Anthropological Interpretations of Culture by Kuper and Geertz - Essay Example

Anthropological Interpretations of the Term "Culture" Introduction Culture, as anthropologists see it, gives meaning, logic, and importance to many discrete and seemingly unconnected facts about human life. Culture evolves, and cultural evolution, like biological evolution, is progressive. Hence, inferior forms regularly give way to superior forms. Just as humans are superior to nonhuman animals, so civilization is superior to barbaric and savage culture. Clifford Geertz (an American anthropologist) and Adam Kuper (a British anthropologist) propose unique interpretations of culture, its structure and impact on society and communication. Their vision of culture influenced anthropological thinking for at least fifty years. Culture, as a guidance system, leads society to notice important differences between humans and other phenomena that get directed. Humans and their guides are often in conflict. Humans, or peculiar primates, create a peculiar guidance system, one that is praised, died for, evaded, avoided, and taught to young children. Intuitively, all we know about culture makes sense. Clifford Geertz and Interpretive Anthropology C. Geertz represents a symbolic anthropology school which underlines a key role of symbols (thoughts) in society and its culture. Geertz develops and discusses the main ideas about culture and its meaning in The Interpretation of Culture (1973) and Local Knowledge: Further essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983). It is important to note that this school of thoughts is also called an interpretive anthropology, paying a special attention to semiotic nature of culture. Under the leadership of Clifford Geertz, culture generates considerable excitement as a semiotic concept. Ideas and concepts used in his theories, Geertz took from the work of Gilbert Ryle and translating his philosophical ideas into notions usable by anthropologists, Geertz is revitalizing an old link with philosophy. This revitalization movement has its own vision of culture. According to Geertz, culture is no longer a map lodged in human minds; it is no longer plans, recipes, and rules. Culture, now, is traffic in things which impose meaning. More completely, and in Geertz's words, culture is traffic in anything "that is disengaged from its mere actuality and used to impose meaning upon experience" (Geertz 1973, p. 45). Within this context, human activity is well described as a "text," and a culture as an assemblage of texts. In presenting texts to interested publics and in interpreting their meanings, anthropologists assume old roles with some new labels, observers, scribes, translators, and interpreters. The documents anthropologists present must be deeply embedded in the contextual richness of social life; a text, that is, must be a "thick" description. Geertz defines culture as "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" (Geertz 1973, p. 89). The problem is, it is quite easy to write a text that is thick, but it is very difficult to write a text that is valid. The problem has not escaped Geertz. He admits that it is difficult to fathom "what our informants are up to and what it all means." Also, he settles rather cheaply for "doing the best we can" and using a lot of guessing. In his words: Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meaning, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape. (1973: 15) Guessing, a fundamental strategy in science, generally passes under the more prestigious name of hypothesizing. And hypothesizing, in traditional science, is but part of the opening moves. In the middle game and the end game scientists (1) build and use models and (2) utilize verification procedures. Instead of formal models, Geertz provides two general and rather strange images. Humans, for Geertz, are like spiders "suspended in webs of significance" (Geertz 1965, p. 66) they themselves have spun. And culture can be considered as these self-spun webs. Put otherwise, spiders spin webs and catch prey; humans spin culture and catch themselves. Culture, beyond its thick content, also has organization. For Geertz, a useful image for organization are the tentacles of the octopus (Geertz 1965, p. 66). Geertz introduces such concepts as gentium and universals. Geertz identifies what is universal in all culture and connects them with the biological nature. Old cultural thoughts, he identifies as the "consensus gentium" which means that all cultures are good, just, and right. Having provided two images, Geertz tells interpretive anthropologists to do nook-and-cranny anthropology, to descend into detail and stare at the truth directly, past the misleading tags, past the metaphysical types, "past the empty similarities to grasp firmly the essential character of not only the various cultures but the various sorts of individuals within each culture if we wish to encounter humanity face to face". (Geertz 1973, p. 53) Adam Kuper and Social Anthropology In contrast to Geertz, Adam Kuper represents a school of social anthropology which empathizes a key role of social factors and interaction of social groups in society. His main works are Anthropologists and Anthropology (1973), The Invention of Primitive Society (1988) and Culture: The Anthropologists' Account (1999). Kuper sees culture as a combination of social and cognitive factors which influence a person and culture. Kuper presents a picture of a static