THE INDEXING PROBLEM

 

The Indexing Problem

The Indexing Problem

Dr. Robert Paul Wolff

Presented to

 The American Philosophical Association

 Pacific Division

 March 25, 1985

 

Professor Buchanan has explicated for us, both in his paper today and in the book which this session serves to celebrate, the limitations of the sorts of unanimity partial orderings to which Vilfredo Pareto has given his name. In my remarks today, I should like to explore some of the ways in which economists and philosophers have sought to extend the scope of inter- systematic comparisons, and to suggest reasons for believing that intersystemic comparisons must always implicitly or otherwise embody some evaluative presuppositions. My thesis is one more instance of a much broader theme, to which I have many times returned in writing and teaching, namely that supposedly value-neutral models of formal analysis usually contain powerful unacknowledged value assumptions which shape their formal structure as well as their substantive content.

The problem with unanimity partial orderings is that although they are transitive, they are not complete. If everyone at our picnic prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, then we can be sure that switching the dessert from vanilla to chocolate will produce an increase in social welfare, assuming that everything else remains unchanged, and that there are no externalities. Furthermore, if we all prefer vanilla to pistachio as well, then the transitivity of individual preference guarantees that we will all prefer chocolate to pistachio, and therefore a switch of the dessert from pistachio to chocolate must increase social welfare. But suppose some of us prefer chocolate to vanilla and the rest prefer vanilla to chocolate. How shall we evaluate the move from vanilla to chocolate, as a collective or group decision?

Obviously, it becomes necessary, at the very least, to ask how much the chocolate lovers prefer chocolate to vanilla, and the vanilla lovers vanilla to chocolate. Some cardinal measure of preference intensity, pleasure, welfare, preference priority, or even, a la Plato and Mill, the
relative objective value of the desire for chocolate versus the desire for vanilla, will have to be invoked if we are to aggregate the preferences or desires of the individuals at the picnic into a single group ranking suitable for the making of a collective social choice. In short, we shall have to define an index.

Bentham assumed that pleasure is the only good, pain the only evil, and that pleasure and pains, no matter whom they afflict, are intersubjectively comparable and hence commensurable. These assumptions do not, of themselves, suffice for the construction of an index, of course. It was still necessary for Bentham to stipulate an aggregation rule or, in the modem jargon, a social welfare function. His version of utilitarianism is just such a rule. We might state it in modern terms something like this:

1. As between two policies, actions, or states of affairs, A and B, if B provides to each individual in the society at least as much net happiness as does A, and if there is at least one person to whom B provides more net happiness than does A, then assign B a higher index number than A.

2. As between two policies, actions, or states of affairs, A and B, one of which provides more net happiness to some individuals and the other of which provides more net happiness to other individuals, measure the amounts of happiness accorded by each alternative to each individual, using the same scale of measurement. Then [this, strictly speaking, is the aggregation or indexing rule], following the rule ' everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one,' add the quantities of net happiness accorded by each alternative to all the individuals in the society, and assign to A or B whichever has the larger sum.

We are accustomed, in the light of the New Welfare Economics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to focus our attention on the phrase, 'using the same scale of measurement,' and then to invoke the supposed logical impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility as a reason for rejecting classical utilitarianism. But as Sen, Suppes, Harsanyi, and a number of other theorists have shown us, there are ways of getting around the problems of interpersonal comparisons which pose no greater philosophical difficulties than the extreme solipsism that generates the problem in the first place. The real problem is the purely normative clause, 'everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.' We can defend the assumption that the welfare of the society consists in the arithmetic sum of the welfares of its individual members only by positing the moral and political premise that all individuals are equally important, or that each individual's happiness deserves to be given equal weight in the social sum. And this premise simply begs all of the questions of policy that utilitarianism was designed to resolve.

Let us take a look, now, at a number of practical and theoretical contexts in which the indexing problem arises. My aim is to show you that in each case, a resolution of the problem requires a normative or prescriptive premise which must be exogenously introduced, as economists like to say.

My first example is drawn from the work of John Rawls. Rawls, you will recall, undertakes to extract a normative principle of distributive justice from non-normative, or minimally normative, premises, by means of the conceptual device of a bargaining game among rationally self-interested agents. In order to avoid certain theoretical difficulties which stand in the way of his establishing the principle that he wishes to promulgate, Rawls introduces into his theoretical construction a limitation on the knowledge available to the participants in the bargaining game which he labels 'the veil of ignorance.'

