Recently, I argued, controversially, that one type of “othering” is what distinguishes anthropology from the other sciences concerned with humanity (from neurology to sociology). Anthropology, as disciplined practice, is here to tell “us” that human beings are always potentially “other” to any generalization about them.  And a subset of “us” (anthropologists) has to keep finding ways to do this more carefully. To approach this argument from a different point of view (bias), let’s consider the classical tension brought out by Boas (and many others before and since) between, on the one hand, the “psychic unity of mankind” (all humans have the same brain bequeathed by evolution), and, on the other hand, the irreducible local and historical make of actual human conditions. This is not the case of the “universal” VS. the “particular” but rather the universality of the particularity of the human (and possibly all life). For humanity, for example, one can safely say that all human groups develop languages (most of) the people caught by them understand, and, most significant, all these languages can be learned by all humans—though it can be difficult for most.

Language is what I generally mention when teaching the fundamental concerns of anthropology, before moving on to other matters, say sex/gender or food production/agriculture (the raw into the cooked). Boas, in his general introduction (1938), mentioned various oddities in etiquette. He also mentioned repeatedly that all breaches to the expected in some group raise emotional responses among the people caught by the assembly. In my own graduate introduction into anthropology, in the late 1960s, I was taught all this through the questions raised by the multiplicity of marriage and descent regulations and practices—something that has all but disappeared from such introduction, as far as I can tell.

I’ll try today to start with something else that is a human universal: music. I will intersperse this with comments about “kinship,” hopefully to trigger some interest among current students to get back to something that remains as “real” as ever (though it may now be labeled “gender” and “class reproduction”).

I explore music because students, earlier this Fall, used music to critique Saussure and his obvious emphasis on the verbal rather than on other media of communication. I have heard many times that music can express emotions much better than any discursive effort that relies mostly on the verbal (though some would point at poetry as an argument against this). The students, perhaps unwittingly, may have been channeling Merleau-Ponty on experience and the “primacy of perception.”

But, to play anthropologists challenging “our” common sense,…

Music is certainly one candidate for attempts to differentiate homo sapiens sapiens from other apes (but perhaps not from the Neanderthals who appear to have used flutes). All apes vocalize. Whether any sing may depend on how one defines singing. The question is the same as whether various calls made by all apes classify as language. Interestingly, recent writing about this broadening of what is to count as language or music echoes the reluctance to make humans special. Paradoxically perhaps, the best evidence against “speciesism” is the work of sociobiologists, for example that of Sarah Hrdy, an anthropologist who writes about “Mother nature” (1999).  In that book, she carefully reviews all we know about the higher apes of Africa, and particularly the females with children, without making a distinction between the species whether the original research is “ethological” or “ethnographic.” About all anthropologists I know find this approach very hard to accept and it is not taught as possible proper anthropology.

So, eventually, the initial stance regarding humans making music is that not only do they sing (talk) but that they do so in many different ways that keep changing even as they trigger strong emotions. To the extent that this is an hypothesis about a universal, one then has to look for the evidence (including evidence that some humans do not sing much differently from other apes–but this is very dangerous as it might bring us back to the pre-Boasian anthropology of human evolution).

So, I am with Boas and will postulate the “psychic unity of mankind” on the matter of music. As Boas insisted, one of the evidence has to be archaeological: there are signs that humans made music from at least 60,000 years ago based on the musical instruments that have survived. One may imagine that singing is much older but it does not leave any trace until, many millennia later, it became possible to translate singing into visual marks and notations. The other body of evidence for the universality of music is ethnographic: All human groups that have been reported to Euro-Americans do make music; they make music even in the worst of circumstances; and the music, is recognizable by all as music—even when it sounds unpleasant to many.

