This is the fourth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class Communication and Culture.

Required Reading:

Culture? (struggles with systematicity)

  1. Intuitions (Benedict)
  2. Hypotheses and explorations (integration, enculturation, authenticity)
  3. Continuing problematics (historical organization of social fields with personal and political consequences: culture as disability, habitus, hegemony, alienation)

  1. Intuitions: Human beings produce, in history, major constraints on their individual lives that are not quite predictable from any observation of their biology, their material conditions, their previous history, or even their contacts with other human beings.
    1. Boas, history and the psychic unity of mankind

      culture vs. race
      culture vs. linear social evolution

      1. Culture as way of life in German 19th cent. philosophy evolved into culture as product of one's ancestry as inscribed into one's blood (mother's milk, genes).
      2. One response and/or restatement: theories of necessary social evolution (social Darwinism; Marx in sociology; Morgan in anthropology)
      3. At the turn of the 20th century, a new response in two steps and the beginning of cultural relativism: it all depends on history as series of accidents; shreds and patches.
        1. demonstration that traits are not related to physical characteristics.
        2. demonstration that traits are not causally linked among each other;
          1. the historical evolution of blue jeans back and forth across the oceans: textile manufacturers in Nimes do not "cause" Levi-Strauss who does not cause the identification of jeans in the late 20th century with youth, rebellion, comfort, America.
      4. "the psychic unity of mankind"
  2. Benedict and the reconstruction of the German insistance on the integration of customs, practices, interpretations, institutions, etc. The integration is now understood as a purely historical process. This process is not necessarily a psychological process but it does have psychological consequences. The argument:
    1. Reaction against Tylor (generally credited with the "first" anthropological definition of culture) and culture as a mishmash of "shreds and patches."
    2. For the "integration" of customs based upon
      1. limitations on borrowing
        1. note the way she emphasizes that the Zuñi (Pueblo) and Plain Indians are neighbors
      2. the same "qualities" that we recognize in certain institutions within one culture are the same qualities one might recognize in other institutions.
      3. "qualities" about the "same" life events--e.g. death rituals--are strikingly different from one culture to the next
    3. Thus a guide for research:
      1. praise and dismissal of Malinowski:
        1. not enough to show that something is rationally useful (rather than odd)
        2. one must also show this trait is made to fit with other traits
      2. what is observable among the Pueblo/Plains Indians is a general feature of humanity even in complex societies (where the idea was first used). The analysis has just to be more careful.
    4. A theoretical exploration of what might be the motor of this cultural integration.
      1. while the process can be analogized to a psychological processes (culture as personality writ large, p. 24), it is not primarily a psychological process even when it may have psychological impact:
        1. p. 8: the patterning of behavior
        2. p. 24: social choice and institutionalization; culture as the subject that is choosing.
      2. the "gestalt" (cultural configuration) as the experience of the observer, and the practice of the participants as they transform what they borrow and it becomes an object within their present. A "gestalt" is not an object outside the constructing actor. It becomes an object in history through the consequences of the actors having taken it into account.
        1. a simple example: the face/vase "illusion"
        2. more (do not accept the comments uncritically: the brain does not "trick" "us," the brain (and the body) is us and it is probable that the "tricks" (i.e. an apparently non-rational relation between formal properties of the images and initial attemps to put them into words (deeds)) are essential to communication-in-culture, that is to the maintaining of relationships through arbitrary means.
        3. a reanalysis of  the diffusion of the blue jean emphasizing how it is made to fit (its meaning?) within the various epochs of its history (from historical continuity to structured discontinuity)
        4. a disturbing example when one considers that the analysis of such "illusions" can be applied to issues like apparently "personal" disabilities.
      3. culture as something other, more, and always there, than "realism" would expect to observe in human behavior.
    5. implicitly:
      1. no discussion of "learning"
      2. a specific, though not developed, critique of simple versions of enculturation theories: enculturation is a secondary matter
  3. A critique and the recent reconstruction of the initial problematics: hybridity (de Certeau, Boon) vs. hegemony and habitus (out of Gramsci, Bourdieu), discourse (Foucault).
  4. The need to reconstruct "culture" as the systematization of items and persons as they are brought together. A matter of "context" but also of mutual constitution within pre-organized fields. This opens questions that are addressed in various ways by G.H. Mead in the American pragmatist tradition and by Saussure in the French Durkheimian tradition as it transformed what would be "structuralism"
Some questions
StudyPlace conversations
  • There is some evidence that Benedict was influenced by the pragmatists (e.g. Dewey and G.H. Mead): can you identify any such evidence in "Configurations..."?
  • Is Benedict's theory of cultural configurations a theory of "popular culture" as Fiske presented it?
  • Given Fiske's understanding of hegemony, would he place a cultural "pattern" within the world of "popular culture"? Why (not)?
  • How does Benedict's discussion of the individual relate to Mead's discussion of the self?
  • How does Benedict's discussion of the individual relate to Mead's discussion of the 'I'?
(Note that some of these questions ask you to "compare and contrast")

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