Anthro-apologist
Nov. 12th, 2004 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI used to think I was a cultural relativist, but now I'm not so sure. I think I might be more 'anthro-apologist' than anthropologist.
What is cultural relativism? 'To be a scientific concept,' writes Mark Glazer, 'culture has to be studied as an object without evaluative consideration. When we are not able to do that we no longer have a science of culture. Some anthropologists associated with this point of view are Franz Boas and his students Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, Paul Radin, Margaret Mead, Ruth Bunzel and many others. Franz Boas is the key theoretician in this group. Boas published his views on the comparative method in 1896. In his "Eighteen Professions" (1915), which is a credo, Alfred Kroeber, a follower of Boas, affirms some of the basic tenets of cultural relativism:
(1) all men are completely civilized, and
(2) there are no higher and lower cultures. Much later in his career, Kroeber makes three additional points on cultural relativism,
(3) that science should begin with questions and not with answers,
(4) that science is a "dispassionate" endeavor which should not accept any ideology, and
(5) that sweeping generalizations are not compatible with science.
Cultural Relativism, Mark Glazer
Well, so far I'm a cultural relativist, because I accept at least four of those five points (I have some problems with 4, as we'll see later). I also like the work of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and am rather annoyed when I hear that they're both often referred to now as having been 'discredited' since the mid-twentieth century. I was discussing Benedict's distinction between Shame and Guilt cultures this week on Click Opera, and Margaret Mead's name came up on my favourite Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed this week. The brilliant Laurie Taylor turned his attention to the prickly question of childhood sexuality. The BBC's blurb runs:
'In the light of the recent Pitcairn case where disclosures of widespread child abuse were pitted against a defence of traditional cultural practices, Laurie Taylor asks is there such thing as a universal sexual morality particularly concerning children. Laurie discusses the construction of childhood and children's sexuality with Dr Heather Montgomery, Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the Open University and Jenny Kitzinger, Professor of Media and Communication at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University and author of Framing Abuse - Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children.'
Until next Tuesday you can hear the discussion here. Scroll forward to 14.46. Taylor talks about Margaret Mead's 'Children and Sexuality in Samoa', and plays a clip of Mead talking about how the Samoan adolescents she observed showed less anxiety about sex than American or European adolescents because 'they'd looked through the blinds of houses and seen lovers, and seen death too. Adolescence is not necessarily the kind of time that we've made of it in Europe and America'.
'Margaret Mead had an explicit agenda,' says Heather Montgomery. 'She went there wanting to find, almost, the Noble Savage. She found what she wanted to find.'
Margaret Mead is, perhaps, an 'anthro-apologist'. She casts aside the scientific neutrality required of cultural relativism and makes positive claims for the cultures she studies being in some way superior to our own, just as I do about Japan.
Heather puts the case for cultural relativism in Thinking Allowed. In different societies, she says, sex is thought of in different ways. Sex in the west is no longer about reproduction but about pleasure and identity. We've been influenced by Freud and Foucault.
Jenny Kitzinger puts an alternative viewpoint, one you might describe as 'universalist liberalism'. She describes how the rapists in the Pitcairn case used cultural relativism as a defense for their forcible rape of young girls, invoking the local age of consent (12 years) and local traditions to justify their actions. This, says Kitzinger is a 'red herring'. The raped women themselves do not give this account of things.
Heather responds with a description of the Crockers' research in the 1970s on Amerindian tribes, where girls as young as seven indulge in sex and are seen as 'stingy' if they don't. We can't talk about 'universal ideas about the body,' she says, and we can't say that this Amerindian tribe was 'abusing' its children, who were well adapted to their own society by these practices and showed no trauma. Jenny questions whether the girls' consent could meaningfully have been given, and questions whether mere adjustment to society is a defense of social practices. Finally, Heather says that it's hard to impose western ideas of childhood innocence on children from other cultures, and the debate ends.
I take Heather's position, but it's important to note that both women are cultural relativists. It's just that one -- Jenny -- distinguishes cultural relativism from ethical relativism and imposes universalist judgements (in fact the judgements of western liberalism) on the cultures she's studying.
In July of this year Terry Eagleton wrote an interesting essay for the New Statesman, 'Rediscover a common cause or die'. It's an essay about both cultural relativism and identity politics.
'Culture has descended from the macro to the micro,' writes Eagleton, 'from whole societies to a range of interest groups within them. It is more about Hell's Angels than Hellenic Greece. This naturally raises the question of how micro you can get. Do the two teachers in the village school constitute a culture? What about Posh and Becks?