However…

Given the small number of basic musical instruments (wind, string, percussion) beside the voice the mythical Martian, particularly if leaning towards sociobiology and Darwinian evolutionism, arriving on earth, might not expect the multiplicity of musical genres, as well as the extent to which the musical genres of people A may grate on the ears of people B (or why some of B might adopt some genres from A even when B’s parents object). Boas, a real “other” among the Inuit, Kwakiutl and others, took the alternate route. He marveled at the multiplicity and asks us to do the same, and then to generalize. Many of his students and contemporaries in Europe also marveled at the multiplicity of kinship vocabularies and other practices. Many who followed him led the discipline into all sorts of blind alleys. But anthropologists, I am convinced, should continue to move towards the other in order to critique or justify any universal statement about humanity.

To make all this more concrete perhaps, I am linking below various examples of what human beings keep producing, musically. This sample tells more about my haphazard exploration of various YouTube rabbit holes than about anything else. I am not a musicologist but I am fascinated both by the multiplicity of the musics human can made, as well as sometimes surprised at what I “like” and what I do not… You will notice that I link here four pieces recorded in China. My idea here is that listening will lead you to ask such questions as: Are the pieces from China “Chinese”? What are your emotional reactions to any of the pieces? What are you reacting to? What do you imagine others (including the original performers) might have felt?

      Lata Mangeshkar

Over the past few days I discovered some things that were somewhat new for me that led me to reassemble some older stuff. One piece of this stuff is a popular (though perhaps fringe) passion for “what if…” stories. This passion is often credited to Dick’ The man in the high castle where he explores how people might have responded in the United States if Germany had won WWII and occupied two third of the country.  Alt histories kind of fascinate me also as another entry into the wonders (and sometimes horrors) I feel when discovering what human beings have actually done.  An alt history is also a thought experiment about human possibilities (as is much science fiction).

In several publications from various part of the political spectrum, I found that this enthusiasm for alt histories was often paired with a discussion of “counterfactuals.” I had never encountered the word/concept but it struck me as something I could do something with. Simply put, a perpetual motion machine is impossible but steam engines have always been possible, even before any human beings thought about them. Steam engines, until late in the 17th century were “counterfactuals.” Traveling near the speed of light is a counterfactual given that we do not have any idea how it might be done. Traveling faster than light is just impossible and this limit may be a physical law.

Chiara Marletto, the theoretical physicist who wrote the book (2021) that is currently making conversations about counterfactuals … factual, does not write extensively about what concern cultural anthropologists but it may be possible to restate some of the most classical disputes in the field in similar terms. Possible words in any language that have never been observed in use would be an example of a cultural counterfactual. So tellus tellas allabouter. The why or whether she looked alloty like ussies and whether he had his wimdop like themses shut. Notes and queries, tipbits and answers, the laugh and the shout, the ards and downs. Now list to one aneither and liss them down and smoothen out your leaves of rose.  (James Joyce as quoted by McDermott and McDermott 2010)
For example “aneither” is one among many words James Joyce coined that had never been attested until 1939. At least one anthropologists (or two) have now used the word for what it can do when used for a critique of educational policy (McDermott and McDermott 2010). The concern with possible words never yet observed is an old one in historical linguistic which even developed a way of writing such words: until 1939 “aneither” would have been written *aneither with the asterisk indicating its “counterfactuality.” Of course counterfactual words are produced not only by artists (Joyce, Shakespeare and such) but by about everybody with wit—and often by children “playing” not to mention by people who learn some language late in life.

Closer to the most factual cultural anthropology, the now fact that many Americans cover themselves with tattoos was something of a counterfactual until the 1970s in the United States. Before that only a very few men, sailors mostly, had them but having tattoos was always a possibility given their ubiquity around the world (and even in European history) among many other “techniques of the body.” Even now, tattooing is not quite the same of it may be among the Maori among whom tattoos are totally “factual”—including in the Durkheimian sense. And, of course, they are now factual in Euro-America—as those who do not find them particularly appealing can attest.

