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'.
Re: From Absolutism to Structuralist Criticism
Date: 2004-11-13 10:45 am (UTC)For all your criticism Marxy, its not like you have any plan to leave, right? From Jack Sensei's comments, and Momus' responses, I think the answer has arrived. Precisely because you will always remain the foreigner, after all the years of study, all your befriending of Japanese people, after attaining fluency in the language, etc, etc, you still won't know shit really. But that's why you'll keep applying yourself to it, because the obsession can never be satiated, there will always be more to understand. As in the best Wong Kar-Wai films, the love affair is never consummated. If it was, you'd probably get bored and move on to something else. You should be fucking glad that it never will be.
I think the syrup factory analogy was pretty effective, but to explain things on a personal level for me, I'd think of getting into Japan as I would a new artist / band / musician / director etc. You come upon their work, you hurriedly collect everything you can, it engulfs you, and you struggle to digest it all. You surround yourself in it, you strive to understand it, you let it effect your own work, and it begins to color the way you look at all other cultural output. Eventually you absorb it to the point of a thorough assimilation into your "perspective on art" as a whole, and you've let it effect you as much as is possible--you've squeezed from it every last drop of influence.
Japan differs from this model in only one way. Whereas this process of obsession / assimilation varies in time depending on the artists' importance to you from a month, to a year or whatever, a strong affliction of J-mania will last a lifetime or more. To me this couldn't be more evident that in some of the retorts in this blog like, "Try 6 months in an Eikaiwa school and you're tone will change really fast." But the people talking like this remain in Japan despite apparent hardship and disgust with many aspects of living here! They'd rather have a shit job here then stay in their own country. I think that's rather telling.
-shane
Re: From Absolutism to Structuralist Criticism
Date: 2004-11-13 11:30 pm (UTC)That does sound like Mr. Grumpy, I'm sure. I actually thought the syrup factory analogy was pretty good. I have used one like it myself, in writing, no less, but with a museum instead of a factory. Obviously, it's not just one person's experience.