REDEFINING CULTURAL PROCESS

Anthropology at the Critical Juncture of Past and Present

by Hugh M. Lewis

The relative presence of culture has been of critical importance to both human evolutionary development as well as in individual human development. The many parts played by culture by human development can be referred to as 'cultural process' and this process can be seen as having had a continuous and continuously changing influence upon the anthropological construction of reality--the ongoing definition and redefinition of human beingness, or 'humanness' and of the human condition in the wider world. Culture itself, lacking any well agreed upon definition can in part be defined by the shaping role it has played in this developmental process. Risking a tautology, we can describe culture roughly those external, material, symbolic and social components which are necessary to the normal, natural development of the human being. Personal adornment and dress, language, aesthetic sensibilities and affective expression, familial relationships, social values and attitudes toward social relations, strategies and economies of food getting and material acquisition, technology, religious beliefs, collective representations, ritualistic ceremonies, values of work and play, all must be seen as important cultural components which have some differential bearing upon the development of the human being and the human group form the earliest moments. Of course, child culture can be seen as rudimentary or lacking in many of these respects, but child culture is in fact a sub-cultural extension of a broader adult world, and the child normally has little if any choice but to share naively in the full cultural of its caretakers and compeers.

Human beings have come to depend upon culture as if this were a vital 'need' or condition for their survival and successful development. Culture serves to continually support us and mediate for us basic conflicts and existential challenges which we may be ill equipped to deal with if left to our own, organically defined resources. Indeed, we might well reverse the conventional formula in this regard and say that it has not been genes that have determined our cultural possibilities, but culture which has constrained our genetic possibilities.

Humankind cannot be conceived of without culture. Culture has long been a critical component of human reality--and yet for the most part the role of cultural process in this most fundamental aspect remains largely unexplained and unexamined. We search for culture in many strange places in the world, and yet consistently fail to define the place of culture in anthropogenesis and human development.

Culture undergoes a process of organic internalization as it embeds itself upon the primary levels of human character. Simultaneously, the sense of human beingness, the expression of organic drives, becomes externalized upon a cultural constructed world, and comes to depend for its expression upon such externalization. Culture, from a socio-psychological and psycho-social point of view, comes to mediate the boundary between culturally defined internal world of the individual and the organically defined external world of living culture. Culture becomes vital in the sense that it is an active, living linkage in human beingness. Cultural elements mediate this boundary, while simultaneously constituting the boundary. Culture lies somewhere between the self and the other, the product of relation between these two worlds.

From the standpoint of internalization, the emphasis upon the subjective side of cultural process, in particular as a distinctive contribution by anthropology to the understanding of human reality, is as equally important as the focus upon its external 'objective' manifestations. Subjective evaluation and reevaluation of culturally derived characteristics have an historical consequence in human development and change.

If we define culture as that externalized and internalized portion of human acquisition and adaptation, those means of cooperative social behavior which have helped to free humankind from the natural preoccupation with survival to pursue other interests, including the development of the intellect, we must see the very important and original evolutionary place of culture in human development, and we must recognize the importance of culture as an externalized facet of human organismic adaptation--one which entails concomitant internalization of 'arbitrary' or constructed or conventional elements, the tight connection of culture with primary acquisition. If the original cultural connections are not made in the early years of life, all subsequent development will be retarded.

This aspect also accounts for the tight linkages to culture and personality, and to the intransigence of culture in the formation of individual character--it constitutes the basis of claims of a deep seated cultural relativity.

In this regard, language, systems of symbolization, as well as technology and systems of social organization must be seen to play a central cybernetic role since the earliest transformations of humankind.

Neurological evidence and case histories of severe childhood deprivation support the hypothesis of critical stages of brain development during which new capacities of mind become inaugurated. If missed, permanent retardation of brain development will be the long term consequence.

The delayed development of the brain among higher mammals and especially marked for humankind, can be seen as a critical period of cultural nurturance during which the relative presence or absence, deprivation and enrichment of an effective cultural life world, will have a critical influence on the subsequent characteriological development of the individual.

