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...

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.