Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1990. Theories of
THEORIES OF CULTURE REVISITED culture revisited.
Roger M. Keesing Canberra Anthropology
13(2):46-60. ISSN
0314-9099
If radical alterity did not exist, it would be anthropology's project to invent it. I
believe that the radical alterity we have sought has not existed for many millenia.
The tribal world in which we have situated that alterity - the world of Uvi-
Strauss's 'cold societies' - was our anthropological invention. We continue to
invoke it; and some of us journey even deeper into darkest New Guinea to find it,
existing still.
The invention and evocation of radical alterity, which has been our project,
required a conceptual universe, a mode of discourse. Especially as the idea of 'a
culture' was developed in the Boasian tradition, as a bounded universe of shared
ideas and customs, and as the idea of 'a society' was developed in functionalist
social anthropology, as a bounded universe of self-reproducing structures; these
concepts provided a framework for our creation and evocation of radical diversity.
'A culture' had a history, but it was the kind of history that coral reefs have: the
cumulated accretion of minute deposits, essentially unknowable, and irrelevant to
the shapes they form.
The world of timeless, endlessly self-reproducing structures, social and
ideational, each representing a unique experiment in cultural possibility, has -we
now know - been fashioned in terms of European philosophical quests and
assumptions, superimposed on the peoples encountered and subjugated along
colonial frontiers. The diversity and the uniqueness are, of course, partial 'truths':
the Tupinamba, the Aranda, the Baganda, the Vedda, the Dayak challenged
comprehension, and still do. But I believe we continue to overstate Difference, in
the search for the exotic and for the radical Otherness that Western philosophy,
and Western cravings for alternatives, demand.
I will touch again on this question of radical alterity, as it has been
interpreted and created in anthropological discourse. My main concern here is to
re-examine the concept of 'culture', particularly our ways of talking and writing
about 'a culture'. Hence I return to issues I addressed in a paper on 'Theories of
culture' fifteen years ago (Keesing 1974). I will begin by setting out a series of
ironies and contradictions.
A first irony is that the presently fashionable - in some quarters, at least,
ascendant -symbolisViterpretive modes of anthropology require radical alterity
more than ever, in a world where such boundaries as there ever were are
dissolving by the day. To show that conceptions of personhood, of emotions, of
agency, of gender, of the body are culturally constructed, demands that Difference
symbol to deploy against foreign researchers, who can be pilloried for having
stolen 'it', having sold 'it' for profit in the academic market place, or simply, as
outsiders seeking to intepret someone else's mystical essence, having
misunderstood and misrepresented 'it'.
At the same time that our anthropological concept of culture has been
increasingly pervading popular thought and talk, social theorists of various
persuasions have started to take 'culture' much more seriously: 'cultural studies'
has become a burgeoning field. Is this 'culture' of cultural studies 'culture' as we
anthropologists have conceptualized it? In general, the answer is -No. The
'culture' of 'cultural studies' (whether post-Marxist, post-modemist, or post-
whatever) has been developed through a broadening and critical sharpening of the
conception to which ours has for decades been counterposed: 'culture' as the
highest artistic and aesthetic refinements and achievements of a complex society.
It is not that 'cultural studies' are preoccupied only with paintings, statues and
symphonies: an increasing engagement with language and semiotic theory has led
to a considerable broadening of the old concept of 'culture' as high art, a
broadening in an anthropological direction. What distinguishes 'their' culture
from 'our' culture most strikingly is the stress in cultural studies on the articulation
of symbolic systems with class and power: the production and reproduction of
cultural forms. I will suggest that instead of our traditional anthropological
conception of culture being extended to complex contemporary 'societies', we
urgently need to draw on the conceptual refinements in contemporary social
theory, including the 'cultural' of 'cultural studies', to interpret the production and
reproduction of symbols among the peoples we have encountered along the
colonial margins and in peasant communities.
