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Recovering 'Culture' Harry Van Den Bouwhuijsen, Tom Claes and Willem Derde Cultural Dynamics 1995; 7; 163 DOI: 10.1177/092137409500700201 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cdy.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/7/2/163
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RECOVERING ’CULTURE’ HARRY VAN DEN
BOUWHUIJSEN, TOM CLAES
AND WILLEM DERDE
University of Ghent
ABSTRACT This article looks into the ’epistemological hypochondria’ that anthropologists appear to face, whereby epistemic critiques of theories in anthropology are seen to challenge the very existence of the discipline itself. While arguing the case that some of the fundamental notions used in anthropology are the result of the dynamic of religion, the article pleads for a re-evaluation of the concept of culture itself. This would entail a decolonization of the social sciences. At the same time some of the obstacles towards this are examined. No amount of individual particles of observed data will suffice to represent 1991. 7~ M/th7 one /!a~ has a f/t~ory mterrelations. ~cy~c~, (Herbert, 7997. 10) theory <3/~~r of their ~y~~M~c systematic M~rrc/ahoM~.
until
a
’culture’
When Cultural Dynamics was founded in 1988, the editors at that time had a well-considered perspective in mind. This was explicitly formulated in the opening article of the first volume, ’Cultural Dynamics: A Vision and a Perspective’ (Pinxten et al., 1988). The new journal was part of the postfunctionalist and post-structuralist ’return to history’, which was taking place in the social sciences and was also strengthening certain trends in the philosophy of the natural sciences (Von Weiszacker, 1960; Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984). The journal intended to study the dynamic aspects of sociocultural phenomena by treating them as historical phenomena, i.e. as irreversible processes. Moreover, the journal would open up a multidisciplinary forum for discussing theories, which aimed at modelling the processes of change and transformation in sociocultural complexes. This perspective was expressed in four foci of interest. The editorial staff wanted to promote (1) the study of the processes of society; by (2) capturing their dynamics in theories; and (3) by giving due attention to possible bridges between the natural and the social sciences. The fourth focus, which provided the general framework for the three other foci, 163
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164
RECOVERING ’CULTURE’
emphasized the importance of both the need for theory building in the social sciences in general, and in cultural anthropology in particular, and the need to carry out this social and cultural research from an intellectually ‘decolonized’ perspective. Cultural Dynamics will continue to be a forum for those writers who take these issues seriously and are willing to study them with an open mind. In this article we want to concentrate on what is identified as the fourth focus. By elaborating on some points, we hope to explain what it means to talk of decolonization of the social sciences. We can neither be exhaustive nor exclusive. What we could do, however, is to provide an impulse to a debate which deserves far more attention than it enjoys currently.
Towards
a
Decolonization
of the Social Sciences
Recent developments in western anthropology appear to threaten the very study of culture as a scientifically viable endeavour. The result is a situation where anthropologists ’hold a doctrine that allows them to know next to nothing’ (Reyna, 1994: 576) not only of other cultures, but also of their own. Ernest Gellner expressed this very forcefully when he wrote about this development: It
pretends, m the name of expiation of past sms of dommation and inter-cultural mequahty, to mamtain and establish that all forms of cognition are equal, that the explication of one in terms of another is madmissible, and it encourages a style in which indulgence in the exquisite torment of mabihty to transcend the chasm which separates investigator from his object, replaces any attempt to say anything very coherent about the object. But this affectation of cognitive equality is indeed but an affectation. The central fact about our world is that, for better or for worse, a superior more effective form of cognition does exist. It was, inevitably, born within the womb of one culture, for anything must begm somewhere; but it is perfectly obvious by now that it is not linked to any one society, culture or tradition, but accessible to all mankind ... [And it is] known as science .... (Gellner, 1992: 6; italic in the original)
Contrary to what seems to be the standard opinion nowadays, the fact that cultural anthropology in particular and social sciences in general, in contradistinction to the natural sciences, have not yet been able to gain universal or intercultural acceptance is no proof of the impossibility of such a project. Rather, we see it as a consequence of the fact that the preoccupation with problems of ’culture’ arises against the background of only one culture, viz. the West. Because, in being socialized, westerners have imbibed the tacit knowledge of their culture with their mother’s milk (Quine, 1976: 229), they are unable to recognize the cultural ladenness of their They consider them as ’neutral terms’ which can be used to describe the world impar-
concepts.
