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...

Mubarak and knowing culture

Here's a story that was picked up by a few papers the other day:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/04/mubarak-stands-fast

"Mubarak, in the first major interview since the protests began, expressed no sense of betrayal over President Barack Obama's call on Tuesday for him to begin the transition to democracy "now". But there was a hint of resentment when he said Obama did not understand Egyptian culture and the trouble that would ensue if he left office immediately.

"I am fed up. After 62 years in public service, I have had enough. I want to go," Mubarak said in an interview with ABC's Christiane Amanpour. "If I resign today, there will be chaos."

--I wonder if these remarks could be seen as an instance of power/knowledge at work in cultural rhetoric. The members of Egyptian culture here are like automatons with no freedom of movement: they will descend into chaos because that is what their culture dictates. In stating his knowledge of this fact Mubarak (unlike Obama) locates himself in the unique position of individual agency and control over its force.
-Ian

Class #2 (Feb 1)

Here I will outline five clusters of questions from our discussion on Tuesday. Please forgive me if I left out anything.

(1) We reflected on the terms “human nature” and “cultures” as found in Boas. On one hand, Boas presents culture in the plural as opposed to a singular culture that varies in degree or quantity. On the other hand, in his final sentence of the Eskmos article, he writes:

…although the character of their life is so rude as compared to civilized life, the Eskimo is a man as we are; that his feelings, his virtues, and his shortcoming are based in human nature, like ours. [55]

What are we to make of “human nature” or the phrase “a man as we are”? How do we understand Boas’ attention to both particularity and universality? Are they in tension, mutually reinforcing, or necessarily paired?

(2) Related to the previous question, we discussed the practice of organizing data with categories. By utilizing general terms to aggregate particularities, do we have a common understanding of “what culture is” or “cultural forms”? What makes a spear a spear? With what criteria are we to know whether “two things” belong to the same type?

(3) A critical and reoccurring question for this class concerns our relationship with what we are reading. What is the purpose of knowing our history and genealogy? In what ways do we place a thinker or article “in its/her/his time” vs. “in our time”? How can the past be used and what do we do with our history?

(4) Another set of questions revolves around the term “integration.” In Boas’ “The Aims of Anthropological Research”, he writes:

Every attempt to deduce cultural forms from a single cause is doomed to failure, for the various expressions of culture are closely interrelated and one cannot be altered without having an effect upon all the others. Culture is integrated. [256]

If culture is integrated, how do we study it? Is it possible to study culture without including every component that makes up culture?

(5) In Elliot’s “The Three Senses of ‘Culture’”, he introduces the possibility of “cultural disintegration”:

Cultural disintegration is present when two or more strata so separate that these become in effect distinct cultures; and also when culture at the upper group level breaks into fragments each of which represents one cultural activity alone. [26]

Do we agree that cultural disintegration is possible? If so, what does it look like and how does it occur? How can we put together Boas’ cultural “integration” and Elliot’s cultural “disintegration”? Do Boas and Elliot use these terms in comparable ways? How do their notions of culture influence this distinction? Is culture something that “must be made” or “simply exists”?

Between Poetry and Science

As promised, this first substantive (if brief) blog post will simply try to record a question that emerged during the introductory class meeting for "Culture":

Within anthropology, how has the relationship between the projects of representing culture and understanding culture been understood at different points of time? How much weight has been given to one over the other? Does the answer to this question vary across the American, British, or Continental traditions? Here representing culture refers to the production of a portrait of a society and its members, whether in the form of description and personal narrative in the voice of ethnographer or via the inclusion of poetry, narrative, folklore, or spoken discourse from native informants. Understanding culture refers to the discovery and explanation of some aspect or other of social life via the development of interpretive or explanatory hypotheses and their subsequent validation or falsification.

Thanks to Charlie for raising this question, which seems to me to get at one of the constitutive tensions that animates anthropology as a discipline poised between the humanities and the social sciences. Of course, this was just one of several interesting contributions that were made at our first meeting. To those of you whose recollections are still fresh: please consider taking a few moments to post them here.

Welcome

Hello all. As Mary and I mentioned during yesterday's first class meeting, this is a place to preserve and extend threads of class discussion as well as to share relevant resources with each other. Please be sure to include your name in every post, whether in the title or at the end of your text. Thanks!