The Interpretation of Culture

The Great Disembedding

a major historical and philosophical shift where human beings became detached from traditional cosmic, social, and religious frameworks to become independent individuals (ex: move from rural/agricultural life to urbanization). Older forms of identity are destroyed and replaced as one become a singular person.

World System

Systems organized into hierarchical relations of larger capitalist powers (center) to the smaller groups that fuel them through industrial production.

Local realities of smaller groups are determined continents away (i.e. shifts in consumption patterns or fashion from an influx of Western advertisement and identity politics)

Globalization

The process by which industrial production shifts from large capitalist countries to “developing societies,” forcing social and political barriers to be broken for the flow of goods and production. Often results in the flow of new ideas into these regions, which have the prospect to destroy pre-established communal values.

Aihwa Ong

• Anthropologist/Ethnographer who studied shifts in identity and cultural logics of human action among (female) Malaysian factory workers

• A New Subjectivity: argues that shifts in economic relations have decisive effects on gender, community, individualism, ethnic identity, reproductive habits, agency.

• Economic changes offer new realities expressed through consumption and fashion habits, socialization with men and other ethnic groups, Western media consumption.

• These changes incorporate people into new forms of control, such as a lack of agency in work, incorporation into a world system, and new forms of threat in both homelessness and the workplace.

• Unleashed Spirits, The World Decentered: argued that capitalism doesn’t fully destroy existing cultural relations, but enters into articulation with them.

• New forms of production induce new modes of control. This does generate pushback, but it does not rise to the category of ‘resistance,’ like the formation of workers movements, unions, strikes.

• Spirits act as fragments of their previous cultural lives, and culture is used as a vehicle for processing grief, and the unconscious beginnings of protest against labor discipline and male control in the modern industrial situation (homology between control from capitalism and spirits).

Enlightenment

Advocates for universal reason, one human nature, and the progress towards a single standard of culture (whether intellectual or otherwise)

German Romanticism

Recognizes particular histories, plural cultures, and each person/group of people as possessing their own “genius.”

Laid the foundation for modern social relativism.

Liberalism

A framework which grew in popularity after The Great Disembedding, which defies the idea of “fixed” status and denotes individualism, allowing for the mutability of the world and the mobility of people.

Emmanuel Kant

What is Enlightenment?

• Culture is an inward category of thought, an internal, individual achievement.

• Freedom is the release from tradition, which controls the means of thought and critical thinking.

• Self and society can develop over time, and it is a duty on self and society to allow this to happen.

• Results in the liberal self, who can control their identity/reality.

• Promotes individualism, rationality, education, autonomy.

• Con: presumes a univocal idea of progress, which is directed at himself as a European protestant. What progress is for one group versus another might not be the same. It believes in the self as separated from the world, able to subject it to critical assessment.

Johann Gottfried Herder

• Advocates for the spirit of the people and that reason emerges from experience with other cultures.

• Establishes cultural relativism — social structures vary wildly without an inherent hierarchy.

• Critiques Kantian premise, establishing that his logic assumes criticism of its culture because it sits so comfortably within it.

Matthew Arnold

Culture and Anarchy

• argues that culture is the best that has ever been thought or said, as “the help out of our present difficulties.” A pursuit of perfection.

• culture turns a stream of fresh and free thought upon stock notions and habits that are followed staunchly and mechanically

• culture depends upon working on the self, the cultivation of one’s own rationality through reading. “This inward operation is the very life and essence of culture, as we conceive it”

• Can breed both the pursuit of culture or the constructs of civilization. One can cultivate the world (ways of living), one can destroy it (AI, industrialization)

E.B. Tylor

Primitive Culture

• argues that culture is a holistic “complex whole” (or systems) that everyone possesses or lives under. It is not the possession of a privileged few.

• Culture is tradition: It exists outside of people and trains people in its norms.

• There are not more or less degrees of it. You cannot use it to develop individually but societies will go through stages of evolution of culture. It is a general law of human development.

• In this broadly dispersed culture we find their truest essence, the things that makes them a people. We find it in folktales, songs, dress, religious customs.

On Alternating Sounds (Franz Boas)

• Perception is assimilated to what we know, and we apply our knowledge to the world.

• Suggests that humans do not encounter raw reality, but reality through preconceived systems of distinction. We classify raw reality into these symbolic grids of understanding.

• Difference in perception does not indicate a lack of faculty to perceive, or a primitive state of perception.

• Differential Threshold: A point of difference where two things cannot be associated/categorized together. Systems of classification rely upon differential thresholds through which categories are separated and are transgressed.

Edward Sapir

THE UNCONSCIOUS PATTERNING OF BEHAVIOIR IN SOCIETY*

• Argued that all cultural behavior is patterned, and “stand in no immediate relation to the needs of the organism” (a symbolic system)

• Social behavior is not adequately known to the individual because the experiences that give them their significance are more felt or intuited than consciously perceived.

• It is impossible to understand the behavior of others without understanding how they act amidst the generalized mode of conduct that is imputed to society.

Franz Boas

On race:

• The concept of race is arbitrary to determining an aptitude for culture, and there is no satisfactory evidence that the white race and European civilization is superior to any other

• Diffusionism: culture develops as ideas and inventions are carried from one group to the other, or the dissemination of thought.

• Unprecedented modern factors prevent “primitive” groups from developing a culture similar to that of Europeans.

• The implication of the term “primitive” limits assimilation or “growth” — the maintenance of separation is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• Overlapping of physical and psychical variation demonstrates they alone (as determinants of race) cannot limit mental faculty.

• “Racial behavior” is often the result of intense social stress and scrutiny AKA RACISM

Civilization

• Sometimes a synonym for culture.

• Post-Rousseau, esp. 19th c.: tied to science and technology.

• For many, this is progress that is anti-culture — culture repairs civilization’s damage (cf. STEM, AI today).

Culture as Reification

The anthropological concept of culture depersonalizes societies — confines into one bounded “thing.” Who exactly is “a people”?