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VAN DEN BOUWHUIJSEN, CLAES AND DERDE
165
But this may not be how it appears to natives from another culture. instance, the Asian-born philosopher Balagangadhara, while rep-
tially. For
views held
by many like-minded scholars (Hsu, 1967; Roland, Xiaotong, 1992), has warned Asian social scientists that by unthinkingly imitating western social sciences, they are taking over the assumptions on which these sciences are built. ’When Asian anthropologists or sociologists or culturologists do their anthropology, sociology or culturology’, he concludes, ’the West is really talking to itself’ (Balu, 1985: 5). As Hamilton, introducing the work of the Chinese sociologist Fei, succinctly remarked: resenting
1988; Fei
Here
is a
clear demonstration that what passes
m
the West for
general social theory is
often, in fact, local knowledge-particular rules about particular people in particular
places. Fei’s sociology demands that we m the West rethmk ourselves. (Fei Xiaotong, 1992: 34) The kind of questions that could break the shackles of western conceptual hegemony would investigate the way in which sociocultural phenomena would be perceived and described against the background of the experiences of the natives of other cultures. Would the social sciences look the same if other cultures were to indulge in social investigation, not simply by adopting western concepts-and thus implicitly adopting the assumptions clustered around them-but by digging into the descriptive resources of their own cultures? We are convinced that only such a movement could lead us to ’decolonize the social sciences’; or as Raoul Naroll put it, it may show the way to social scientists to finally go beyond the ’transatlantic focus’ on humanity which we have been stuck with since the 18th century. Cultural Dynamics therefore wants to promote both (a) the recuperation of the concept of culture as a useful scientific tool by means of an analysis and remedying of its particularly western interpretations, and (b) the development of a ’native’ comparative anthropology in which descriptions of other cultures are provided against the background of the anthropologist’s own cultural experiences.
Obstacles
on
the Road towards Decolonization
The renewed emphasis on ’culture’ may strike the reader as strange. Raising this topic may even cause a certain embarrassment, because it forces us to confess that culture, though endlessly talked about, seems to be an essentially contested concept, adding up to-according to some-a ’perilous idea’ (Wolf, 1994). It is the kind of phenomenon that, like a fata morgana, ’evaporates under the heat of inquiry’ (Lee, 1989: 115).
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166
RECOVERING ’CULTURE’
The fuzzy nature
of the concept of culture One of the main problems with the concept of culture is that it is used in almost as many ways as there are authors. ’[I]t means whatever we use it to mean’, as Keesing (1974: 73, note 2), trying to make some order out of chaos, rightly concluded. Moreover, the concept is used in many different ways. It appears to make sense to speak of the culture of Asia, Africa and the West. But it appears equally sensible to speak of Flemish culture or Frisian culture or of mass and elite culture. Recently, it even seems to make sense, at least to some, to speak of ’culture and management’. As a Dutch specialist tells us, all aspects of a business organization are ’soaked with culture’ (Verweel, 1989: 12; see also Hofstede, 1991). Obviously, this has the implausible consequence that cultural differences between, say, Africa and the West are implicitly taken to be of the same order as differences between the ’corporate identity’ of, say, Shell and Unilever or, perhaps, Honda and McDonalds. Such a volatile character testifies to the absence of a viable theory, whose presence may stabilize the phenomena by allowing us to describe them as the facts of a culture (Claes, 1990). More than 25 years ago, in their famous work
on
the definitions of
culture, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963: 357) identified the absence of
theory as the main source of problems in the field of culture studies: As yet we have no full theory of culture. We have a fairly well-delineated concept, and it is possible to enumerate conceptual elements embraced within that master concept. But a concept, even an important one, does not constitute a theory.... Concepts have a way of coming to a dead end unless they are bound together in a testable theory. In anthropology at present we have plenty of definitions but too httle theory. (emphasis added) In other words, it is essential to have an explicit theory which tells us what makes differences between human groups into cultural differences. That is to say that, in order to talk about cultural differences sensibly, you must have a theory specifying what makes human groups into cultures to begin with. Only when you have a theory of culture will you be able to ’coalesce’ the observed fuzzy phenomena by describing them as facts of a culture (Vermeersch, 1977). In other words, only a theory would allow you to solve the ’mixed-category problem’ (mixing the categories of culture, subculture, etc.) we described above. In fact, to formulate the issue succinctly, if you had at your disposal an explicit theory of culture, there would be no ’mixed-category problem’ in the first place.
Cultures
’cognitive greenhouses’ But, alas, there is not only the problem of an elastic concept of culture. As we already mentioned, our attempt to recover ’culture’ as a tool for science appears to be mortgaged, due to recent developments in that scientific as
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VAN DEN BOUWHUIJSEN, CLAES AND DERDE
167
discipline which claims to have culture as its object of investigation: social and cultural anthropology. The intrinsic dynamic of cultural relativism has progressively made cultures into cognitive greenhouses, each constituting a habitat for the development of exclusive creatures-’The Elusive Other’who are inaccessible to those from the greenhouse next door. As our argument hinges upon the viability of the concept of culture, we cannot leave this problem untouched.
