Bee Larvae and Onion Soup: Culture PDF

Chapter 2 Bee Larvae and Onion Soup: Culture When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the...

Chapter 2 Bee Larvae and Onion Soup: Culture When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; What is Man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of Man, that Thou visitest him? For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. Psalm 8:3–8 Even if we take the psalmist’s triumphalism with a grain of salt, it is hard to deny Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. that Homo sapiens is an unusual species in the natural history of this planet. Other species are faster, stronger, better adapted to their environments by physique and instinct than we are. What is it, then, that separates our species from all others? There are many things about humans that are unique. But perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic is our capacity to conceptualize the world and to communicate those conceptions symbolically. Anthropologists, especially those trained in the American tradition, call this capacity ‘culture’. Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  What is ‘Culture’? However we define culture, most anthropologists agree that it has to do with those aspects of human cognition and activity that are derived from what we learn as members of society, keeping in mind that one learns a great deal that one is never explicitly taught. Indeed, no species has as protracted a period of infantile and juvenile dependence, a period that allows for and is devoted to the absorption and transmission of ways of knowing and doing, ways that are unique to each society. It is impossible to imagine anything beyond even a rudimentary technology – such as one based on the manufacture of stone tools – in the absence of an exceptional capacity to conceptualize abstract ideas and communicate them symbolically, the primary human means for which is, of course, language. Our genetically inherited predisposition for language and symbolic communication, and all of the complex social organization that it makes possible, has allowed the human race to achieve a kind of inheritance of acquired characteristics in which the acquisition of knowledge can be cumulative from generation to generation. We hasten to add that there have probably been more anthropological definitions of ‘culture’ than there have been anthropologists. The two of us were trained with a sense of culture as ‘shared patterns of learned behaviour’. In the Victorian era, Edward B. Tylor’s 1871 definition of culture endured essentially unchallenged for thirty years: ‘Culture or civilization, taken in its wide [comparative] ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. society.’ Tylor’s focus on knowledge and belief as acquired – that is, learned – by members of a social group, as well as his sense that these constitute an integrated system, continue to inform our sense of what culture is. On the other hand, the Victorians tended to regard ‘culture or civilization’ as something a nation or people might possess to a greater or less degree. In this sense of the term, the fellow who goes to the opera, sips champagne, and reads Proust is more ‘cultured’ than the one who goes to a soccer match, swills beer, and reads the tabloid Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  dailies. While this sense may continue in everyday uses of the term ‘culture’, it is rejected by anthropologists. Culture, or civilization... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Edward Tylor, 1871 That rejection of the term ‘culture’ as something that a people or an individual has more or less of has profoundly changed the way the modern world views differences between societies. Returning to Cambridge from World War II, Raymond Williams found himself ‘preoccupied by a single word, culture’. Where he had previously heard the term used to refer to ‘a kind of social superiority’ or ‘where it was an active word for writing poems and novels, making films and paintings, working in theatres’, he now heard it in a sense that indicated ‘powerfully but not explicitly, some central formation of values’ as well as ‘a use which made it almost equivalent to society: a particular way of life – “American culture”, “Japanese culture”.’ Williams was hearing the rippling consequences of a rethinking of the culture concept at the turn of the century by German and American social theorists, most prominently Franz Boas. Franz Boas is generally considered the father of modern American cultural Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. anthropology. Born in Germany in 1858, Boas was trained at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, concentrating in his studies on geography and what was called ‘psychophysics’, which focused on the study of how the characteristics of the observer determined the perception of physical phenomena. At the same time, as a Jew he was alienated from the politics and social establishments of nineteenth century Germany, which was one of the reasons for his emigration to Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  the United States six years after completing his doctorate. From the outset, Boas was fascinated by the idea that environment, cultural as well as physical, had a determining effect on the way one views the world. His earliest work in ‘psychophysics’ had to do with the way Eskimos (Inuit) perceived and categorized the colour of seawater. After several years Boas received an appointment at Columbia University in New York, which became the principal training ground for the next two generations of American anthropologists. 