Chapter Two
Cultural
Systems
Human systems are uniquely characterized as a species by their shared culture, and cultural transmission, which is a form of learning and transmission of cultural traits independent of any genetic linkages or conditioning, based upon modeling and instruction, is an important means of the reproduction of cultural trait-patterns across time and place. Cultural patterning varies consistently across time and place, and cultural change is an inherent part of cultural transmission and reproduction.
Anthropology has inherited a Culture Historical model of culture, as a thing, as something to be found, rather than as a property of human systems, a pattern, something that occurs as a consequence of sharing, rather than what is being shared. There has been thus a tendency to look for culture, a base-line, as something like an artifact buried in the ground of the area where a culture is found to occur.
A systems approach to cultural understanding, what might be called a perspectivist or processual approach, emphasizes culture as being an experience, an occurrence, something happening through time rather than across space. From this standpoint, culture, and its sister concept, society, is more like the eco-trophic community structure of an ecosystem in which different kinds of organisms occupy different niches and interact in decisive ways with other organisms. While in the biological world, eco-systems are based largely upon who eats whom, in cultural systems, it is based on who interacts with whom, and how, and who shares with whom, and what is being shared--whether things, knowledge, money, power, status, emotion, etc.
Cultural patterning is the symbolic sharing of traits between and within a grouping of people, which sharing occurs upon multiple levels of cultural transmission simultaneously--behaviorally, linguistically, symbolically and cognitively, as well as materially and institutionally. Cultural patterning is embedded in a community of people, or an ethno-cultural grouping, to the extent that this community shares a common sense of tradition, a focal symbolic orientation, more or less unified, and an at least implicit set of conventions that serve to constrain behavior and provide a common framework for the interpretation of behavior. These shared patterns become customarily ossified in relational patterns of kinship and in terms of reference and inference that affect relationships and status-role identities in different proscribed socio-cultural settings.
Cultural systems emerge with distinct ethnocultural groupings of people and are more or less integrated around key adaptive functions of these groupings of people. Such systems serve the needs of the people for adaptive survival, and successful genetic and cultural reproduction. There is a conservative character to cultural systems, as the diagonal and vertical transmission process, from parents to offspring, from guardians and authorities to children and youth, tend to offset and limit the extent of horizontal cross-cutting transmission that may take place between different ethnocultural orientations.
Cultural systems achieve integration through the incorporation, enculturation and socialization of the individual into the life-ways and values patterns of the ethnocultural grouping. Cultural integration depends primarily upon the active sharing of cultural traits upon multiple levels of daily articulation , or cultural construction.
We can speak of the on-going cultural construction of everyday reality, by which a common grouping or ethnoculture of people daily create, share and recreate the patterns of their life world, their common values, precepts and percepts, and all the associated traits. Reconstruction on a daily basis of group identity, and of individual membership role identity (i.e., secondary social identity) within the ethnocultural grouping, forms the basis for the cultural construction of human reality and for the transmission of this reality from generation to generation and from one group or individual to another group or individual.
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Definitions of
Culture
Culture
has been the traditional forte' of the cultural anthropologist. At the time that
cultural anthropology has been eclipsed as the result of ethno-political
economies, the concept of culture and recognition of its importance in
understanding human reality has emerged in other disciplines as a central
defining dogma.
Culture
as a concept of human order and social organization, as a descriptive label
referring to both the style and pattern of human integration in the world, has
been widely defined and there is very little close agreement as to its
appropriate denotations or determinations. My own research has led me to see
culture as more ofa dynamic process shaped in terms of a tradition, but made
real and vital in the present, than it is a static and unchanging reality that
is superimposed, like a set of rules, upon human reality. Culture is embodied in
the behavior, beliefs and very being of its participants, and it is enacted and
reenacted at every minute upon many different stages of social performance.
Cultural process is therefore an on-going production of forms and symbolisms,
materially and behaviorally manifest, that reshapes the tradition and fits it to
the needs and purposes of the future.
The
remarkable aspect of culture is its tremendous transparency in our own lives,
and its tremendous obviousness to ourselves in the lives of people removed from
us. We do not normally see it in ourselves, in what we do and how we behave,
because it is so much a part of us that we take it for granted. It is expressed
in the clothes we dress in, in our speech, in our attitudes and in our social
relations. It is expressed in our habits and routines and in the manner that we
conduct ourselves and our business both in polite society and otherwise. We find
it so easily in others because it forms the basis of the differences in others
that are so marked in implicit contrast to ourselves. It is clear therefore that
cultural variation overlaps and is often confused with individual variation of
pattern, so that it is impossible sometimes to tell the difference between the
one and the other unless we have some social frame of reference for common
comparison.