'Neither a work of art nor a way of life can be said to be "right" or "wrong", as one might say of a political strategy or a code of ethics. It would be like saying that the Romanian language was a mistake... Culture tends to appeal to custom, not reason, which is to say that it has a habit of drawing its justification from itself. An appeal to cultural tradition simply means that doing something for a very long time is the next best thing to being right. The reason why you go in for honour killings or racial lynchings is because this is the kind of thing you go in for. The word "culture", like the words "taste" or "evil", means among other things: don't argue. What we do is what we do. We cannot justify it rationally, but neither can you justify your objections to it.
'So we might as well declare a truce. As long as you let us get on with female infanticide, which is completely unremarkable in our society, we shall let you get on with the domestic violence that figures so richly in your own cultural tradition. Cultural relativism of this sort is highly convenient for the ruling powers. If it means that they cannot criticise other cultures, it also means that as a culture they are immune from criticism themselves.'
Eagleton, a Marxist, subscribes to a universalist view of justice, and doesn't see this fragmentation of cultural identities, and the irrationality of their self-justifications, as a positive development. But if Margaret Mead is disparaged for having 'had an agenda', doesn't Marxism also have an agenda? And what about science itself? The ethical outlooks of Marxism and science are western in their origins, so to the extent that we propose them as 'objective' we are being ethnocentric. But it's fine to be evangelical on their behalf and proclaim them as 'a better world system'. Just so long as you realise you're in the ring with a lot of competing agendas and ideologies about what's universally desireable.
Recently I've been debating with Marxy on his blog about Japan, and whether it should open up its markets and become more like the west. I made fun of Marxy when he declared himself an Absolutist rather than a cultural relativist, telling him that Absolutism is the belief in things like the Divine Right of Kings and Natural Law, but in fact there is a position called Parochial Absolutism which opposes cultural relativism. It's just a rather stupid position. Here's a Parochial Absolutist called Richard Kulisz:
'I'm an extreme Absolutist, I just have no illusion that the culture around me (which is not "my" culture even though it's the culture I grew up with) is ideal. So I can condemn the barbarism of middle-east pederasty and the authoritarianism of modern education in the same breath. Actually, my revulsion of barbaric societies (eg, any society that has remained in the Stone Age in this era) leads me to positions like "either brainwash them or nuke them all"; I don't care how it's done, those cultures should be wiped off the face of the planet.'
Now this is an extreme version of what Marxy seems to be saying about Japan. But it's also a negative version of what I say about Japan. Because I'm actually a Japan evangelist. I think Japan is better than other cultures, and I want to see the whole planet Japanized. So perhaps I'm more of an Absolutist than I thought. But I prefer the term 'enlightened anthro-apology'.
What is cultural relativism? 'To be a scientific concept,' writes Mark Glazer, 'culture has to be studied as an object without evaluative consideration. When we are not able to do that we no longer have a science of culture. Some anthropologists associated with this point of view are Franz Boas and his students Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, Paul Radin, Margaret Mead, Ruth Bunzel and many others. Franz Boas is the key theoretician in this group. Boas published his views on the comparative method in 1896. In his "Eighteen Professions" (1915), which is a credo, Alfred Kroeber, a follower of Boas, affirms some of the basic tenets of cultural relativism:
(1) all men are completely civilized, and
(2) there are no higher and lower cultures. Much later in his career, Kroeber makes three additional points on cultural relativism,
(3) that science should begin with questions and not with answers,
(4) that science is a "dispassionate" endeavor which should not accept any ideology, and
(5) that sweeping generalizations are not compatible with science.
Cultural Relativism, Mark Glazer
Well, so far I'm a cultural relativist, because I accept at least four of those five points (I have some problems with 4, as we'll see later). I also like the work of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and am rather annoyed when I hear that they're both often referred to now as having been 'discredited' since the mid-twentieth century. I was discussing Benedict's distinction between Shame and Guilt cultures this week on Click Opera, and Margaret Mead's name came up on my favourite Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed this week. The brilliant Laurie Taylor turned his attention to the prickly question of childhood sexuality. The BBC's blurb runs:
'In the light of the recent Pitcairn case where disclosures of widespread child abuse were pitted against a defence of traditional cultural practices, Laurie Taylor asks is there such thing as a universal sexual morality particularly concerning children. Laurie discusses the construction of childhood and children's sexuality with Dr Heather Montgomery, Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the Open University and Jenny Kitzinger, Professor of Media and Communication at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University and author of Framing Abuse - Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children.'
