Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

CULTURE

The politics of culture

The breeze of post-colonialism

Today, the politics of the use of the concept of culture is such an explosive topic that no anthropologist can afford to remain naive about the issues involved. Anthropology is not an innocent endeavour—a point the debate makes abundantly clear. At the same time it raises questions that appear to threaten the very political and academic viability of the discipline—at least as practised in modernist guise. Post-modernism has taken its deconstructive toll, while the voices of post-colonialism have been even more devastating, though in many ways fair, in their criticism of the grand narratives of anthropology. Combined, this is a literature that has played an important role in implementing certain major shifts of focus in the ethnographic ‘eye’. One thing is certain: anthropology today is not what it was a decade ago.To a certain extent the subject is now in a period of confusion, indeed breast-beating, as each new post-colonialist treatise is published: we find within such literature the anthropologist replacing the missionary as the ‘bad guy’ of the Western world. For many of us the breezes of post-modernism and post-colonialism have been refreshing. Be that as it may, there is no simple answer to the accusations that anthropology has served as handmaiden to colonial conquest and government, and for the most part was developed within intellectual frameworks distinctly modernist in design (see Ardener 1985). Although most anthropologists working among the colonized have viewed their programme as one to alleviate the weight of colonialism by reducing its mistakes, anthropology—at least to the extent it has considered itself a social science and not of the arts—has nevertheless inadvertently served colonialism’s aim. It has also served the hegemony of modernist programmes of development and ways of thinking. How did this occur?

The creation of the exotic other, or cultural relativism gone wrong

The claim is that in its representations of other cultures, anthropology has transformed the ‘other’ into anthropological object, and in so doing has reified, homogenized and exoticized the lives of other peoples. Within this gaze it is difficult to glimpse real, living, experiencing, meaning-making human beings who follow particular lifeways. Rather, such lives are reduced to the ‘objective’ abstract structures created by the anthropological expert, and the people who live them are thereby silenced. Anne Salmond suggests (1995:41) that in this act of silencing the other, the ethnographic other becomes as object, a resource for the

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self. As she notes, objects have negative properties in Western thought, for they cannot speak, think, or know. In their describing and their measuring, anthropologists have, in her words (1995:23), produced ‘others’ as ‘exotic curiosities for European consumption’!

Thus we see that the liberality of the notion of cultural pluralism within modernist constructions is now being strongly contested. What was considered to be the healthy route of cultural relativism is being reinterpreted as the weedy path of a diseased exoticism. For instance, McGrane argues (1989) that the idea of the superiority of Western culture, particularly its spectacular scientific success, became the potent and decidedly unliberal yardstick through which anthropologists assessed the accomplishments of other cultures. There is the superior Western culture, and then there are all the rest as contrast. A sharp divide is created, with epistemological privilege always on the side of the West. In general, the process of exoticizing other cultures has been intensified through this tendency of characterizing their salient features in contrastive frames to our own (cf. Ingold 1994b:331).The content varies somewhat in accordance to context, but in each contrastive frame, we find lurking the underlying idea that ‘unsophisticated’ technology is understood to entail weak religion, weak thought, weak ritual, weak politics, weak economics.Thus, we have science, they have magic; or we have history, they have myth; we have high-tech agriculture, they have subsistence practices; we have priests, they have shamans; or we have scientists, they have shamans; we have philosophy, they have beliefs; we are literate, they are illiterate; or we have writing, they have oral literature; we have theatre, they have ritual; we have government, they have elders; we have rationality, they are pre-logical; we have individualism, they have community—and so on through a myriad of cultural traits that are suggestive of a thesis long popular in the history of Western thought that equates ‘simple’ technology with simple minds. Such contrasts do indeed play havoc with the original tenets of cultural relativism, where understanding and judgement were meant to be relative to local context.