One of the other reasons for this post is a comment from students echoing much that has been written by anthropologists of the past half-century on the dangers of “othering.” These were most powerfully stated by Said (1978), I understand the critique, particularly as it applies to 19th century Euro-Americans of the type who drove Boas, Durkheim, Malinowski, etc., to build a whole discipline critical of easy generalizations, if not laws, about human beings. Very obviously, (counter-)factuals in culture imply a position/point of view/bias from which any cultural trait becomes visible to others/us.
Among the many things they brought to the attention to Euro-Americans (who mostly did not listen) where such matters as the reality that tattoos are factual among the Maori and,as I put it today, mostly counterfactual among Europeans. M. Mead followed the same path when she insisted that what she observed among a few Samoan girls be taken seriously by American psychologists (Thorndike?), particularly when they imagined that they could generalize psychological processes by only looking at the people they kept in their labs. On the other side of the Atlantic, Malinowski challenged Freud on the Oedipus complex by insisting the people of the Trobriand should be taken seriously.

The students made their comment after reading Mauss on the Kula ring, the potlatch, and other ways of gifting that are not found among Europeans. I can see it is easy to miss why Mauss picked up on these, as bringing out that some counterfactuals are factual “over there” and thereby can be used to, precisely, challenge the argument that, if something has never been brought out so far among social scientists, then it is impossible. It may also be that students are yearning for what Malinowski called “the natives’ point of view”—a goal that is probably fundamentally impossible (rather than difficult or counterfactual).
This, as far as I am concerned, is one of the points of anthropology: to challenge easy generalization to “humanity” based on the observation of what, without ethnographical accounts of some “other,” would not be noticed to be applicable to only a very limited range of people. This is what Mead once called the “anthropological veto.”

I might even dare to write that yielding this veto is only possible through the “othering” that is a primary tool of anthropologists—or, to stay with today’s theme the veto requires a determined search for what will then, after careful ethnography, cease to be “counterfactuals.” It is a difficult and somewhat dangerous tool to yield appropriately as it is very easy to fall into thinking that one’s one predilections (or dislikes) are more basically interesting. Actually, it is not necessary to travel across the globe to face that which has not yet been observed. One can go around the corner from the university as long as one determinedly look for that which has never been noticed. Many of my favorite recent anthropologists and students have brought such observations from many settings in the United States that had never been noticed before thereby expanding the boundaries of the “possible among human beings”—as well as suggesting how much work it might take to make that which is possible practically impossible here or there.

This post was triggered by something in the New York Times about “Julia,” a chimpanzee in a sanctuary in Zambia so named by the observing humans. The humans noticed her sticking blades of grass in her ears and this being adopted by other chimpanzees in the same sanctuary, and then passed on in further generations even after she died (Natalie Angier “Meet the Other Social Influencers of the Animal Kingdom” May 7, 2021). The original paper by Andrew Whiten (“The burgeoning reach of animal culture.” Science April 2, 2021) worked off a definition of culture ” as all that is learned from others and is repeatedly transmitted in this way, forming traditions that may be inherited by successive generations.” This was presented as part of the argument against human centeredness. “Culture” must have universal evolutionary advantages for all life forms as it allows “traits” (such as “grass in ears”) to move “horizontally” (through discovery/learning/teaching) among adults and their descendants as well as “vertically” (through genetic drift and biological reproduction).

I will leave the evolutionary implications to the authors of the various articles quoted by Angier, and translated into NYT speak. What fascinates me is the production of the trait in the history of the group. Van Leewen et al. who first reported on the case emphasize that they could not find anything functional to the behavior. They titled their paper “group-specific arbitrary tradition”—an excellent definition of “culture” (and a better one than Whiten’s). Interestingly, no one in the small crowd indexed by the journalist appears to have looked for the origin of the behavior, thereby suggesting that it was an “original.” Someone who commented on the first reporting of the case in the Smithsonian Magazine wondered whether Julia had picked up on something she saw a human do, e.g. wear earrings. But we are not given any evidence on the (pre-)history of the behavior. So, we are told of a behavior (“grass-in-hear”) that is, as Lévi-Strauss once said, subsequently “adopted on a collective mode” (1971:  560) and thus becomes a “trait” somehow distinctive (Bourdieu 1977 [1970]:5) of the group.

