Class #2: Cultural Patterns [Mead and Benedict]

During class on Tuesday, we discussed the importance of Mead and Benedict and the "culture and personality school," wherein we can think of culture as the individual personality writ large. Both were students of Boas and Benedict's thinking was also highly influenced by Sapir. Can we see the roots of their thinking in Boas' work? As we read the week earlier, Boas was drawn to the emotional and mental life, to poetry, to the roots of what makes people individuals (and by extension, how they convey and express themselves). Yet he largely discredited the emerging school of psychoanalysis as an inherently ethnocentric phenomenon arising out of a specific class and psyche (that was not an appropriate framework or lens for the people he worked with).

Benedict was highly influenced by her communications with Edward Sapir, known for his desire for an epistemology for the human sciences that was not a search for "laws" and generalizations but was true to the individual, the concrete and the experiential aspects of peoples. Therefore, Benedict and also Mead were concerned with how the individual became a representative of the social whole... yet there was also an equally important focus on interiority that was emerging.

Yet it is important to remember that Mead and Benedict were a product of their time and their place--1920s New York City @ Columbia, largely influenced by Jews fleeing Germany who brought with them an interest and fashion for psychoanalysis.

We also differentiated the American school from the Durkheimian model of the individual/society. For the Durkheim school, the individual was what was left over that was not society (essentially a negation) vs. the American "rugged individualism" and difference via deviance. For Mead and Benedict, the individual must differ from the social group by rejecting it. Innate to Mead and Benedict is the idea of malleability/plasticity (or that human nature is infinitely moldable, that it can be changed).

Both Mead and Benedict sought to understand culture (as a whole) as parts of the "arc of all human potentialities. Benedict sought to find these cultural patterns in so-called "simple" societies... or those that were outside of "Western" influences (i.e. the Zuni and other Native Americans). When she talks about the primitive, therefore, she is referring to a particular "purity." Again, both her work and Mead's is based on an implicit comparison (that we can see in the discipline reaching far back, per the Margaret Hodgen). This emphasis on comparison makes reading Benedict and Mead seem a little dated for us.

Finally, we discussed how Benedict's notion of culture is very much an aesthetic one (culture is like a poem). She argues that some cultures are more coherent than others--i.e., that they are coherent in terms of individual's commitments to particular parts of an arc or particular themes).

Anthropology and Science

Ever since we touched on issues of anthropological methodology one or two classes ago, I have been thinking about the relationship between anthropology and science, and the relationship between the two. I'm particularly interested in hearing other points of view on this one.

A good brief article which covers the decision of the American Anthropological Association to remove the word science from its long-range plan statement, as well as the reaction to it, can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/10anthropology.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22anthropology%20a%20science%22&st=cse (I found the image of the cat going around clawing up all the furniture particularly amusing.)

To restate my position from class, while I think that anthropology is not as falsifiable in the Popperian sense as the physical sciences, anthropology does use many scientific epistemologies: observation, hypothesis testing, quatitative/statistical analyses, even (in archaeological anthropology at least) experimentation. The systematic removal of the word science from the AAA's long-range plans seems to be an attempt to distance itself from these methods which, as a whole, form a central piece of anthropological methodology. I prefer to think of anthropology not as a science but as a consumer of the scientific method.

What do you think?

--Nat

Anthropology and "The Arab Mind"

Ian and Jasmine both touch on instances of a (many way) traffic in psychologizing (and pathologizing) cultural stereotypes of Arabs and of specific Arab national cultures. The impulses underlying the action of circulating such stereotypes can vary widely, from the cynical opportunism (Mubarak), to what our own Michael Herzfeld calls "cultural intimacy," namely in-group solidarity-making (Jasmine's relatives).

Certain anthropological "culture and personality" studies on the model established by Ruth Benedict have played their own role in consolidating and relaying such stereotypes. The case one particular book, Raphael Petit's The Arab Mind, comes to mind. The 1973 book was reprinted in 2002 and was widely and uncritically used as source material by counterinsurgency strategists with the U.S. army in Iraq. In a column printed some years ago in Anthropology News, Gregory Starrett assesses the book as well as the possibility that it contributed to the armed forces' mistreatment of Iraqis on an everyday level as well as in such sensational affairs as Abu Ghraib.

http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/infocus/viewsonhumans/starrett.htm

Cultural "expertise"

Ian's post on Egypt made me think about the continuing echoes of ideas we saw in "Patterns of Culture". I'm especially interested in how legal systems give weight to conceptions of culture-- consider for example this story reported in the Israeli news in 2004, "Court Erupts Over Expert's Testimony on 'Arab Mentality'":

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/court-erupts-over-expert-s-testimony-on-arab-mentality-1.144943

In this case, a Middle East studies professor serving as an expert witness for the prosecution during a trial described the "Arab mentality", which he explained is characterized by a victim mentality and low standards of cleanliness (as evidence, he noted that "Arab" villages are "dirtier", apparently with little discussion of whether this could be due to economic inequalities and discrimination in the provision of state services...) My Palestinian relatives (especially my very tidy aunts!) would reject this description of the Arab mentality, but I wonder if they would dispute the very existence of an "Arab mentality" at all - would they defend its existence, but just define it differently (e.g. saying it tends to include a love for children, elaborate poetry and syrupy desserts?) Or would they reframe so-called cultural characteristics as merely a rational response to a particular political environment (e.g. is it irrational conspiracy thinking to speculate that the CIA might be involved in certain events when it does in fact have a notorious track record of involvement in coups, assassination attempts, etc.) Questions for my next family reunion...