The
Epistemic Boundaries of Cultures
onwards, anthropology as a discipline has of crisis. It is a crisis which, according to Geertz gone through long period in a results fast-spreading ’epistemological hypochondria con(1988: 71), know that anything that one says about other forms of how one can cerning life is as a matter of fact so’. This disciplinary crisis was caused by a peculiar intermingling of epistemological, political and moral problems. The epistemological question of how to obtain knowledge of other cultures was transformed into the moral question of how to do justice to ’the Other’ (mind the capital!). How was this Gordian knot, on which anthropology is about to hang itself, tied in the first place? From the time of Edward Tyler’s Primitive Culture (1889) onwards, anthropology has conceptualized ’culture’ as a ’complex whole’. It is this assumption that has given the concept its ethnographic significance, because it enabled anthropology to generate a method of research, as well as a set of directing assumptions, problems and procedures (Herbert, 1991: 5). ’Culture’ has always been burdened with an inherent tension between ’Culture’ and ’cultures’. Put differently, it has always been burdened with two different concepts of ’wholeness’. There was the whole of Culture-as against Nature-and there was the whole of a culture-as against other cultures (Vermeersch, 1977: 12-13). Since the 1930s the emphasis has been on the whole of a culture. Cultural relativism was supposed to be a remedy for ethnocentrism, but its centripetal forces have made cultures into something from which no escape is possible. The principle of cultural relativism is, as Herskovits (1967: 63) says, ’briefly stated, as follows: Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation’. It almost goes without saying that a similar conception asked for an epistemological snag, viz. the problem of how an outside observer can ever know another culture, if cultures are what this approach claims them to be: complex wholes. That is to say, this relativistic concept of culture is burdened with a vital self-contradiction: ’research based on the doctrine of culture both requires and prohibits the relativistic corollary’ (Herbert, It is
no
secret that from the 1970s a
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168
RECOVERING ’CULTURE’
1991: 8;
see
also
Auge,
1982:
11,77, 83; Sperber, 1982: 41; Archer,
1988:
126). anthropology, this problem got linked up with a in which these ’cultural wholes’ were conceived of very specific conception either as ’meaningful orders of people and things’ (Sahlins, 1976), or as ’systems of symbols and meanings’ (Schneider, 1968). If it could be traced back solely to the epistemological snags inherent in the specific conception of culture as a system of meanings, the epistemological hypochondria which Geertz refers to might rightly be said to be a ’localized’ problem. In fact, however, this problem has popped up in English social anthropology as well, by way of the rationality debate which, as Overing says, ’revolve[s] around reflections on the epistemological presuppositions of anthropological fieldwork, and include[s] the hoary issue of comprehending in general &dquo;other minds&dquo;’ (Overing, 1985: 1; see also Wilson, 1970; Horton and Finnegan, 1973; Hollis and Lukes, 1982). We would like to argue that the ’epistemological hypochondria’ concerning the possiblity of valid knowledge of ’the Other’ was present in the whole discipline of anthropology, though the way it was expressed differed. In American cultural
On the
of epistemic hypochondria The question is how an epistemological problem could give rise to the ’hypochondria’, as Geertz refers to it. The answer is that, as it is, it could not. What happened was that this epistemological problem in fact intermingled with the moral and political issues that were debated during the turbulent 1970s and early 1980s (Hatch, 1983). Making a clear distinction between the epistemic, the moral and the political aspect in speaking about cultures is a first necessary condition if one wants to go beyond the contemcause
porary stalemate.
When, during the 1980s, the focus of attention shifted towards the
epistemological problem (’How can I know the Other?’), the moral and political issues that were at the centre of attention were not clearly distinguished from the epistemological ones (Gellner, 1992). In a sense, this was appropriate as epistemology is no founding ’first philosophy’, but a part of our scientific theorizing (Quine, 1969). It was, however, not because of the insight into the web-like structure of our theories that no clear distinction was made between epistemological and other problems. On the contrary: the consideration of epistemological problems was often inspired by the expectation that political and moral problems could be solved by epistemic means (Roth, 1989). This much is implied in Clifford’s remark that the repeated guilty chastising of the colonial context in which anthropological research has conventionally been carried out ’has been reinforced by an important process of theorizing about the limits of representation itself’ (Clifford, 1986: 10). Clifford, who is a main exponent of
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VAN DEN BOUWHUIJSEN, CLAES AND DERDE
this trend, refers to this
’important process of theorizing’ as ’the accumulating politicalltheoretical critique of anthropology’ (1986: 11; emphasis added). Likewise Marcus and Fisher, the major advocates of this approach, suggest in their review of Said’s Orientalism, that epistemological questions follow a political and moral problem. Said, say Marcus and Fischer (1986: 2): suggests that the world written about
is often quite different from that imagined m writings of disciplines like anthropology, which take it upon themselves to represent authoritatively social and cultural forms of life contrasting with those of the West. For those in such disciplines, the urgent task remains to rethink and experiment with their conventional forms of writing m response to what IS, after all, a trenchant critique in Said’s polemic. (emphasis added) ...
the
This passage 1.
can
be rewritten in the form of four
propositions:
Anthropologists pretend that they are able to give representation of the societies they have studied.
2. ’The real world’ is different from the world
as
it is
an
authoritative
depicted by
the
anthropologists. 3. Another way of writing must bridge the gap between the world-asdepicted and ’the real world’. 4. This is not merely an epistemic problem but a moral problem as well, because ’the real world’ is the world of ’the Other’. The gap between the authoritative world-as-depicted and ’the real world of the Other’ is an index of the amount of injustice inflicted upon the Other. The citation offers
excellent example of the way in which an epistemic culture is mixed up with a political and a moral probproblem regarding lem. For the sake of clarity, let us specify these problems. 1. The
an
epistemic problem is how we
can ever know what the world means member of another culture, given that cultures are ’bounded wholes’. 2. The political problem is caused by the awareness that the development of western science in general, and of anthropology in particular, owes a great deal to the colonial encounter in which it was actively involved (Reingold and Rothenberg, 1987; Issawi, 1989; Petitjean and Jami,
to
a
1992; MacLeod, 1993). Awareness of this pedigree may raise the
question whether describing other societies in the conceptual framework originating from this colonial heritage might not be a continuation of colonialism by another, viz. by conceptual, means after all? 3. The moral problem is inspired by the feeling that just as it was wrong to colonize other people in the past by political, military and religious weapons, it is equally wrong to colonize them in the present by conceptual artillery, or, for that matter, by economic measures (Bailey, 1991: 103-18; Gellner, 1992). One may feel that the only way to do justice to
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170
RECOVERING ’CULTURE’
the others when describing them is not to impose our conceptual apparatus upon their world but to describe the world from their point of view, i.e. to reconstitute their world of meanings (which is epistemologically very difficult, if not impossible).
