STRANGE AND FAMILIAR

by Hugh M. Lewis

Being strange is recognizing the need to learn about something--it is a relationship to the unknown. Familiarity is the attitude of knowing, in which the need to learn is satisfied. Turning something once familiar into a thing strange is to convert what is known into something unknown, with the recognition of a need to learn about it. These are relative terms, depending upon the point of view of the knower. Recognizing this epistemological relativity does not preclude the ability to learn or to alienate, to estrange or to familiarize, but it does acknowledge the ability to transform one into the other, to transform oneself in relation to the world. Perhaps we may call this the translation of difference in human realities.

The attribution of incommensurability to cultural realities is a suspect premises underpinning the direction and linkages of this article. It depends upon an implicit conflation between a weaker kind of cultural relativism and a strong sense of determinism. Corollary to this conflation is an implicit definition of culture as a boundable entity--as little culture gardens and as reified objects, as epiphenomenal artifacts. Missing in such an understanding is the conception of culture as being, as process, as performance--as something which happens between people and which people do in relation to one another. Absent is the idea of culture as a phenomenon of social construction. The strong version of determinism leads us to the logical extreme that cultural realities are indeed incommensurable and untranslatable. The agenda of the ethnographer as an interpreter of cross-cultural realities becomes then an impossible dream. "Namely, if cultures were incommensurable, then for the investigator who studies a cultural group other than his own, the communications of its actors would mostly consist of uninterpretable 'noise'." (page 58)

To substitute 'Navaho' for 'Galileo' is an interesting rhetorical sleight of hand. Galileo is one of the father of Astronomy and Physics, one of the founders of modern scientific method. This bespeaks a very conservative philosophy of science. 'Navaho' cannot be substituted for 'Galileo' without 'mixing our metaphors' confusing our 'metaphysics'. But 'substitute' now 'Navaho' for 'Galileo' and the application of that passage to anthropology is clear…(page 58) reveals the attempt to bypass the whole question of commensurability in a 'softer' kind of anthropology as 'natural science' depending upon application of a weaker kind of relativity.

To reiterate, the weak version only says very simply, but very confusingly, that cultural realities are a lot less commensurable than they may seem on the surface, then some of us would like others to believe. Statistical measures drawn from different cultural realities tends to obscure real differences which may in fact exist. Translation is never as straight forward an affair as its final reading might suggest, and then there is never a bottom line on the best translation possible. The task of getting to know, of learning, of 'making the strange familiar' becomes a lot more problematic when terms of reference, frames of inference, metaphors and their meanings are a lot less directly translatable then we might suppose. Being a lot less commensurable, the job is much more difficult, but not impossible.

Otherwise, specific points of the article are quite clear and suggestive. Notions of 'alienation' and 'ego-dystonic' demand explanation of 'whose alienation from what'. As a gloss upon our modern reality, as a raison d'être for making the familiar seem strange and denying the possibility of making the strange seem familiar, and as an implicit value orientation, such critique (destruction of the familiar) does not adequately explain the problem of construction in anthropology, of answering 'what is it?'. Like all criticism it is attached to the thing which it destroys.

The dangerous reductionism of the 'depreciation of the familiar' (footnote #2) is not the same agenda of 'destruction of the familiar' of post humanist deconstruction and dialogical reconstruction in anthropology. It is the result of the same conflation of relativism and determinism, and the kind of reductionism implicit in deterministic 'depreciation of the familiar'--'humans are little different from machines', the human minds and the computer are equivalent, human being is in its depths a stone, culture gardens are like fungus or a mold, human societies are insect societies, etc. etc. this kind of reductionism is what is implicit in socio-biological reductionism of culture to nature, in materialistic reductionism of mind to body. 'depreciation of the familiar' does not beget 'appreciation of the strange'.