Part of the problem has been methodological, for anthropologists have steadfastly used as analytical categories such concepts as science, religion, economics, politics, kinship, society. Such Western classifications, while highly relevant to our own highly compartmentalized existence and history, have proven to be very clumsy tools through which to understand the perspectives of other peoples. Moreover it means that the very vocabulary that anthropology has used for analysis, its own definitional terms, have carried a perverse and hidden agenda: the other’s local was to be understood within the context of our local,

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which in the end became a universal standard, not only of judgement, but for description as well. This has placed the other in a true doublebind situation. The relativist (and humanist) intention that insisted upon respect for the local could hardly be achieved through such a methodology.

The politics of exotica

Thus there is little wonder that the post-colonialists accuse anthropology of the production of fictionalized exotica. Its use of the concept of culture has well served the purpose of distancing ourselves—politically, epistemologically, morally, technologically, mentally—in time and space from all other peoples of the world (see Fabian 1983; Ardener 1985). Through modernist classification, a powerful ‘primitivism’ has been created that freezes most of the peoples of the world within a time (neolithic, medieval) and space (Asia, Africa, Amazonia) a hopeless distance from our own. As Johannes Fabian says (1983), it would be impossible to achieve a conversation with the other, one based upon mutuality and respect, through such a programme of study that so relishes exotic difference. The ‘catch-22’ (Heller 1961) for anthropologists has been that it would only be through establishing such coeval conversations that we could learn the discipline’s prejudices: without the conversations, we could not come to know the prejudice; while, because of the prejudice, we could not know the benefits of conversation! This has been an important step for anthropology—to recognize the necessity of achieving a mutual, coeval exchange to the endeavour of understanding other perspectives on ways of living.

The political implications of this process of creating exotic cultures are truly awesome. Just think of being frozen in neolithic time, and your chances of dealing equitably with those who recognize only themselves as existing today! Exoticism provides impetus to ‘first-world’ development projects, though which ‘inferior’ forms of life can ‘assimilate’ the knowledge of a ‘superior’ sort of people in order to live a ‘better life’. Exoticism plays into the politician’s hand by reinforcing and contributing to Western antipathies toward other peoples of the world (cf. Said 1978 on the effects of Western Orientalism). Culture and difference have become the most powerful political paradigms fuelling political action in the modern world (cf. Eller 1997), where for instance a common strategy of nation-states is the fixing of cultural identities (in the name of ethnicity) within its territorial boundaries toward the end of centralized control and domination.We know all too well the dangers of these notions of ethnic purity and ethnic separation.

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Many people are driven to conceive of themselves in this way, and thus to devise and proclaim their own cultural distinctiveness (cf. Eller 1997). As Sahlins remarks:

the cultural self-consciousness developing among imperialism’s erstwhile victims is one of the more remarkable phenomena of world history in the late twentieth century. ‘Culture’—the word itself, or some local equivalent—is on everyone’s lips …For centuries they may have hardly noticed it. But today, as the New Guinean said to the anthropologist, ‘If we didn’t have kastom, we would be just like white men’!

(Sahlins 1994:378)

In Amazonia, people who never lived before within a bounded universe are today instructed by national governments to devise boundaries for themselves—and to live in accordance to their ‘authentic’ cultures; many peoples who had no singular self-denominations are now creating them in order to deal with national governments, and are recognized by government agents only insofar as they display the practice of their ‘authentic’ culture, such as through the wearing of indigenous dress and their lack of political savvy in dealing with these self-same agents. The notion of culture is a true monster, if we agree with Abu-Lughod who argues (1999:13) that the concept of culture is always contaminated (as is the concept of race) by the politicized world.