5. Franz Boas Demonstrating a Dance from the Northwest Coast Culture embraces all the manifestations of social behaviour of a community, the reactions of the individual as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the product of human activities as determined by these habits. Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Franz Boas, 1930 Where Tylor saw ‘culture’ as an accumulation of human accomplishment, Boas described a ‘Kulturbrille’, a set of ‘cultural glasses’ that each of us wears, lenses that provide us with a means for perceiving the world around us, for interpreting the meaning of our social lives, and framing action in them. Here is something Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  that happened to John during a stay with the Mixtec of Oaxaca, Mexico: I was invited to go hunting with several of my Mixtec friends. We hadn’t had. much luck, only managing to shoot a couple of thin squirrels. Toward the end of the day I was following my friends up the side of a ridge. They were well ahead of me, and when I finally reached the top I could see them crouched around something at the base of a tree and talking excitedly. As I approached, I saw it was a beehive, which one of them knocked down with a stick. When it hit the ground it split open, revealing a mass of comb, honey, and bee larvae. My three friends were busy tearing out pieces of the hive – including those containing the bee larvae – and popping them into their mouths. One of them suddenly stood up and said ‘Wait, we’re being impolite.’ He reached down into the hive and pulled out a big glob of comb, honey, and squiggling bee larvae. He then turned to me and said, while holding out his hand, ‘Here John, this is all for you.’ Seeing no way to refuse him I took it from him, held my breath, put it in my mouth and swallowed. About a year later I got a revenge of sorts when I invited some of the same people over to my house to eat. As a surprise I prepared onion soup, something I am partial to but had never seen served anywhere in Oaxaca. After serving out the portions, I noticed that my guests were slow to begin eating. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of my hunting companions pour his bowl out onto the dirt floor behind a table. When I asked if there was something wrong they at first refused to say anything until one finally, with a disgusted look on Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. his face said ‘Onions have a terrible odour and, if you eat too much of them it makes you stupid’! What has this mutual disgust at each other’s eating habits got to do with culture? For one thing, it shows that both Americans and the Mixtec make a distinction between ‘food’ and ‘not-food’ in ways that have to do with more than simple considerations of edibility. Insects are in fact not just edible, they are quite Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  nutritious, and onions contain lots of vitamins. This kind of categorization is part of the work of culture, and it is something that we do not only with regard to food, but in every other imaginable domain. John’s disgust arose because he had learned to categorize insects as ‘vermin’ (definitely not food), while his Mixtec friends were disgusted by onion soup because they had learned to classify onions as a ‘condiment’, and no more suitable for a meal than a bowl of mustard would be for us and, taken in excess, positively stupefying. But perhaps more to the point – and here we return to Boas’ metaphor of ‘cultural glasses’ – experience is not simply given to us. For John and his Mixtec friends, eating is something that is part of a complex system of ideas, perceptions, norms, values, feelings, and behaviours so that the act of eating is never just about satisfying hunger, but is also an expression of how we have learned to see the world. Culture, like a set of glasses, focuses our experience of the world. Culture is the integral whole consisting of implements and consumers’ goods, of constitutional charters for the various social groupings, of human ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs. Whether we consider a very simple or primitive culture or an extremely complex and developed one, we are confronted by a vast apparatus, partly material, partly human, and partly spiritual, by which man is able to cope with the concrete, specific problems that face him. Bronislaw Malinowski, 1944 Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. And as this example shows, culture becomes a part of us, right down to ‘natural’ reactions, such as nausea. Over the years John has dined on grasshoppers, grubs, flying ants, and other, unnamed, insects; Mixtec cuisine is far from crude or primitive – an entire culinary aesthetic has developed based on foodstuffs Westerners consider ‘inedible’. We may know in a dispassionate intellectual sense Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  that insects are good for you, but John, at least, can never bring himself to feel