What is culture? What are the origins of the concept? Do we make culture or does culture make us, or both? Does everybody have culture, or just those people belonging to ‘other cultures’? What are anthropologists trying to do when they describe and represent culture(s)?
Anthropology does not own the term ‘culture’. ‘Culture’ as a word has a long history; this history informs both academic and popular uses of the term, where it is employed to mark many different kinds of distinctions (high culture/low culture, the culture-less civilised/the culture-full primitives, arts/technical matters, the made/the natural, the particular/the universal, etc.). The founder of cultural studies, Raymond Williams, called culture ‘one of the most complicated words in the English language’.
Anthropology students will probably already be aware that Clifford Geertz’s work on ‘culture’ came to be criticised with the turn toward Foucauldian and Gramscian-influenced models in the 1980s. But how well do we really understand where Geertz was ‘coming from’? It is often forgotten that when first publishing their influential interventions in the early 1970s, Geertz, along with several other anthropologists, were themselves protesting against the reigning anthropological doxa(s) and setting out frameworks that addressed some of their limitations. We thus need to situate Geertz’s writing about culture within a general turn toward interpretation within the social sciences: the interpretive or hermeneutic turn (erminevo means ‘I interpret’ in Greek; for a dense but excellent summary of this ‘turn’, see Giddens; also Crick). This was a turn away from approaches that conceptualised society as an organism, machine or wholly determining structure, and that were therefore preoccupied with system, function, prediction and explanation, while paying little attention to how people understood, experienced and operated within these structures. Moreover, hermeneutics, as a philosophical and historical approach, recognised the role of the analyst/scholar in creating meanings. Looking at this material, we can see two key themes of post-1970s anthropology—interest in the subjects as active meaning-makers, but also in the analyst as meaning-maker—emerging in tandem. There are, nonetheless, quite varying assessments of the relationship between these two elements in the representations of ‘culture’ or local/group ‘specificity’ which result.
Within this generally hermeneutic orientation, we will look at three ways of characterising what anthropologists are doing when they encounter, record and represent culture: interpreting, translating and inventing.
Clifford Geertz asserts that anthropologists should be concerned with culture as a product of active social beings who are trying to make sense of the world. For him, anthropologists interpret (other people’s) culture; they do this by watching how people use symbols and by paying attention to how they interpret actions and events. Roy Wagner adopts a more radical position. He asserts that the anthropologist invents culture. That is, culture is a textual by-product of the anthropologist’s attempt to make sense of a very different society: an act of encounter, abstraction, comparison and contrast. Michelle Rosaldo could be positioned somewhere in between. Drawing both on Geertz’s ideas but also on a long-standing Oxford-based British social anthropological tradition influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, she sees anthropology as an (always imperfect) activity of translating cultural concepts, as they are expressed in ordinary language. Malcolm Crick presents a British version of the hermeneutic manifesto, calling for a ‘semantic anthropology’ attuned to language and meaning.
Culture has long been, and remains, a central concept in anthropological work, and a preoccupation of much theorising. From the overview provided by ‘Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties’, you will be aware that a wide-ranging critique of the concept of culture developed in the 1980s; a key refrain of this critique was that anthropologists needed to give greater attention to issues of power and domination. In this course, we will look in more detail and depth at some selected anthropological approaches to culture and meaning-making and to the critiques and counter-critiques that have emerged. But as a way of starting off, we will consider a kind of ‘where-we-are-now’ special issue, edited by Sherry Ortner, that reviewed ‘the fate of culture’ at the end of this debate. Ortner et al. assessed the work and influence of Clifford Geertz, the most prominent proponent of the cultural turn. As opposed to those who advocated that we should drop the term culture altogether (e.g., see Kahn 1989, Fox and King 2002), Ortner and her colleagues argued that we still need to talk about culture. A key argument of the special issue is that one cannot choose between ‘culture’ and ‘power’. Rather, anthropological accounts of power relations still need careful attention to culture and meaning-making, as well as to history.