The
notion that culture is shared is important to the definition of culture, but
culture as merely frequency patterning belies some of the dynamic and variable
components of culture. To a great extent, we can even say that individual
variation is a form of cultural variation of pattern. Culture is often contested
and the result of compromise as much as it has been a matter of sharing and
agreement. Agreement implies an unconscious component of culture, and it is
indeed upon an unconscious level that we find most of the agreement occurring. It
is as often as not this unconscious level of conformity that individuals are
reacting to in a deliberate manner when they seek to be different or to express
themselves in a culturally non-conformist manner. It represents an attempt to
escape the psychological constraints of culture as these serve to shape and
possibly frustrate their lives. Culture becomes contestable when it is realized
that different versions or patterns or models of culture come into competition
with one another, when one person's construction is somehow contradictory to
another's. This happens more than we may know or realize, and it is clear that
culture, to be effective, cannot be a straight-jacket or even a military
uniform. It is referred to as a concept of the organization of diversity, rather
than as the replication of uniformity. It is also the source of a tremendous
paradox about cultural patterning, for though it comprehends all individuality
and individual variability of patterning, it does not invade every
private space or every nook
and cranny of a cultural defined reality. We cannot strictly say that individual
behavior is dependent upon culture, or cultural patterning is dependent upon the
expression of individual behavior. We can say that these are interdependent in a
partial way but not in an
incomplete way.
Cultural
variability is an inbuilt function therefore of cultural pattern, and reflects
the fact that culture is acquired and learned, constructed and created, in a
social environment. Individual variation is a natural extension of cultural
variability of pattern. In this regard, cultural pattern can be said to be the
substrate and ground for individual action and choice. It defines the range and
directions that individual variation will proceed in, and sets
constraints or limits beyond which such variation will be defined as
abnormal or anomalous. It is a logical consequence of the fact that any cultural
pattern that defines a group of people over time and place comprehends a broader
range of phenomena than is expressible by any one individual or even a group of
different individuals. We can say that culture in this sense is a corporate and
institutional reality that extends beyond the boundaries of individual
variability. It is, in other words, larger than life, and it becomes
symbolically so expressed.
Culture
is an historically transient phenomena. As conservative as we expect traditional
tribal cultures to be, from generation to generation and from century to
century, it is likely that the epigenetic profile of the cultural landscape will
shift and evolve continuously, in part as different casts of characters happen
upon the stage, and in part because outside forces are steadily impinging upon
those people to shape and erode their patterns of culture.
Culture
is therefore an instantaneous phenomenon that exists in the present. Its
reference to the past is as a sense of heritage and tradition that connects to the present in institutional and
ritual religious forms and
symbolisms.
My
desire to escape a definition of culture as something that is only shared and
fixed is rooted in the idea that though a basic consensus is vital to cultural
transmission, this transmission is never complete nor perfect, and its
information is always subject to distortion and mutation over time. Transmission
can only be understood in this regard as a temporal and therefore historical
process, or rather as a series of events that can be chronologically ordered and
that can be attributed some form of efficient causality or determination. People
are bound within a cultural system, but through their lived experience and the
embodiment of culture, in their everyday production and reproduction of the
cultural symbolisms and forms, they come
to have a transformative effect upon culture as a whole, gradually altering the
pattern of culture beyond recognition of what can be considered its original or
baseline form.
This
process suggests that culture in this case is anything but shared and fixed by
tradition. It suggests that its sharing is not a function of its conservativism,
but it dynamics, via the various mechanisms of transmission that are
recognizable in the study of culture. There have been very few baselines or
original cultures on earth in the past 30,000 years at least. There have been
founding cultures, and abrupt hiatus of cultural vacuums that are then
filled by new forms brought by new people. Original primordial hominid culture
probably dates back to as deep in time as there are recognizable tool
assemblages. Granted, cultural isolates occur
that seem to have been frozen in time, or even to have regressed by the
loss of previous cultural traits to
a more primitive condition of
cultural development. We cannot say that these tools or the soft culture that
they represent was invented at anyone place or time, but they were repeatedly
transmitted all over the place most of the time by many different individuals. These forms evolved ever so gradually out of even more
original and basic forms of proto-cultural pattern upon which some model or
another of anthropogenesis has been built. If we want to recognize these
proto-cultural patterns, we can find them with the use of different kinds of
tools by native Chimpanzee groups in the rain forests and fields of Central
Africa. These patterns are recognizable by their transmission and their
variation, and they lead to the conclusion that proto-cultural development in
humans may have proceed relatively early in hominid evolution, possibly as much
as 5 or 6 million years B.P.
If
we want to apply any kind of gene-culture model of coevolution, we must
recognize that this model may have worked on two levels. Culture provided a
carpentered context in which some
kinds of genetic patterns would have been positively selected, and others,
negatively selected. At the same time, genetic selection would have led to the creation of phenotypes that were culturally
dependent creatures, which can be seen in the relatively slow and advanced
phases of human ontogenetic development. There is obviously no strong linkage
between genetic and cultural information, nor of their modes of transmission.
Whereas the first can be thought of as being genetic and biological, the
second can be considered to be at best historical and social. These forms
of information are only linked indirectly in terms of the human embodiment of
culture and its evolved organic basis
in human development.
Human
beings can be said therefore to have become, sometime early in our hominid
evolution, culturally dependent creatures. We cannot now survive without
reliance upon cultural habits and means of adaptation. Cultural dependency is a
unique mark of humankind and constitutes the basis for the paradox of cultural
constraint in our lives. It is the basis for both our individual variability and
for our basic requirement for cultural conformity, even in our anti-structural
disconformity. We can find individual variability of personality even among
different members of the same reptiles, for instance, where obvious differences
of temperament and response are evident. If we refer to canines, it is apparent
as well that dogs show an enormous range of expression and variability of
personality traits, more than just the kinds of root emotional responses of a
snake. So much more so is it for human beings.
