Download Lecture 3-4 Theories of culture If the premise of linguistic

Lecture 3-4
Theories of culture
If the premise of linguistic anthropology is that language must be understood as
cultural practice, our discussion of the field must include a discussion of the
notion of culture. This task is particularly challenging at the moment. Never
before has the concept of culture been so harshly scrutinized and attacked from
all sides. In recent years, the concept of culture has been criticized as an allencompassing
notion that can reduce sociohistorical complexities to simple
characterizations and hide the moral and social contradictions that exist within
and across communities. Many social scientists – including some anthropologists
– have argued that the notion of culture is so identified with a colonialist agenda
of intellectual, military, and political supremacy on the part of western powers
toward the rest of the world that it cannot be used without assuming a series
of naive and misleading dichotomies such as “us” and “them,” “civilized” and
“primitive,” “rational” and “irrational,” “literate” and “illiterate,” and so on.
“Culture” is what “others” have, what makes them and keeps them different,
separate from us. In the nineteenth century culture was a concept used by
Europeans to explain the customs of the people in the territories they came to
conquer and populate (in Africa, North and South America, Australia, the
Pacific Islands, Asia). Today, culture is used to explain why minorities and marginalized
groups do not easily assimilate or merge into the mainstream of society.
A criticism of such uses is valuable, among other things, in making us aware
of the role of academic discourse in the production and legitimation of marginalization;
a role that academic personnel engage in often without an awareness of
it (e.g. Bhabha 1994; Fox 1991; Said 1978). At the same time, newgenerations of
students of human social conduct need to have a historical understanding of our
root metaphors and concepts, if they want to attempt new theoretical elaborations
and syntheses. Whatever problems earlier concepts of culture might have
had, they are small compared with the danger of avoiding defining the concept
that can help us understand similarities and differences in the ways in which
people around the world constitute themselves in aggregates of various sorts.
Rather than systematically reviewing the different theories of culture that
2.1 Culture as distinct from nature
A common viewof culture is that of something learned, transmitted, passed
down from one generation to the next, through human actions, often in the form
of face-to-face interaction, and, of course, through linguistic communication.
This viewof culture is meant to explain why any human child, regardless of his
genetic heritage will grow up to follow the cultural patterns of the people who
raised him. A child separated from his blood relatives and brought up in a society
different from the one in which he was born will grow up to be a member of
the culture of his adoptive parents. Largely through language socialization, he
will acquire the culture (language included) of the people he lives with.
In anthropology a culture is the learned and shared behavior
patterns characteristic of a group of people. Your culture is learned
from relatives and other members of your community as well as
from various material forms such as books and television programs.
You are not born with culture but with the ability to acquire it by
such means as observation, imitation, and trial and error.
(Oswalt 1986: 25)
Despite the acknowledgment made in textbooks like the one just mentioned of
the need for an “ability to acquire” culture, the viewof culture as learned is often
understood in opposition to the viewof human behavior as a product of nature,
that is, as an endowment which is passed down from one generation to the next
through the principles of genetics. The “nature/nurture” dichotomy has divided
scholars who are in fact interested in the same question: what makes humans
special? The answer of this question must lie at the crossroads of biology and
culture, inheritance and acquisition. No better example could be found than language.
There is no question that humans have a capacity to acquire a language.
Hearing children all over the world, when exposed to the sounds of the language
spoken by those around them will be able in a relatively short time (two, threeyears) to start processing first and then producing
complex messages with complex
ideas. The capacity to learn a language is in fact independent of the ability
to hear sounds, as shown by the spontaneous use of sign language by deaf
people. When exposed to an environment in which people systematically use
gestures to communicate, deaf children easily adopt those gestures and use them
just as efficiently as hearing children use linguistic sounds (Monaghan 1996;
Padden and Humphries 1988; Sacks 1989; Lane 1984). What is clear at this point
is that in the acquisition of language, nature and culture interact in a number of
ways to produce the uniqueness of human languages.
2.2 Culture as knowledge
If culture is learned, then much of it can be thought of in terms of knowledge of
the world. This does not only mean that members of a culture must know certain
facts or be able to recognize objects, places, and people. It also means that they
must share certain patterns of thought, ways of understanding the world, making
inferences and predictions. In a famous statement that sums up what we might
call the cognitive view of culture, Ward Goodenough wrote:
... a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or
believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members,
and do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves.
Culture, being what people have to learn as distinct from their
biological heritage, must consist of the end product of learning:
knowledge, in a most general, if relative, sense of the term. By this
definition, we should note that culture is not a material
phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or
emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms
of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving,
relating, and otherwise interpreting them.
(Goodenough [1957] 1964: 36)
There is a linguistic homology at work here. To know a culture is like knowing
a language. They are both mental realities. Furthermore, to describe a
culture is like describing a language. Hence, the goal of ethnographic descriptions
is the writing of “cultural grammars” (see Keesing 1972: 302 and section
6.3.2).
2.2.1 Culture as socially distributed knowledge
Recent work by anthropologists and cultural psychologists (Lave and Wenger
1991; Resnick, Levine, Teasley 1991; Suchman 1987) on howpeople think in real
life situations has provided another perspective on culture as knowledge. For
these researchers, knowledge is no longer something exclusively residing in a
person’s mental operations. As succinctly stated by anthropologist Jean Lave
(1988: 1), when we observe how people problem-solve in everyday life, we find
out that cognition is “distributed – stretched over, not divided – among mind,
body, activity and culturally organized settings (which include other actors).” To
say that cultural knowledge is socially distributed means to recognize that (i) the
individual is not always the end point of the acquisition process, and (ii) not
everyone has access to the same information or uses the same techniques for
achieving certain goals. The first point implies that knowledge is not always all in
the individual mind. It is also in the tools that a person uses, in the environment
that allows for certain solutions to become possible, in the joint activity of several
minds and bodies aiming at the same goal, in the institutions that regulate
individuals’ functions and their interactions. This is the position taken by cognitive
anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, who, by studying navigation as practiced on
the bridge of a Navy ship, came to the conclusion that the proper unit of analysis
for talking about howcognition takes place must include the human and material
resources that make problem-solving possible.
2.3 Culture as communication
To say that culture is communication means to see it as a system of signs. This is
the semiotic theory of culture. In its most basic version, this viewholds that culture
is a representation of the world, a way of making sense of reality by objectifying
it in stories, myths, descriptions, theories, proverbs, artistic products and
performances. In this perspective, people’s cultural products, e.g. myths, rituals,
classifications of the natural and social world, can also be seen as examples of the
appropriation of nature by humans through their ability to establish symbolic
relationships among individuals, groups, or species. To believe that culture is
communication also means that a people’s theory of the world must be communicated
in order to be lived.