CHAPTER NINE

THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY

by Hugh M. Lewis

The theory of the cultural construction of reality is centered within what is known as the Anthropology of Knowledge and is derived from the theory of the social construction of reality as elaborated by Berger and Luckmann (1967) and theories of the psychological construction of reality (Kelly, 1955). The cultural construction of reality is concerned primarily with the symbolic relativity of cultural knowledge (i.e. symbolic and collective representations, ethos, folk beliefs, customs and traditions, common sense, rationalizations, etc.) as this is situated within a specific socio-environmental context. As such it explicitly brings into critical, reflexive focus the received presuppositions of truth value of our knowledge. A great deal of cultural knowledge is symbolic and operates at a very concrete level of action and affect. A great deal of such knowledge is therefore implicit within the background of the culture bearer's lives.

The basis of the cultural construction of reality is the premised definitional and biological "world openness" of humankind which means that people are essentially unconstrained by instinctual drives and action patterns, and are instead free to mold behavior in a manner which becomes embodied as if instinct but that is in fact man-made or constructed. Thus definitional world openness of the human species entails that humans have been able, to an increasing extent, to free themselves from the constraints of natural selection, through the mediation of cultural adaptations, and to eventually superimpose an organized form of cultural selection upon the natural environment. The absence of instinct characteristic of human beings entails that they are open to conditioning on a very basic level which becomes biologically automatic in place of, and as if, it were natural instinct. By and large, this is the cultural level of conditioning that is achieved through life-long processes of enculturation within man-made and socially constrained environments.

The processes of the cultural construction (and ethnographic re-construction of constructed realities) comes to full expression in the critical moment of the reproductive transmission, or transculturation of cultural knowledge, both through time from generation to generation, and across space, from one community to another. Cultural knowledge thus is rooted on the presupposition of the integral holism of patterning of such knowledge, and on the specific contextuality in which such knowledge is situated.

Berger and Luckmann delineate the dialectical process of the behavioral rituals which lead to the deposition of a common stock of knowledge and the objectivation of knowledge in the carpentered environment and social organization of people. Secondary institutions serve the function of reinforcing these primary obectivations of knowledge, and symbolization has the purpose of providing existential reinforcement and unification of experience, which leads to the "reification" of such constructions as if these were not manmade, but natural. Subjectivation complements this process by the psychological internalization and enculturation of basic values, symbolizations and identity of the individual, such that these internalized attitudes and orientations of culture-bearer's are consistent and consonant with the institutional and objective realities of the cultural orientation. Language, both as the objective medium of the common stock of knowledge, as the principle vehicle of symbolic mediation of experience, especially in the rehabilitation, legitimization, collectivization and annihilation of knowledge, and as small talk that reinforces subjectivation of cultural reality.

To a large extent, the theory of the cultural construction of reality serves to explain and analyze the various aspects of how mostly implicit cultural knowledge, unevenly distributed over a social landscape, coheres to create a corporate sense of completeness and comprehension to a given cultural orientation which transcends and orders the biographical experience of the individual culture-bearer, and that is conservative and resistant to the relativizing influence of alternative orientations or change.

The cultural construction of reality also serves to reflexively de-center and deconstruct the presupposition of the ultimate truth value of knowledge, as this is culturally situated and relative, and which enables us to escape the straight jacket of our own implicit cultural values and orientation, and to overcome the invisible ethnocentric biases which stand between us and an objective comprehension of either our own or other's cultural realities. At the same time, it enables us to attempt a more objective description of culturally rooted knowledge as this is mostly implicitly and situated within specific cultural settings and contexts. This is a necessary precursor to the achievement of genuinely objective, scientific knowledge of culture. We cannot claim a genuinely etic approach to ethnographic description and ethnological explanation as long as we fail to come to terms with the situation of our own and other's knowledge, or as long as we take as given unquestioned primes or implicit presuppositions of truth value.

The processes of cultural construction of reality refer to the arbitrariness and human artificiality of our knowledge as essentially non-absolute and relative in status, and to the ability of humans to symbolically reify, as if a priori and natural, such knowledge as a given reality. We normally operate under such presuppositions, and it is this normality of our unquestioned and implicit presuppositions that it becomes the goal of existential ethnography to come to terms with. It is the very basicness and transparency of our own cultural orientations, their received reification as if natural and universal, which means that, given all its symbolic reinforcement, the question of its fundamental existentiality needs never be broached, unless there is confrontation of marginal events or with alternative symbolic orientations or discrepant realities of others which leads to existential inconsistency and which relativizes our orientation. We are then led to repair or reconstruct our orientation in such a way that our reality again becomes complete and consistent.

The fact that we construct our ethnographic texts in a similar way as we construct our cultures, entails that we never really escape the relativities of our knowledge or its existentialities, unless we make ideological leaps of faith to achieve symbolic closure, or we are able to apply relatively non-arbitrary standards of etic, objective measurement to our observations such that we can inductively derive general hypothesis and conclusions from empirical evidence.

Because the cultural construction of reality appears empirically to be a symbolic process that involves the perceptual-cognitive organization of the mind, and the symbolic behavioral organization of an individual actions and social relations, it is via systematic means of measurement of symbolic patterning in the various facets of its expression and at its different levels of organization, that we can attempt an objective, scientific measurement of cultural orientation, and a realistic assessment of cultural variation and differences.

In such a systematic manner, the distribution of knowledge (percepts, responses, values, beliefs, etc.) across a representative sample of cultural informants can be fairly precisely delineated, and this distribution of knowledge can be compared across different samples of informants, both sub-culturally and culturally. At the same time, the symbolic profile and cultural orientation at the individual, sub-organic level can also be systematically delineated by the same means. Such a method will never be complete, but it can be made reliable enough to reproduce systematic patterns of response at different levels of analysis such that cultural profiles of knowledge and orientation can be constructed. These profiles can then be empirically anchored in situ by ethnographic observation and other forms of fieldwork.