completely at ease when eating a bug. (Peter can report similar experiences with goat testicles.) John’s experience provides a good way of looking at how anthropologists have used the idea of culture to uncover some of the fundamental ways learned behaviour shapes our lives and how they have begun to understand the ways in which, to paraphrase Clyde Kluckhohn, each person is simultaneously like some other people, like all other people, and like no other person. In John’s story our attention is immediately attracted to the exotic, to the seemingly bizarre tastes of the Mixtec, in short, to the differences cultures make between peoples. But the story could equally be read for what it reveals about the similarities between John and the Mixtec, similarities that may be part of a universal human heritage. For example, as we noted above, both Americans and the Mixtec employ an elaborate system of classification to deal with food. The specific content of the categories may differ, but the fact of classification remains constant. Indeed, the universal propensity of humans to create systems of classification, by means of which categorical meaning is assigned to domains as disparate as foodstuffs, diseases, and colours, has long been a subject of fascination and debate among anthropologists. At the beginning of this century, the French social theorist Émile Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss, argued that the human capacity for classification was Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. an extension of our social nature. ‘Society was not simply a model which classificatory thought followed; it was its own divisions which served as divisions for the system of classification. The first logical categories were social categories; the first classes of things were classes of men, into which these things were integrated.’ Half a century later, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of ‘structuralist’ anthropology, would claim that Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  human classification is indeed universal, but that it is universal because a human predisposition to making distinctions produced classifications that mutatis mutandis were but surface representations of a more fundamental ‘deep structure’ shaped by the binary nature of the human mind: ‘... [I]f we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind... the common denominator is always to introduce some kind of order. If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not chaos.’ Culture is neither natural nor artificial. It stems from neither genetics nor rational thought, for it is made up of rules of conduct, which were not invented and whose function is generally not understood by the people who obey them. Some of these rules are residues of traditions acquired in the different types of social structure through which... each human group has passed. Other rules have been consciously accepted or modified for the sake of specific goals. Yet there is no doubt that, between the instincts inherited from our genotype and the rules inspired by reason, the mass of unconscious rules remains more important and more effective; because reason itself... is a product rather than a cause of cultural evolution. Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1983 Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. In the United States, an interest in native systems of classification led in the 1960s to an approach that came to be called ‘ethnoscience’, in which formal methods of analysis were applied to domains such as kinship terms, flora and fauna, colour, diseases, and the like. One observation that came out of ethnoscience was that while the content of cultural categories was plastic, arbitrary, and highly variable, Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  that variability was itself both ordered and constrained by, among other things, the physiological means of perception. More recently yet, the French philosopher Michel Foucault has popularized a new direction among some anthropologists, who have come to see the categories of meaning imposed by culture as a basis of inequality and oppression. In other words, they see the ability to control the content of cultural classifications as a primary source of power in society. This in turn makes the contestation of categories of social classification, such as ‘male’ and ‘female’, with all of the social, political, and economic associations that attend them, a primary mode of resistance to authority. Going back to our example of John’s experience with his Mixtec friends, it is of course difficult to see how classifying onions as a meal or a condiment has much to do with power. Indeed, not all of what we do is motivated politically, and in behaviour associated with such an important area as food, moral precepts (as expressed in the etiquette of serving guests first and with choice portions) are at least as significant as considerations of dominance and resistance. This, too, is something we can see as informative about the similarities that unite human cultures even as our differences can divide us. The behaviour that John recounts in his story is not random, nor can it be described purely by the logic of economic utility. The whole notion of etiquette, of manners, if you like, is one shared by all human