distracted by Ingold

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 11 2001 - 17:13:45 PST


Faced with the need to write an intro to the next, extremely diverse and
stimulating issue of MCA, and not up to the task, while I struggle to find
threads of unity in the diversity, I turned to the second of Tim Ingold's
pieces, Three in One. I recommend it warmly to those similarly bent on
not doing what they ought to be doing, or simply those who want a braod,
intelligent, discussion of many issues of long term intrest to mca-like
folk.

For openers, I was startled to find the term, habitus, in the mouth/pen
of Marcel Mauss from a time when Bourdieu (who figures later in the piece)
was at most a mere pup. Harbingers of things to come.

Here is one para I thought emblematic and perhaps inducive of further reding
for others, as I turn back to the "real" tasks at hand.
mike

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Human beings, then, are not born biologically or psychologically identical, prior to their differentiation by
culture. There has to be something wrong with any explanatory scheme that needs to base itself on the
manifestly ludicrous claim - in the words of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides - that 'infants are everywhere
the same'.26 Even parents of identical twins know this to be untrue! The source of the difficulty lies in the
notion that culture is an extra ingredient that has to be 'added in' so as to complete the human being. We have
found, to the contrary, that all those specific abilities that have classically been attributed to culture - to walk
in a certain way, to speak a certain language, to sit or squat, and so on - are in reality incorporated, through
processes of development, as properties of human organisms. In that sense, they are fully biological. Culture,
then, is not superorganic or supra-biological. It is not something added to organisms but a measure of the
differences between them. And these differences, as I have shown, arise from the ways in which they are
positioned vis-`-vis one another, and non-human components of the environment, in wider fields of
relationship.onents of the environment,
in wider fields of relationship.

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