Until next Tuesday you can hear the discussion here. Scroll forward to 14.46. Taylor talks about Margaret Mead's 'Children and Sexuality in Samoa', and plays a clip of Mead talking about how the Samoan adolescents she observed showed less anxiety about sex than American or European adolescents because 'they'd looked through the blinds of houses and seen lovers, and seen death too. Adolescence is not necessarily the kind of time that we've made of it in Europe and America'.
'Margaret Mead had an explicit agenda,' says Heather Montgomery. 'She went there wanting to find, almost, the Noble Savage. She found what she wanted to find.'
Margaret Mead is, perhaps, an 'anthro-apologist'. She casts aside the scientific neutrality required of cultural relativism and makes positive claims for the cultures she studies being in some way superior to our own, just as I do about Japan.
Heather puts the case for cultural relativism in Thinking Allowed. In different societies, she says, sex is thought of in different ways. Sex in the west is no longer about reproduction but about pleasure and identity. We've been influenced by Freud and Foucault.
Jenny Kitzinger puts an alternative viewpoint, one you might describe as 'universalist liberalism'. She describes how the rapists in the Pitcairn case used cultural relativism as a defense for their forcible rape of young girls, invoking the local age of consent (12 years) and local traditions to justify their actions. This, says Kitzinger is a 'red herring'. The raped women themselves do not give this account of things.
Heather responds with a description of the Crockers' research in the 1970s on Amerindian tribes, where girls as young as seven indulge in sex and are seen as 'stingy' if they don't. We can't talk about 'universal ideas about the body,' she says, and we can't say that this Amerindian tribe was 'abusing' its children, who were well adapted to their own society by these practices and showed no trauma. Jenny questions whether the girls' consent could meaningfully have been given, and questions whether mere adjustment to society is a defense of social practices. Finally, Heather says that it's hard to impose western ideas of childhood innocence on children from other cultures, and the debate ends.
I take Heather's position, but it's important to note that both women are cultural relativists. It's just that one -- Jenny -- distinguishes cultural relativism from ethical relativism and imposes universalist judgements (in fact the judgements of western liberalism) on the cultures she's studying.
In July of this year Terry Eagleton wrote an interesting essay for the New Statesman, 'Rediscover a common cause or die'. It's an essay about both cultural relativism and identity politics.
'Culture has descended from the macro to the micro,' writes Eagleton, 'from whole societies to a range of interest groups within them. It is more about Hell's Angels than Hellenic Greece. This naturally raises the question of how micro you can get. Do the two teachers in the village school constitute a culture? What about Posh and Becks?
'Neither a work of art nor a way of life can be said to be "right" or "wrong", as one might say of a political strategy or a code of ethics. It would be like saying that the Romanian language was a mistake... Culture tends to appeal to custom, not reason, which is to say that it has a habit of drawing its justification from itself. An appeal to cultural tradition simply means that doing something for a very long time is the next best thing to being right. The reason why you go in for honour killings or racial lynchings is because this is the kind of thing you go in for. The word "culture", like the words "taste" or "evil", means among other things: don't argue. What we do is what we do. We cannot justify it rationally, but neither can you justify your objections to it.
'So we might as well declare a truce. As long as you let us get on with female infanticide, which is completely unremarkable in our society, we shall let you get on with the domestic violence that figures so richly in your own cultural tradition. Cultural relativism of this sort is highly convenient for the ruling powers. If it means that they cannot criticise other cultures, it also means that as a culture they are immune from criticism themselves.'
Eagleton, a Marxist, subscribes to a universalist view of justice, and doesn't see this fragmentation of cultural identities, and the irrationality of their self-justifications, as a positive development. But if Margaret Mead is disparaged for having 'had an agenda', doesn't Marxism also have an agenda? And what about science itself? The ethical outlooks of Marxism and science are western in their origins, so to the extent that we propose them as 'objective' we are being ethnocentric. But it's fine to be evangelical on their behalf and proclaim them as 'a better world system'. Just so long as you realise you're in the ring with a lot of competing agendas and ideologies about what's universally desireable.