Consequently, the conception of culture as a ’bounded whole’ came under attack (Rosen, 1991). The most interesting criticism of the concept of culture viewed from this epistemological point of view is the one in which the ’bounded whole’ was replaced by ’a complex notion of culture as multivocal, fragmented, and contested’ (Hess, 1992: 3). This fragmensevere
tation was a twin-faced process, where criticism of the concept of culture and the criticism of traditional ethnography mutually reinforced each other. The counterpart of the notion of culture as a fragmented and contested entity is that of ethnography as a reflexive, dialogical, polyphonic discipline or worse (Boon, 1980; Marcus and Cushman, 1982; Clifford and Fisher, 1983; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Marcus and Fisher, 1986; Clifford, 1988; for a critical but sympathetic view of this trend see Strathern, 1987; for a sceptical review see Roth, 1989). In which way did epistemology and morality get entangled in this polyphonic choral music?
Questioning the credibility of ethnography as a symptom This hypochondria led among other things to the questioning of the credibility of the classical ethnographic text and the implicit assumption about ’transparency of representation and immediacy of experience’ (Clifford, 1986: 2) underlying it. Two issues play a leading role in this epistemological critique: 1.The credibility of the text is contingent upon the invisibility of the author. (He/she is but the camera obscura recording the world of the
Other. ) 2. The credibility of the text is supported by the use of certain conventions. (Narrative structure, rhetoric and literary tropes constitutive elements of ethnographic description.)
literary are
the
The tarnishing of ethnography’s epistemological credentials has raised in its wake the question: About whom is anthropology talking? For instance, Peter Mason wonders whether Malinowski’s ’Trobriander’ is more than just an artefact of the text in which he appears. In which way, he asks, can ’The Trobriander’ be distinguished from literary figures like, for example, Dostoyevski’s ’Ivan Karamazov’, Flaubert’s ’Madame Bovary’ or Joyce’s ’Leopold and Molly Bloom’ (Mason, 1990: 13). It should be noted on behalf of Mason that he is consistent enough to accept the conclusion that the ’Other’ and the ’self’ are both artefacts of the text in which they take shape. In his view, every allusion to an ’external reality’ is nothing but a
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VAN DEN
BOUWHUIJSEN, CLAES AND DERDE
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rhetorical tool, launched in order to produce a ’reality effect’ (Coward and Ellis, 1977: 45-66). This means that ethnographies do not offer a ’window to the world of the other’, as is so often assumed, but these ’ethnographic worlds’ may well be called imaginary worlds (Mason, 1990: 15); Joyce’s ’Leopold Bloom’ as an artistic creation and Malinowski’s ’Trobriander’ as an ethnographic construction, could be treated symmetrically (Mason, 1990: 13).
Taking the wrong turn The question of whether anthropology (or history for that matter) is art or science is a problem which has made opinions diverge until this very day (Carrithers, 1990). What makes Mason’s position interesting is that it shows us the ultimate consequence of the position that takes anthropology to be a form of art. As anthropology has very little art to offer, the argument to classify it under literature ultimately boils down to giving up anthropology itself. This, consistently, is where Mason ends up. Anthropology, he concludes, urgently needs deconstruction (Mason, 1990: 166), which appears to be a euphemism for ’shut down’. ’Few of us take mesmerism seriously any more’, he says, ’mesmerism has had its day. Well, why not anthropology?’ (Mason, 1991: 65). It is in this remark that we find a clue as to where the ’literary turners’ have taken the wrong turn. For what was mesmerism after all? The essence of mesmerism consisted of a medical theory, which was found to be false (on mesmerism, see Darnton, 1968). Consequently, mesmerism disappeared as a scientific discipline. But this did not lead to a call for the abolition of medical science, did it? Well, why for anthropology then? ’One could and should draw a distinction between (i) a field of study, and (ii) a particular approach or a collection of approaches used in that field of study’ (Pinxten and Balagangadhara, 1990). Mason is not addressing one specific anthropological theory, but anthropology as a discipline. However, as we will argue in the following paragraphs, he is attacking a specific ’metatheory’ (connecting ’understanding’, ’meaning’ and ’culture’), which is one of the pillars of contemporary anthropology and one which can be recognized in the form of a set of implicit assumptions that underlie a wide range of specific paradigms. It is in not recognizing the theoretical status of ethnographic descriptions that the ’literary turners’ have taken the wrong turn.