We must speculate whether the ontogeny of characteriological development, such as the timing as learning to walk, the acquisition of speech, or learning the principles of classification and conservation may in certain fundamental aspects reflect the general order of the phylogenetic sequence of human cultural acquisition--the rate and timing of the process being pushed further and further forward in both the life cycle of the individual human being as well as in the sequence of evolutionary emergence of new capacities and characteristics.

It is crucial in this regard to view culture as internally, historically holistic and organic. It is a living process which has its own unique sense of history and of rootedness within a particular home environment. It is important that it is not enough to analytically dissect the socio-cultural world in order to discover its functional order--it must be observed naturalistically in its cultural environment.

Cultures as social and historical realities are not without contradictions or loose ends, but for the most part they present themselves to the newborn as full blown, fully coherent systems--they are effectively complete and total, and 'subjectively inevitable' in their influence upon human development and environmental adjustment. It is by virtue of their completeness that they must be studied as if complex and holistically integrated systems.

They constitute the basis for the channeling, externalization and displacement of internalized controls and 'needs' or 'drives' which become posited in external forms. By virtue of this innate cultural dependency, humankind in its development has been always incomplete in a sense that most animals can be considered genetically finished. This unfinished state of human condition entail that without culture, humankind would not be merely animals but as 'monsters' without even the kinds of coordinated instinctual patterning which animals possess. We therefore cannot conceive of humankind with out culture.

Emphasis early in life upon some styles and genres of cultural components, including expressive and affective modes, aesthetic sensibilities, causal normative and social evaluations, symbolizations and ordering of behavior must be seen to confer upon cultural processes a sense of historical conservatism and resistance to change, and a lasting intransigence to superficial, subsequent modifications.

We must refer to basic cultural factors which underlie and give rise to subsequent complex, anti-chaotic cultural patterns constrained and reinforced by the sanction of custom, the force of habit and acquired traits, and the easy preference for the conventional.

It remains the principle purpose of the anthropologist to elucidate this cultural process and the part it plays in human adaptation and integration.

Culture has been the special provenience of the field of anthropology. With the rapid disappearance of cultural differences on earth, a disappearance which parallels in some respects the loss of species and genetic variability the varieties of cultural forms have been rapidly diminishing. Anthropology has not only been losing the principle object of its investigation but with it, the loss of its own identity and raison d'être as a science.

With the disappearance of culture from earth, we are facing an anthropological disaster in the rapid reduction of the variability of cultural patterning--the historical evolution of which probably required at least a few million years.

It is upon the anthropologists shoulders to carve out a new science of culture, one which has no other reference than its own object of study, and yet one which is by definition cross disciplinary in its resources. The science of human culture has not yet been written. It must borrow from biology, genetics, neuroscience, as well as from systems of science, artificial intelligence, and from history, philosophy, economics, psychology, etc.

And yet it must remain to the anthropologist to define for the world the critical place which culture plays in the human scheme of things.

Anthropology must seriously take up once again the question of cultural acquisition and the role which cultural process has played in human development. If culture plays a crucial role in human acquisition then we must discern which of those aspects and elements are more basic, which are derivative and which are primary and which secondary in importance.

This brings back into view the problematics of cultural focus of elaboration and the continuum or arc of cultural variability.

Such a study comprises a renewed foundation for comparative research--the broad based search for similar cultural correlates which together comprise basic cultural categories, categories which are empirically, statistically derived. Cultures vary widely in the kinds of cultural institutions and in the way in which these institutions are constituted and reconstructed within the cultural configuration.

It is up to the anthropologist to recover ground that has been lost in the wake of the advances of other human sciences and studies.

Anthropology cannot continue to contribute critically to the discourse of the human condition if it remains too attached to archaic intellectual attitudes and canalized by a narrow academic tradition of scholarship. On the other hand, anthropology could make crucial contributions to this dialogue in terms of its holistic and cultural orientation, as well as in terms of being able to assimilate into a coherent order different, often contradictory traditions of knowledge. If anthropology cannot carve out for itself a niche in a modern state of knowledge, a niche that is regarded as vital and necessary, then anthropology must face the consequences of becoming increasingly narrowly defined as specialists in the esoteric nature of things.