Culture
exists as a collaborative project. We can say therefore that it is constitutive
of reality in the sense that it is made up of many different things at the same
time, and different kinds of things through time. A culture cannot be created by
one person alone--culture is created socially in the group as a result of
sharing and variation of common patterns. Culture as a group process emerges
with time, and is subject to the constraints of time.
The
fundamental challenge of all cultural orientations is that of its survival and
reproduction in time and place, and this challenge is related to the fundamental
dilemma of cultural patterning, and that is the problem of achieving cultural
integration. It can be said that relative integration depends upon the extent
and depth of cultural sharing or transmission. Cultural patterning that
is highly coherent can be said to have achieved a relatively high degree of
integration. Of course, this concept of cultural integration is a slippery one
to get hold of. Coherence of culture
can be assumed to be achieved through symbolic consonance and
reiteration of common forms. It is the case though that there can be
substrate or structural sharing
reflecting a high order of systemic integration, while at the same time the
degree of variability of surface pattern in the expression of culture can be
quite high.
*****
Conceptual and
Symbolic Systems
It
can be demonstrated therefore that symbols and symbolisms do not exist as
discrete and isolated entities with a specific set of functions. They are always
a part of a larger system of symbolization and meaning that comprehends many
different kinds of functions and forms (whether these are pragmatic or
expressive or social or material
or textual or abstract or iconographic) Symbols thus have an inherent
effect of relating us to the world of which they are a apart and from which they
derive their significance and value. They tie object, and the experience of that
object, to a larger framework of order and value in our symbolic universe. At
the same time, they have the effect of concretizing or precipitating that larger
sense of order in the embodiment and experience of the object. This effect is
never complete or total, nor is it a permanent effect. It is one that must be
reiterated time and again in ritual form for its renewal and revitalization to
occur. The national flag is a common political symbol of the modern world that
is a clear cut example of this aspect of symbolization. Most symbols can be said
to be partial symbols in that their
symbolic function is more diffuse and less focused than a special purpose symbol
like a flag. It is hard to see a hammer as a symbol, though in the hands of a
carpenter who is quite capable it can take on a symbolic function that is shared
with its pragmatic value for driving nails. If we append a hammer to a flag, as
a symbol of the proletariat, of industry, of Homo faber, then its symbolic
function that can be said to be intrinsic to the hammer and its history takes on
a more focal and specific role.
We
can see that any symbolic or any symbolic function of a device is fundamentally
communicative--this is the transmissive aspect of the cultural content and
integrative function of symbolism. Symbols and symbolization therefore serve to
unite cultural reality into a coherent system of meaning and function. It is the
mechanism for achieving cultural integration. The communicative function of
symbolism is important to understanding its role in maintaining social order and
in the organization of social relations and resources. As is usual with most
communication systems, their efficacy and purpose become most evident in cases
of error or contradiction, when symbols as communicative devices break down or
come into conflict with one another upon basic levels of their articulation. If
an old regime is overturned, so too must the old statues and other icons of that
regime either be overturned, or else appropriated symbolically to the services
of the new regime. It would be seen as inappropriate by citizens of a country to
hoist a foreign flag, particularly that of a country considered hostile or a
threat, in place of its own flag. This is what happens when one nation is
defeated by another nation. Similarly, in our country, flag burning always
raises more than an eye-brow, it is considered sacrireligious and unpatriotic by
many people, though others would content it is only an exercise in one's freedom
of expression. It does point up that communication is society serves an
important function and is in itself of some social value as a resource. Burning
the flag becomes more therefore than just a demonstration of freedom of
expression. It becomes a communicative and symbolic enactment of contradiction
and in an implicit sense, of
denial, of the dominant social order. It becomes an insult and a way of doing
indirect violence to the country and the reality that the flag represents.
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Cultural-Cognitive
Integration
The
basis of cultural integration can be said to be symbolic-cognitive integration
of the informational patterns, or knowledge, that is represented and
subjectively embodies that cultural reality. It follows that the breakdown of
cultural order can lead to symbolic-cognitive dissonance and disintegration,
and, vice versa, the breakdown of cognitive-symbolic order can lead to and
signal the loss of cultural integrity. This process is invariably accompanied by
the increased noise and sense of contradiction that is embodied in such systems
in the first place. Because part of the function of symbol systems is the
mediation between contradictory or otherwise incompatible or contraposed
realities, the fact or state of contradiction is normally disguised when symbol
systems are effectively integrated and functionally adaptive. We say that such
symbolisms can be ideologically resolved and this is usually sufficient in
itself. When symbol systems can no longer resolve internal contradictions they
are intended to mediate, they can be said to be relatively dysfunctional. Sense
of contradiction then becomes exposed and self-evident and the symbol systems
designed to ideologically cover them no longer sufficient.
