CHAPTER FOUR

CULTURAL PHOBIA

The Neurosis of Modern Being

by Hugh M. Lewis

We and our children are facing a world that will be characterized increasingly by signs of over-development: destruction of rain forests, increasing sterilization and pollution of the oceans, desertification and soil loss, and global circumscription of the human population.

Still, modern development is continuing to be pursued at all costs and at a break neck pace by most nations on the earth, without much regard for environmental standards or preservation. The fiasco of over-development will not be experienced environmentally. But it will become increasingly expressed socially and culturally in terms of the cultural loss and reorientation of groupings of peoples who are increasingly incorporated into a vast international system of market exchange and who struggle to regain a sense of cultural identity, often in competition with or at the expense of alternate orientations of other groups of people. This is sure to be an unpredictable factor of socio-political destabilization in the future.

In the conservative, backward looking decade of the 80's, there has arisen within American Anthropology departments a common fear of "Culture" as a human reality that is inherently problematic. Socio-biologists (ethno-biologists, bioculturalists, etc.) implicitly deny the functional reality of culture in their evolutionary-genetic schemas. Post-modernists, post-structuralists, post-humanists, critical theorists, etc. (what I shall call the post-culturalists) express a certain antipathetic preoccupation with (and appropriation and rejection of) cultural texts, the inherent dilemmas of cross-cultural interpretation, and the processes and motivations of their social production. Between these two tribes of spear wielding, shield shaking anthropologists, there is little room or tolerance left for the conventional cultural anthropologist who has become a symbol and target of everyone's frustrations and who, from a statistical standpoint, probably does not like to shake spears and who, by obligatory definition, must remain a "professional stranger."

I believe the devaluation of culture that has been witnessed in the 1980's is symptomatic of a deeper, broader malaise; a rejection of cultural realities which is the rooted in a fear of these realities--a fear which arises, like all fear, from the unknown and the uncertain. This social "archosis" must be seen in relation to a background of development which has witness the increasing loss of traditional cultures around the world, the bureaucratic incorporation and encapsulation of the groupings of people who embody such traditions; worldwide, and increasing, capitalist penetration of market values and relations into the socio-cultural ethos, behaviors, attitudes and symbolisms of people across the world.

"Cultural denial" that is now characteristic of social attitudes and relations in Anthropology departments is an echo of a larger process of the loss and devaluation of traditional culture that is accompanying its transformation and acculturative substitution by an international "global culture" of modern development.

The main feature of this new global culture is that it is primarily an industrial-based, capitalist-oriented and urbanized way of living. This global culture can be characterized by values of increasing industrial production and consumption and by the prevalence of certain material symbolic fetishes--Michael Jackson, VCRs and Disney Animation Videos, Toyotas, Hondas, traffic congestion and highway trauma, Masters of Business Management with foreign accents, Shopping Malls, Toys-R-Us, Barbie Dolls with accessories and Power Ranger figurines, Computers & Fuji Film, Marlborough, Salem and Dunhill cigarettes, No-smoking areas, Espresso Coffee and poor French pastry, MacDonald's Happy Meals, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza, CNN international newscaster culture speaking standard English, MacIntosh, IBM clones, Microsoft and Internet, Iron Men, Hollywood Action Heroes, Beverly Hills 90210 and Automatic Assault rifles. We can now come off a domestic air-line in virtually any major capital city in Asia, the America's, Europe or the Middle East, and find within a short radius of a taxi ride many or almost all the "conveniences" of life that we once left behind.

There are several common denominators of this new global culture. First and foremost is money and everything that money can buy and the concomitant and implicit devaluation of the old and the traditional things that money can't buy. Second is the increasing social inequality and asymmetry between those who have more money and those who have less. Third are the complex relations of labor and resource distribution in the world which situates groups of people along a modern scale of being, from primary producers to final consumers. Fourth are the increasing means and use of impersonal violence to reinforce or alter these relations of labor upon the modern chain of being. Finally, there is the reemergence of a new kind of cultural orientation-- an ethnic-based cultural orientation which is increasingly defined on the basis of a group's market inter-positioning in relation to other alternate ethnic-cultural groupings within the global system, in relations of ethnic schism, communal cleavage and racial markers of difference in market competition for position and access to opportunity and resources within the global system. The key characteristic of these new ethnocultural orientations are their increasing geo-political decentering and fragmentation and local recolonization within a international global economy, as patterns of migration and mobilization of labor, capital and money erode and destroy traditionally defined cultural boundaries and lead to the increasing urbanization of humankind.