As a cultural anthropologist, I also want to emphasize that the trait is not “good to eat” (useful in some functional way) but appears to be “good to think”—to play with another one of Lévi-Strauss’s pithy sayings (1963 [1962]: 89). I would translate it to say that it was “good for fun” or “good for beauty” and perhaps also, more darkly, “good for domination.”  In any event it is good to make a further future.

Van Leenwen told a journalist that keeping a blade of grass in one’s ear is no mean feat. Those who attempted it, including the observing human, found it painful and they struggled before succeeding. This is actually true of all “techniques of the body” whether they involve cuttings, piercings, colorings, reshapings, etc., of this or that part of the body. Displaying oneself as somehow appropriate is almost always difficult, if not painful and expensive. But it may also make you beautiful. It is not really chance that the main form of body reshaping surgery in Euro-American culture is labeled “aesthetic.”

History and ethnography is full of accounts behaviors that transform into traits. This may be ubiquitous matter, but it is not always, if ever, a peaceful one. Almost all new traits, on their way to become part of a “tradition,” are resisted by at least some in the population who find it unpleasant, disgusting, dissonant. One wonders whether some among Julia’s peers laughed at her, unless she was an emperor in new clothes that made critics cower… But maybe noticing her new ear ornament was just an occasion for other leaders, including the humans who inscribed the event, to celebrate a “breakthrough” produced by a “genius” artist. Given the criticism of invocations of “genius” in the historical production of a trait, say of something like the four movement symphony in 18th century Europe, it makes more sense to imagine a long process of proposals, demonstrations, developments, etc. Beethoven’s 9th symphony does not arise out of nowhere (de Nora 1997).  And it did not remain the distinctive tradition of a (European) group (population, congregation, assembly…).  Over the past two centuries it has become a pan-human trait that may not be solely the product of it being beautiful.  In my exploration of various YouTube rabbit holes, I have become fascinated by the extent of European style music and instruments in China, as well as its vicissitudes from a time when Mao Zedong attempted to “island” (Benedict 1932) China from “foreign” influences to the time when “flash mobs” are organized to play the “Ode to Joy” in a Chinese mall (August 12, 2013). As far as I can tell, a lot of fun was had by many—literally a thousand in a Japanese yearly  performance by a choir reunion (Jun 7, 2017).  Boasian anthropology was at its strongest when it emphasized such borrowing and diffusion, as well as rejection of what others, in other valleys, had said and done.

Unless of course some of those who sing the “Ode to Joy” are coerced, directly or indirectly. This brings me to the second trigger for this post: a student exploring in detail Bourdieu (and Passeron)’s most powerful line: “All pedagogic action is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power” ([1970] 1977: 5). I never hesitate to assign it to students with the injunction to translate “pedagogic action” to any act that may trigger another act whether the original act was intended to teach or not. All acts are potential “pedagogic” and so was Julia’s sticking grass in her ear. But the importance of the quote lies in the dual use of “arbitrary,” first as a noun referring to some tradition, and then as an adjective modifying acts of imposition (whether intended or not). “Cultural arbitrary” indexes the Boasian tradition as transformed by Lévi-Strauss. Adding an emphasis on the process of maintaining a tradition in a population is Bourdieu’s central contribution to culture theory. So he (and maybe Foucault also) asks us to wonder what led the other chimpanzees in Julia’s troupe to imitate her. Did any of their peers resist (think of the reaction of parents of my generation to their daughters coloring their air pink and shaping it into a Mohawk…)? Did the trait become fully institutionalized and consequential for future advancement in the group? Did it fade as an ephemere fad or did it become part of some canon (think of jazz moving from the periphery, to being the soundtrack of a generation, to its installation in an institution like “Jazz at Lincoln Center”)?  I also found on YouTube the climactic scene of a Chinese movie about students in a school of music fighting each other through their musical instruments: those who played pre-European instruments won.

