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

• Lévi-Strauss, Claude "Nature and culture," Chapter 1 of The elementary structures of kinship. Tr. by J. Bell and J. von Sturmer. Boston: Beacon Press. 1969 [1947].
• Duranti, Alessandro Linguistic Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. (Chapter 2)

OF RELATED INTEREST:

• Smelser, Neil "Culture: coherent or incoherent." in Münch, Richard, and Neil Smelser, eds. Theory of culture, 3-28. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 1992
• Singer, Milton "The concept of culture." International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 3: 527-543.1968
• An introductory lecture on the paradigm of culture.
• Some definitions, classical and recent.
• Do check Duranti's undergraduate version of a course in "Culture and communication."

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The sources of the anthropological obsession with culture

or

Why "culture" got to be known as the organizing concept of anthropology
(vs. "society" for sociology or "the psyche" for psychology)

[Note that this is an alternative way of presenting to the way Duranti does it, while making most of the same points.  The two ways are fully compatible even though I stress different aspects of the tradition of concern with "culture"]

1. One of the major consequences of
   • the European travels around the globe
   • the more or less temporary conquests of various populations
   • and the continuing hegemony of certain forms of discourses about humanity

   was the recognition of the extreme diversity of human beings. The reality of this diversity was immediately (from the 16th century onward) recognized to have

   • philosophical (and eventually behavioral scientific)
   • political (and juridical)
   • practical (and economic)

implications.

2. By the end of the 19th century, the various theories proposed to explain observed human diversity, and through them, human nature can be classified into four major traditions:
1. "all human beings are fundamentally alike": French enlightenment and the foundation of modern democracies (later articulated as the theory of "the psychic unity of mankind")
2. "some human beings are more developed than other human beings": theories of differentiated biological evolution, now mostly discredited as racism
3. "not all human societies are equal in what they can provide for humanity. Some are more developed than others": an application of Darwin to human societies (not human individuals), these theories are at the basis of all marxisms, socialisms, and in liberal economism is the fundamental argument for talking about "development" when talking about the industrialization of non-European societies.
4. "human beings in group develop different cultures and are thus different from each other": this was originally articulated most strongly by American anthropologists, supported by American philosophers like John Dewey, who were themselves building on the German philosophical reaction against French universalism. This has now become the basis of much theorizing about "multi-culturalism."  
3. Boas and the building of "cultural historicism" as a reaction against racism, nativism, and as an argument for an open democracy.  
1. Human diversity is a contingent product of historical accidents (diffusion vs. evolution). There are no grounds that would allow for the ranking of societies as more or less primitive or developed. All human beings are equally removed from the first homo sapiens sapiens. All have histories of the same length. All groups borrow heavily from each other, genetically, materially, and ideologically.
   1. Note the implied critique of theories of "authenticity." Note also the prefiguration of what is now known as "post-modern" "hybridity."
2. Because of Boas roots in Germany, and the strong influence of German philosophical writings on American pragmatism, it made paradoxical sense for many of Boas's American students to build on the historicist argument and continue to work on the assumption that participation in a particular historical period in a particular geographical place intimately transformed the child growing into a person.
3. Thus starting with "the psychic unity of mankind" (a Boasian phrase) and combining it with a strong historical sense, one moved towards models of the psychic diversity of mankind that characterized research into "culture and personality," particularly in the work of Ruth Benedict's, as it was interpreted by Margaret Mead, and later, by Erik Erikson. In recent years, this has led to radical hypotheses by some "cultural psychologists" (Shweder, etc.) about irreducible difference between differently socialized people.
4. Eventually this work, as it absorbed Freudian insights, was influenced by various readings of Max Weber and others, and then reconstructed in the 1940s and 1950s by Talcott Parsons and his students, became the common sense understanding of "culture" as
   1. "an entity internal to a personality system which controls a system of concrete orientations and actions aimed at securing for the personality certain relationships with objects" (Parsons & Shils 1951:159).
5. The Parsonian integration continues to frame what cultural anthropology is common sensically made to be about, particularly outside the discipline.
6. This integration is all the more powerful that it fits the American (political) revolt against

1. biological evolutionism (and racism)
2. social evolutionism (and socialism or marxism)
3. simple versions of theories of human universalism
4. and all senses of the uniqueness of each individual

1. Duranti's categories
   1. Culture/nature (and the philosophical roots of the conversation): Kant
   2. Culture as knowledge
      1. Goodenough and individual cognition
      2. Lave and distributed knowledge
   3. Culture as communication
      1. Lévi-Strauss
      2. Geertz
      3. Indexicality
   4. Culture as mediation (tools between nature and human beings) 
   5. Culture as a system of practices: Bourdieu
   6. Culture as a system of participation (?Duranti?)

    BUT

2. Duranti does not give a good sense of the interaction between the various traditions (and there are probably less than he makes it appear) and the extent and focus of the polemics between the major figures in the field.
3. We might identify at least three strands in the initial critique of the first dominant uses of culture in anthropology:
   1. the anthropological critiques of transforming a concern with diversity among human populations into a theory of culture and personality: a classical text opening towards the modern problematics (see Singer)
   2. [see quote from Kroeber & Kluckhohn (1952: 357) p. 528]
   3. The reaction was invoked various difficulties with the dominant formulations:
      1. empirical difficulties
         1. how does one measure personality cross-culturally?
         2. what is one led to ignore when operating within a culture and personality model?
         3. emotion or cognition?
      2. theoretical difficulties
         1. culture and social structure/organization (what remains of "commonality" when groups (communities?) are differentiated?)
         2. from emotion to symbolization and interpretation (rhetoric, language) --> Geertz
         3. Lévi-Strauss and a return to psychic unity as potential of human beings communicating and together transforming nature (biological rules for mating) into culture (the incest taboo and all rules regulating sexual intercourse).
            1. Note how this echoes Marx on human beings producing the means of their own production (German Ideology, p. 46, 48 ), and how it prefigures much of what is now known as "constructivism"
   4. the social structural critique focusing on the absence of interest in the mutual shaping of groups in complex societies (classes particularly
   5. the more recent critique by those interested in joint action and "practice.  
4.  Recent developments:
   1. Shweder and the psychic disunity of mankind
   2. from culture to action and practice
   3. from action and practice to habitus (Bourdieu 1977)
   4. the temptation of some anthropologists to go "beyond culture"-- given what has happened to the concept as it has gotten used for political, practical purposes.
   5. Lave, etc. and the emphasis on participation
   6. culture as social faction (construction) and as the process of resistance (Varenne and McDermott 1998)
5. Questions a painting by Cézanne might raise:

Some questions   (in the context of this course)
Give a brief example to illustrate what "culture substitutes itself to nature" might mean. Assuming that "race" is a cultural matter, how would some of the authors on culture presented by Duranti develop this assumption? How would a concern with class (inequality, etc.) be handled within a cultural framework?   Which of the theories might make it difficult to deal with social stratification?