It
is the case that critical systems of knowledge, including forms of science, seek
deliberately to expose the contradictions contained within symbol systems in
order to better understand the realities that are then exposed, and to at least
temporarily or relatively expose the false realities that are the product of
symbolic construction of reality. It is normal and expected therefore that these
kinds of systems of knowledge seek to stand apart and alienate themselves from
the everyday affairs of human society. It is also the case though that normal
society does not function well if
it is disinvested of its mythologies upon which its sense of symbolic order and
cultural integration depend. The social sciences provide a poor substitute for
the symbolic consonance such systems provide, and no one can be perennially
comfortable living only with a sense of contradiction.
The
intensive and extensive study of knowledge systems as these are culturally
situated and symbolically articulated, reveals that their coherence and
effectiveness depends upon achieving and maintaining a degree of integration
between culturally received forms of belief and behavior and cognitive models
and maps--those symbolic meanings that are articulated
through language and thought. This integration can be said to be brain
based, and knowledge systems are culturally dependent upon the context in which
they are situated and articulated. The variegation of patterning between
different knowledge systems is clear evidence of the difference in mental
template organization that people psychologically achieve. This template
patterning must be seen as a constraint of the hardwiring and functional
patterning of the brain. Simply put, brains must achieve a certain consensus of
its patterning within a shared cultural
context in order to achieve the degree of socio-cultural integration required.
The medium for this process to occur is largely
through language and behavior, as well as the carpentered symbolic
manifestations of the environment. Evidence from symbolic framing reveals how
much meaning structures are culturally variable and rooted to different
patterning of mental and psychological function. It is the wonderful plasticity
of the brain, a by-product of its enormous complexity, that allows it to achieve
so a broad range of variable patterning.
If
we compare, for instance, the knowledge structuration of a system such as
mathematics with that of a natural language, we will see that both systems will
utilize many of the same and common pathways, and that the underlying kind of
semantic structures and logical relations may be fundamentally
similar and differ only in their details and consequences. Learning
multiple languages permits the brain a plasticity
and multi-modality that intensive orientation within one language system
lacks.
Language
systems are important in this process of integration as mediational and
communicational devices. They can
be said to both mediate and to symbolically encode and concretize reality
through expression. All knowledge systems are ultimately based
upon and depend upon the language systems from which they are derived.
Learning a new kind of knowledge system requires preparation by learning the
language system that defines that knowledge system and its rules of articulation
and framing.
From
a semantic standpoint, we can make a strong claim for the linguistic relativity
of meaning structures, though this by no means connotes a form of linguistic
determinancy. Without development and learning of the language, the meaning
system that is embodied by and in
terms of that language, and the larger cultural reality that lies behind that
language, will be unavailable to the stranger. This is not to say that the
structural patterns of overt behaviors cannot thereby be understood or
studied--often language serves as much to obfuscate and rationalize reality as
much as it is meant to express and
reveal it. It is clear though, that language provides the vehicle by which the
brain can organize itself, and, in times of relearning, reorganize itself to
adapt to newer patterns of information received in the effective environment.
Another way of looking at this is
to say that language structures and frames meaning systems, without which
meaning systems would be incoherent, even schizophrenic. Language disorders are
a chief symptom of the development
of mental pathology. This is a very human kind of trait that characterizes human
intelligence for that of any other
known animal or creature. Meaning systems, for their effective organization and
function in the brain, depend upon their articulation in terms of some kind of
language. Though the basic relationship between meaning and the term is
arbitrary and symbolic, meanings that are arrived at usually by some form of
orginal implicit ollective agreement and social sanctioning and
participation, we cannot have the one without the other, and it is the term that
situates meaning within a social world, making it a phenomenon of social
construction. We can therefore say that the linguistic integration of culture and cognition
is fundamentally social psychologically mediated.
Different
knowledge cultures and cultural knowledge provide their own symbolic framing
mechanisms within culturally defined behavioral settings, ritual contexts, and
in terms of received expressions and meanings, that serve to reinforce every day
in basic ways the symbolic coherence and sense of legitimate reality that these
knowledge systems carry. This can be referred to as the symbolic embodiment and
articulation of knowledge cultures in the everyday world in which they exist.
Achievement
and learning of any knowledge system, especially to the point of mastery and
expertise that is expected upon a professional level, requires years of
investment in study and learning frameworks that are situated in language
context and reinforced through social relations. Such mastery is not achieved
overnight, in a week, or a month or even in a single year of instruction. Such
learning cannot take place in isolation or even in the kind of alienation that
is afforded by electronic
communication. It is very much the case when were are talking about different
kinds of knowledge cultures that
we can compare, for instance, the culture of physics
with the culture of chemistry or microbiology, and that the consequences
for each of these cultural-cognitive patterns in shaping worldview and relations
is dramatic and fundamentally different. As scientific cultures, they all share
a certain core of fundamental values and research priorities, just as they share
a common language in terms of their mother
tongue. But from that point of a similar core of knowledge structure and values,
the similarities diverge in ever greater ways and increasing degrees of
difference. Knowledge is becoming so stratified and hypercoherent, that even
subdisciplinary boundaries within broader fields are emerging as largely
mutually exclusive cultural knowledge territories.
