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| ISBN-13: | 9780520951822 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/09/2012 |
| Series: | FlashPoints , #7 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 204 |
| File size: | 227 KB |
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The Cultural Return
By Susan Hegeman
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95182-2
CHAPTER 1
Cultural Discontents
The documents having now piled up on its putative grave, what are the central arguments against the culture concept? The answer to this question is often shot through with the specificities of the disciplines from which the writer emerges, so that the anthropologist's concerns are never quite the same as the literary critic's, the cultural studies scholar's, the evolutionary psychologist's, the historian's, or the political scientist's. I'll return to the issue of disciplinarity later. But here, my effort is to be as synoptic as possible, in order both to systematize the often self-contradictory claims made against culture and to offer some account of how these arguments reflect larger concerns and trends.
So to begin, I offer the following list of common complaints against culture:
1. Culture is reified: it demarcates solid boundaries of belonging, without regard to complex processes of contact, creativity, and change.
2. There is no such thing as culture: its meaning is imprecise and it is insufficiently referential of the "real" structures of human existence.
3. "Culture" is just a sneaky word for "race," a scientifically outmoded and politically objectionable concept.
4. Culture is politically conservative.
5. Culture is substitute religion.
These issues are sometimes clearly related, as in the conjoined complaints that culture is conservative and that it represents covert religious thinking. Similarly, the idea that culture is just another way of demarcating race emerges from the idea that it is an abstract nothing: if "culture" means anything at all, then what it connotes simply recapitulates another problematic abstraction. At other times, what is striking is these critiques' significant opposition to each other. Thus the concern that culture is too easily reified, that it implies solid boundaries and demarcations of inclusion and exclusion that simply don't exist, is exactly the inverse of the worry that there is no such thing as culture, that it is a meaningless abstraction. It is in these sites of opposition that we see the real contours of the debate over culture since the cultural turn.
1. CULTURE IS REIFIED
In The Predicament of Culture (1988), a key document of the "cultural turn," James Clifford made an interesting prediction:
An intellectual historian of the year 2010, if such a person is imaginable, may ... look back on the first two-thirds of our century and observe that this was a time when Western intellectuals were preoccupied with grounds of meaning and identity they called "culture" and "language" (much the way we now look at the nineteenth century and perceive there a problematic concern with evolutionary "history" and "progress"). I think we are seeing signs that the privilege given to natural languages and, as it were, natural cultures, is dissolving. These objects and epistemological grounds are now appearing as constructs, achieved fictions, containing and domesticating heteroglossia. In a world with too many voices speaking all at once, a world where syncretism and parodic invention are becoming the rule, not the exception, an urban, multinational world of institutional transience—where American clothes made in Korea are worn by young people in Russia, where everyone's "roots" are in some degree cut—in such a world it becomes increasingly difficult to attach human identity and meaning to a coherent "culture" or "language."
Clifford nicely captures several things here. First, he historicizes a certain concept of culture, which he calls "natural culture," as the product of a particular moment and equally shows how inadequate such a concept is for conceptualizing a present characterized by what everyone would soon be calling "globalization." Yet despite his relegation of this culture to the past, Clifford's statement of another, more heteroglossic, mobile, and syncretic cultural alternative would become a central preoccupation of the cultural turn. So an interesting feature of the cultural turn is precisely "culture's" centrality as the frame of reference in the face of a widely held view that the term in its received meaning ("natural culture") is either inadequate to describing the present or downright politically objectionable.
In chapter 3, I'll offer a broad context for this paradox by accounting for why "culture" became such an important keyword in this specific period. But for now, we must simply note that one of the central gambits of the cultural turn, especially for anthropologists, was to identify and critique what they saw as an outmoded, inadequate, and stubbornly persistent usage of "culture." For many critics of culture emerging from this context, including not only Clifford but also Renato Rosaldo, Arjun Appadurai, and Lila Abu-Lughod, to name just a few, the concept is plainly still too connotative of an older way of thinking. It sneaks in subtle or not-so-subtle assumptions about homogeneity, purity, boundedness, and authenticity that are ultimately connected to an imperialist will to power over the colonial subject, the equally reified entity designated the "native." Moreover, this flies in the face of all other evidence that shows that culture is not rigid and reducible to static "patterns" but mobile, plastic, and promiscuous. The interesting stuff is not what fits but what doesn't; what exists on the borders and complicates assumed values, hierarchies, and categories, including those of self and other.