It is because the notion of culture can so easily be used in pernicious ways that Abu-Lughod argues for the abandoning of its use in anthropology. However, it is for that very reason—its prevalence in everyday and political talk—that anthropology should not turn its back on the concept. As Cerroni-Long argues (1999), times demand that anthropologists actively counteract the dangers of ‘cultural fundamentalism’, in all its colours and practices. Multi-culturalism, transculturalism, transnationalism are phrases in the air, so to speak. The strength of anthropology is that we appreciate multi-perspectivism: there are a multiplicity of colonial discourses and post-colonial ones, and a plurality of potential and active subversions of both. Our recognition of this universe of pluralities is surely anthropology’s real competence.We should therefore remain firmly and reflectively engaged with the concept of culture, so as to resituate it so as to play into our strengths, one of which is the possibility of destabilizing all those grand narratives that underpin ongoing relationships of cultural domination. It is not the word ‘culture’ that is at fault.The word is not responsible for the sins of its academic and

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political use. Rather, the problem has been the modernist paradigms of knowledge within which it has been placed, which entail very specific relationships of domination and subordination. Insofar as anthropologists collude with the postulates that provide weight to such frameworks of knowledge, the anthropological task is hardly innocent.

See also: Classification, Community, Myth, Post-Modernism,

Society, Stereotypes, The Unhomely, World-View

CYBERNETICS

Cybernetics might be described as: the ‘elucidating of patterns in recursive, nonlinear systems’ (Harries-Jones 1995:3). More generally it deals with the patterned nature of the world: with the connectedness of phenomena and the connections between things; with the way patterns of connectedness both relate spheres of life and experience that might circumstantially seem unrelated, and are ultimately responsible for the existence of those seemingly unrelated phenomena in the first place. Cybernetics takes seriously Whitehead’s counsel (1925):

[T]he misconception that has haunted philosophical literature throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence’.There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

Cybernetics is the elucidation of the circuitry of the world, and how that circuitry can best be appreciated and maintained for the future existence both of human societies and their relation to the natural environment.

One of the founders of cybernetic thought was the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. It is with his work that we begin here, therefore, before exploring briefly how others have applied cybernetic thinking since.

Gregory Bateson

In his intellectual biography of Bateson (1904–80), Harries-Jones describes him as ‘the most brilliant holistic scientist of this century’ (1995:3). Holism was a key word for Bateson; an understanding of our human part in the whole ‘living system’ that was the world he saw as

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crucial for our earthly survival. Furthermore, anthropology had to be a non-specialist, ‘interdisciplinary discipline’ because only in a holistic (however seemingly seeming amateurish) use of all manner of information could it expect to tackle the ‘vast intricacies’ of the worlds of cultural construction and social interaction (Bateson 1959:296). Hence the need for an anthropological understanding to connect up with ethnology, ecology, biology, philosophy, aesthetics and psychoanalysis. This might then give onto a new ecological world-view where aesthetics and consciousness combined to form a ‘sacred’ recognition of the one-ness of life, of life’s ontological monism.

Holism called for a new language, one which transcended the long tradition in Western metaphysic of positing dualisms: between human and animal, between nature and culture, between mind and body. In this search, Bateson was variously inspired: by the English poet William Blake, by his naturalist father, by his own fieldwork among the Iatmul of New Guinea (1936). Significantly, he was also inspired by the new theme of ‘cybernetics’, as coined by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener.Wiener’s realization that the social-scientific concept of ‘information’ and the natural-scientific concept of ‘negative entropy’ were in fact synonymous represented, for Bateson, ‘the greatest single shift in human thinking since the days of Plato and Aristotle’ (1951:177). Or, in Wiener’s own words (1949:18):

The notion of the amount of information attaches itself very naturally to a classical notion in statistical mechanics: that of entropy. Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization: and the one is simply the negative of the other.

Let me backtrack, however, and offer nine basic steps to a Batesonian appreciation of the ‘recursiveness’, the circuiting, of life on earth.