Unfortunately, the veil of ignorance deprives the players in the game of so much information that they no longer have any rational reason to care about its outcome. So Rawls is forced to re-equip them with knowledge that they have coherent life-plans whose fulfillment they are rationally committed to pursuing. But even this information is insufficient, for what one wishes to bargain for depends on what in particular one has chosen as a life plan. Hence Raw1s must add the notion of primary goods, which is to say those things - 'rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth' - which, as he says ' a rational man wants whatever else he wants.' The idea is simply that no matter what life plan one turns out to have chosen, possession of these primary goods will serve to advance it.

But now the indexing problem rears its head. Clearly, as between two principles of distributive justice, A and B, if B promises at least as much of each primary good as does A, and more of at least one, then B is to be preferred to A. But suppose B promises more opportunity and less wealth, or greater income but less power. How then shall the rational man behind the veil of ignorance choose? [I say 'rational man,' because as a careful reader of A THEORY OF JUSTICE will discover, Rawls' world contains only men.] The answer is to construct an index of primary goods. It is this number which the individuals in the original position bargain over.

Although Rawls is aware of the problems of indexing, he glosses over them, admitting that we must ' rely on our intuitive capacities.' Nevertheless, he stands by the fundamental claim on which his entire philosophy rests, namely that his theory allows him' to replace moral judgments by those of rational prudence...' [THEORY OF JUSTICE p. 94]

Rawls' actual discussion of the indexing problem is arbitrary in the extreme. First he stipulates, with very little ground, that bargainers in the original position will choose to make rights and liberties lexically prior to all other primary goods. This has the effect of eliminating the need for an index that aggregates rights and liberties with the other primary goods, for lexical priority stipulates that any increase in rights and liberties, however small, will take precedence, for example, over any loss of wealth or income, however large.

This still leaves the problem of aggregating wealth and income with opportunities and powers. Since this is manifestly impossible - how, for example, shall we compare an increase of ten percent in the opportunity to pursue a medical career as against a decrease in income of five thousand dollars a year? - Rawls makes yet another simplifying assumption. Reminding us that the Difference Principle concerns itself primarily with the least well-off representative man, Rawls simply asserts that the least advantaged tend to have both the least wealth and income and the least powers and opportunities. In short, Rawls assumes away any indexing problem at all.

But clearly the issue is not so simply resolved. One of the major points of controversy in modem social welfare policy concerns precisely the relationship, in the lives of the least advantaged, of income or power. Radical critics of current welfare practices have argued that transfer payments, particularly payments in kind, have the effect of depriving the poor of social and political power, and indeed may even have that as their purpose. Hence, as between two social policies, one of which increases the income of the least advantaged while making them impotent clients of the welfare bureaucracy, the other of which increases economic or political power but at the cost of a lowered income, it becomes a matter of substantive and evaluative social philosophy which to espouse.

Rawls himself has finally recognized the inescapably normative element in his notion of life plans and primary goods. In a recent volume of essays titled UTILITARIANISM AND BEYOND, edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, Rawls returns to the subject in an essay on 'Social Unity and Primary Goods.' In the following passages, Rawls virtually acknowledges that the formation of an index of primary goods presupposes normative constraints on what will count as an acceptable life plan.

Imagine two persons, one satisfied with a diet of milk, bread and beans, while the other is distraught without expensive wines and exotic dishes. In short one has expensive tastes, the other does not. If the two principles of justice are understood in their simplest form (as I assume here), then we must say, the objection runs, that with equal incomes both are equally satisfied. But this is plainly not true.... The reply is that as moral persons citizens have some part in forming and cultivating their final ends and preferences. It is not by itself an objection to the use of primary goods that it does not accommodate those with expensive tastes. One must argue in addition that it is unreasonable, if not unjust, to hold such persons responsible for their preferences and to require them to make out as best they can. But to argue this seems to presuppose that citizens' preferences are beyond their control as propensities or cravings which simply happen.