If
look into the criticism voiced by the ’literary turners’ purely from epistemological point of view, their argument boils down to the conclusion that assumptions and background theories are involved in the construction of data. This view represents the consensus in contemporary philosophies of sciences, although there are different opinions as to the weight it should be given: we
an
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RECOVERING ’CULTURE’
observation statements are those hypotheses that are formulated more directly as responses to particular sensory stimulations. But what counts as a direct result of sensory stimulation is itself subject to theoretical interpretation. (Rouse, 1987: 52; see also Hesse, 1974: 9-44) ...
at least in
this very basic epistemic respect, the distinction between our of knowledge Nature and our knowledge of Culture does not hold water. Both ’nature’ and ’culture’ are constituted by our hypotheses about the
So,
world. There may be important differences between the natural world and the social world as we understand them; but these would be empirical differences that are established by our theories, not some kind of transcendental difference between two different kinds of knowledge about two different kinds of objects. (Rouse, 1987: 58; emphasis added)
Our scientific knowledge has the epistemological status of a hypothesis.2 In what way, Peter Mason asks, can Malinowski’s Trobriander be epistemologically distinguished from a literary figure like, say, Ivan Karamazov? The epistemological answer is: in exactly the same way a black hole can be distinguished from Peter Pan. Trobriand culture and black holes are both elements of a certain hypothesis, a proposal to look at the world in a specific way. It is a hypothesis which stabilizes them, black hole and Trobriand, into distinct phenomena and it is a hypothesis which allows us to describe them as facts of nature (black hole) or of a culture (Trobriand) in the first place. The point is that without a hypothesis they would not be facts at all but volatile phenomena, which might not even be observed.
Epistemology, Discipline and Theory: Cultural Anthropology’s Hidden Assumptions Leaving the political and moral problems for what they are, and concentrating upon the epistemological problem, we see that the kind of critique that
to devastate the ’science’ of culture is not new at all. In fact the criticism is formulated with far more clarity in the philosophy of science, however, without leading to the same consequences (see also Reyna, 1994, for a more detailed analysis). Scientific knowledge is theoretical and all theories have the epistemological status of a hypothesis. They therefore share all the elements that are characteristic of hypotheses. This is what science is all about. Even those who want to gain scientific knowledge of other cultures cannot escape this situation. Why does this have such devastating results for the human sciences and not for the science of nature? This point can be made perspicuously, if we break down this ’fear’ into conceptual steps: (1) Contemporary anthropology as a discipline appears to be threatened by an epistemological critique. This is true only under the seems
same
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VAN DEN
BOUWHUIJSEN, CLAES AND DERDE
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additional presupposition that: (2) Anthropology as a discipline is founded on a set of epistemological assumptions. However, we know that: (3) Epistemological critiques are relevant only at the level of theories. So only if one assumes (2) to be true is it possible to argue that anthropology is threatened by an epistemological critique. Given that (3) is true, and (2) is not explicitly recognized, one must state and defend this assumption clearly if one is worried at all about the impact epistemological critiques have on the discipline itself. However, all of this is trivially true. Why, then, have the anthropologists not seen this point? Surely it is not credible to argue that a crashcourse in philosophy would be a remedy for this situation? What we would like to suggest instead is that this epistemic ’confusion’ has its roots in the very nature of theory-forming as it has come into being in the last 150 years or so. Our suggestion will be that the fundamental concepts and the conceptual framework used in the study of cultures have taken on the status of the discipline itself. Lack of alternative descriptions, pitched at the same level of generality as the ones used today, is what makes it difficult to recognize that the epistemic critique of theories, however fundamental they might be, hardly affects the status of the discipline. In the next section we do not provide an alternative description as much as show how and in what sense some of these concepts (we tackle only the concepts of Nature and Culture by way of examples) are fashioned by one culture. The separation
of nature and culture In their book Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Shapin and Schaffer (1985) trace the parallel separation between Nature and Culture on the one side, and object and subject on the other side back to the 17th century, where they see it taking shape especially in the discussions between Hobbes and Boyle on the credibility of experimental science. Shapin and Schaffer suggest that in experimental science, Boyle and his colleagues in the Royal Society were defining a new relation to Nature: they defined Nature as that which could be known by experimental science. Whether Shapin and Schaffer are totally accurate or not, and whether this attitude continues to persist today in the same form, we could nevertheless suggest what Shapin and Schaffer describe is but one phase in the age-long crystallization process in which the religious belief in a created universe which is ruled by the Will of the absolute and transcendent Sovereign, was transformed into the concepts of western natural science and of western folk psychology. Although this statement needs thorough argumentation, doing so would take us far beyond the confines of this paper. Therefore, we will notice merely two implications of this approach as they relevant for our purposes. The first is about the nature of knowledge. The
are
image of Nature is that of
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RECOVERING ’CULTURE’
a message or a text, which makes the activity of acquiring knowledge of Nature into an act of decoding or reading. ’It was one of the commonplaces of early modern philosophical discourse, that nature had the status of a text and that natural philosophical exercises were hermeneutic in character’ (Shapin, 1988: 23). From the 16th century onwards, this view was expressed in the well-known metaphor of The Book of Nature (Eisenstein, 1993: ch. 7), in which the world is conceived as verbum visibile. In fact, as Benjamin Nelson (1974: 471) reminds us, the image of the book was applied not only to Nature.
For many, everything that was made by the divine architect was necessarily intelligible and was itself a revelation. The usual suggestion was that there were three books-the Book of Creation (or Creatures), the Book of Nature, and Book of Conscience. Knowledge of the world was deemed to be available in each of these books.