I: ‘Maps are not territories’

According to Bertrand Russell’s theory of logical types, there is an inevitable discontinuity between a class and its members; the term used for the class belongs to a different level of abstraction from the terms used for members. Bateson borrowed this Russellian insight and made it fundamental to his conceptualization of the universe of human behaviour. Logical types and levels, for Bateson, characterize, differentiate, hierarchize and interrelate world, biosphere, society, body

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and mind; and there is an infinite regress of such contexts. For example, there is a world of material objects, of things-in-themselves, which is distinct from (which is known differently to) the world of human bodies, of metabolic supplies and channels, which is in turn distinct from the world of the mind, of narratives, thoughts and ideas.The mind can thus be said to be made of parts and processes which are not themselves mental but metabolic, while consciousness represents a transformation of unconscious metabolic processes.

Linking one logical level or context to another is a complex network of meta-relations. Moving from the world of one logical type or level to another always entails, for Bateson, a transformation of knowledge: a recodification of how and what is known. Between distinct logical types or levels, however, there can be no direct knowledge and no ‘complete’ communication. Hence, the metabolic processes which give rise to the rich content of consciousness are not themselves subject to direct introspection or voluntary control. Similarly, ‘maps are not territories’; the worlds of human experience are distinct from a noumenal world of external things, of things-in-themselves. There are no rocks, trees, or even people in the human mind, Bateson is wont to say, there are only ideas of rocks, trees and people. Things enter the human world of experience, of meaning and communication, by our ideas of them— whatever else they may be in their thingish world. Ideas are the only things human beings can know and we cannot otherwise imagine the world ‘as it is’.

Ideation, the processes of perceiving and thinking and communicating about perceiving and thinking, involves a transformation or codification (translation or substitution) which might variously be described as ‘symbolic classification’, ‘naming’ or ‘mapping’.We attribute names and qualities to things and so ‘produce’ them by reproducing them in a world of human experience. Ideation Bateson describes as itself an operation of logical typing; but since direct communication between logical types remains impossible, the ‘things’ that enter our minds as ideas are at best guesses at the things-in-themselves. For the mind as such is a no-thing, existing only in ideas, while ideas are also nothings; they are not the things they refer to.What occupies the mind, in short, is an abstract account of a concrete external world which otherwise remains itself, distinct and mysterious.

What ideas do involve are differences.

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II: ‘Information is difference which makes a difference’

The mind operates with and upon differences; differences are the unit of psychological input. So that if minds are aggregates of ideas, then what minds contain are differences: ideas and differences are synonymous. For to perceive something, to recognize a thing, is to recognize a difference between it and some other thing or some other perception. Things are thus defined by and through their differences. To the extent that things enter the world of human experience they do so as aggregates of their differences.

Another way of saying this is that human thought is relational. We perceive and think in terms of relationships—difference is a relationship—and not in terms of things-in-themselves.Things enter the world of human experience (are seen as separate and real) only through their interrelations; they are epiphenomena of the relations to which we perceive them to be a party: relations to ourselves, to other things, and to themselves in other contexts.

Information about the world Bateson then defines as differences which make a difference, which human beings see, and see as relevant, at a particular time. Information is ‘news of difference’ (1980:37), while maps are organizations of news of difference.

III: ‘All phenomena are appearances’

Since the mental worlds of human beings are about maps, and maps of maps, and not about things-in-themselves, all human phenomena can be said to be abstractions, their truth-value turning upon appearances. The Berkeleyian motto, ‘To be is to be perceived’, therefore applies to all human behaviour, for the human universe has no objective features. Even so-called natural-scientific knowledge shares this character; Euclidean geometry, for example, is not about space as it exists but as it is defined by a human perceiver or imaginer.There is an infinite number of potential or latent differences and relations between and within things in the external world but only some of these become ‘effective’, meaningful or manifest in the world of human ideation—differences which have made a difference and become information. Hence, we create the world we perceive, editing and selecting from the noumenal universe so that it conforms with our beliefs, with our vision of ‘order’: of the orderly relations between objects.

