a life-shaping commitment to engage his or her own life with theirs. Ethnographers have a term for that impossible standpoint: "Participant observer."

But "participant observer" is a contradiction in terms. To be a participant is to join with one's fellows in collectively making the decisions and engaging in the actions that create, recreate, shape, and change one's society. To be an observer is to remain disengaged from the objects of one's inspection, to have and preserve one's own life, one's own projects, plans, hopes, and efforts, always to remain aware that one will be going home, that one may, next season, choose some other group as the object of one's ethnography.

To put the point tendentiously, but perhaps less abstractly, the fundamental choice confronting the anthropologist or anyone else who seeks to understand a group of people is not whether to be a participant observer or a native, but whether to be a comrade or a tourist. The essence of tourism is its atemporality. I arrive in Paris or Las Vegas or Beijing, eager to see the sights and immerse myself in the local culture. If my travel arrangements have been successful, I quickly and efficiently experience a series of striking visual images, sounds, tastes, and smells, all before my tour is over. When I leave, everything is as it was before, ready for the next tourist. Exactly like DisneyWorld, except that the streets are not so clean and the sequence of images not so reliably predictable.

One last personal anecdote: Five years ago, during my first trip to Africa, I spent two days at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. All my life, I had dreamed of seeing the wild animals of the East African plain. I set out the first morning in an official Land Rover to see the animals, most of which, as it happens, had moved up to the hills because of heavy rains. At about eleven in the morning, five Land Rovers, apparently by accident, converged on a clump of bushes off to one side of the road. As we drew up, three lions suddenly burst from the bushes, and the fifteen or so of us in the Land Rovers snapped pictures before they ran off. Afterward, I thought to myself: the drivers of all five Land Rovers knew where to find the lions, and had obviously agreed beforehand to meet there at a set time to flush them for the tourists. This must happen six days a week, every week of the year! What do the lions think? Do they get vacations? Are there temporary lions that stand in for them when they are on their annual holiday? Despite their enormous sophistication, their linguistic facility, and their mastery of local folkways, anthropologists are, in the end, just tourists in Land Rovers waiting for the lions to appear.

Finally: What are we to make of the uses to which the concept of culture is put in contemporary South African discussions? Defenders of Apartheid, of the entrenched power of the White minority, make much of the notion of culture, even, in what appears to be not quite irony, applying the dismissive term "tribe" to themselves in an attempt to justify their demand for a veto over the actions of a democratic majority. Having attempted for five decades to partition the country according to imagined cultural essences and their associated territorial embodiments, they now fall back on the notion of group rights to rationalize the continued rule of the many by the few.

The self-serving character of these arguments is so transparent that I at least, feel no intellectual or political compulsion to take them seriously - although that may very well reveal the degree to which I am an outsider in South African life. But how shall we evaluate the recent calls for a national culture, a culture of liberation, to replace the divisive cultures of the Apartheid system?

If this amounts to nothing more than a celebration of literature, visual arts, and music that has been given less than a fair hearing in the public space of South Africa, no one can possibly object. But I suspect something more is at work. From my outsider's perch, as an infrequent visitor to this country, I see a liberation movement that, in process of overthrowing the tyranny of a small, powerful minority, too easily loses sight of the conflicts of interest within the Black majority. I see a highly publicized circle of newly visible, increas-\ingly powerful men - and, I might say, very few women indeed - who manifestly represent the interests of only a segment of the total Black population, but who speak in the name of all, and make decisions for all.

The call for a national culture obscures these conflicts and divisions, and inevitably, obscures them in such a way as to enshrine the interests of a favored sector of the Black population as the interests of all. The idea that all South Africans are one people with one culture, one history, and therefore one politics, flies in the face of the reality on the ground.

Several years ago, the ANC revised the Freedom Charter, giving up socialism and land reform for democracy. Perhaps that was a necessary accommodation, perhaps not. I believe only those who must live out its consequences are in a position to judge. But there can be no doubt that that accommodation benefited the urban, upwardly mobile, better educated sector of the Black population disproportionately. If the ANC now undertakes to call into existence a national culture as the ideal unification of the South African people, it will further obscure the competing projects, plans, aspirations, and needs of the many segments of the South Africa, and hegemonically impose one collective vision to the detriment of all others. In my worst nightmares, I foresee a South African variant of that bizarre American instrument of political repression, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. How much better to set aside the concept of culture as an inappropriate tool for the understanding of society, and attend instead to the political projects in which men and women embody their hopes and aims, and thereby organize their understanding of their collective life.

 

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[1] Close observers of the higher apes are able to identify clear personality differences that bear some family resemblance to the personality differences among humans, of course, though it seems not to be so clear that they can identify "cultural" variations from band to band of primates.

[2] I might note that in writing this sentence, I first actually typed out "execretory" for "excretory," which says a very great deal about the causal and metaphoric relationship between bodily functions and personality formation!

[3] The full justification for this claim can be found in my paper, “Narrative Time,” a copy of which was made available to you.