We confront a deep irony, then, that our anthropological conception of
culture has pervaded popular thought and has been applied willy-nilly to
contemporary life; while at the same time some of us are beginning to question its
utility, and to look for alternative ways of thinking about collective symbols and
meanings being explored outside our own discipline.
Let me unpack some of these arguments. Fint, let me say something about
the invention of radical alterity. Just how different the thought and experience of
non-Western peoples are from our own is a moot point about which we could all
argue ad nauseam. I recently spent some weeks immersed in conversation with a
brilliant young Kwaio (Solomon Islands) man who still practises his ancestral
religion and lives in a world where magic, ritual, and conversations with the dead
are the stuff of everyday life. Maenaa'adi's cultural alterity is perhaps as radical as
any in the world of 1989-90 (although he too lives in the collages of our time,
riding buses and checking the time on his watch when he comes to town). He
takes for gmnted that if his shadow were cast on a fissure where a leprosy victim's
50 CANBERRA ANTHROKlLDGY 13(2) 1990
body has been thrown, he would die of leprosy; he takes for granted that every
night his shade encounters the shades of his ancestors who give him messages of
impending events. He recites magical spells a dozen times a day, with complete
faith that they should work. Obviously, I am not claiming that Maenaa'adi's
world of experience and mine are minor variants of one another: there is more to it
than that. Yet I see no reason, in all the texts, to infer that the pragmatic way in
which he finds his way through his world is qualitatively different from the way in
which I find my way through mine; or that his culturally constructed senses of
indivuation and agency (or personhood or causality or whatever) are strikingly
different from mine.
We could argue endlessly about how radically diverse are culturally
constructed concepts of personhood and agency or experiences of emotion. I
believe that anthropologistshave disciplinary-vested interests in construing cultural
diversity in more extreme terns than our ethnographic evidence justifies (Keesing
1989a). Moreover, we have ignored the implications of steadily mounting
evidence that casts doubts on our extreme relativisms. Some of this evidence
comes from the neurosciences and cognitive sciences, where the constraints of
what can be learned and remembered by members of our species loom large, and
logics of thought begin to look not at all exotic. Some comes from research on the
neurobiology of mammalian emotional systems, including those of humans and
other higher primates. Some comes from studies of language, b t h the formal
structures of syntax and the logics of semantics and conceptualization. The
burgeoning field of cognitive grammar increasingly unites grammatical theory with
other realms of cognition.'
Languages, seen through this lens, look not at all exotic or radically diverse
(even though particular languages obviously explore different logical and
organizational possibilities in different ways). I do not want to go off on a tangent
abut this, but I want to note two lines of development I find particularly important
with regard to anthropology's exaggerated relativisms. The first is the pervasive
importance of metaphor in language: both the way languages as conceptual
systems are pervaded by conventional metaphor, as explicated (albeit imperfectly)
by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and the way change in a language over time,
whereby lexical forms acquire grammatical functions (the process that has come to
be called 'grarnmaticalization'), follows metaphoric pathways in ways that show
striking similarities from language family to language family (see, for example,
Heine and Reh 1984). I have suggested elsewhere that with our predilection to
take the most exotic possible readings of cultural texts, in fieldwork languages we
learn to quite limited degrees, ethnographers run the danger of elevating
conventional metaphoric schemes into cosmological structures and religious
philosophies (Keesing 1985, 1987,1989a).
The second point, which has emerged partly through studies of language
and conventional metaphor but has much wider implications, is the degree to
which the embodied-ness of cultural experience is turning out to be critical.
Studies of conventional metaphor and the linguistic encoding of relations of time,
space, perception and causality, increasingly point to the centrality of embodied
experience. Mark Johnson's The body in the mind (1987) powerfully argues the
costs of Western philosophy's mind/body dualism and its focus on disembodied
reason. Anthropology is engaging embodiedness and the cultural construction of
the body largely through what we used to call 'medical anthropology', but as
Johnson's philosophical argument and feminist reflections on embodiedness (see,
for example, Gatens 1983) illustrate, progress is being made on other fronts as
well.