Recently I've been debating with Marxy on his blog about Japan, and whether it should open up its markets and become more like the west. I made fun of Marxy when he declared himself an Absolutist rather than a cultural relativist, telling him that Absolutism is the belief in things like the Divine Right of Kings and Natural Law, but in fact there is a position called Parochial Absolutism which opposes cultural relativism. It's just a rather stupid position. Here's a Parochial Absolutist called Richard Kulisz:
'I'm an extreme Absolutist, I just have no illusion that the culture around me (which is not "my" culture even though it's the culture I grew up with) is ideal. So I can condemn the barbarism of middle-east pederasty and the authoritarianism of modern education in the same breath. Actually, my revulsion of barbaric societies (eg, any society that has remained in the Stone Age in this era) leads me to positions like "either brainwash them or nuke them all"; I don't care how it's done, those cultures should be wiped off the face of the planet.'
Now this is an extreme version of what Marxy seems to be saying about Japan. But it's also a negative version of what I say about Japan. Because I'm actually a Japan evangelist. I think Japan is better than other cultures, and I want to see the whole planet Japanized. So perhaps I'm more of an Absolutist than I thought. But I prefer the term 'enlightened anthro-apology'.
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Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 04:01 pm (UTC)You misunderstood if you think that view was being presented by Jenny Kitzinger. Her view is very close to yours; I think where you both differ from me is that you think there is a neutral social space. I don't. For instance, you say 'I think that this attitude [Japanese girls deciding they'd been abused by chikkans] is less a result of being brainwashed by Western sexual mores than it is having a cultural distance which makes it possible to talk about the experience and judge it.' Now, sure you can step away from one culture, but not into a vacuum. You always step into another. Thought is not even possible without language and its codification of social meanings, which are culturally relative. Likewise, you say 'victims, I think, who had moved to the mainland and gotten out of the male-dominant microculture.' That may be true, but you don't describe the other half -- these women had gotten out of something, but into something else.
Margaret Mead described her Samoan girls as having the choice of whether to indulge in childhood sex or to take refuge in the missionary's house. But she didn't try to portray the missionary's house as having a 'missing ethics' -- as being, in other words, a completely neutral space. The price you paid for sheltering there was indoctrination with Christianity, and the whole package of metaphysical and moral ideas about the body contained in it.
I think the title of Jenny Kitzinger's book is interesting, because it pre-judges the question:
'Framing Abuse - Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children'
The epistemological model of that title is odd. First of all, 'abuse' and 'violence' are not morally neutral terms. She is already 'framing' social relations in a particular way by using those words, already declaring her situatedness. But the book also wants to be a deconstruction of western 'framing' (by the public and media) of non-western practices. In other words, it deconstructs western terms but not its own, and it tolerates everything except what it finds intolerable. It also uses the language of cultural relativism while endorsing the idea that there are some things -- rights -- which are exempt from it. Does Jenny believe she's standing on neutral ground, whereas everyone else is implicated in culture?
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 04:54 pm (UTC)I accept that there is no such thing as neutral cultural ground, but what then do you see as acceptable reasons for cultural intervention? I assume, for example, that you don't think female circumcision is a good idea, no matter how acceptable it might be to the majority of Malians or Somalians, perhaps even to the women themselves. Do you think 'we' (the West) should use our considerable economic and diplomatic muscle to get those governments to ban the practice? Or do you think that it's their affair to sort out within their own society?
R.
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 07:27 pm (UTC)One thing I do know is that I reject and abhor the attitude outlined by the Absolutist who talked about 'barbaric societies (eg, any society that has remained in the Stone Age in this era)' and said they should be nuked or brainwashed. It's just a historical nonsense to say that some societies existing now are 'in the Stone Age'. All societies now existing are postmodern societies, including those like the Taliban, or those that practise clitorectomy. We've all by now met each other, or at least are aware of each other's presence. This 'meeting' has relativised all our mores and made them as dependent on 'the way others do things' as 'the way we've always done things'. So I think that clitorectomy now might look the same as clitorectomy then, but that it's very different. If it does indeed persist, it's 'postmodern clitorectomy'. It may well, like postmodern Islam, have got stricter and more 'fundamentalist' because of its contact with the West.
I'm always a bit suspicious of the way the West intervenes in other cultures using women as its point of entry. It's as if the West says 'You guys can cut off each other's heads, eat dogs, and all the rest of it. That's up to you. That's culture. But we don't like the way you're treating your women'. Now, that may actually be a modern form of 'rape and pillage'. We come and sack your material resources and take your women. We believe that the women are the weak point in your tribal system because it is our habit to think that women are 'a weak point'. We believe that your women will betray you, and we reward them for betraying you. We talk to your women in such a way that they see the error of their former ways. We talk to your women in such a way that they realise that to be a woman is a terribly low thing. Except in our culture, where it's almost as good as being a man.