Questions for your learning journal:
Why have anthropologists thought it important to use the culture concept—and to continue using it--despite the many criticisms raised against it?
What are some of the various senses of the term ‘representation’ and how are they relevant to what anthropologists do?
To describe the anthropologist’s activity in relation to ‘culture’, Geertz speaks of ‘interpretation’, Wagner of ‘invention’ and Rosaldo of ‘translation’. What is useful/illuminating/limited about each of these descriptions, what was each writer attempting to reveal and/or emphasise by using them and what are areas of common ground?
Look at some critical engagements with the methods of ethnographic inquiry that led anthropologists to produce the domain of 'culture'. We will focus on the practical processes through which anthropology has reproduced particular images of various cultures.
Talal Asad aims his critical gaze at the British anthropological tradition. He is critical of how, after the demise of structural-functionalism as a paradigm of ethnographic explanation, anthropology professionalized itself as an academic discipline, through professional associations and annual conferences, rather than sharpening its critique of modern forms of explanation. He thinks that the problem of anthropology being used as an aid by western colonial powers has not disappeared but continues in the post-war period, its critical tools having been blunted.
Edward Said locates the problem of anthropology and its encounter with the colonized in the deeper structures of western domination that have dominated women, sexual minorities, and others, outside the West but also inside it. He thinks that the United States has deepened the colonial legacy through neo-colonial forms of domination across the world: through knowledge, the military, and trade. Anthropology has not found adequate critical tools to challenge this in the world, in his view; however, he goes on to argue that an inter-cultural understanding could be possible if we were to produce knowledge through permeable means where both the western and native societies produce culture in dialogue with each other.
Johannes Fabian, like Said, also wonders if the violence done by ethnography in abetting colonial and neo-colonial forms can be undone. His focus is the question: how do we represent the ethnographic object in writing? He charts three form of representing cultures in writing 1. Monological (Explanation of a phenomenon by an author through empirical findings) 2. Dialogical (Explanation of an ethnographic phenomenon through dialogue with the local perspectives) 3.Analogical (Conceptualisation of the ethnographic phenomenon through comparison with other cultures).
Questions for your learning journal:
How has ethnography been used, and by who, to aid and abet the colonial project? Has it also been used to contest or challenge it? Explore using examples.
In Sherry Ortner’s view, rather than choosing between ‘culture’ and ‘power’, anthropologists need to pay attention to both, as well as to history, in analysing people’s agency and actions. To what extent would such an approach to ethnographic analysis answer the criticisms about ethnography and the representation of culture raised by Asad, Said and/or Fabian?
Week 4:
In the 1980’s, anthropological work on culture came under criticism. Critics claimed that culture had been ‘exaggerated’, or portrayed as overly systematic. They complained that anthropologists too often saw culture as a monolithic, static system and that they did not pay enough attention to contradictions or the ways ideas/meanings are rooted in relations of power and in the practical tasks of life. They questioned whether it was right to assume that culture was necessarily ‘shared’.
Asking questions about ‘culture’ as an object of anthropological enquiry also raised questions about how to represent culture. A debate developed over anthropology as a way of knowing but also, especially, as a way of writing. ‘What do anthropologists do?’ Clifford Geertz famously asked. ‘They write.’ Anthropologists turned attention to the literary means by which the anthropologist as author established authority and persuaded. This debate was partly inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism, and an earlier critique of anthropology’s complex relationship with colonialism, by Kathleen Gough, Talal Asad, Johannes Fabian and others (as explored in Week 3). Said, like Wagner, had suggested that there is a degree of ‘invention’ on the part of the observer in his or her records of non-Western people and, moreover, (following Foucault) that the invention was an effect of the grossly asymmetrical power relations between West and the Orient. Proponents of the Writing Culture debate focussed attention on the politics of the writing process
Questions for learning journal:
• What does a focus on writing reveal about ethnography and culture that was previously obscured?
• What else do anthropologists do, besides write? Is ethnography only about writing?
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