The Symbolic
Definition of Culture
The
definition of cultural systems is central in human systems theory, as these
systems exist at the core of what it means to be human and in terms of how
humans organize and relate to their environments. We may say that culture
defines the world of meaning for human beings, and this meaning has both
subjective and objective aspects and consequences. This meaning furthermore is
fundamentally symbolic in structure in a manner very similar to that elaborated
by Levi-Strauss's structuralism. We can say, in other words, that human social
reality is culturally determined, and human cultural reality is symbolically
determined, and human symbolic reality is linguistically and psychologically
determined, in a manner that is context-bound to the environment in which it has arisen.
Cultural
Anthropology has been foremost the field of inquiry that has managed to
foreground and give scope and scientific significance to the problem and
definition of culture and its reality. It was this early recognition of the
centrality of importance of culture in understanding human reality that
attracted me as a student foremost to the discipline, much to my subsequent
misfortune. Before the rise of Boasian anthropology in North American and
Haddon's social anthropology in Great Britain and abroad, our notions of culture
were largely defined by an archaic and largely Eurocentric model of culture
history and classical philology. Other views emerged on the horizon in about the
same time frame, the views of Marx and Freud, for instance, and of Comte and
Durkheim and Weber, that served to some extent to break the strangle-hold of an
earlier European rationalism that saw all good things as coming from, and
referring to, a continental frame of reference.
A
century later, so much elaboration along related lines of inquiry has gone on in
the relativization of knowledge, in one field of scholarship or inquiry or
another, that the entire framework of critique has seemed to be carried to a
logical limit beyond which logic and reason breaks down completely in a kind of
narrow solipsistic language game, especially in the face of normal institutions
of science that have made tremendous breakthroughs in knowledge discovery and
technological advances.
In
considering the structure of the development of human civilization, what can be
called its cultural evolution, I cannot but help think of the perspective of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock
that sees the reel of reality speeding forward at ever increasing tempos with
each passing year. The rates and volumes of information communication and
knowledge production has been increasing exponentially, and the degree of
complexity and sophistication achieved in any one area, the requirements for
expertise and specialization so hypercompartmentalized, that many knowledge
systems, and the humans that articulate them, are spinning forward divisively
and independently without mutual awareness or even the possibility of mutual
consideration.
Worldview
has become a critically important, even strategic, concern of the 21st
Century. The worldwide web emerged on the scene in the last decade of the 20th
Century just in time to create a challenge of control and freedom of
information in regard to what can be considered
a rising global hegemony of ideas by large nation states and
multi-national corporations. Needless to say, the worldview of the world is at
best fragmentary and disparate, lacking in either wholeness or in sufficient
depth. We cannot speak of a single worldview, but only of many competing
worldviews, all of which are in themselves incomplete and insufficient as
worldview. Worldview is perhaps the ultimate aim of any knowledge system that
claims coherence and a distinct identity in the world. Of course, there are
institutions, individuals, groups, corporations and even entire nation states
that systematically and deliberately take advantage of the fractured state of
worldview to manipulate and persuade people, often with misinformation, into
some agenda of action or some relation that is asymmetrical or exploitative. At
times, it seems, that there may even be a majority of people in the world whose
function, it seems is to be part of a larger conspiracy to manipulate and
dispossess people's worldview and hold upon a sense of reality.
There
have been many competing definitions of culture. The one I have come to prefer,
though grounded in Anthropology, surprisingly is situated more in the field of
the sociology of culture, and concerns how humans symbolic construct meaning in
their lives, and construct the world in a symbolic manner.
The
fact of human cultural reality that has not been easily explained or even
directly dealt with is its vast continuity of culture from its origin until the
present. There have been no permanent discontinuous states in human evolution
that has been marked by an absence or a total loss of cultural context.
Individuals may become more or less dissociated from the cultural stream of
humanity, and many cultures may find themselves in isolated backwaters, but
culture remains continuous and for the most part forward flowing with time.
This
continuity of culture has assured an unbroken string of cultural transmission
from generation to generation from the first inception and rise of culture, much
as protocultural forms have been observed and studied among Chimpanzee groups in
the African rainforests. It has been a part of the human heritage, and its
continuity assures a common foundation of structural patterning whatever its
divergent manifestations may become in one instance or another. Humankind has
depended greatly upon this sense of fundamental continuity, so much so that we
have evolved in such a manner as to become culturally dependent creatures who do
not do well outside of the fold of its structure.
As
a cultural anthropologist, a deep and fundamental appreciation of culture and
its central place in our world is profoundly important and well abided. Of
course it is not the only facet of our knowledge and meaning that can be used to
characterize humankind and to differentiate people from one another, but without
it, all other knowledge systems run the risk of falling into their own
ideological conundrums and horizons.
I
employ readily the concept of culture, and especially, of knowledge culture, as
a mechanism for mediating between, and possibly even integrating, different and
divergent knowledge systems in the world, as well as the social realities that
underlie these systems. This brings to the foreground one of the central
functions of culture in our lives, and that is in the mediation of stress and
conflict of people in relation to their natural and social environments. Culture
as a mediational concept and construct is vitally important to the application
of cultural knowledge systems to various kinds of problem sets in human reality,
and even beyond in the larger natural world.