So no, I don't support clitorectomy, but neither do I support going in to your culture to talk, particularly, to your women. And especially not when my culture has a recent history of going into your culture to grab your natural resources or trade in your people as slaves. The solution is to find a way to relate to your whole culture in a way that is respectful, and not isolate elements of it.
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-13 02:05 am (UTC)I say that all people are created equal. I take part of my line of reasoning from certain teachings of Christ, certain teachings of Buddha (both filtered through the English language and the modern West), and from certain Western philosophers.
I have no problem saying that "slavery is wrong" or that "all people should be treated equally." If this puts me in opposition to another group, so be it. They are now, in that regards, against my beliefs, and by extension, me.
If you like the meme metaphor, then ideas are memes, and we are 'hosts' for waring memes. Personally, I see no problem siding with certain memes and claiming allegiance. You can ignore your "shrink-wrap phenomenon" and withdraw particular memes.
I am willing to fight, and perhaps die, for "slavery is wrong" and "people should be treated equally" even though it means a type of slavery (or at least a constraining of freedom) is inflicted on my enemy, or (through violence) horrible treatment of my enemy (which would mean horrible treatment for all).
I see the ideological conundrum but don't see any reason not to act, or to pretend that I believe in moral relativism.
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-13 02:21 am (UTC)I have no problem declaring my hatred for a certain type of government, belief system, etc. And I don't particularly care if it's against someone's "culture." Everything is part of SOME PERSON's culture and I don't pretend to dance around other people's feet. There is a time for dancing, and there is a time for stomping.
Right now I can say, with very few qualifications, that I'm against anyone who is a Wahhabist, supports Sharia law, wants a Christian state in the US (or anywhere), is a proselytizing fundamentalist, or an fundamentalist Israeli settler. Likewise, this type of relativism is one of the reasons the French, the US, and the UN could drag their feet and watch as a million people were massacred in Rwanda, or the Belgians do shit as thousands were killed in former Yugoslavia, or today, when people ignore the genocide in the Sudan because "it's a cultural issue" which, in the case of Africa, is really is a code for racism and xenophobia.
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 06:06 pm (UTC)As to Klitzinger's book, I agree that it's a dicey project. But academia is full of that kind of supercharged deconstruction-cum-political tract. By the way, what kind of 'choice' is it to give a child the opportunity to flee her family, friends, everything that's familiar to her, and join some creepy whiteface missionaries? That does not count as 'choice', not for a child at least. I have read a little Mead (though admittedly not much), and I agree with Heather--she always seemed to have something invested in keeping her savages savage and noble. Anyway, the last word in any anthropological debate like this is, for me, the "Gentle Tasayday" hoax--just a delicious example of the Western wet dream of the other.
B
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 06:32 pm (UTC)http://www.plexus.org/lacink/lacink11/zizek.html
B
Re: children
Date: 2004-11-12 07:08 pm (UTC)It must be the way Freud tells them, but that's a very funny joke.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-13 03:09 pm (UTC)I have my doubts; How do you test this?
Could you define your meaning for "thought"? Assuming "abuse" equals "thought" process may reduce too much things, over-rationalization.
The label "Abuse" may describe (from the victims view) a phenomenon that may not limit itself to "thought"
Assuming that we pick up signals from our senses we can think in at least five different sensorial systems. (see, hear, smell, taste, feel)
Let's assume, The "feel" can further divided : hot/cold , shape-feeling, meta feelings ( normally in the "stomach" area like sometime in "fear")
Maybe the different words and culture allowed the victim to access signals she couldn't in the other culture "thought" off. But the feeling and meta feelings provoked by the "abuse" might still occur regardless of an existing cultural label (in the same way regardless of blind people I still can see things; Imagine a child raised in country no one sees. No words for vision but he/she could see. But no way way talking with other people his experience. Or even to understand them. Latter on traveling to another country finds people how see and have words for it and then understands better this experiences)
So the operative word: Consciousness. The more thought systems you learn the richer the ways you can understand the world.
Another test for the "abuse" model of reality: do the expected reactions to "abuse" occur with this non western subjects? If so maybe the model seems validated and it's scope valid beyond west.