social structure, while the other argues that race and class are now irrelevant in society. The social approach conceptualizes culture as a set of plans, instructions, and rules or, less purposively, a means of social accounting. Culture thus provides the framework by which people justify their actions to others and call them to account to us for theirs. This concept of culture starts from the assumption that much of human thought is basically both social and public (Kuper, 1988). Kuper has argued that the theory, though basing its propositions on folk concepts, has transformed these ambiguous concepts into "timeless models". Focusing especially on race and class, he tries to show the variability and overlap inherent in folk conceptions of these two key factors. Kuper is particularly struck by sociologist Ferdinand Henriques's discussion (Gingrich & Fox 2002) of race in Jamaica, since the latter has argued that, in assessing this variable, multiple criteria--i.e., color, skin texture, facial features, hair form, and socioeconomic status--must be considered together Kuper argues that the use of such multiple factors in constructing race and, in general, social status is evidence that, contrary to what sociological models predict, ordinary Jamaicans possess no clear-cut way of ranking individuals (Kuper, 1988). In The Invention of Primitive Society, Kuper writes: Among tribes of low culture there is but one means known of keeping up permanent alliance, and that means is intermarriage. Exogamy enabling a growing. Not only were all human beings similarly endowed, all cultures could ultimately be reduced to the same basic mental principles, the Elementargedanken.' Local circumstances produced modifications in custom and organization (1988, p. 100, 127). The resulting ambiguity has lessened the amount of conflict one would expect to find in a highly inegalitarian society with a history of racial discrimination. Where conflict occurs it centers primarily on the entrenched two-party system. Overall, concludes Kuper, folk conceptions of race and class are so ambiguous, one can say definitively that clearly defined strata do not exist in Jamaica. Such strata only seem to exist because academics impose definitive criteria on a situation which is inherently fluid. "Culture history was to provide the critical materials with which to puncture the pretensions of the evolutionist writers" (Kuper 1988, p. 135) The importance of Kuper's analysis lies in his underlying assumption that social relations are dynamic. Far from being a society ossified since the end of slavery, the picture is one of social change, especially in the twentieth century, tending toward the undermining of preslavery social relations. Kuper (1999) writes: Every historical period has its own laws, each culture its particular dynamics. Moreover, cultures shape individuals to their ends. "Against mechanism, individualism, atomism, it has placed organicism." (p. 48). In his work, Changing Jamaica Kuper cites the following as being the most important changes: (1) the domination of the island's political structure by individuals of African ancestry; (2) the inclusion of the masses in the political process because of the need of both main political parties for their votes; (3) the rise of black racial consciousness through the Garvey and Rastafarian movements; (4) and massive immigration. Together, these changes have led to a society that differs in fundamental ways from society before the present century (Gingrich & Fox 2002) Discussion Section: geertz vs Kuper Kuper states that people do not think with a private metaphysical mind, but with words, pictures, gestures, actions, and both natural and manufactured objects. This is the main similarity with Geertz's concept of symbolic meaning of culture. Kuper underlines that people assign symbolic meaning so as to impose some sort of order and coherence on the stream of events. In so doing, people sift and filter their sensations of the world; some perceptions are admitted, some rejected, and others combined or broken down. If we did not filter experiences in this way or make use of public symbols for organizing perceptions and communicating them to others, then we would likely be overwhelmed by the variety of possible interpretations that could be assigned to events. People would have to abandon intellect and discourse and thereby be forced, like the lower animals, to rely on instinct (Inglis, 2000). In contrast to Kuper, Geertz states that (1973) mankind has observed, to mental basket cases. The filtering of sensory input and the use of symbols in thought are public processes, aspects of the cultural control mechanisms. Individual decisions are made according to a shared structuring of consciousness that is readily observable--in the organization of markets, in the layout of houses, in the adoption of dress codes, and, indeed, everywhere in the realm of public behavior (Geertz, 2000). In the book, Culture: The Anthropologists' Account Kuper pays attention to Geertz' theories and their strengths and weaknesses. He writes: "Above all, Geertz's message is that culture's is the essential element in the definition of human nature, and the dominant force in history. .. Culture rules: indeed, high culture rules' (Kuper 1999, p. 120) Since cultures differ radically from each other, cultural comparisons are impossible. How can the radically different be compared What standards could be used with which to compare Generalizations