The
mediative aspects of culture have rarely been addressed as such, much less for
its broader implications in relation to the articulation of worldview and
different kinds of knowledge systems in the world. We can find in this the
foundation for the integration of
worldview and of different, disparate knowledge systems, and through this we can
seek to achieve a new form of synthetic integration of these systems in a
functional and efficacious manner in our world.
The Psychic
Unity of Humankind and the Science of Cultural Anthropology
The
hypothesis of a universal structure underlying the pattern variation of human
culture and history has been both proposed and opposed vehemently in the
literature. Some scholars would impose a completely relativistic model upon
anthropological study of humankind, claiming that there are no universals by
which to anchor and define a scientific paradigm of human reality. Furthermore,
it is clear that human reality is exceedingly complex and multi-factorial, and,
many would say, underdetermined from even a biological point of view. True
exceptionless universals have been hard to find.
I
propose that the universal basis for a genuine science of anthropology is in the
recognition and realization of the true scope of the psychic unity of humankind,
which suggests that it may not be the case that all people think the same way,
but it is possible that all people may, at least in theory, think alike. Such a
claim demands an empirical hook and anchor to some objective, empirical data in
reality that would support such a claim.
It
is in the brain of humankind that we can find, upon a deep level, structural
patterns that recur in varying form across cultural boundaries, but which occur
structurally in a similar manner in all cultures. If this is the case, as it
appears to be, then a strong case for the psychic unity of humankind as a
scientific universal can be made. One form of evidence for this strong claim is
in the potential intelligibility of all natural human language--or what might be
called its "inter-translatability."
The
proposal of a scientific basis for anthropology being founded upon universal
patterns of brain organization and function, in conjunction with other uniquely
human traits, does not preclude an equally strong argument for the
anthropological relativity of human knowledge and attitudes. Such a proposal
also, to be complete, requires its systematic extension, in an empirically
consistent manner that is equal to that stated for human cognition, to an
accountable explanation of social and cultural patterning and behavior by
people.
My
claim is that a certain class of methods, referred to as symbolic framing
devices, lends itself to a certain manner of interpretation of a wide range of
human behavior patterns, the logical explanation for which leads to the
conclusion that cultural patterns and differentials are tied to different
patterns of thinking in the brain. Rather than support a relativist claim, this
evidence strongly supports an argument for
the deep brain-based psychic unity of humankind, and the influence of
this noetic patterning, upon all that we see, think and do.
Cultural
Indeterminancy and Anthropological Relativity
The
anthropological definition of culture is imprecise and from a scientific
standpoint leaves much to be desired. There are in fact many competing
definitions of what is culture, and hence, no single received definition that is
agreed upon by all anthropologists. In fact, implicitly or explicitly,
definitions of culture are a big bone of contention among most anthropologist.
From
a human systems standpoint, I offer the following definition of culture that is
tentatively scientific:
Culture
is the sum total of the integrated patterning of the human experience, both in
terms that are individually subjective and collectively objective, and in terms
that are both ideal in form and material in expression. It includes the
language, behaviors, attitudes, institutions and symbolic systems created and
maintained by human beings.
This
definition is necessarily general and somewhat vague as far as the explication
of specific aspects of human culture, such as various institutional
manifestations in legal systems, in politics, economics or religion. Its
emphasis is not in the detail or particulars of cultural life as this is
experienced, but in the totality of culture as a system that is integrated, and
that serves the function of integration, of human reality. I have privileged
culture as something that has a central role and a pivotal force in the life of
humanity, that plays a critical part in the organization and expression of that
reality. Others surely would take issue with this argument. I have offered it
here, as an anthropologist, from the standpoint that we cannot seek a genuine
vision or version of human reality without somehow eventually coming to terms
with the definition of culture and the realities that are represented by it.
And
yet, culture remains an inherently difficult and slippery concept and sense of
reality to get hold of. It is not enough simply to dismiss this problem to the
explanation of inherent complexity of pattern, which is true but by itself
rather empty of import. Nor is it enough to consign the vagueness of culture to
the reflexively kind of paradox that it presents to us as culture
bearers--rather what is known as its subjective transparency and invisibility in
our own lives and the critical role it plays in shaping our lives.
I
invoke the principle of the critical indeterminancy of culture to explain its
inherent sense of difficulty in definition and explanation. I invoke the concept
of cultural indeterminancy as a fundamental condition of our reality in part to
demonstrate that the principle of cultural relativity, to which it is related,
is not and does not imply cultural determination or determinism. Culture is not
an inescapable background tyrant controlling all we think and do in the world.
As Herskovits wrote, it is not even a high fence preventing us from seeing into
other's cultural backyards. Culture can be said to be inherently underdetermined
in our lives, because it is not inherent or biologically preprogrammed. We do
not inherit it from our genes. We learn it from our social environments, and it
is transmitted socially between people on a daily basis. And yet, not unlike the
weak but ubiquitous force of gravity, culture does have a compelling influence
upon all of us the broader dimensions of which we cannot escape completely. It
keeps our feet in our shoes, and our shoes on the ground.
