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

CULTURE

The politics of culture

The breeze of post-colonialism

Today, the politics of the use of the concept of culture is such an explosive topic that no anthropologist can afford to remain naive about the issues involved. Anthropology is not an innocent endeavour—a point the debate makes abundantly clear. At the same time it raises questions that appear to threaten the very political and academic viability of the discipline—at least as practised in modernist guise. Post-modernism has taken its deconstructive toll, while the voices of post-colonialism have been even more devastating, though in many ways fair, in their criticism of the grand narratives of anthropology. Combined, this is a literature that has played an important role in implementing certain major shifts of focus in the ethnographic ‘eye’. One thing is certain: anthropology today is not what it was a decade ago.To a certain extent the subject is now in a period of confusion, indeed breast-beating, as each new post-colonialist treatise is published: we find within such literature the anthropologist replacing the missionary as the ‘bad guy’ of the Western world. For many of us the breezes of post-modernism and post-colonialism have been refreshing. Be that as it may, there is no simple answer to the accusations that anthropology has served as handmaiden to colonial conquest and government, and for the most part was developed within intellectual frameworks distinctly modernist in design (see Ardener 1985). Although most anthropologists working among the colonized have viewed their programme as one to alleviate the weight of colonialism by reducing its mistakes, anthropology—at least to the extent it has considered itself a social science and not of the arts—has nevertheless inadvertently served colonialism’s aim. It has also served the hegemony of modernist programmes of development and ways of thinking. How did this occur?

The creation of the exotic other, or cultural relativism gone wrong

The claim is that in its representations of other cultures, anthropology has transformed the ‘other’ into anthropological object, and in so doing has reified, homogenized and exoticized the lives of other peoples. Within this gaze it is difficult to glimpse real, living, experiencing, meaning-making human beings who follow particular lifeways. Rather, such lives are reduced to the ‘objective’ abstract structures created by the anthropological expert, and the people who live them are thereby silenced. Anne Salmond suggests (1995:41) that in this act of silencing the other, the ethnographic other becomes as object, a resource for the

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self. As she notes, objects have negative properties in Western thought, for they cannot speak, think, or know. In their describing and their measuring, anthropologists have, in her words (1995:23), produced ‘others’ as ‘exotic curiosities for European consumption’!

Thus we see that the liberality of the notion of cultural pluralism within modernist constructions is now being strongly contested. What was considered to be the healthy route of cultural relativism is being reinterpreted as the weedy path of a diseased exoticism. For instance, McGrane argues (1989) that the idea of the superiority of Western culture, particularly its spectacular scientific success, became the potent and decidedly unliberal yardstick through which anthropologists assessed the accomplishments of other cultures. There is the superior Western culture, and then there are all the rest as contrast. A sharp divide is created, with epistemological privilege always on the side of the West. In general, the process of exoticizing other cultures has been intensified through this tendency of characterizing their salient features in contrastive frames to our own (cf. Ingold 1994b:331).The content varies somewhat in accordance to context, but in each contrastive frame, we find lurking the underlying idea that ‘unsophisticated’ technology is understood to entail weak religion, weak thought, weak ritual, weak politics, weak economics.Thus, we have science, they have magic; or we have history, they have myth; we have high-tech agriculture, they have subsistence practices; we have priests, they have shamans; or we have scientists, they have shamans; we have philosophy, they have beliefs; we are literate, they are illiterate; or we have writing, they have oral literature; we have theatre, they have ritual; we have government, they have elders; we have rationality, they are pre-logical; we have individualism, they have community—and so on through a myriad of cultural traits that are suggestive of a thesis long popular in the history of Western thought that equates ‘simple’ technology with simple minds. Such contrasts do indeed play havoc with the original tenets of cultural relativism, where understanding and judgement were meant to be relative to local context.

Part of the problem has been methodological, for anthropologists have steadfastly used as analytical categories such concepts as science, religion, economics, politics, kinship, society. Such Western classifications, while highly relevant to our own highly compartmentalized existence and history, have proven to be very clumsy tools through which to understand the perspectives of other peoples. Moreover it means that the very vocabulary that anthropology has used for analysis, its own definitional terms, have carried a perverse and hidden agenda: the other’s local was to be understood within the context of our local,

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which in the end became a universal standard, not only of judgement, but for description as well. This has placed the other in a true doublebind situation. The relativist (and humanist) intention that insisted upon respect for the local could hardly be achieved through such a methodology.