Of course, as a number of commentators on the doing-away-with-culture phenomenon have already observed, the older anthropological usages of culture were hardly as rigid, as invested in boundaries and stability, as many of their detractors made them out to be. Indeed, immersion in the history of the discipline has often proven quite the opposite, and a diverse group of anthropologists (but especially those in the Boasian tradition) have been recuperated precisely on the grounds that not only are they sophisticated thinkers about culture, but they anticipate this or that aspect of the cultural turn. Nevertheless, as Clifford's futuristic thought experiment indicates, there is a strong progressivist tendency to rewrite the discipline as one of a benighted past unfolding into an increasingly enlightened present. Thus Rosaldo for one contextualizes his refutation of the "classic norms" of his discipline, including the culture concept and traditional ethnographic practice, with an admitted "caricature" of disciplinary history, beginning with the figure of an imperialist "Lone Ethnographer." This figure of the "heroic period" and the "birth of ethnography" is subsequently supplanted in the equally composite moment of "classic ethnography" (1921–71).
Rosaldo's demarcation of this second period gets us closer to a plausible critical target of the cultural turn. It is the moment of Ruth Benedict's widely influential conception of distinctive cultural "patterns" modeled along the lines of personality types, the wide influence of British structural functionalism, Parsonian conceptions of social determination, and structuralism proper. In other words, what is really being critiqued in the caricature of older conceptions of culture is not so much "culture" but structuralist, culture-and-personality, and social-determinist deployments of the concept, all of which could fairly be seen, from the perspective of the cultural turn, as overemphasizing homogeneity, coherence, stability, and so forth. Which is to say, this moment also generally deemphasized individual agency, an issue of increasing interest to scholars of the post-1968 generation. This is the larger context for reading one of Arjun Appadurai's central complaints against culture: "The noun culture appears to privilege the sort of sharing, agreeing, and bounding that fly in the face of the facts of unequal knowledge and the differential prestige of lifestyles, and to discourage attention to the worldviews and agency of those who are marginalized or dominated."
The result of this culturalist critique of culture has been a twofold fastidiousness. First, it is almost obligatory in the literature of anthropology to state concern and skepticism about culture as a guiding concept on the predictable grounds of its reifying tendencies, followed by some palliative methodological proposals, such as refining one's usage of "culture" in some specific way, or abstaining from nominatives and using only the adjectival form "cultural." But such gestures also imply, and are part and parcel of, a general phobia about reification, resulting in a deep hermeneutic suspicion of generalizations of any kind. Lila Abu-Lughod, in her widely cited essay "Writing against Culture," states, "If 'culture,' shadowed by coherence, timelessness, and discreteness, is the prime anthropological tool for making "other," and difference, as feminists and halfies [people of mixed cultural identity] reveal, tends to be a relationship of power, then perhaps anthropologists should consider strategies for writing against culture." One of her central strategies for writing against culture, the creation of "ethnographies of the particular," takes explicit aim at the sin of generalization and its attendant associations of abstraction and objectivity.
In the midst of this panic over reification, it seems more than a little scandalous to ask, Is it always such a bad thing? There is a compelling reason why anthropologists in particular might be pressed on this point, for, as many have lately noted, sometimes with ill-concealed dismay, there are probably no people left on earth who do not assume that they have something called a "culture." While many such people can speak with a great deal of sophistication about that fact, such indigenous views of culture are certainly not fastidiously avoidant of reifications. Christoph Brumann puts the case as follows: "Whether anthropologists like it or not, it appears that people—and not only those with power—want culture, and they often want it precisely in the bounded, reified, essentialized, and timeless fashion that most of us now reject. Moreover, just like other concepts such as 'tribe,' culture has become a political and judicial reality."
Such "reflexivization" has long been considered a hallmark of what it means to be a subject in modernity: being able to conceive of oneself as embedded within historical time and space. To be Hopi or Fijian is no longer a matter of unselfconsciously going about one's (premodern) life but an active form of identity construction and maintenance. And this is also, of course, a clear example of culture's reification. Each of these specific cultures is now a thing out there in the world, which means that each is also susceptible to the commodification, theft, and investment of aura that characterize all of our modern identities. Hopi culture is now fully available to the uses and abuses of tourism, New Age nonsense, the art market, school, and copyright law. All of which explains the tristesse over this reification, which (as Claude Lévi-Strauss once helped us see) is in no small part sorrow for our own fallen selves. But we may as well be honest that this desire for a prereflexivized world holds a tang of romantic othering and acknowledge that there are both ethical and practical difficulties in wishing to deny someone this self-conscious sense of cultural identity, even with all its attendant theoretical problems.