Is Beethoven fun or is it imposed?  When writing about “culture as disability,” McDermott and I emphasized the imposition.  When I put together Educating in Live (2019), I looked for all the wonderful things people might do even in very difficult situations (girsl improvising conversations about bullying! Other girls organizing single-sex proms!).  But, of course, when confronted to a tempting fabricated dichotomy one should chose, as McDermott and McDermott argue, quoting James Joyce, “‘one aneither’” (2010).

And so I will end today with Lucy’s doubt when she argued: “Beethoven wasn’t so great … You’ve never seen his face on a bubblegum card, have you?” (Schulz, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” 1965) thereby giving evidence that even children can resist influencers (Schroeder) even as they may fall victim to others (the capitalists who sell bubblegum), even as they make clear both are real consequential in their lives as they are always already there and remain there.

(further links about the other authors quoted here can be found here)

Once upon a time culture was everything, even the kitchen sink (Tylor [1871] 1958). And then culture became a “value-concept” (Weber [1897] 1994) or a “system of symbols” (Schneider 1980). And then the word all but disappeared from serious theorizing, to be replaced by words like “epoch,” “episteme,” habitus, paradigm, and now “ontology.” But few, over the decades, have approached what “culture” attempted to capture, at least in the Boasian tradition, the way Latour did when he wrote:

I am very comfortable with this way of putting what I have been trying to say, throughout my career about “America.” I have always written that I am not concerned with “everything that can be found in the United States” and even less with “what individual Americans believe”

So, let’s translate Varenne into “Latourian” (though the actual Latour might not agree with my translation).

Let’s take a “typically American” controversy about “free speech.” I suspect people in the United States first meet the First Amendment, not in early childhood but sometimes in their school years, in some “citizenship” class many probably wished they did not have to sit through. And they may mostly forget about it until, perhaps in some College in the second decade of the 21st century, they are forced to participate in arguments about whether this or that kind of speech is protected. I suspect most college students participate at the periphery, as overhearers or lurkers in such arguments, wishing it all went away as they struggle with exams, parties, families, or any of the other controversies within which they are caught as full participants. But a few students will discover that “free speech” is, also, a machinery to stake a claim they want to make, or deny it. Free speech, in these terms, is an assemblage of discourses that morphed many years ago into institutions with a staff of people with the authority to write regulations, adjudicate claims, and mete consequences for breaches. The staff of this particular “shop floor” starts, in American universities, with administrators of special sub-offices (at Columbia, the current local staff is part of “Student Conduct and Community Standards”). The staff can then include about everybody in the university, including its president who may have to defend the university’s action in front of the Supreme Court that has the final say in controversies about adjudication. This enormous machinery is continually being reconstituted by a particularly thick and entangled network. It is not surprising that, once the machinery has been activated, “free” speech can become very expensive indeed, for those on one side or the other of a controversy, and particularly perhaps for those who might challenge the very ground for the assembling, maintenance, repair and expansion of the machinery.

Approaching American free speech as a machinery assembled over the centuries, staffed, repaired, and always available for invocation, justification, and adjudication, might allow a solution to the perennial problem in cultural anthropology. Documenting “difference” is easy. Figuring out how it is maintained over a period of time much longer than the life of an adult has been difficult, and perhaps all the more so when culture is taken as “learned,” “transmitted through acculturation” and altogether unavailable for controversy. One may, in the course of one’s life in the United States, “learn” about the particularities of “free speech” but it is not this learning that will make it consequential. What makes it consequential is the reality that it is always already there in institutions that may appear dormant but can prove themselves, at any time, not dead at all as agents of these institutions get alerted, dust off various weapons, and constitute a particular arena for another instantiation what must not be presented as just “performance” or “theater.” The stakes are just too high for all now caught.

Wondering about “culture” through the unfolding of controversy into joint action does make the analytic task easier and provide for a more solid theory of culture.

But no analysis will help with the value-laden choices involved in arguing for the centrality of “free speech” in academia or political action, in challenging the very grounds of “free speech,” or in any attempt to amend the 1st amendment in order, for example to allow Congress to pass laws (or Universities to enact regulations) about what constitutes an abuse of free speech (as Article XI of the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme, appears to allow)?