And Rawls continues:

The idea of holding citizens responsible for their ends is plausible, however, only on certain assumptions. First, we must assume that citizens can regulate and revise their ends and preferences in the light of expectations of primary goods. [And so forth]

In short we can hope to arrive at a usable definition of an index of primary goods, only if we require that our prudentially self-interested bargainers constrain their life-plans by considerations of fairness and, as Rawls says a bit later in the same essay,” the higher-order interests of moral persons.” I think we can fairly conclude that Rawls has failed, in his own words, 'to replace moral judgments by those of rational prudence.'

The same indexing problem surfaces in a quite different context, in the proposal currently being debated to award women equal pay for jobs comparable in worth to those performed by men. It may not be immediately obvious that the comparable worth dispute is really an argument about indexing, but a few moments of reflection will make this clear.

Consider a firm that employs three groups of workers: machine operators, truck drivers, and office clerks. What wages shall it pay? The answer popular with neo-classical economists is, of course, Let the labor market decide. The firm should offer the lowest wage with which it can secure competent help. If the going market price, say for machine operators, is so high that the firm cannot make a profit when paying that wage, then it must either shift to a different production technique or else go out of business. If some extremely simplifying assumptions are made about the production techniques available to the firm, the behavior of workers and consumers, and the motivation of the firm's managers, then in long-run equilibrium, each worker will earn a wage precisely equal to his or her marginal product, which, under some additional strong assumptions, might plausibly be construed as a fair wage.

There are essentially three things wrong with this story, which you will all recognize as the standard story told in beginning courses in economic theory. The three things wrong with the story are, First, that it fails to establish its normative claims even in the impossibly restrictive theoretical case of which it is supposed to hold, Second, that it does not hold at all for theoretical cases whose assumptions are somewhat less restrictive, and Third, that it bears no relation at all to what happens in the real world.

For a demonstration of the first claim, I refer you to the first chapter of David Schweickart's fine book, CAPITALISM OR WORK CONTROL? The third claim, that marginal productivity theory totally fails to predict what actually happens, is widely acknowledged. For an extended discussion, you can consult Lester Thurow's suggestive work, GENERATING INEQUALITY, or a forthcoming Oxford Press Book, CHOOSING THE RIGHT POND, by a young Cornell economist, Robert Frank.

I wish to focus my attention on the second problem - the inadequacy of marginal productivity theory for more complicated theoretical cases. What I wish to show you is that under certain theoretical assumptions designed to model more accurately the modem firm, a problem of wages policy arises which, in its broadest outlines, is inescapably normative, and in which the issue of comparable worth plays a central role. There, as we shall see, indexing again proves to be the stumbling block.

So long as firms are small, single-product producers purchasing all inputs, including semi-finished parts, at competitive market prices, performing a single transformation on the inputs, and selling the output at the same competitive prices, the theory of wage determination is relatively simple. But things go seriously awry as soon as firms grow large enough to engage in multi-stage production processes with joint product outputs.

Consider a meatpacking firm, for example, that fattens the cattle, slaughters them, butchers the carcasses, packs the cuts of meat, and tans the hides. The managers of the firm must ascertain, by means if their internal accounting system, how much of the total cost of the firm to allocate to each final product, and also what prices to place on intermediate products within the firm for purpose of cost accounting.

Under these circumstances, it is theoretically impossible to determine the marginal productivity of a worker. Indeed, as firms grow into large bureaucratically organized institutions, it may in practice be impossible to identify any change in final output that can be associated with the presence or absence of a particular employee. Clearly, what is required is a positive wage policy which dictates what level of compensation is to be associated with each position in the firm.

The first rule that suggests itself- a normative rule, be it noted - is equal pay for equal work, where equal work is interpreted as meaning the occupying of bureaucratically identical positions. All beginning truck drivers, all clerks of grade three, all machine operators working the same machines, will receive equal pay. It is a good deal harder than one might think to come up with a moral rationale for this principle, although considerations of prudence and labor/management peace might suggest it. If the firm were dispensing justice, then one might invoke familiar considerations of procedural fairness, but in a competitive economy, mutual self- interest, and not justice, is supposed to regulate the relations between labor and management.