Cultural
indeterminancy can be accounted for mainly by the fact of the social
organization and patterning of culture, which entails that it is not so much a
"thing" that exists as a material object in the ground (an
archaeological version of culture as artifactual or textual expression) so much
as it exists as tendencies and frequencies of patterning in the background of
our lives, as certain predispositions, habits, reflexes, appetites and aversions
that we share in the world with one another. It can be said to exist in some
abstract but applied statistical sense, like the 2.5 kids in the average family,
even though there may be no clear-cut demonstration of its reality in actual
historical happenstance. Neither is it only an "idea" that gains some
physical manifestation in the real world, rather it is a field of meaning,
socially constructed and communicated, that lies behind the expression of the
"idea" itself. It can be seen therefore that from the standpoint of
cultural indeterminancy, neither "things" nor "ideas" are
sufficient by themselves to a definition of culture. These things are products
of culture, and stand as symbolic representations of culture, but they are not
culture itself.
I
would argue at length for the reality of culture that is independent of our own
imagination and construction, but I am not sure that this is necessary any
longer, and it is clear that other anthropologists have argued these issues at
great length, repeatedly, to no final consequence. From a strictly scientific
perspective (from, in other words, a human systems approach) we would have to
say that "culture" must exist as an independent reality, else we could
not conduct experiments upon it or arrive at any testable conclusions about it.
Either this, or failing to falsify our definitions, throw the concept of culture
out as something that just did not work from a scientific perspective. This
problem may not be so much a problem of the definition of culture, which in all
its indeterminancy is also therefore "indefinite" in outline or key
forms. It may be more a problem of the model of the kind of science that we seek
to apply to an understanding of culture. Clearly
the scientific model directly adapted from the physical or biological sciences
may be ill-suited for a systematic explication of cultural realities.
The
issue of culture and its indeterminancy I would state in relation to scientific
method and theory, as something like this: Where physical science play heavy
emphasis upon the "objectivity" of their empirical data-base and
measurement of phenomenal reality, social scientists place an equivalent form of
"inter-subjectivity" in their observational descriptions and reasoned
explanations. What is "objective" from one standpoint that tends to
occlude the identity and role of the observer in the process of observation,
becomes "intersubjective" when this identity in the process of
observation is implied and confirmed, and its social and communicative aspects
are also emphasized and not ignored.
We
must qualify this altered criteria with one set of limiting conditions, and this
is the fact that inter-subjective substantiation or validation is achievable, at
least in theory, by only independent means. By independent from a human point of
view, I would include a broader but relative sense of psychological, ideological
and even social and cultural independence. I would call it symbolic and
behavioral independence, and this implies on some level at least what can be
called both trans-personal and cross-cultural agreement.
In
specifying these terms for the scientific definition of human culture, it can be
seen that we have not come very far after all from a conventional definition of
science that is tied to its empirical methodology and rational philosophy. And
we can see that were we have arrived at is not so very different from where
Thomas Kuhn arrived in his argument for the socially paradigmatic structure of
scientific revolutions. Even if we more or less reject Kuhn's central thesis
about how scientific knowledge becomes articulated in exclusive scientific
communities, we must at least acknowledge in some minimal sense the role that
scientific culture and community plays in shaping the direction of knowledge
that this culture achieves by means of its normal and routine-operational praxis
and its received views of the world.
Cultural
indeterminancy is a critical concept underlying human knowledge systems,
including those that are scientific, and the phenomenon that I have come to
generally label as anthropological relativity of knowledge. We may say that
culture is an inherently underdetermined pattern that prestructures both our
world and our worldview, and that all knowledge we construct or derive about the
world, is constrained by and grounded to the same cultural patterning. It
perplexes our knowledge with a kind of existential uncertainty--we can attribute
this sense of uncertainty to the fact of death and marginality of some
experiences in our lives, but we can just as well apply to it the idea that
cultural indeterminancy underlying our knowledge systems of whatever kind leaves
us with rather shaky ground to stand upon.
The
criteria of independence of observation and measurement upon which the notion of
scientific objectivity (and its methods) is based, is the criteria of what can
be called relative non-arbitrariness of our knowledge. In other words, if our
knowledge or information or conclusions can be said to have been arbitrarily
arrived at, by some means fair or foul, then it cannot fulfill the criteria of
scientific objectivity. Non-arbitrary knowledge is information which exists and is confirmed
independently of our own judgment about it. If a biologists runs an experiment
expecting to find one kind of results, but in the course discovers another,
totally different kind of result, that person is obliged then to report the
result that was discovered and not merely what was expected. Of course, all too
often, especially in statistical applications, expectations can have a way of
influencing discovery and conclusions in ways that essentially represent a
manipulation of the data in arbitrary ways. What is arbitrary can also be either
unconscious or else just plain implicit to the social context of the experiment
or the language within which the description, the experiment and its
explanation, were derived. This is especially true when we commit in our train
of thinking certain informal or even formal fallacies of logic, such as the
hypostatization or reification of formal categories or typologies and the
misplaced concreteness of culturally defined meanings. An entire theoretical
paradigm, especially in the social sciences but even in the stricter physical
sciences, can run aground on the rocks and shoals of unquestioned initial
presuppositions and preconceived classifications and terminologies, especially
when these notions and their implications are not carefully and critically
thought out beforehand, but merely taken for granted as is.