cultures. Eating is not simply the satisfaction of our need for nutrition: it is hedged about with a system of conceptual categories (e.g., ‘food’ vs. ‘non-food’ or ‘choice’ vs. ‘ordinary’ items), moral values (e.g., favouring one’s guest), and Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. culturally determined emotions (e.g., delight or disgust) which invest the satisfaction of nutritional needs with meanings that give it depth and resonance as a human experience. Culture lends significance to human experience by selecting from and organizing it. It refers broadly to the forms throughout which people Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  make sense of their lives... It does not inhabit a set-aside domain, as does... politics or economics. From the pirouettes of classical ballet to the most brute of brute facts, all human conduct is culturally mediated. Culture encompasses the everyday and the esoteric, the mundane and the elevated, the ridiculous and the sublime. Neither high nor low, culture is all-pervasive. Renato Rosaldo, 1989 Human cultures, then, seem to be infinitely variable, but in fact that variability takes place within the boundaries produced by physical and mental capacities. Human languages, for example, are tremendously diverse, differing in sound, grammar, and semantics. But all are dependent upon what appears to be a uniquely human capacity and predisposition for learning languages. While the range of sounds used in human languages extends from clicks and pops to guttural stops, the distinctive speech sounds that are meaningful in all the languages of the world are but a fraction of the sounds it is possible for humans to make. Another way that we might observe the intricate relationship between the culturally specific and the universal is in the way John and his Mixtec friends reacted emotionally, even viscerally, to bee larvae and onion soup: whether they felt delight or disgust was determined by the way they had learned to perceive food, but delight and disgust seem to be basic and universal human reactions to food. Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Where is Culture? At least three points of debate have continued to recur in the way anthropologists talk about the concept of culture. One has to do with the extent to which a ‘culture’ should be regarded as an integrated whole; the second has to do with the extent to which ‘culture’ can be seen as an autonomous, ‘superorganic’ entity; and the third has to do with how we can best go about drawing boundaries around Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  ‘cultures’. The idea that culture is an integrated and integrating whole is in part based upon the great modernist insight that underlying apparently discrete bits of belief or behaviour rests a more fundamental reality. For Karl Marx that determining reality was the mode of production; for Émile Durkheim it was society; for Sigmund Freud it was the unconscious; and for many in anthropology, following the lead of Boas, it has been culture itself. Different schools within anthropology have formed around ideas about the nature of this whole. Ruth Benedict, one of Boas’ first students, conceived of a culture as a Gestalt, a total pattern. In her classic work, Patterns of Culture, Benedict compared beliefs and institutions across several societies, noting how differences between cultures were consistent within a single culture. In other words, Benedict felt that the practices, beliefs, and values of a given culture differed from other cultures in a consistent and mutually reinforcing way. She could thus characterize the Zuñi (southwest United States) as ‘Apollonian’, the Kwakiutl (northwest coast of North America) as ‘Dionysian’, and the Dobu (southwest Pacific) as ‘paranoid schizophrenic’. Although Benedict’s approach is now regarded as too simplistic and reductionist, because of its tendency to view cultures in terms of one or two key themes, it has continued to prove a powerful means for organizing and integrating the minutiae of ethnographic observation. Clifford Geertz is one contemporary anthropologist who has been spectacularly adept with this approach: in one classic description of Balinese society, for example, he used cockfighting – a popular form of Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. entertainment in Bali – as an image that also serves to characterize beliefs and practices ranging from the way Balinese men see their sexual potency to the way status hierarchies organize the whole society. In this way, Geertz is able to show how disparate elements of Balinese culture create a ‘fabric of meaning and belief’ that is consistent and mutually reinforcing. For Geertz, cultures can be read as texts, much as one might read a novel or a poem. The trick, according to Geertz, is to seek out cultural ‘texts’ that the people of the society themselves find Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  compelling – as the Balinese are fascinated by cockfighting – and to not only understand them as they see them, but to see the ways the themes of these ‘texts’ illuminate other aspects of the society. Another view of integration has a more rationalistic basis, derived as it is from the linguistic idea of a grammar or set of rules underlying speech. In this approach, culture is often