But equal pay for identical job position, although a principle capable of revolutionary potential in some circumstances, does not even begin to solve the problem of formulating a wages policy. From a formal point of view, that principle merely groups the workers into equivalence classes, without saying anything about the relative salaries to be paid to the several classes. Paying all truck drivers the same wage and all file clerks the same wage leaves undetermined which class shall make more, and by how much.

Some progress can be made by invoking Pareto comparability, assuming that there is agreement on the dimensions along which different positions are to be compared. If machine operating requires the same physical effort as truck driving, more responsibility, at least as much dexterity, and more attentiveness, and if these are the only qualities or characteristics of the work process which ought to count in determining wage levels, then we can agree that machine operators ought to make more than truck drivers.

But now the old familiar indexing problems reappear! How shall we compare machine operators with office workers, whose job demands greater literacy skills, less physical effort, more independence of judgment, less manual dexterity, and roughly the same degree of attentiveness? Once again, we must define an index which allows us to map heterogeneous characteristics onto a one-dimensional measure.

This is by no means an issue of purely theoretical significance; you may be interested to learn. In a number of large corporations in this country, top management has found it necessary to develop a detailed policy of compensation and raises which will possess some objective bureaucratic rationale and be perceived as fair by the employees affected. In response to this need, a number of management consultant firms, such as the Hay Company, have developed systems of job evaluation designed to generate a unidimensional index, or numerical measure, of the relative difficulty of the jobs performed by employees, particularly at the lower and middle management levels.

Consider, as an example, Sears, Roebucks, and Company, the great retail merchandising firm. Sears employs thousands of men and women who occupy such job positions as store manager, large appliances salesman, overhead fan buyer, truck driver, cashier, and vice president in charge of the Middle Western states. These are manifestly incommensurable jobs, requiring skills, talents, efforts and personal characteristics that vary along many dimensions. Sears faces two problems with regard to formulating a compensation policy in the face of this diversity: First, at any given time, what wages or salary shall it pay each position, and how shall it justify that compensation; and Second, how shall it determine what relative raise to give each position annually?

Along comes the Hay Company with a systematic answer. A middle level executive at Sears - who, as it happens, is currently my brother-in-law - is assigned the task of evaluating each of the hundreds of positions in the Sears system. This executive travels around the country making on-site inspections. He assigns to each job so many points for the amount of physical effort required, so many points for the manual dexterity required, so many points for independence of judgment, imagination, responsibility, direction of subordinates, and so forth, all according to a complex process provided by Hay. He totals the assignments and arrives thereby at the index of Hay points [as they are called] associated with each position. The top management then decides how many dollars in compensation will be paid per Hay point throughout the corporation, and a simple multiplication gives the salary the Sears will pay to anyone occupying the position. If the position of manager of a "B" store earns 5,134 Hay points, and if Sears decides to pay eleven dollars a point, then any manager of a "B" store will be paid 56,474 dollars.

As for raises, Sears at the end of each year chooses an amount - let us say 87 cents - which it will pay per Hay point as a raise. Our store manager then receives a raise of 4,466.58.

How does the Hay Company, or my brother-in-law, decide, when implementing this system, how much weight to assign to industry, initiative, independence, manual dexterity, or the ability to operate a word processor? It should by now be obvious that the answer cannot possibly be in terms of relative profitability to the firm of its employees' possession of these various characteristics. If anyone could actually ascertain directly such a measure of profitability, there would be no need for the Hay system.

In fact, as we might expect, the system embodies a number of normative or evaluative presuppositions which are only thinly concealed by a putatively impartial rationale. Head work is routinely assigned more Hay points than hand work. Any position requiring its holder to direct or control the performance of others is valued especially highly. It is not too simple to say that the Hay Company has constructed an index designed to confirm and legitimate the greater worth and hence higher salaries of the positions at the top of the executive ladder, by assigning the greatest weight to whatever talents, skills, traits of character, or modes of activity are in fact performed by those executives.

But how could it be otherwise? During the Culture Revolution, the Chinese counterparts of the Hay Company dictated an alternative set of evaluations, declaring manual labor to be superior to mental labor, and so forth. The result may have been morally superior - I leave that to your own judgment - but it was not, and could not be, more 'objective.'