Shapin (1988: 24) insists that the image of nature’s book was neither a mere literary trope nor an empty aesthetic analogy. The Book of Nature set the frame of reference for natural philosophical enterprise. It determined the nature of the decoding process that defined natural philosophy, and it licensed the use of the particular language of natural philosophical discourse. (emphasis added; for literature see esp. note 2) ...
Within the context, Nature can conveniently be conceived of as an object, carrying a message from its Sender to the receiving subjects who have to decipher it. The second implication is that western natural science has originated in the course of a process in which religious themes were reformulated in a secular guise. Now, of course, the view that the origin of science has ’something to do’ with religion has been expressed a great many times before (e.g. Whitehead, 1925; Foster, 1934, 1935, 1936; Dillenberger,
1960; Hooykass, 1972; Jacob, 1976; Klaaren, 1977; Jaki, 1978a, 1978b; Funkenstein, 1986; Heyd, 1988; Nebelsick, 1992). But what has not been
explicitly captured is the dynamic of this process, where religion (not just Protestantism or Puritanism) ’went secular’. It is our belief that a real anthropology of the modern world should capture this process, as it is the focal point around which western culture has crystallized (Becker, 1932; Stace, 1975: 5; Cohen, 1988; for a more comprehensive theory see Bala3 gangadhara, 1994).3 Nature as a ’biological’ concept. The above separation between ’Nature’ and ’Culture’ had to do with the inanimate. It was Hobbes who defined another, ’biological’ concept of Nature (if this anachronism is permitted) in which Man was not separated from Nature. On the contrary, Man was subjected to its ’condition of war’ and had ’in the foresight of [his] own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby’ (Leviathan: Part II, ch.
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XVII) had to restrain himself by introducing an ’artificial animal’, namely, a
State: The final cause, end, or design of men ... in the introduction of that restraint upon of getting themselves themselves, in which we see them live in Commonwealths, is out of that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent ... to the natural passions of men where there is no visible power to keep them in awe. ...
As Westerman (1991: 133) rightly argues, in Hobbes, the ’naturalization’ and ’culturalization’ of man are two strands of the same process. It has been in this polar sense that ’Nature’ and ’Culture’ were to become major concepts in the human sciences, especially in anthropology. However, two issues should be noticed which make matters more complex. First, in the human sciences there has never been an unambiguous division between Nature on the one side and Man on the other. So the division between ’Nature’ and ’Culture’ does not run parallel to that of Nature and Man. Second, there has never been an unambiguous concept of ’Culture’ either. As we have mentioned already; the concept of Culture is used in many different senses. The double nature of ’Man’. If we look at the issue of Nature and Man, what strikes us is that the ’Man’ here is the western Man. As the saying goes in the West, he has two souls: he is a part of Nature and yet remains apart from it (Pouwer, 1984: 61). Christianity is more ambiguous in this regard. It tells us that he is, on the one side, created after the image of God. As God transcends His creation, so does Man: he is ’outside’ or ’above’ Nature (Groethuysen, 1953). On the other side, however, he is also a part of creation and thus must share the fate of all flesh. Now what does it mean to be ’created after the image of God’? According to Aquinas it means the following: Man is said to be after the image of God not as regards his body, but as regards that whereby he excels other animals.... Now man excels all animals by his reason and intelligence. Hence it is according to his mtelligence and reason, which are incorporeal, that man is said to be according to the image of God. (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. 1, Q 3, art. 1, Reply Obj. 2)
The Imago Dei, says Anthony Pagden (1982: 61), ’is a form of illumination granted to all true men, whether they be pagans or Christians, as an instrument of cognition which allows man to &dquo;see&dquo; the world as it is, to distinguish between good and evil and to act accordingly’ (emphasis added). This passage has two important implications. First: ’to &dquo;see&dquo; the world as it is’ basically means that we should learn to see the world as the expression of God’s Will.4 The second implication is that in order to act in the world properly, we should have knowledge of the world first. But how can we know the will of an actor by studying his actions? From our own experience, we know that there is a hiatus between our actions
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and our intentions. Exactly here lies the difference between God and Man. In God reasons and causes are identical. God’s Will brings forth the world (Balagangadhara, 1994: 334-5). In Man, however, reasons and causes point in different directions. It has been this ambiguity which has been at the root of the never-ending controversy within the human sciences as to whether Man’s actions have to be causally explained in terms of some ’underlying mechanism’, or whether they have to be made intelligible by appealing to the reasons for performing the actions (Apel, 1978). Where the ascription of trustworthiness (that is: of predictability) to God on the one side, and the assignment to ’see the world as it is’ in order to act properly on the other side, were necessary conditions for the emergence of the natural science in the West, it has been the fundamental religious ambiguity regarding Man which has stifled the human sciences by inciting them to a kind of dogged ’crab antics’ (for sociology Dawe, 1970; Vanberg, 1975; for social sciences in general see James, 1984; for anthropology see Sperber, 1985; for psychology see Krewer, 1990).5
The double nature of culture. It is during the Enlightenment debates on the of Man that the term ’culture’ (or ’civilization’) acquired its present connotations within the human sciences. From the very beginning, this concept was used in highly different senses. ’Indeed, even before the last decade of the eighteenth century, the proliferation of meanings led the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder to remark of &dquo;culture&dquo; that &dquo;nothing was more indeterminate than this word&dquo; ’ (Barnard, 1968: 614). What interests us here is just one of the major ambiguities in the concept that is with us to this very day. On the one side, ’Culture’ has, from the Enlightenment onwards, alluded to the psychic unity of humankind. On the other side, however, it also signifies ’anthropology’s romantic rebellion against the enlightenment’ (Shweder and Levine, 1984), where it picks out forms of life in different human groups. This is to say that the concept is inherently burdened with a tension between Culture, conceived of as a universal human potential, and cultures, conceived of as concrete forms of existence (Krewer, 1990: 25). Man is both in and ’above’ Nature. The implication is that Culture can be seen as an extension of Nature (when humanity’s capacity to create culture is conceived of as part of a species-specific biological capacity) as well as sui generis, something not reducible to Man’s natural make-up.6 essence
The concepts
of ’Man’ and ’Culture’ as cultural concepts
’Nature’ and ’Culture’ are concepts which are part of a specific cultural in which the assumptions of the Christian religion have crystallized into the concepts of science and into the tacit knowledge of a group of people, namely, those of the West.