spoken of as a code or program. Thus, culture is integrated by the internal logic of the rules that enable it to be meaningful and productive. Hence, the American anthropologist Ward Goodenough uses the example of a football game to illustrate the goal of ethnographic description. If you want to play football you need to learn enough of the rules and style of playing the game to get along with the other players. By analogy an ethnographer should aspire to learn enough of the social rules and customs of a culture to be able to live in a way acceptable to the people he or she studies. Culture, then, consists of standards for deciding what is, standards for deciding what can be, standards of deciding how one feels about it, standards for deciding what to do about it, and standards for deciding how to go about doing it. Ward H. Goodenough, 1963 A third concept of integration draws on the notion of a formal system, where Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. elements stand in a relationship of mutual implication. Robert Murphy once observed: ‘Simple though it is, the idea that societies are systematized is central to the social sciences. The systematization occurs through the mutual adjustment of norms, ideas, values, aesthetics, and other things cultural, and it takes place in the arena of practical, everyday activity, in the adaptation and accommodation to each other of ways of behaving.’ For example, in Pigs for the Ancestors, Roy Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  Rappaport illustrated a complex ecological system in which the elaborate ritual cycles of the Tsembaga Maring of Highland New Guinea operate as a self- balancing mechanism that regulates the size of the domestic pig population, acreage under cultivation, fallow periods, energy expenditure, subsistence activities, diet, and inter-tribal warfare. At the opposite extreme are those who would deny that culture is integrated, or at least to the extent implied in the foregoing examples. Early studies of the borrowing or diffusion of traits among Native Americans lead Robert Lowie, another student of Boas, to suggest that culture is nothing more than ‘a thing of shreds and patches’, the product of a complex but essentially random history. A rejoinder to this critique was provided by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who pointed out that although the elements found in a given culture might have a wide range of historical origins, they have been pieced together as a ‘bricolage’, a kind of collage in which the odds and ends of culture are turned to uses for which they may never have been intended but which fit into an underlying pattern. More recently, anthropologists who reject the modernist assumption of underlying foundations have appropriated the idea of bricolage to view the essence of culture as a constant reworking, casting off, and reviving of elements into ever-changing complexes. This allows them to avoid the problem of essentializing culture, that is, treating it as if it exists outside of history and not subject to human agency. Up to this point we have taken the collective nature of culture for granted. In fact Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. we often refer to cultures as if they were autonomous things with lives of their own. Alfred Kroeber once compared culture to a coral reef, which is built up by the secretions of millions of tiny animals, but which existed before any of its living members, and will outlast them all, providing a structure within which future generations will be constrained. In using this metaphor Kroeber explicitly minimized the role of individuals in shaping social and historical trends. Yet if culture consists of what we learn as members of society, it would seem that Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  culture must be located in human heads. But isn’t it true, as the Mexican proverb states ‘Cada cabeza es un mundo’ (‘each mind is a different world’)? And how accessible can the contents of an individual mind be to an ethnographer? Anthony Wallace argued that the contents of the individual mind are in fact highly divergent, and that what culture does is not so much impose a uniformity, but provide a set of shared communicative symbols that organizes this diversity. Culture means the whole complex of traditional behaviour which has been developed by the human race and is successively learned by each generation. A culture is less precise. It can mean the forms of traditional behaviour which are characteristic of a given society, or of a group of societies, or of a certain race, or of a certain area, or of a certain period of time. Margaret Mead, 1937 The indeterminacy that is built into the concept of culture would seem to make it difficult, even with physically isolated peoples, to determine precisely where one culture ends and another begins. One of the deep roots of the Boasian concept of culture after all was the German concern with nation building. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Germany was divided into a number of different kingdoms and principalities. Nationalists employed the idea of a pan-German Kultur or Geist, to argue that German people shared a great deal (language, Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. folklore, and customs among other things) and this Kultur or Geist transcended the political divisions separating them. This premise, combined with the essentialism attributed to culture, found itself expressed in ethnographies that routinely assumed ‘one people, one culture, one society’. But, as Arjun Appadurai recently asked, doesn’t this premise fly in the face of ‘unequal knowledge and the differential prestige of lifestyles, and discourage attention to the world views and Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  agency of those who are marginalized or dominated’? Perhaps it would be best to join with most anthropologists today, who tend to view culture not as a thing in itself, but as a learning device for uncovering meaning in social life. In this respect one is more likely to read in ethnographies specific discussions of norms, values, beliefs, ontologies, world view, ideologies, and categories that may in fact be seriously contested than totalizing statements about such and such a ‘culture’. In addition, a number of anthropologists have concerned themselves with developing concepts that transcend the pervasive dualisms that have informed many of our debates about the nature of culture. One example is the idea of ‘embodiment’, that is, when we act, we act not simply as minds but also as physical bodies. Thus when John consumes insects in the Mixteca he not only thinks ‘bugs are vermin’ but viscerally experiences bugs as vermin. It might be said that, whatever its difficulties, the anthropological concept of culture has been our discipline’s most significant contribution to modern thought. In uncovering the fundamentally arbitrary and learned basis for the differences among and between human communities, the culture concept has been a powerful weapon in combating racism, national chauvinism, and the ‘scientific’ racism that characterized much of anthropology in the nineteenth century. For Boas and his students, fighting racism and ethnocentrism – the tendency to measure others entirely by the yardstick of one’s own values – was a primary mission for the discipline of anthropology. Ever the empiricist, Boas carried out studies that countered prevalent American beliefs in the hereditary ‘weakness’ and ‘inferiority’ Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. of certain immigrant nationalities by showing that once in the United States improved conditions of health and nutrition quickly produced populations as robust as any. Boas’ conviction that environment rather than biological inheritance is the principal determinant of character and behaviour in humans was taken up by some of his students and developed into a theory of cultural determinism that reached a crescendo in the ‘nature versus nurture’ debates that still engage us. Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  Cultural Relativism Among the moral, philosophical, and political consequences of the emergence of the concept of culture has been the development of a doctrine of ‘cultural relativism’. We start from the premise that our beliefs, morals, behaviours – even our very perceptions of the world around us – are the products of culture, learned as members of the communities in which we are reared. If, as we believe, the content of culture is the product of the arbitrary, historical experience of a people, then what we are as social beings is also an arbitrary, historical product. Because culture so deeply and broadly determines our worldview, it stands to reason that we can have no objective basis for asserting that one such worldview is superior to another, or that one worldview can be used as a yardstick to measure another. In this sense, cultures can only be judged relative to one another, and the meaning of a given belief or behaviour must first and foremost be understood relative to its own cultural context. That, in a nutshell, is the basis of what has come to be called cultural relativism. It is important to understand that many anthropologists, especially in the United States, regard relativism not as a dogma or an ideological desideratum, but, at heart, as an empirical finding. This has been most prominently expressed in the work of the anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who used linguistic data to show that categories such as time, space, and number are given in different ways by different languages, leading Sapir to state that in learning a language, we learn a world. Thus, when reporting on a cloud burst Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. speakers of English are likely to say ‘it is raining’. But what is the ‘it’ that is raining? We say ‘it is raining’ because we are predisposed by our language to think of events in the world in terms of the direct effects of specific causes. In contrast, an Indonesian would report ‘Ada hujan’ (‘there is rain’). Rather than cause and effect, the Indonesian expression predisposes its speakers toward seeing the world as a flowing together of things and events. Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  Taken to an extreme, a view of relativism that consigns the members of different cultures to utterly different worlds would make all translation impossible, including the translation performed in ethnography. As Dan Sperber has observed, ‘the relativist slogan, that people of different cultures live in different worlds, would be nonsense if understood as literally referring to physical worlds’, and an extreme ‘relativist in earnest should be either quite pessimistic about the possibility of doing ethnography at all or extraordinarily optimistic about the abilities of ethnographers.’ What cognitive relativism does mean is that the orientations provided in a language have consequences for a range of beliefs, institutions, and behaviours, something we should expect if cultures are even imperfectly integrated wholes. In the Indonesian example we might note that a predisposition toward viewing events in the world as confluences rather than as the immediate effects of causes is consistent with holding a person legally liable for events they ‘might have’ caused, as was the case in the anecdote recounted in the last chapter. In addition to these aspects of cultural relativism we must also entertain the moral dimensions of cultural relativism. If the way one perceives the world is a product of one’s culture, then even more so are the beliefs, values, and social norms that govern one’s behaviour. On what basis, then, can any one society claim a monopoly on moral truth or claim to have discovered a superior set of norms and values? Behaviour that might be nonsensical, illegal, or immoral in one society might be perfectly rational and socially accepted in another. The only Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. reasonable thing to do, it would seem, is to suspend any judgement of the practices of another society. But this is not as simple a matter as it may seem to be. For one thing, we immediately re-encounter the problem of determining where cultural boundaries might be drawn, a particularly difficult matter in today’s world in which global patterns of migration and diaspora have led to the possibility of truly multicultural societies. How do we deal with the stranger in our midst when that stranger’s culture is morally different from our own? At what Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  point are segments of a given community entitled to a claim of cultural distinctiveness that demands autonomy and respect? Are soccer hooligans or terrorists entitled to claim the protection of cultural relativism? Must we in the name of cultural relativism refrain from acting against ancient and traditional cultural practices in others that we see as oppressing a segment or class of that society? Culture is... learned, adaptable, symbolic behaviour, based on a full- fledged language, associated with technical inventiveness, a complex of skills that in turn depends on a capacity to organize exchange relationships between communities... Adam Kuper, 1994 This is not merely an abstract metaphysical problem. Take the practice of female circumcision as one example of this sort of dilemma. In a number of East African societies it has long been the practice to mark a girl’s passage to womanhood with, among other things, a genital operation that in its most extreme form includes the unanaesthetized excision of the clitoris and labia. It is easy to see this practice as violating basic human rights and equally easy to be moved to work for its suppression. On the other hand, doing so would be a fundamental violation of the cultural autonomy of the people who practise this ritual. Moreover, when, as cognitive relativism dictates, we view the practice in the context of cultural Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. theories regarding sexuality, reproduction, gender, and the life cycle, we may find, as Janice Boddy did in her study of the Hofriyati of Northern Sudan, that female circumcision participates with male circumcision in a rich set of meanings having to do with the way society, rather than nature, makes boys and girls into men and women. Placed in its cultural context, Hofriyati female circumcision is neither irrational nor deliberately cruel and oppressive and is, moreover, a Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.  practice as much subscribed to by traditional Hofriyati women as men. We may find the consequences of such practices repellent, but we are hard pressed to find a moral basis for advocating its suppression that does not also violate the cultural autonomy of the Hofriyati. One wonders, ultimately, if it is logically possible to simultaneously subscribe to both the notion of universal human rights and a belief in the relativity of cultures. For all these problems, we note with Clifford Geertz that the crimes committed in the name of cultural relativism pale in comparison to those committed in the name of cultural and national chauvinism or, for that matter, almost any other ‘ism’. His stance is one of ‘anti-anti-relativism’ and is a position we find congenial. One can make a claim for meddling in the business of others on the basis of a common humanity; we do, after all, share this planet as a single species. But any such claim should be made with the greatest care and reluctance, and only after a sincere and thorough attempt to understand what it is we object to in its own cultural context. Copyright © 1999. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Monaghan, John, and Peter Just. Social and Cultural Anthropology : A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csusm/detail.action?docID=232868. Created from csusm on 2024-11-23 22:16:31.