As should be obvious, the existence in actual operation of practical systems of job evaluation like that of the Hay Company constitutes a continuing source of rueful embarrassment to conservative business men, like my brother-in-law, whose politics incline them to look askance at the demands by organized women workers for equal pay for comparable worth. One cannot operate the Hay system and claim that the concept of comparable worth is economically meaningless without badly fouling one's own nest! Nevertheless, the real thrust of my remarks is that my brother-in-law is right. Any system for the indexing of incommensurable tasks presupposes a set of normative or evaluative assumptions. Bringing those assumptions to light does not permit us to eliminate them, for without them we have no way of carrying out the indexing process.

Let me tum, finally, to a third example drawn from a very different sphere, namely Gerald Cohen's attempt in his important book, KARL MARX'S THEORY OF HISTORY, to define an objective measure of the increase in productivity of an economy. Cohen undertakes to defend a quite orthodox, uncomplicated version of Marx's theory of historical materialism, one that many would call economistic, technological, and determinist. After distinguishing, by some careful conceptual analysis and textual exegesis, between the productive forces of an economy and the social relations of production, Cohen summarizes his version of Marx in two theses, which he labels the Development Thesis and the Primacy Thesis.

The development thesis states that 'the productive forces tend to develop throughout history.' The primacy thesis offers a functional explanation of the social relations of production in terms of their suitability for furthering the development of the productive forces. The thesis states: 'The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces.' [Cohen, p.134] Cohen then goes on to give an original and controversial defense of functional explanation in terms of what he calls consequence laws.

Most of the comment on Cohen's book, not surprisingly, has concentrated on the notion of consequence laws, but there is, it seems to me, a prior problem concerning the development thesis, a problem which, oddly enough, involves the same issue of indexing that we have been examining in connection with Rawls' work and the problem of wage determination and comparable worth.

At the risk of appearing to have wandered away from Professor Buchanan's work into a critique of Cohen, let me elaborate a bit the structure of Cohen's argument, so that we can see precisely where and how an indexing problem arises.

At this point, since the precise statement of Cohen's thesis will become rather involved, I will ask you to refer to the handouts distributed at the beginning of my remarks.

According to Cohen, consequence laws have the following doubly hypothetical form: {see handout, number 1}

IF it is the case that if an event of type E were to occur at t1, then it would bring about an event of type F at t2

THEN an event of type E occurs at t3.

To put the matter less technically and more provocatively, what explains the occurrence of event E is the fact that if it were to occur, it would bring about event F . Or, even more succinctly, E is explained by the fact that it is functional for F.

Using this formal structure we can now state Cohen's primacy thesis in proper consequence law form, namely:

IF it is the case that if the production relations conducive to the use and development of the productive forces available in a society at that time come into being, then the productive forces available at that time will be used and developed,

THEN the production relations conductive to the use and development of the productive forces available in that society at that time come into being.

To defend his primacy thesis, Cohen must do four things. First, he must explain what he means by 'productive forces available in a society' and ' production relations of a society' with sufficient precision and clarity that we can tell them apart, and also ascertain, for a given society, what productive forces are available and what the production relations are in the society. Second, he must explain what he means by the 'development' of productive forces, and specify some way of telling as between two states of affairs in society, which constitutes a higher development of the productive forces. Third, he must defend explanation by consequence laws in general. And finally, he must offer some evidence or argument in support of the particular consequence laws that express the primacy thesis. It is in his attempt to meet the second of these needs that Cohen runs of a foul of the indexing problem, in my judgment.

Cohen defines an increase in productivity as an increase in the quantity of product or output that can be produced with a given amount of direct labor. For example, in a simple one- commodity economy that uses com and labor to produce corn, an increase in productivity is an increase in the net output of com per unit input of labor.

This measure of productivity becomes problematical, as Cohen recognizes, as soon as there are two or more commodities being produced, for a new technique might permit us to produce more of the first commodity but less of the second, with a given quantity of labor. Would this be an increase, a decrease, or no change in productivity? Some technological innovations, of course, might enable us to produce more of every commodity with the same labor, or at least more of some and no less of others. In those cases we could appeal to a Pareto principle to establish a rank ordering of relative productivity. But in the general case, some way must be found to make what Cohen calls ' global productivity' comparisons. Here is Cohen's solution:

Of course, if everything producible at stage s1 is producible at stage s2, and each thing at s2 in less time than s1, then we need no common measure of the magnitude of products to claim that productivity is higher at s2. But suppose forces at s2 outclasses those at s1 with respect to some products, and are less powerful with respect to others. How can we then make a global productivity comparison between s1 and s2?