That all humans everywhere experience the world 'out there' in and through
their bodies, and that this embodiedness becomes the model for cultural
conceptualization of spatial orientation, agency, perception, emotion and thought,
is not to say that the cultural elaborations of embodied experience all go in the
same direction. Let me come back for a moment to my friend Maenaa'adi. In one
sense, Maenaa'adi's dream experience and mine must be quite similar, yet he
attributes a reality status to the nocturnal wandering of his soul and its encounters
with others, while I assume that it is all being fabricated in my dreaming
imagination. To see one's shadow as a component of the body that may be
damaged or polluted, to fear the possibility of soul loss, to attribute forms of
illness to magically injected foreign objects, entails having conceptions of the
boundaries and dynamics of one's body very different from mine.
Culturally constructed bodies and bodily images and experiences
unquestionably vary in different times and places. Yet anthropology's theoretical
predilections and disciplinary interests ryn in this direction and make us prone to
overstate the case and to miss or underestimate a reverse phenomenon. We know
a good deal, through the writings of Foucault (for example, 1973, 1977) and
recent anthropological explorations, about how the power of the body social is
inscribed on the body physical. Yet we have not seen clearly eoough,I think, the
power of the body physical -as subjectively experienced by its 'occupant' -to
inscribe itself on cultural traditions and thus to conmain cultulal diversity.
My point is not to argue endlessly what I admit is a partisan position with
regard to radical cultural diversity. But I do want to register deep scepticism about
much of what I read nowadays about the cultural construction of personhood,
agency, and emotion. I believe that in a decade or two, when some of the
biological/cognitive constraints on human thought, emotion and learning have
come more clearly into view, the extreme relativisms and cultural constructionist
52 CANBERRA ANTHROPOLDGY 13(2) 1990
positions of our time will seem quaint in the extreme. That is what I mean by a
radical alterity that does not exist.
The second point I want to expand concerns the hidden agendas in
conventional anthropological conceptions of 'culture'. I have suggested that our
quest for radical alterity shapes, and is shaped by, our conceptualizations of
'cultures' as discrete, self-contained, self-reproducing universes of shared
customary practices and beliefs. For 'a culture' to be a separate experiment in
human possibility, it must not only be separate and internally coherent and
homogenous; the 'experiment' must, as it were, be 'natural' (in the sense that
intentional agency and interest do not contribute to its cumulative coral-reef-like
forn). There is a whole set of hidden agendas here. Indeed, anthropological
theories of culture can be subjected to the same order of political critique as
functionalist sociology in, say, its Parsonian variants: that is, as smssing order,
integration and stasis, and hiding conflict, contradiction and the ideological and
hegemonic force of 'shared' symbols and institutions. Marxists, feminists and
other critics of societies as-they-are have aptly pointed to all that is hidden by
representations of 'culture' and 'society' as consensual, collective, coherent,
integrated and self-reproducing. The voices of subaltemity (Guha 1983a, 1983b).
contradictions and conflicts, the hegemonic force of dominant ideologies,
cleavages of class and gender, are glossed over with a wave of the analytical
brush.
Anthropological conceptualizations of 'culture' have been - shall we say
- imcent (in the sense of naivett?,not culpability) in terns of the battleline of
social theory. Our ways of conceptualizing what used to be called the 'primitive'
world still embody a set of assumptions deriving from the nineteenth century about
the collectiveness and sharedness of 'custom'. Counterposing Them to Us,
nineteenth-century ethnology characterized 'primitive' peoples in terns of the deep
conservative force of tradition, the lack of individuation in the way they lived their
lives, the unseen force of social convention. As anthropology refined 'custom'
into 'culture', it preserved largely unexamined the assumptions about collectivity
and uniformity of culturally defined beliefs, norns and experiences (although there
were few dissenting queries, notably those posed by ad in).^ The coral-reef
conception of how cultures cumulate remained intact. Cleavages of gender and
social inequality were unreflectively hidden. The production, ideological force and
hegemonic power of cultural meanings went substantially unexamined in a
discipline that grew up (especially in North America) in curious isolation from
continental social theory.