heritage
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Apart from its intrinsic heuristic value, this insight may substantially reduce the ’epistemological hypochondria’ which has been spreading like a bushfire in anthropology. As Christopher Herbert (1991) has convincingly shown, this ’epistemological hypochondria’ is intrinsically linked to the fact that cultures have been defined as systems of their own, as ’inextricable webs of affinities’. To anthropology it has always been a basic concept on which hinges much of its identity as a discipline. As Foucault has pointed out, it was within a similar framework that: ’man’s behaviour appears as an attempt to say something; his slightest gestures ... have a meaning; and everything he arranges around him by way of objects, rites, customs, discourse, all the traces he leaves behind him, constitutes a coherent whole’ (Foucault, 1973: 357). It has been exactly this assumption that has rendered the various elements of a way of life systematically readable (Herbert, 1991: 5). This should make us aware of the analogous developments in the discussions regarding the concepts of ’Nature’ and ’Culture’. Next to the Book of Nature, which was to play such a prominent role in the conceptual universe of the Scientific Revolution, there is now another Book, which appears to play an equally important role in the development of the social sciences: the Book of Culture. However, there is a major dilemma involved in this conception of culture. If a culture is a closed system of meanings, an outside observer can never know for certain what anything means to a native (Herbert, 1991: 8). In anthropology, this dilemma has given rise to a substantial uneasiness concerning the problem of ’how to describe the Other accurately’. As soon as we realize that this dilemma is but a function of the way in which ’culture’ is conceptualized, the possibility of describing other cultures need no longer be formulated as an unsolvable epistemic dilemma, but as an empirical problem which can be investigated.
Why Anthropology Has to be Decolonized for Epistemological Reasons: An Appeal For the human sciences the only way to get out of the stalemate into which they have boxed themselves, we submit, is to participate in their own decolonization, and this for epistemological reasons. Anthropology urgently needs descriptions of the West against the background of, say, Asian, African or Oceanian culture. Only then can we begin to locate problems and ask questions, which we cannot see now, let alone formulate. How would human actions look if actions were not conceived of as revealing something? What would other kinds of knowledge look like? And, should they exist, what would they do to our conception of what knowledge is like? And what would cultural differences be if described against the background of other cultures? According to the western belief in
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RECOVERING ’CULTURE’
concepts that are universally applicable, it may be presupposed that ’difference’ is such a concept and that the way in which the West differs from, say, Asia can be replicated when describing the differences between Asia and, say, the American Indians. However, as Balagangadhara (1994: 512) has rightly remarked, if these cultures are different, their experiences of difference could also be different. Urgent or not, decolonization of the human sciences, to put it positively, is still in its earliest infancy. As Andre Beteille reminds us: in the early days of comparative methods, from Durkheim to Radcliffe-Brown, scholars from one part of the world were studying societies m all parts of the world as well as others. Speaking as recently as forty years ago, Evans-Pritchard (1951: 84) observed: ’However much anthropologists may differ among themselves they are all children of the same society and culture.’ (Béteille, 1990: 11; emphasis added) ...