In certain instances of the type just identified comparison will still be possible without a common measure of product size. Thus supposed that at both s1 and s2 twelve hours per day is the length of time each producer is able to labor productively: marginal product is negative beyond that point. Imagine that there are just three products, p, q, and r. At s1 it takes 3 hours to produce a unit of p, 4 hours to produce a unit of q, and 5 hours to produce a unit of r. At s2, it takes 2 hours to produce a unit of p, 3 hours to produce a unit of q, and 6 hours to produce a unit of r. Then s2 is more productive with respect to p and q, and less productive with respect to r. Note, however, that only 11 of the 12 hours available at s2 are used up when it produces one unit each of p, q, and r. Suppose the remaining hour were allocated to producing  r: then as long as some r were produced in that hour, we should be able to say that s2 is globally more productive than s1, even though we have stated no ratios between units of one product and units of any other. [Cohen, p.57]

But Cohen's argument is quit incorrect. To see why, let us suppose that the technologies of s1 and s2, are just as Cohen specifies, but that final demand for commodities p, q, and r is different from that assumed by Cohen. In other words, let us suppose that these societies, using these technologies, do not wish to produce one unit each of p, q, and r.

Instead, let final demand be .75 units of p, .5 units of q, and 1.5 units of r. In that case, s1 is globally more productive that s2, for the desired final demand requires 12 units of labor in s2 and only 11.75 units of labor in s1.

Now assume final demand to be one unit of p, 4/9 units of q, and 13/9 units of r. In that case, s2 and s1 are equally globally productive, for the desired final demand requires just 12 units of labor in each system.

But 'global productivity' is supposed to be an objective measure of the level of development of productive forces, independent of consumer taste and final demand. Thus Cohen's measure is unsatisfactory.

It should be obvious that this result is perfectly general. For any two technologies, one of which is more productive with respect to commodity i and the other of which is more productive with respect with commodity j, there will always be some final demand that makes the first technology globally more productive, and yet a third final demand that makes them equally globally productive.

In fact, of course, we are presented here with exactly the same need for a normative or evaluative principle as the basis for our indexing rule. Either we must assume that the final demand manifested in the market by consumer behavior has a moral sanction, so that consumer tastes will ultimately determine the relative productivity of two stages of capitalist development
- an assumption which undermines any attempt to mount a critique of the formation of consumer tastes- or else we must simply stipulate that some commodities are worthier that others, and hence will count for more in the index by which we measure productivity. For example, suppose that the advent of industrialization and the decline of craft skills made it less costly in labor hours to produce food, but more costly to produce hand-carved furniture. Is that technological change an advance in productivity or not? It depends on our moral evaluation of the relative importance of food and beautiful furniture.

Lest we imagine that this is a purely theoretical quibble, let us reflect that current debates about the effects of the economy on the environment are, from a certain point of view, really arguments about the proper weights to use in an index designed to measure increases in productivity.

I hope it is clear from these three examples - Rawls, comparable worth, and Cohen - both that the indexing problem arises repeatedly in theoretical and practical contexts, and that it is always impossible to solve it in a value-neutral manner. Here, as in so many other cases, supposedly objective formal methods of analysis carry with them covert evaluation presuppositions which, if not acknowledged, serve the ideological function of rationalizing particular political or economic positions. I take this as one important example of the general truth that politics cannot be reduced to rational administration, or class conflict to impartial calculation.

 

LIVING DANGEROUSLY

On Thursday, Susie and I did something that we have not done in nearly 3 years. It was brash, daring, and dangerous. We went to the movies! We did not watch a movie on television, we did not watch a movie on my computer, we drove to a real movie theater, ordered dinners to be delivered to our seats at the concession stand, went to our seats, received our dinners and glasses of wine, and watched a movie. The movie was TICKET TO PARADISE starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts. It is a light movie, a silly movie, a romantic comedy and we had a simply wonderful time. We agreed afterward that we would do it again.

 

It was almost like being alive.

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.

 

---

[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.

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.