To this extent, objects (as well as their being experienced) are subjective creations. Indeed, all thinking and all human experience can be said to be subjective: a matter of the images our brains make about

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the ‘external world’, a matter of the mediation of our sense organs and neural pathways. Even pain is a created image. And while nineteenthcentury science founded itself on the claim that this subjectivity was ‘in fact’ objective, it was the latter which was illusory. Human knowledge and conditions of knowledge are always, and inevitably, personal; knowledge is a relationship in the eye of the beholder.As Bateson pithily phrases it (1951:212): ‘man lives by those propositions whose validity is a function of his belief in them’.

In this way, the subjective viewer and the personal world which he or she creates can be seen as one; since things-in-themselves never enter the mind, only complex transforms of these, there is a one-ness between the perceiver and the things perceived. Rather than subjects and objects there exist subject—objects and perceiver—perceiveds: always the purposive organism in interaction with its created environment; always the territory of things and objects filtered into a mental world of subjective images and maps. Bateson talks of the ‘mental determinism’ immanent in the universe (1972:441).

In this way too, worlds are multiple. If order is defined as the privileging of one or more of an infinite number of possible relations between objects and events, between things in the world, then the perception of any two viewers, or the same viewer at different times, need not overlap. Even two individuals in interaction have a freedom regarding how they interpret: both how they codify the world and how they act upon their codifications. And differences multiply. Because to assert one thing, privilege one pattern of relations, is to deny something else.

Finally, visions of order are self-fulfilling. Human individuals live in worlds of their own perceiving, codifying, creating, imagining, because they set out to establish a correspondence between what is in their heads and what is outside them, and in large measure they succeed. They see what they want to see and want to see what they see. Or, as Bateson puts it, value is a determinant of perception, and perception a determinant of value; evaluation and codification are aspects of the same central mental phenomenon.We must wish things to be as we see them, and vice versa, or our actions will bring us frustration and pain instead of success. In short, in the perception of a particular set of relations between things, a particular order in the external world, value and information meet.

IV: ‘Patterns connect’

While there are discontinuities between logical types and levels, between classes and members, Bateson also posits the existence of corresponding

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patterns between the components of particular types and levels which connect those types and levels. Similar relations between parts evince meta-patterns: shapes and forms of an aesthetic kind. The process of recognizing connecting patterns between logical types and levels, Bateson calls ‘abduction’. He finds it in metaphor and in dream, in parable, allegory, poetry, totemism, and comparative anatomy, and he believes that what he calls ‘abductive systems’ characterize great regions of nature and human life, linking the body and the ecosystem (1980:158).

For example, stereoscopic vision, provided by two eyes which are logically discrete but perceive corresponding patterns between the component parts of the worlds they perceive, amounts to an abductive system. Similarly, a routine relationship of exchange between two people is an abductive system: a relationship Bateson describes as a double view of something or a double description. Not internal to a single person, a relationship is based on the recognition by the parties concerned of corresponding patterns of behaviour and response on each side. Or again, an abductive system characterizes the process of perceiving an environment. A difference between a standing and a falling tree is transformed into a difference between neurons in the human brain; the physical event is translated into an idea, a piece of information, which bears a commensurate pattern between component parts. The mental process entails a sequence of interactions between neuronal parts, which is a coded version, a transformation, of events perceived in the external world. There is a relationship of commensurate difference which connects the two.

V: ‘Mental processes are recursive’

A clear emphasis in Bateson’s understanding of how we come to perceive both difference and sameness is upon the movement inherent in mental processes.We come to know difference by cognitively moving between two or more things, or moving ourselves relative to a thing, or moving between two of our cognitions of a thing. And we come to know sameness by abducting, by moving between patterns of relations between things and appreciating the meta-patterns that they share. Knowing entails cognitive movement.

And we remember these movements, Bateson next argues. If we value the information which they provide us, then the cognitive movement is reinforced and comes to be habitual: a habitual pattern or pathway between neurons in the brain, a habitual association of ideas in the mind. These remembered, habitual movements, Bateson calls a ‘cybernetic

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