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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.