All of which brings us to what we might call the romantic heart of the anthropological cultural turn. In the context not only of obvious and objectionable forms of cultural reification (as, say, in the South African usage of the idea of cultural difference to justify racial apartheid) but also of the nascent globalization that Clifford so clearly recognized, all that complexity and particularity, all those liminal cases and things that failed to fit the categories serve another function: to describe an ineffable culture that might be seen to avoid reification and thus somehow to slip out of the bonds of market logic. In a moment of the complete commodification of culture, perhaps culture could be so reconstituted to still mark a space of externality—of possibility. Of course, this space of externality is almost by definition indefinable—which brings me to complaint number 2.
2. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CULTURE
While the critiques of culture that emerged from within the cultural turn worried over the problem of the term's reification, its dangerous solidity, another critique of culture of long standing has gone in precisely the opposite direction. No less a figure in anthropology than the famed British structuralist Mary Douglas once put the matter as follows: "Never was such a fluffy notion at large in a self-styled scientific discipline, not since singing angels blew the planets across the medieval sky or ether filled in the gaps of Newton's universe." For critics of culture such as Douglas, the problem is not culture's excessive solidity of meaning but precisely the opposite: if it is not an entirely meaningless abstraction, then it is certainly a "hyper-referential" concept in strong need of some reining in.
According to Adam Kuper, "culture" simply connotes too much, is too messy, and needs to be broken up into its various components—"knowledge, or belief, or art, or technology, or tradition, or even ... ideology"—in order to be properly analyzed. This list is itself telling: Kuper relegates to "culture" items that in a Marxist tradition might be called "superstructural." But this also implies a base. Kuper writes, "Political and economic forces, social institutions, and biological processes cannot be wished away, or assimilated to systems of knowledge and belief. And that, I will suggest, is the ultimate stumbling block in the way of cultural theory, certainly given its current pretensions." In other words, there are things that are simply, irreducibly, not cultural. Moreover, there are things that are not explainable culturally. The difficulties really start for Kuper when "culture shifts from something to be described, interpreted, even perhaps explained, and is treated instead as a source of explanation in itself."
I will get to a discussion of Kuper's specific criticisms, but first it is important to note that he is hardly alone in suggesting that there are other fundamental areas that cannot be "wished away, or assimilated to systems of knowledge and belief." Indeed, a very prominent strain of complaint against culture is that it fails to account for the "real" processes of human existence: the political, the economic, the social, or the biological.
For the prominent evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, "culture" has too long been the retreat of social scientists, whom they caricature as adhering to a rigid set of scientifically insupportable ideas about the human mind and an equally rigid superstructural model of culture in order to avoid acknowledgment of the basic biological foundations of human existence. In a thought experiment, they offer an interesting snapshot of how human behavior might be characterized, and of how the idea of culture might be put in its place:
Imagine that extraterrestrials replaced each human being on earth with a state-of-the-art compact disk juke box that has thousands of songs in its repertoire. Each juke box is identical. Moreover, each is equipped with a clock, an automated navigational device that measures its latitude and longitude, and a circuit that selects what song it will play on the basis of its location, the time, and the date. What our extraterrestrials would observe would be the same kind of pattern of within-group similarities and between-group differences observable among humans: In Rio, every juke box would be playing the same song, which would be different from the song that every juke box was playing in Beijing, and so on, around the world.
According to Tooby and Cosmides, each of these juke boxes would appear to behave like a "cultured" being in the following senses: because its original playlist of songs was large and diverse, its actual program of played songs would seem "complexly patterned"; because its programming was directed by a clock, its behavior would change over time; and because its navigational sensors required it to change its repertoire with any change in location, it would appear to "adapt" to new surroundings. But all these behaviors are products of the relationship between the environment and a "highly organized architecture that is richly endowed with contentful mechanisms." Tooby and Cosmides suggest that if this be considered culture at all, then it should be denominated as "evoked" culture, as distinct from what they consider the far more restricted field of "epidemiological" culture: behavior learned, or transmitted like the flu, from one person to another. Indeed, conspicuously absent from their thought experiment is any such consideration of inter–juke box learning or interaction: though all juke boxes may share a common "architecture," they are strict individualists.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Cultural Return by Susan Hegeman. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. Cultural Discontents
2. Haunted by Mass Culture
3. A Brief History of the Cultural Turn
4. Globalization, Culture, and Crises of Disciplinarity
5. The Santa Claus Problem: Culture, Belief, Modernity
6. The Cultural Return
Notes
Index