Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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the African Nuer, or the Amazonian Yanomami. Each culture pertains to a specific, historically contingent, way of life, which is expressed through its specific ensemble of artefacts, institutions and patterns of behaviour. Another and related use of the term within anthropology states that culture pertains to that huge proportion of human knowledge and ways of doing things that is acquired, learned and constructed, that is, not innate to a newborn child.Thus while the capacity for language may be inborn, the specific language that the child learns to speak is not, and as learned knowledge its particular grammar and idiosyncratic classifications of the world become a crucial part of his or her own cultural heritage.

There is nothing straightforward about any of these meanings, including the anthropological notion of culture in the plural. Probably most of us apply the term across a range of overlapping meanings, depending upon the approach being used, the questions being asked, and increasingly the political point we wish to make. From its inception, anthropology has been engaged in active controversy over the meaning of the term, and in recent years there has been an ongoing, virulent debate over the propriety of its very use. Thus today, even in the most ‘liberal’ of hands, the term is so fraught with complications that what we might individually decide to include as ‘belonging’ to the category of culture becomes a flag-waving gesture, a throwing down of the gauntlet. Edwin Ardener noted (1985) that important concepts tend to go through periodic stages of hot debate, and they do so whenever a field of study is on the verge of a strong epistemological break. The concept about which he was speaking was ‘rationality’, and the epistemological rupture that he foresaw was an abrupt shift away for anthropology from the high modernist era of the anthropological grand narratives of Marxism, structural-functionalism and structuralism. Ardener’s discussion was over a decade ago, but the present-day controversy over the concept of culture is to a large extent a continuation of the same remarkably perplexing chore of extricating ourselves methodologically, epistemologically and politically from the powerful categories of modernist thought.

Below will be discussed some of the more interesting aspects of the controversy over culture, such as questions about the status of culture‘s reality (does culture in fact exist?). If there is a reality to culture, where does this culture reside? does it dwell in the mind or is it a matter of practice? to what extent is culture shared? through which approach (cognitivist? phenomenological? materialist?) can ‘it’ best be understood and translated? These are large issues, and none of course has been resolved.To do so would entail agreement over just what culture is, and

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also over just what it is that anthropology does. It is probably because an agreement with respect to either endeavour would be most unlikely that controversy over culture will remain electric, and thus continue to play an essential role toward creating an anthropology that is relevant (and we hope acceptable) to the academic and political concerns of the twentyfirst century. As will be made obvious, the big question revolves around the ways in which anthropology can best persevere toward the end of extricating itself from its nineteenth-century colonialist and grand narrative beginnings.

The critique of cultural homogeneity, and culture’s objective reality

While anthropologists have insisted upon the plurality of cultures, they have also tended to view a given culture in the singular. Although Boas was the most important force in introducing the idea of the plurality of historically conditioned cultures into anthropology, the discipline has not always followed his insistence that culture itself is an ongoing creative process through which people continually incorporate and transform new and foreign elements. Boas argues further, still within his romanticist and anti-evolutionist perspective, that it is through such adaptations that a culture arrives at an integrated spiritual totality. Although his observations on the creativity and openness of the cultural process tended to be ignored, Boas’s notion that cultures become manifest as distinctive coherent systems has had considerable influence. A more up-to-date version would be the notion of the aesthetic autonomies of cultures. The idea that culture refers to a systematically harmonized whole with each therefore comprising a shared and stable system of beliefs, knowledge, values, or sets of practices held sway for a very long time in anthropology. It is a notion strongly embedded in all functionalist, structural-functionalist and structuralist thought.Thus this notion of the homogeneity of culture flourished and developed through many versions, but in the direction that assumed (unlike Boas) the fixity, coherence and boundedness of cultures. In what Fabian (1998:x–xi) refers to as this ‘classical modern concept’, a position of ‘ontological realism’ is assumed with respect to culture which understands tradition as something real, to be found outside the minds of individuals, and objectified in the form of a collection of objects, symbols, techniques, values, beliefs, practices and institutions that the individuals of a culture share.

It is a position that has much at stake, for in portraying cultures as having objective reality over and beyond individual agency, the

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foundation is set for what is thought to be the development of a true science of anthropology.The major bequest of Durkheim (1966 [1895]) to the discipline was the idea that the discovery of the social sciences’ own distinctive object (‘the social fact’) would provide the upstart human sciences with a competitive edge—i.e. the methodological procedures through which human behaviour could be explained. With this achievement the social sciences would acquire scientific respectability vis-à-vis the natural sciences. There have been important voices taking exception to such a goal. We have Evans-Pritchard in his Marett Lecture of 1950 (see Evans-Pritchard 1962) hotly debating that, because anthropology’s distinctive subject matter pertains to conscious, thinking human beings, the methodology of the discipline should be situated within the humanities, and not the natural sciences. On the whole, however, we see that Boas‘s most important argument, that creative process, historical contingency, and learned, socially transmitted behaviour are not in conflict, has not been widely explored until fairly recently. We find instead that the notion of culture as a coherent, bounded, and stable system of shared beliefs and actions has been a powerful twentieth-century idea that has been very difficult to shift. As intimated above there were reasons for such neglect.