across cultures become, essentially, meaningless. If native watchers are no longer scientists, what are they And, what is their purpose Here hermeneutics enters as a savior of an established but floundering profession. Anthropology is redefined as an interpretive or hermeneutic discipline (Geertz 1973). Kuper, like Geertz, has provided culture with the relevance of excitement, triggering conflict, and debate. In the American society, instantly understood theory does well. While such theory does little for anthropology as science, it continues to generate much interest in anthropology as a discipline (Gingrich & Fox 2002). In contrast to Kuper, Geertz views culture as an Image of the world that includes cultural "maps," "taxonomies," and "paradigms" as particular organizational forms. The Image is analogous to the lexicon in models of natural language. It consists of "models of," not "models for," a way of life (Geertz 1973, p. 93). in contrast, cognitive anthropologists have made substantial progress in the analysis of the cultural Image, of Image domains such as color, kinship relations, folk biological taxonomies, and folk anatomy. Considerable progress is also evident in the study of decision trees, cultural rules, and routine planning (Inglis, 2000). Critics (Gingrich & Fox 2002) admit that the problem is that Kuper exaggerates the degree of social change that has occurred in society; in reality, modern-day society is neither quite what is used to be, nor has it become egalitarian. For instance, race and class no longer correlate as closely as the classic tripartite model posits but this does not mean, as Kuper argues, that society exhibits no fixed racial or socioeconomic strata. Indeed, Kuper's analysis of a small rural village in Jamaica reveals the existence of such strata. His study shows that: (1) folk views in society, though indeed ambiguous, are not infinitely variable; (2) real divisions exist within the society and these stem primarily from the ownership/nonownership of property and occupation. The village exhibited four primary groups: big landowners, small landowners, laborers, and a "middle class" deriving its position from such service occupations as teaching and shopkeeping. These material criteria correlated only loosely with socially defined race. Locals esteemed "whiteness" over "blackness," but these designations embraced not just color, but occupation, social status, and lifestyle. Generally speaking, big landowners were "white," but this group also included dark skinned individuals who, having acquired property, made a living by renting it to others. Moreover, most of these landowners avoided exclusivity, since they had married dark skinned women. Similarly, Kuper found large color variation among the local middle class, with no clear correlation between phenotype and social status (Gingrich & Fox 2002). The objects that researchers have sequentially encountered and brought one by one from the future into the present are integrated into an overall pattern. This pattern constitutes an object itself, a generalization of the present, and from its position we get a view of the world in which we now are. The view of the world in which we now are creates, at times more intensely than others, an aesthetic experience (Geertz, 2000). The consummation of these efforts locates the experience of each of us within the collective work of all; we experience each other's touch. The objects of this dialogue of words are self and other. Geertz states that self and other are the objects of speech; we, you and I, are names, symbols, attached to the flesh-and-blood of our primate being (Inglis, 2000). The key defining feature of symbols is that they are arbitrary. A sign is something that stands for something else. According to semiotic theory three basic varieties of signs can be recognized: icon, index, an symbol. More properly each of these concepts can be thought of as a quantitative dimension by which a sign can be classified. An icon is a sign that has a factual similarity to the thing or process signified. For example, a technical drawing picturing a farming technique is an icon. An index has a factual connection with the thing signified. For example, a bulging storage bin or fat cattle is an index of a farmer's skill and energy since each is correlated with farming talent (Inglis, 2000). A symbol is a sign that stands for a thing by conventional agreement. In language, usually it does not matter what sound pattern or series of letters are used to signify a particular thing or concept, it only matters that the members of a speech community agree on its meaning (Geertz, 2000). Similar to Geertz, Kuper underlines that since special skills are needed to grow symbols, which may be different from the skills required to grow other crops, giant yams are not necessarily an iconic sign of farming skill, or even a good index of horticultural talent. Convention could specify quite other means of signifying prestige in such a horticultural society, say by the growing of small, perfectly shaped (Gingrich & Fox 2002). Kuper states: certain degree of functional consistency we may add a second, which is a special instance of the first. Any human social life requires the establishment of a social structure consisting of a network of relations between individuals and groups of individuals" (Kuper 1973, p. 53) In contrast to Kuper, Geertz, as a symbolic anthropologist, questions how behaviors that are objectively "mere" symbols can come to be taken by people as central to their existence and whether (and in what sense) such behaviors can be functional. On the one hand, the arbitrariness of symbols with respect to function suggests, as Geertz argues, that the forces of what he calls "practical reason" cannot affect their evolution, while on the other the evident efforts their users devote to them suggest that they cannot be neutral with respect to natural selection. Under some circumstnces, the evolution of symbols my be utonomous becuse the use of lterntive symbolic vrints hs no effect on genetic fitness (or other criteri of function). In this cse symbols my be rbitrry without conflicting with genetic-fitness-mximizing hypothesis or other vrieties of functionlism. Kuper underlines that: "conflict is endemic in the social structure but a set of mechanisms exist whereby conflict itself is pressed into the service of affirming group unity" (Kuper 1973, p. 145). In other cses, the runwy dynmic my result in group selection of symbolic trits, so "group functionl" hypothesis of symbolic evolution must lso be entertined. The evolutionry dynmics of symbolic system re quite different from tht of ordinry dpttions. The vrint words for "ct" in different lnguges re ll functionlly equivlent (Geertz, 2000). For ech symbolic trit we observe, there is very lrge number of lterntives tht re equivlent in terms of fitness. Kuper states that "cultural symbols defined gross alternatives, and permitted the actors to make a traditional sort of sense out of whatever real structure emerged" (Kuper 1973, p. 155). The simplest hypothesis we might hve is tht symbol systems cn evolve by the rndom jiggling of men usge, combined with selection or bis ginst vrints tht re so distnt from the men s to cuse problems in communiction. To the extent tht symbol systems function simply for communiction within culture, these forces might be sufficient (Inglis, 2000). In contrst to Geertz, Kuper sttes tht socil structure nd relted process of chnge tht re perhps esier to recognize in the historicl record thn in ordinry ethnogrphic fieldwork becuse of the length of time involved in the evolution of the structure itself. This process involves the sense of n evolving structure of conflict between prties t interest, struggle tht moves, over decdes or genertions, towrd resolution by mens of importnt culturl chnge (Gingrich & Fox 2002). Behind it lies the community engged in its normtive debte nd the lws, conventions, nd socil vlues to which the normtive debte gives rise. Humns spek, they use rhetoric nd scrutinize one nother's speech (Kuper, 1988; Kuper 1976). Their individul conflicts of interest surfce nd re overruled s they try to persude one nother to compromise or to stnd firm. Fced with conflict, contestnts hve to resort to the rhetoric of the common good to support their privte clims. Kuper rgues tht regionl comprison must ctively confront methodologicl problems similr to those involved in ny other comprtive procedure in nthropology, including such topics s commensurbility, the units of comprison nd the question of boundries (Gingrich & Fox 2002, p. 14). Kuper identifies the bsic mechnism of the normtive debte tht sets the ground rules for ny form of socil structure, whether tht of mrket, the stte, or the voluntry ssocitions with which he ws primrily concerned (Gingrich & Fox 2002). conclusion In sum, Kuper and Geertz propose different views on culture and its development, key factors abd processes which influence its formation and interaction between people. For Geertz, culture is ideas while for Kuper culture is a combination of social factors and processes which influence a person. The strength of the Kuper's approach is its recognition that human behavior both affects and is affected by a complex environment, the social and ecosystems of which humans are but one part. This strength becomes a weakness if it is not clearly recognized that social systems are composed of individual organisms, each of which is pursuing its own plans. The strengths of Geert's approach is unique interpretation of the meaning of worlds and actions as symbols of interaction and culture formation. In reality, the social system was more complicated than this: internal differentiation based on occupation and race characterized each segment, and the society afforded individuals some latitude for defining the latter. Unlike the cultural pluralist view or that to Kuper, Geertz takes a middle path in analyzing society. Kuper stresses the importance of change over time, but he also recognizes that class and race remain variables. Bibliography Geertz, C. 1973, The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic. Geertz, C. 1965, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man." In New Views on the Nature of Man. J. R. Platt, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, C. 2000, Local Knowledge: Further essays in Interpretive Anthropology. Basic Books; 2 edition. Gingrich, A. Fox, R. 2002, Anthropology, by Comparison. Routledge. Inglis, F. 2000, Clifford Geertz: Culture Custom and Ethics. Polity. Kuper, A. 1973, Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School 1922-1972. London: Allen Lang. Kuper, A. 1988, The Invention of Primitive Society, New York, Routledge. Kuper, A. 1999, Culture: The Anthropologists' Account. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Kuper, A. 1976, Changing Jamaica. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Read More