INTRODUCTION

THE REALITY OF CULTURE

by Hugh M. Lewis

A great deal of controversy has been occurring in academic forums that have to do directly or indirectly with the ontological status of culture and of our ability to study and come to terms with culture, especially through the social production of ethnographic texts which to some extent come to symbolically represent and iconographically stand in place of cultural reality.

Despite over a century of study of cultures and cultural phenomena, we are still without a single accepted definition or theoretical description or explanation of culture. This lack of preparadigmatic consensus which Thomas Kuhn identifies as the initial foundation of a science, has a consequence of generating a great deal of argument over fundamental questions about cultural reality and its influences in our life--a concept by which vagueness lends itself to the promotion of a broad plethora of alternative, competing theories and explanations.

This text was conceived and written with the premises that culture is a reality which has a critical influence upon our lives and our world, cultural patterning is empirically available to description and analysis. Indeed, the description and understanding of culture is primarily gained through the empirical validation of first-hand experience with culture. A central theory of culture may be inductively derived from this empirical patterning, a theory that lends itself to a pan-human definition of culture, and to a systematic program for the measurement and analysis of culture and cultural differences as they occur in the world. Human culture in the civilized sense that we understanding it conventionally arose in only the last few millennium of hominid evolution and its autochthonous origin and genesis is unique to the human species.

Cultural realities present themselves to our everyday experience as something that is largely unknown and to be reckoned with in a systematic manner. We are all novice students of cultural anthropology in this regard. Cultural realities are something which demands description, understanding and explanation, as something which has a functional, causal and determinative influence in our lives. Thus it is never suitable to attempt to explain away cultural realities in reductionist terms of analytical or interpretive categories--especially in terms which are monocausal, monotypical and prime mover. Culture is not just a consequence of genes, natural selection, history or psychology, but culture is a causal force of which much that is human in the world is a consequence.

Cultural reality is characterized by its transparency in our lives, its contextuality in the background of our worlds, its symbolic texture, antinomies and contradictions, its irreducible holism of partially integrated patterning which resists analytical description.

The transparency and invisibility of the force and influence of culture in our lives is due to the "naturalization" and reification of cultural constructions as if a priori and inherent--it is both embodied in our own sense of being, our tastes, habits and aversions, as well as embedded in the background context of our everyday lives. The facticity and historicity of cultural inventions, symbolisms and behavioral constructions becomes apparent or obvious only when our own cultural orientation comes into juxtaposition with alternate and radically different cultural realities of other people. The coexistence of multiple cultural realities serves as a reminder to us of the relativity of our own cultural orientation.

What makes culture intractable and difficult to study is that it is preeminently both a psychological and a social reality. It is reinforced socially and most of its sanctioning is achieved through such social reinforcement. Culture thus is an historical process of social enactment and behavioral patterning that is corporate in the sense that it is larger than life, and extends beyond the biographical horizons of any single culture-bearer to encompass and entire community. At the same time, cultural values, orientations and traits are internalized into the mind and worldview of the culture bearer, and become intrinsic to everything that we are and do in the world. The very glasses through which we see and come to know the world, are basically cultural in composition and design.

The recent and growing devaluation of culture and cultural studies must be seen against the background of the implicit devaluation of both cultural diversity and of the role and function of culture in our lives. At the same time there is a rise of a global capitalist mono-culture that, via sponsorship of the media, the arts and sciences, has attempted to foster and cultivate the illusion of the natural reality of its own cultural orientation. Great profits are to be realized in the breaking down of traditional cultural boundaries and in the promotion of the new global monoculture. But such profits must be seen as only short term gain when measured against the potential, and very real, long term losses: the loss of genuine cultural diversity in our world, of the appreciation of cultural differences and the opportunity to learn from these differences, and of the ability to exert some kind of influence over those forces and powers in our lives which have such a hand in manipulating our needs, views and habits, and in exploiting these for private gain.

The science of cultural anthropology is rooted to the study of culture as a basic human reality. The five cornerstones of cultural anthropology have long been the premises of the relativity of cultural differences and their influences upon our lives; the need to step beyond the ethnocentrisms (historicity, facticity, constructions and implicit reifications) of one's own cultural boundaries; the doctrine of cultural holism--that the patterning of culture must be comprehended from the synthetic standpoint of the whole; cross-cultural comparison; the search for pan-human universals; and a firm inductive-empirical footing on the ground of human experience that is rooted to participant-observation and detailed descriptive ethnography. While it makes an important difference whether we adopt an analytical (traits, elements, schemas, etc.) or a synthetic approach (pattern, gestalt, model) and whether we emphasize an etic or emic point of view, or a realist or idealist notion of what culture is in the first and final place, these alternative orientations are but minor dialectical variations of a basic theme of the importance, pervasiveness, patterning and forcefulness of culture in our lives and our world--facts from which we cannot escape.

However we seek to construe and define culture, it is paramount that we understand that culture as it has developed and become articulated in our world is not a monolithic phenomena--it has many levels and many facets, and multiple foci. It is a quite variable phenomena, both individually and socially. This multiplicity of culture is both its intractable weakness and its empirical source of strength as a genuine science. Nevertheless, basic shared patterns of culture may nevertheless be universal and common to all humankind.

The reality of culture and of cultural differences will long remain to plague humankind. The need for a science of culture will also remain, even if there are no longer any students of culture left. But we are all the unwitting children of culture.