The crisis in representational theories of meaning

In the 1960s there was a move away from the earlier emphasis upon culture as customary or patterned behaviour, to a stress upon culture as idea systems, or structures of symbolic meaning. Each culture was understood in this later view to consist of a shared system of mental representations. As David Schneider saw it, culture consists ‘of elements which are defined and differentiated in a particular society as representing reality—the total reality of life within which human beings live and die’ (1976:206). In this view culture is not just shared, it is intersubjectively shared (cf. D’Andrade 1984). Such a Parsonian/ Weberian systemic, ‘symboland meaning-centred’ concept of culture became the centrepiece of a ‘unified theory of action’ designed to provide a mighty and authoritative theoretical linkage between all the social sciences (see Fabian 1998:3–4, 6). Culture, as a conceptual structure made up of representations of reality, was understood to orient, direct, organize action in systems by providing each with its own logic. Culture gave purpose to the social system, and ensured its equilibrium. Behaviour out of sync with the system’s cultural valuations was said to be abnormal, deviant, dysfunctional, with the implication being that it was aculturally, or anticulturally, driven. It took some time for this

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powerful law-and-order (as Fabian dubs it) concept of culture to be seriously questioned.

However, over the past couple of decades anthropology has increasingly been involved in a crisis over its representational theories of meaning, and at the same time expressing deep regret over its former misdirected scientific hopes—those as envisioned by our more sociologically oriented masters, who used the natural sciences as the yardstick for judging our own success.What is particularly being called into account is the understanding of cultural (collective) representations as a template for social action, with its related unfortunate effect—all those anthropological portrayals of cultural dopes who act unconsciously in accordance to underlying structures of shared symbolic meaning.The world of meaning, as Roy Wagner insists (1986, 1991), cannot articulate with a natural science format, which must by the very nature of its task (of objectification) ignore, mystify, disdain, doubt personal invention and concrete imagination. Wagner, one of the most persuasive in his critique of the idea of shared, stable systems of collective representations, suggests that cultural meanings are not constituted of the signs of conventional reference, but instead ‘live a constant flux of continual re-creation’. He goes on to say that ‘the core of culture is…a coherent flow of images and analogies, that cannot be communicated directly from mind to mind, but only elicited, adumbrated, depicted’ (Wagner 1986:129).

Any fieldworker who has worked carefully with the telling and learning of myths, or the performance of rituals, should recognize the wisdom of Wagner’s insight into the poetics, creativity, individuality, inconsistencies, contradictions of such cultural processes (also see Dell Hymes (1981) on the poetics of the American North West Coast telling of myths, and Overing (1990) on the tropes and performance of Amazonian myths). As Ingold says (1994b:330, his italics), ‘what we do not find are neatly bounded and mutually exclusive bodies of thought and custom, perfectly shared by all who subscribe to them, and in which their lives and works are fully encapsulated’. What we do find can be much more challenging, and, as one antidote to the treatment of culture through the lens of representational theories of meaning and other grand theory, many anthropologists today are focusing upon the dialogics and poetics of everyday behaviour. In so doing the primary concern is with living, experiencing, thinking, affectively engaged human beings who follow (in varying degrees and a myriad of manners) particular lifeways. It is antagonistic toward all those attempts to create ‘objective’ abstract structures that have the effect of dismissing much of what the rest of the world has to say.

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The question of practice

There is much, it would seem, that representational theorists omit in the experiencing of culture (also see Ingold 1994b). First, while it is meaning systems that is their primary concern, it is cogent to stress that these systems are creations of the anthropologist, and not of the people who supposedly ‘follow’ them. The usual claim is that, for the people, the ‘system’ and the mental representations that comprise it are unconsciously followed. Thus the meaning-creating, speaking, socially occupied person (whether from Chicago, Italy or Timbuktu) is omitted. As too is all practice in which he or she engages, and this by definition since the symbolist view of culture excludes behaviour.

What, we may ask, is the relation between meaning and practice? between mind and body? concept and performance? The present trend is to oppose the representational view of the body as a passive instrument, and thus time and again we find in today’s literature across a range of disciplines—in anthropology (e.g. Wagner 1986, 1991; Fabian 1983, 1998; Ingold 1994b), cognitive psychology (e.g. Shanon 1993), philosophy (e.g. Meløe 1988a, 1988b) and culture theory (e.g. de Certeau 1997)—the plea to recognize embodied meaning, that is, to wed concept and practice, the perceiving with the acting agent.We might say that there is no such thing as ‘a culture’, or rather that ‘culture should not be a noun, but a verb: “to culture”, or “culturing”’ (Overing 1998; also see Friedman 1994:206). As Ingold notes (1994b:330, his italics), ‘it might be more realistic…to say that people live culturally rather than they live in cultures’. For most people around the world, culturing is an endless and ever ongoing, overt activity, which ill fits the social scientist’s categories. From the Amazonian perspective culture time and again refers to the skills for action, which conjoin (independent) thinking and a sensual life, that individuals have, mould and use to live a particular human life. However, to reunite the body, the sensual, acting, feeling, emotive aspects of self, with the thinking, language-knowing self creates havoc with most modernist versions of culture. As should only be expected, debates today on the implications of a more phenomenological approach to culture for the future development of anthropology have a certain edge, a passion and often a political as well as academic challenge to them.

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