Our ability to learn about the strange depends upon our ability to know the familiar, and vice versa. Our ability to transform the strange into the familiar and the familiar into the strange, our 'translation of difference' in human cultural realities, is the beginning of our anthropology as a soft, shared science of culture, and not the end of anthropology as a hard, objective science of nature. It is an anthropology premised upon the principle of relativism not determinism. It is premised as it always has been upon our ability to learn, share and appreciate both the strange and the familiar in our cross-cultural realities.

Philosophers of science have been arguing the epistemology and metaphysics of scientific method for a very long time and with good reason, for a bottom line of the problem would not only be undesirable but probably unscientific as well. Successful scientists do something, yet even they may not have an exact idea of how it works. And the philosophical argument had come to reveal that there may be a little more tradition, ideology and authority in the development of science that purists and fundamentalists would like to acknowledge.

It is most relevant that the comparative study of religions always leads to the question of 'collective representations' and the problem of 'primitive mentality'. This is contraposed against the a frequently too implicit notion that we have a firm idea of what the 'civilized' mind is all about. Usually it is logical, rational and scientific. What kind of logic children learn to use may vary across cultural and traditional settings. Evidence suggests that 'tradition bound' logic or folk reason is different from 'scientific method' logic--that though the former may be from the scientific standpoint fallacious (modus tollens) it may not necessarily be less complex but a more difficult form of reasoning than arguing from the antecedent (modus ponens). This difference leads to the paradox that 'natives' argue from the consequent, and therefore don't make the kinds of associations with the facility that western oriented thinkers would expect. It leads to the perhaps fallacious impression that:

We must pause for a second look back upon our scientific tradition as perhaps its own culture bound system informed by its own principles of authority and ideology (prediction and control?) which perhaps superimposes upon the natural mind its own sets of syllogistic constraints (identity, two value logic, etc.) whose implicit aim is the elimination of cognitive uncertainty. It is rooted in a tradition of civilization which has set a certain premium upon rational literacy. And this ideology is one of 'collective representation'. I have sat in more than one anthropology, philosophy and science course in which the following commentary rings true--"It is each man for himself, except where tradition itself dictates cooperation" and "No occasion arises for a child to use his talent for discovery, or his curiosity in relation to the subject matter of the course…" (page 34) In the transmission of our own traditions, are we any less tradition bound, any less authoritarian or is the encouragement of competition any different from the "lack of cooperation"?

As we come to export this tradition to other peoples, we must be cautious about the problems of acculturation and enforced assimilation to our own value orientations and rational structures. We must learn that there is a critical difference between assimilation and integration, where the former leads to renunciation of the indigenous cultural values and the latter leads to a genuine amalgamation of cultures. To some extent, this work successful achieves the latter--"To be most effective, the teacher should begin with materials of the indigenous culture, leading the child to use them in a creative way…" (page 94) and 'to state in their own terms that they have, for instance, a set of stones, a set of bottle caps, or a set of leaves…for their own organization of experience in an arithmetical framework." (page 95) But we must be wary of "instead of using traditional Kpelle authoritarian method of rote memory and imitation as a means of introducing for comprehending, clarifying and organizing content drawn directly from the child's familiar, daily experiences" (page 93) and "The Kpelle schoolchild does not in the present system of education organize his universe of school experience in a meaningful way…" (page 93) We must be careful of merely substituting one sense of tradition for another, one kind of authority for another.

A more interesting and suggestive analytical framework, rather than 'traditional versus scientific ' is the contrast between orality and literacy and the difference between oral cultures based upon a different tradition of cultural transmission and cognitive orientation and literate cultural traditions based upon the transmission of print media. This is not a direct contrast between oral and literate, but a comparison of cultures bound by these different kinds of tradition. Furthermore, there are no pure culture types--semi-oral cultures and sub-cultures abound in civilized societies. A basic sense of orality underlies all cultural orientations however literate, however much literacy predominates as an overarching epistemological and metaphysical paradigm. In this regard a fundamental 'orality' (respect for authority, concrete thinking, lack of abstraction, rote memorization, imitation?) may be found within any cultural context, however scientific or literate. "No occasion arises for a child to use his talent for discovery…"