Diane,
I admit that i have a difficult time following a lot of what you post to
xmca and the following is a very good example of a passage that left me
quite dizzy afteer reading it:
"cultural-historical has always implied a critical-historical, because
historical perspectives are subsumed within culture,
but culture needs its own resources for reckoning with history - so each
particular cultural position is biased with its cultural tools,
thus positioned to reckon a particular relation to history, one that
affirms the cultural tool
in such a way that even a critical perspective can substantiate the
cultural values embedded in the work of critical analysis. "
in particular I can't understand how culture would need to "reckon" with
history if, as you say, history is subsumed in culture. To me the main
question concedrns the relative independence of the spheres of "history" and
"culture"? In other words, is history something that exists independently
of culture, something that happens to a culture, something a culture must
reckon with, and if so what is it considered independently of culture? You
seem to be denying this independence in general as I understand from having
read many of your posts but I could be wrong. The classic anthropological
study of cargo cults in the south pacific after ww2 brings this problem
directly to mind. there the historical events of Japan and the Allies
fighting a war that had nothing to do with and that engulfed the populations
on the islands, each with their own cultural traditions, were recoded but
produced something new. Lauriston Sharp similarly wrote a very interesting
study called "Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians" where he showed how a
historically new event (steel axes brought in by missionaries) was subsumed
into the classificatory system of the aboriginal tribes. But this wasn't
exactly the subsumption of a "perspective" in either case. It was the
subsumption of something that happened. A whole lot has been written about
how the historical fact of the conquest in central and south america was
subsumed doubly into native cultures--Guadalupe being in fact an aztec
goddess, and my own research in the central andes showing how the systems of
catholic saints were simply superimposed over prexisting socio-religious
systems as long as the material systems.
So what is this HISTORY that is independent of culture, that culture takes
into account, and subsumes? The examples i've given are examples of
external processes that produced changes that had to be taken into account,
but there are also internal processes; e.g., the transition from feudalism
to capitalism in Europe in the period between the XVI and the XIX centuries.
I think Eugene is totally correct that Vygotsky's understood culture in a
totally historical way and I think that this is way too limited, although as
I have indicated in other posts, there are significant cultural parallels
that coincide with definite levels of socio-political and technological
organization, and I do believe that in fact, cultural specificity is
subsumed within specific stages of human social development; ie., history.
In this sense history is the history of the unfolding of humanity's conquest
of necessity, or the workings out of labor's original alienation/social
division of labor and the corresponding class struggle that this division of
labor engendered. In this sense one can speak of a directionality to
history (something that is really hard to deny) though it certainly doesn't
imply that progress means that things are better in any moral or even
existential sense of the term. As Marshall Sahlins said in Stone Age
Economics, the late paleolithic was probably the best time to be alive in
terms of freedom from drudgery and the fullest enjoyment of one's faculties
as a an individual homo sapiens..
But what is history for you that it could be independent and therefor
subsumable at all in cultural systems of representation and/or discourse? I
can't seem to find that in what you've written.
And one other point; in what way are Palestine, Servia, Hungaria, Ethiopia,
White South
Afrikaans, or Black Zimbabwe, etc. cultures at all? Aren't these ethnic and
political entities, or do you see an equivalence between ethnicity and
culture, nationality and culture?
Paul H. Dillon
"It seems ridiculous to me to attempt to study society as a mere observer.
He who wishes only to observe will observe nothing, for as he is useless in
actual work and a nuisance in recreations, he is admitted to neither. We
observe the actions of others only to the extent to which we ourselves
act." - Jean Jacque Rousseau
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