Culture and cultures

From: Paul Dillon (dillonph@northcoast.com)
Date: Mon Dec 13 1999 - 22:51:56 PST


Diane, Nate, Genevieve, Stanton, . . .

It seems the relation of empathetic observation to scientific procedure has
now been clarified somewhat although there still remains the caveat that
"science" is a product of western culture and therefor particular, with no
claim to transcultural truth. I think this confuses the general and the
particular. I personally don't restrict my conception of "science" to the
lineage that moves from Democritus' insistence on the primacy of the
empirical through Bacon's formulation of methods for "interpreting nature"
to Galileo and Descartes' mathematization of phenomena in time and space.
For me, the Mayan calendar is irrefutable proof that quite precise
predictive science developed independently of this tradition and that it is
a human practice not restricted to a historico-geographically particular
culture. For Levi-Strauss, what anthropologists after Frazer and Durkheim
called "totemism" was nothing less than "the science of the concrete,"
insofar as totems served as logical operators, that were "good to think
with." In other words, science already is a transcultural practice.

Having been trained as an anthropologist it always amazes me to see how
appeals to cultural relativity (objective idealism) always come out like
some kind of trump card in discourses concerning scientific truth. In fact
there is no such trump card because the claims that all practices are
cultural products tends confuses the concept of culture with particular,
empirical cultures. It is quite obvious to me that Culture with a big C,
is the medium of human existence and that no human product or experience is
beyond culture. I'm quite comfortable with Mike's definition of culture as,
"a system of artifacts and mind as the process mediating behavior through
artifacts in relation to a supra-individual "envelope" with respect to
which object/environment, text/context are defined." (Cultural Psychology,
p. 143) But the accuracy of this statement says nothing about the
particularity or relativity of cultural artefacts that originate in
specific historical epochs and among particular peoples, e.g., the specific
scientific method that emerged in the West during the last 2500 and
especially the last 500 years. People everywhere encounter similar
'supra-individual "envelope" (environments?) and develop comparable
artefacts to mediate their interactions with that environment at given
stages of the development of social forces (technical and social relations
of production). Humans have always adopted and integrated alien artefacts
into their native "systems of artifacts and mind" when those artefacts can
increase the efficiency of attaining the goals of their multiple activity
systems.

Last week a Vygostkian psychologist I know up here in Bigfoot Country gave
me a rough draft of a piece he is working on. In the piece he argues that
certain artefacts (e.g., house designs) have have specific influences on
individual psychology while others (e.g., hammers) don't. During our
Friday noon discussion, I suggested to him that this isn't a question of two
types of artefact as much as a question of the universality and perhaps
necessary form of certain types of artefacts. I proposed that what we have
is a continuum of artefacts some of which are more totally constrained by
their purpose (in turn derived from the goal of the activity system of which
they form a part) and the natural laws of the organic and inorganic material
environment of that activity system (as we know these laws at the present
stage of cultural historical development). A hammer, to function as such
will not have the shape of a screwdriver -- which is not to say that one
couldn't hammer something with a screwdriver -- which would in any event
probably be more effective than screwing something with a hammer -- but that
they probably wouldn't do it for too long before hitting on a better hammer.
In most cases, human ingenuity finds the best designs with which to hammer
or to screw. And such designs tend to spread to other peoples and some
designs even stablize and don't change over extremely long periods of time
and space (the Clovis point, needles, or the machete for example). A
house, on the other hand, can vary considerably.. Whether everyone sleeps in
the same space (as in a plains indian teepee), or everyone sleeps in their
own space, (as in upper middle class American home), is really something
that natural laws don't seem to determine, although radical cultural
materialists (e.g., Marvin Harris) might want to make this claim. If
everyone sleeps in the same space it is probable that their psychological
attitudes about things that people do when they're lying down at night will
be different than the attitudes of people who are segregated during such
times. Here we'll probably tend to find a lot of culturally specific
variability that won't exist about the proper shape of a hammer or a needle
or a fish hook. And some artefacts are simply better than others for
achieving the goal of a given activity, Lauriston Sharp wrote some very
interesting stuff about the cultural incorporation of iron axes and other
tools into stone age cultures but the point is they were incorporated
because they were better for chopping than stone axes.

In anthropology this is studied as the phenomena of cultural diffusion. In
the essay, Science is Sciencing, Leslie White, an anthropologist who I'm
increasingly beginning to appreciate from a CHAT perspective, claimed that
the purpose of both science and art is to render experience intelligible and
that science does this by dealing with particulars in terms of universals.
The world wide adoption of the procedures of science that developed in the
above mentioned Democritus-Newton tradition certainly bespeaks the
suitability of these procedures for understanding particulars in terms of
universals, just as the universal adoption of iron tools bespeaks their
suitability and improvement upon stone ones. This says nothing about how
the scientific procedures will be employed--whether to build h-bombs or cure
AIDS -- just as the adoption of iron axes into Australian aboriginal
cultures did not prevent them from assigning these new tools to a
traditional totemic class. Of course scientific knowledge has limits but
this in no way makes it culturally relative in the sense the Nate and Diane
appear to claim. . Increasingly we are growing to have a more common and
universal global culture. Wouldn't the "cultural" origins of one or
another artefact (primary, secondary, tertiary) in this global culture have
the same relevance to their use as the etymologies of words have to the
speaking of a language?

 I hope its clear that I don't think science has all the answers, I just
can't see throwing the baby out with the bathwater. One of my favorite
movie characters was the theater owner in "Shakespeare in Love" who kept
telling everyone: "I don't know why it works out, it's a mystery." As
Evans-Pritchard wrote in "Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande":
the Azande know the physical reasons that caused the grain bin to collapse,
they inquire of the oracles why it happened to fall on a particular person.

Paul H. Dillon



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