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

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Required Reading:

• Benedict, Ruth "Configurations of culture in North America," American Anthropologist 34: 1-27. 1932

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Culture? (struggles with systematicity) Intuitions (Benedict) Coding life Making life Expressing made-up life

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 (the manufacturer) 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
2. Coding the facts of life (and anthropology as decoding)
   1. an example: wedding, mourning
      1. visualizing death in popular art ([1:10-] 1:45 - 2:20 - 2:45 -2:50)
   2. the disappearance of arbitrariness:
      1. culture and the fishes: "It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water" (Kluckhohn 1949: 11)
      2. the anthropological task is one of translation leaving open the question of the universality of what is being symbolized by colors (and also other means of symbolization)
   3. and thus the issues of power and its reproduction that fascinate
      1. Foucault
      2. Bourdieu
   4. the need for enculturation ("learning one's culture")
3. Making the facts of life (and anthropology as deconstruction)
   1. the factual power of the act of human symbolizing power:
      1. in general:

         I placed a jar in Tennessee,
         And round it was, upon a hill.
         It made the slovenly wilderness
         Surround that hill. (Wallace Stevens)

      2. property lines (and laying a grid on a continent)
      3. making particular forms of brain functioning into diseases:
         1. the case of Asperger's Syndrome, a plausible problem that may help people focus on close analysis of complex data. Look at the list of people in history who may have "suffered" with this: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Thomas Jefferson. The issue is well prefigured by Benedict's distinction between the "character" one may be born with (what we would not present as a matter of brain functioning) and whether this will be a problem depending on where one is placed within a culture.
      4. school failure;
   2. Latour and the "thing-ness" of all that human beings cannot escape (hills, jars, people who have placed jars on a hill)
   3. the need for the on-going reconstitution of order given that people, always, "screw around" (Garfinkel, 2002: 257)
4. Expressing experience of the encoded facts of life (anthropology as tracing openings and closings)
   1. or, as Robert Frost put it, poetically, (Mending Wall)

      SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall,
      That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
      And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
      And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
      The work of hunters is another thing:
      I have come after them and made repair
      Where they have left not one stone on stone,
      But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
      To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
      No one has seen them made or heard them made,
      But at spring mending-time we find them there.

      ...

      I see him there,
      Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
      In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
      He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
      Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
      He will not go behind his father's saying,
      And he likes having thought of it so well
      He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

      that is, culture makes society, darkly.

   2. and again, philosophically,:

   THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground , bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." (Rousseau, The origin of inequality, opening of second part)

   3. thus the continuing need of modeling that which are the (cultural) facts of everyday life for particular people -- that is modeling the (one) culture that is consequential (makes a difference) for particular persons, whatever their personal constitution (identity, character, personality structure).
      1. the inevitability of (productive) ignorance
      2. 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" 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. education as the production of culture
   5. A technical coda: Islanding assemblages of haecceities