Thus,
arbitrariness or nonarbitrariness is itself a relative concept. If our knowledge
were totally non-arbitrary, there would be no need for scientific curiosity and
inquiry in the first place, much less the serendipity of scientific discovery.
We would immediately and directly apprehend the total truth about natural
reality, or else we would just be satisfied with our experience of this reality
as is, without needing to apprehend its implicit patterns and structures in any
larger frame of reference. On the other hand, it is the recognition, or at least
the suspicion, of the arbitrariness of this or that point of view, that it is a
perspective arrived at by our own means and imposed upon reality to shape it to
our own devices and designs, that drives us forward to seek some alternative
point of view that seems somewhat less arbitrary, and from the point of view of
the natural patterning, a little closer at least to the actual truth of the
natural patterning of reality, the thing in itself, and not just as we would
have it be.
And
cultural indeterminancy and its underlying anthropological relativity
determines that for ourselves at least, the hardest realities to talk
about in any non-arbitrary,
scientific manner, are the realities about ourselves. By comparison it has been
relatively easy, once the basic periodic table of the elements was unraveled
from the evidence, to talk about atoms and their electrons and properties. Sense
of non-arbitrariness about these kinds of physical descriptions, especially when
set to mathematical terms and equations that work and that are empirically
derivable, is far less suspect and in a sense less relative on this level that
would be a similar sense of a definition of some periodic table of cultures that
is based, for instance, on kinship or economic patterns. It is hard to argue the
facts of measurement of a chemical reaction--it is much less difficult to argue
the theoretical attributions of "facticity" to ethnographic
descriptions or historical narratives of events. We can state this as a kind of
fundamental principle about anthropological relativity and cultural
indeterminancy of our knowledge systems:
The
further removed or more distant the object of our observations and measuurement
from ourselves, in kind or quality or property of pattern we observe, the more
non-arbitrary hence more objective manner we can attribute "truth" to
our facts.
The
complementary antithesis of this is the opposite principle:
The
closer our descriptions and observations are in kind or quality or property of
pattern to ourselves, even in a social sense of reality, the less non-arbitrary
and hence less objective the knowledge and the manner with which we can
attribute "truth" to our facts.
It
seems we can contrapose the mighty but small atom against the larger but weaker
human upon the opposite ends of a spectrum that is defined by relative arbitrariness and certainty about
knowledge. If we realize at some point that, as the only observers and knowers
in town, all our knowledge is ultimately situated at the human end of the
spectrum, then we can see the dilemma this results in terms of the inherent
anthropological relativity of our knowledge systems. We can, as "pure"
scientists pretend that this is not so, or, better yet, presume it away, but we
cannot really escape its implications and consequences for our knowledge systems
and the constraints that we must deal with in terms of the scientific discovery
and definition of reality.
Cultural
Mediation
To
a great extent, the mediational function of culture has largely been ignored or
unaddressed in any scholarly manner. Many studies allude to it, but almost none,
with but a few noteworthy exceptions, deal with the issue in any direct or
decisive manner. Evidence suggests that mediation of reality is one of the
principle, if not the central, function of culture in the first place. This can
be justified evolutionarily in terms of natural human history and it can be
found to be equally applicable today
in the most advanced systems that have ever existed.
This
mediation function of culture arises from its symbolic processes of integration
of reality, and it can be found to occur at different levels and serving
different kinds of ends. We may thus
see that the mediation function of knapping a point from a core and hafting it
to the end of an arrow in order to kill the next available buffalo or deer, is
upon a fundamental symbolic level little different from the priest who chants a
passage from the bible every night in prayer before turning into bed. The
purposes and consequences may be different, but the symbolic
mediational aspects of both processes are very similar in form and
function.
Because
I believe the mediative aspects of culture have largely been ignored and left
unaddressed as serious scientific issues, the capacity and potential to
"capitalize" upon these critical facets of human society and culture
have been somewhat unrecognized and unrealized. These intermediative aspects of
cultural integration can proceed upon different levels as well. Analytically, I
will recognize four basic levels that can be further subdivided: 1. The
individual; 2. The family; 3.The community or group; 4. Inter-community or
inter-group relations. We can find symbolic and cultural mediational functions
occurring and articulated upon each of these levels as well as between these
different levels. Furthermore, we can find language in various forms as a
communication medium that facilitates this mediative function. News programs and
newspapers are excellent examples of communication that serves a mediative
function--in this case it goes beyond merely "informing" a reader or
viewer about events in the
world. It serves to reinforce the individual's own psychological constructions
about the world and that person's relationship to a larger world. Events that
happen far away can become
intensely personalized even if there is no other than symbolic connection to the
event.
The
mediative function of culture can be said to accomplish the following kinds of
ends:
1.
stress reduction, both psychologically and socially
2.
to reinforce relational patterns
3.
to minimize and channel aggression
4.
to prevent and remedy conflict (sometimes to promote conflict)
5.
to promote and organize cooperation for different ends
6.
to organize knowledge, values, meaning structures and behaviors within a
symbolically shared framework
Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2009. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.
Last Updated: 09/18/09