There has been a worldwide transition made by members and bearers of more traditional culture, which has witnessed a change in the status of culture in people's lives--from one of loss, acculturative adjustment, to one of anomie and cultural denial, to one of ethnocultural renaissance and rediscovery of roots which were severed in the great transition/transformation of the becoming a member of modern society. But the cultural orientation which reemerges from this change is not the same as the traditional, centered cultural orientation that was the bailiwick of the cultural anthropologist as professional stranger.

It is culture with a difference--ethnoculture that is defined not on the basis of mechanical identity or solidarity with one's own kind, but on the basis of highlighted, frequently quite superficial, differences with other kinds of people and of specialized, organic solidarity within a complex system of social relations and labor production. Whatever the cultural background or ethnocultural orientation, all people share an increasing and increasingly common commitment to work within and compete for position and resources within a global, industrialized capitalist system. This commitment becomes frequent expressed ethnically, and more often realized individually.

Human beings, suffering the loss of cultural traditions and its great positive orienting force, are also discovering that the material-fetishistic substitutes of global culture are indeed poor and inadequate, if increasingly necessary, in the shaping of a new existence.

In this regard, it is especially the secular, scientific based worldview of modern global culture that offers little solution for the growing sense of existential anomie and perennial human antinomies that must become increasingly felt within an impersonal, largely anonymous and spurious global system. People and their groups are returning to new or alternate religious orientations in which to find identity, symbolic orientation and to express their sense of existential despair and growing dissatisfaction. Religious as an ethnocultural and socio-political force in not on the wane in relation to the rise of global capitalism, but is being given a renewed vigor and importance in the world increasingly faced with impending ecological disaster.

The academic culture (or subculture) that is becoming threatened and vulnerable to critical attack, is the culture of science. Heroic scientists who had once paved the way for technological development, and who were the principal rationalists and legitimizers of this development, are finding themselves caught in a double bind within a love-hate relationship to an increasingly unsympathetic host society. The world has grown to depend upon them in a neurotic relationship of technological dependency. The baton of the scientist as leader and seer of modernity is being passed to a new kind of applied technocratic specialist managed by a business-minded administrator-corporate organizer. The role and capacity for the scientist to work effectively is thus becoming increasingly compromised. The culture of the scientist is also becoming an ethnocultural orientation that must increasingly compete with alternate groupings on the global marketplace for opportunity and resources.

This essay closes with the suggestion that there is a great deal of modern global culture that is fundamentally neurotic for human beings. Global culture promotes an orientation of dependency to a larger system which affects our attitudes, our behavior, our world view and which reaches by daily means of the media and our habits of consumption, into the very foundation of our being. It promotes a way of being that is increasingly, and in the final analysis, essentially, vicarious, artificial, contrived, and culturally unsatisfactory. It is therefore a reified way of being that is essentially unreal from a cultural standpoint.

The recovery of culture as ethnoculture must be seen as an adaptive and very natural social response, even if it is also somewhat destabilizing. Groups who feel existentially threatened or overshadowed with doom will predictable turn towards violence towards out-groups as a solution. Frustrated people, displaced by machines to which they were previously enslaved, will become more mobilizable and violent in the confrontation of ethnocultural emergencies. From the point of view of the scientist, who is herself increasingly enclaved within an academic ghetto, this response quite natural and inevitable, if never very attractive, and often quite ugly.

I leave this essay with the open, unanswered question of the place and role of the cultural anthropologist as the scientist and student of culture in a world in which humankind's basic cultural relationships are becoming transformed. The cultural phobia which we are experiencing is the sense of loss of the old and the threat of the new and uncertain. The reality of culture as a functional force in organizing the human world is not being served by retreat and denial.

To watch an international group of children playing together in international student apartments, one cannot but notice the overwhelming fact of the basic developmental affinities of little boys and girls around the world. The differences which take on such a vital importance by the time these children become adults, are those which are by definition and in essence, cultural. They are acquired within basic cultural settings of family and community. When these settings change, and the social relations which embody them become transformed in a modern world, then the cultural processes to which they give rise much also change.

I suggest that it is the professional responsibility of the modern cultural anthropologist, as scientist, humanist and as a student of culture, to systematically, and empirically study and come to terms with these basic cultural transformations which are occurring in the modern world, and to interpret these changes in such a way that they become more understandable, and less feared, by everyone. There is the hope that these cultural transformations may then be effectively mediated in a manner which will render them less unpredictable and safer for everyone (i.e. a more human and more humane world, in which development means, by definition, human development).