The politics of exotica

Thus there is little wonder that the post-colonialists accuse anthropology of the production of fictionalized exotica. Its use of the concept of culture has well served the purpose of distancing ourselves—politically, epistemologically, morally, technologically, mentally—in time and space from all other peoples of the world (see Fabian 1983; Ardener 1985). Through modernist classification, a powerful ‘primitivism’ has been created that freezes most of the peoples of the world within a time (neolithic, medieval) and space (Asia, Africa, Amazonia) a hopeless distance from our own. As Johannes Fabian says (1983), it would be impossible to achieve a conversation with the other, one based upon mutuality and respect, through such a programme of study that so relishes exotic difference. The ‘catch-22’ (Heller 1961) for anthropologists has been that it would only be through establishing such coeval conversations that we could learn the discipline’s prejudices: without the conversations, we could not come to know the prejudice; while, because of the prejudice, we could not know the benefits of conversation! This has been an important step for anthropology—to recognize the necessity of achieving a mutual, coeval exchange to the endeavour of understanding other perspectives on ways of living.

The political implications of this process of creating exotic cultures are truly awesome. Just think of being frozen in neolithic time, and your chances of dealing equitably with those who recognize only themselves as existing today! Exoticism provides impetus to ‘first-world’ development projects, though which ‘inferior’ forms of life can ‘assimilate’ the knowledge of a ‘superior’ sort of people in order to live a ‘better life’. Exoticism plays into the politician’s hand by reinforcing and contributing to Western antipathies toward other peoples of the world (cf. Said 1978 on the effects of Western Orientalism). Culture and difference have become the most powerful political paradigms fuelling political action in the modern world (cf. Eller 1997), where for instance a common strategy of nation-states is the fixing of cultural identities (in the name of ethnicity) within its territorial boundaries toward the end of centralized control and domination.We know all too well the dangers of these notions of ethnic purity and ethnic separation.

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Many people are driven to conceive of themselves in this way, and thus to devise and proclaim their own cultural distinctiveness (cf. Eller 1997). As Sahlins remarks:

the cultural self-consciousness developing among imperialism’s erstwhile victims is one of the more remarkable phenomena of world history in the late twentieth century. ‘Culture’—the word itself, or some local equivalent—is on everyone’s lips …For centuries they may have hardly noticed it. But today, as the New Guinean said to the anthropologist, ‘If we didn’t have kastom, we would be just like white men’!

(Sahlins 1994:378)

In Amazonia, people who never lived before within a bounded universe are today instructed by national governments to devise boundaries for themselves—and to live in accordance to their ‘authentic’ cultures; many peoples who had no singular self-denominations are now creating them in order to deal with national governments, and are recognized by government agents only insofar as they display the practice of their ‘authentic’ culture, such as through the wearing of indigenous dress and their lack of political savvy in dealing with these self-same agents. The notion of culture is a true monster, if we agree with Abu-Lughod who argues (1999:13) that the concept of culture is always contaminated (as is the concept of race) by the politicized world.

It is because the notion of culture can so easily be used in pernicious ways that Abu-Lughod argues for the abandoning of its use in anthropology. However, it is for that very reason—its prevalence in everyday and political talk—that anthropology should not turn its back on the concept. As Cerroni-Long argues (1999), times demand that anthropologists actively counteract the dangers of ‘cultural fundamentalism’, in all its colours and practices. Multi-culturalism, transculturalism, transnationalism are phrases in the air, so to speak. The strength of anthropology is that we appreciate multi-perspectivism: there are a multiplicity of colonial discourses and post-colonial ones, and a plurality of potential and active subversions of both. Our recognition of this universe of pluralities is surely anthropology’s real competence.We should therefore remain firmly and reflectively engaged with the concept of culture, so as to resituate it so as to play into our strengths, one of which is the possibility of destabilizing all those grand narratives that underpin ongoing relationships of cultural domination. It is not the word ‘culture’ that is at fault.The word is not responsible for the sins of its academic and

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political use. Rather, the problem has been the modernist paradigms of knowledge within which it has been placed, which entail very specific relationships of domination and subordination. Insofar as anthropologists collude with the postulates that provide weight to such frameworks of knowledge, the anthropological task is hardly innocent.

See also: Classification, Community, Myth, Post-Modernism,

Society, Stereotypes, The Unhomely, World-View

CYBERNETICS

Cybernetics might be described as: the ‘elucidating of patterns in recursive, nonlinear systems’ (Harries-Jones 1995:3). More generally it deals with the patterned nature of the world: with the connectedness of phenomena and the connections between things; with the way patterns of connectedness both relate spheres of life and experience that might circumstantially seem unrelated, and are ultimately responsible for the existence of those seemingly unrelated phenomena in the first place. Cybernetics takes seriously Whitehead’s counsel (1925):

[T]he misconception that has haunted philosophical literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence’.There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

Cybernetics is the elucidation of the circuitry of the world, and how that circuitry can best be appreciated and maintained for the future existence both of human societies and their relation to the natural environment.

One of the founders of cybernetic thought was the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. It is with his work that we begin here, therefore, before exploring briefly how others have applied cybernetic thinking since.

Gregory Bateson

In his intellectual biography of Bateson (1904–80), Harries-Jones describes him as ‘the most brilliant holistic scientist of this century’ (1995:3). Holism was a key word for Bateson; an understanding of our human part in the whole ‘living system’ that was the world he saw as

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