It was the same Evans-Pritchard who argued that anthropology is about ’that wondrous creature man ... in whatever place or time we meet him’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1951: 129). Words from the past? Yes, says Beteille; views have changed because the context has. ’[T]he whole context of comparative sociology is being altered by the fact that not only are the same people studying different kinds of societies, but ... the same society is being studied by different kinds of people’ (Béteille, 1990: 15). He is also joined by Eric Wolf, who tells us that: It used to be that
we taught our students about the people out there. Now the very people sit m my classroom. Some tell me of their direct familiarity with the places in the textbook photos, others explain the virtues of the various medicines and the physical powers of witchcraft.... The object has become a talking subject with a definite point of view. (cited in Friedman, 1987: 117) same
We know that anthropologists have changed. But has anthropology? Madan (1982: 10) has argued that the continuing absence of mutual interpretation cannot be repaired simply by bringing in a ’salvation’ army of native or indigenous anthropologists. ’The purpose of the play may remain the same, namely the ending of the puzzlement which the Occidental consciousness experiences in the mysterious Orient, and the direction of the play may remain the same as well’ (Madan, 1982: 10). What this passage refers to is the well-known problem of ’the captive mind’ of nonwestern intellectuals (Alatas, 1972). How has this ’captivity’ come about? Claude Alvares in his Homo Faber (1979) has argued forcefully that much of western progress (Alvares would enclose ’progress’ in scare quotes) in science was not so much based upon achievements which were borrowed from the civilizations of Asia (as the Needham school would have it in regard to China), as it was extracted from Asia (and from the rest of the Third World as well) during centuries of an essentially exploitative relationship. In a similar vain, Talal Asad, concentrating on just one of those sciences, has argued that anthropology, rooted ’in an unequal power encounter between the West and the Third World’, has contributed to the
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process that gave ’the West access to cultural and historical information about the societies it has progressively dominated’ and has helped in ’maintaining the structure of power represented by the colonial system’ (Asad, 1973: 16ff). Similarly, a group of social scientists drawn from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, meeting under the auspices of Unesco in 1976, stated that: There has long existed an imbalance between intellectual ’imports’ and ’exports’ between Third World countries and the advanced nations of the West. There has been an abundant flow into the developing countries of ready-made conceptual models, theoretical frameworks, research techmques, etc., whereas the flow in the reverse direction has been the raw data, whether collected by foreigners or ’native’ scholars. (Madan, 1977: 9)
Whatever its origin, the ’captive mind problem’ shows us that the decolonization of the human sciences is a problem for the West as well as as for those outside it. In his seminal paper ’Science and Swaraj’ (self-rule), the Indian sociologist Jit Singh Uberoi warned Asian social scientists that by unthinkingly imitating western social sciences they are imperceptibly adopting all the assumptions on which these sciences are built. ’Until we can concentrate on decolonization, learn to nationalize our problems and take our poverty seriously, we shall continue to be both colonial and unoriginal’ (Uberoi, 1968: 119-20). His appeal has been interpreted by some as a call for a distinctive Indian sociology, but Uberoi has emphasized that his aim was not a culturally unique sociology but a nationally independent one. ’For us’, he said (quoted in Abbi and Saberwal, 1969: 191-2), ’the important considerations should be to define our relevant problems and pursue their solutions ...’ (emphasis added). Uberoi’s manifesto has been very influential in that it has stimulated debate (Fahim, 1976, 1982; Hsu and Textor, 1978; Fahim and Helmer, 1980). But, surely, the problem itself has remained unresolved ever since. The Korean anthropologist Choon Soon Kim, in a similar vein, has recently argued that the West is hardly interested in contributions from non-western anthropologists as far as the building of theories is concerned (Kim, 1990). Kim repeated a complaint, voiced by Francis Hsu as early as 1973 in an ’Ethnographic Report’, published in the American Anthropol-
ogist : White anthropologists find it most mtolerable to accept theones about their White American culture by non-White anthropologists, especially if the theories contradict the ones White anthropologists have already held dear.... Since theoreticians enjoy higher professional esteem than mere fact-gatherers, they can tolerate non-Whites in the role of the latter far more than that of the former. [However,] [e]ven in the role of fact-gatherers, White anthropologists would like non-Whites to confine themselves to their native non-White cultures, and not to poke into the White preserves where the White anthropologists were born, live, work, and raise their children. (Hsu, 1973: 5).
If Kim and Hsu refer has to be
right, as we think they are, the situation to which they deplored. As we have argued, we are convinced that a
are
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RECOVERING ’CULTURE’
comparative science of cultures is only possible if we have at our disposal multiple descriptions given by members from different cultures of both themselves and others against the background of their own cultures. The western attitude to which Kim and Hsu refer is epistemologically harmful because it interferes with the coming into being of even the preconditions for the development of a viable science of cultures. That is why this journal explicitly asks scholars, non-western and western alike, to conceive of its pages as a forum intended for participating in this project. NOTES 1. This may sound an absurd claim in the ears of those who are brought up with ’reflexive’ anthropology, the ’anthropology’ of the anthropologists, as their staple diets. Very soon, we shall see what kind of claim is being made, what its
implications are, etc. 2. The distinction is the one between ’hypothesis’ and ’truth’. 3. The only work which, to our knowledge, has succeeded in convincingly capturing in a theory the dynamic of religion in relation to the crystallization of Western culture is S.N. Balagangadhara’s ’The Heathen in His Blindness: ...’: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion (1994). As we believe this theory to be of great heuristic value, we have invited a number of outstanding scholars to discuss it in a forthcoming issue of this journal. 4. Augustine, The City of God, Book XI, Chapter 28: ’But we are men, created in the image of our Creator ... and therefore, while, as we run over all the works which He has established, we may detect as it were, His footprints ...’ 5. The term ’crab antics’ derives from the way crabs in a barrel, when trying to crawl out, pull each other down. The term was used by Peter Wilson in Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean (1972), to describe the scrambling for reputation in the Englishspeaking islands of the Caribbean. 6. Note that the psychic-unity-of-Man view is not congruent with the view that Man is in Nature. Psychic unity may be taken to be a biologically based phenomenon, but it can also be conceived of as something which transcends biology, as
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