What, then, of the present? Obviously things have changed, most notably
through a serious input from Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of
an anthropology of gender and the serious study of women's lives, and a much
ROGERM. KEESING 53
greater openness to issues of social theory. But have they changed enough in the
needed direction?
Whereas the lives of those we now study are situated in the 1980s world of
global mass culture, consumerism, and capitalist labour relations and
dependencies, their culnues still can be subjected to that analytical sleight of hand,
that denial of 'coevalness', so aptly characterized by Johannes Fabian (1983).
Their cultures are hermetically sealed beyond the reaches of time and the world
system. Margaret Jolly and I have recently written on the way anthropological
characterizations of Melanesia, where we work, persistently edit out Christianity,
trade stores, labour migration, contemporary politics and cash economy,
exoticizing and essentializing 'traditional culture' as it ostensibly survives in
hinterland villages (Keesing and Jolly, in press.). This is not to say that
contemporary anthropology is still unwaveringly committed to the portrayal of
exotic cultural alterity, as a cursory reading of any recent American
Anthropological Association annual meeting programme will attest. Yet this
pursuit of the exotic Other is still a persistent theme and 'culture' is a powerful
device for its perpetuation.
Let me return briefly to the way in which anthropological talk about
'culture', with its irresistible temptations to reify, personify, and essentialize, has
passed into the cultural nationalist discourse of Third World klites. For the latter,
Westernized though they may be, to claim that 'it' is 'our culture' is to make
claims of identity, authenticity, resistance and resilience. Culture, so reified and
essentialized, can be subjected to metonymic transformation, so that the cultural
heritage of a people or a post-colonial nation can be represented by its fetishized
material forms and performances: 'traditional dress', dances, artefacts. So
transformed, 'it' - the cultural heritage, semiotically condensed - can be
deployed in rituals of state, art festivals, tourist performances and political
appearances to reaffirm that 'it' survives despite Westernization (and hence to deny
the erosion, capitalist reorganization and pauperization of rural life). It is worth
observing that such a semiotic of cultural identity has its origin in nineteenth-
century cultural nationalism in Europe expressed in an intense search for ethnic
roots and folk origins, for primordiality and cultural tradition. The museum and
folkloric traditions so strong in eastern and nolthern Europe grew out of this
romantic quest for origins and local folk tradition. The Third World has inherited
these European semiotic systems and institutions in the colonial process, and they
have been deployed in a parallel affirmation of cultuml identity.
I have noted (1989b) the ironies that emerge when a conception of culture
indirectly borrowed from anthropology is used to denounce foreign reserachers,
with anthropologists as the quintessential villains. They, as outsiders (it is
argued), can never penetrate Our essence, never really understand Us. Once 'a
54 CANBERRA ANTHROPOEY 13(2) 1990
culture' has been reified and hypostatized as a symbol, the outside researcher can
also be accused of appropriating 'it'. 'It' can be cornrnoditized as well, depicted as
having been alienated by an anthropologist and sold for profit in the academic
market place. I take it as the crowning irony that our own conceptual diseases
should be deployed against us.
Let me come back to the extreme cultural-constructionist and relativist
positions, the post-modemist elevations of ethnography as the core of the
discipline, and the indulgent subjectivism and narcissism of 'experimental'
ethnographic accounts, that have been so prominent in the practice and politics of
recent American anthropology. I do not find it coincidental that these approaches
have flourished during the conservative era of Thatcherism and Reaganism.
Cultural interpretations illuminate some questions, but they hide a host of others.
If classical Orientalism, including its anthropological fofis, was part and parcel of
the imperialist process, the neo-Orientalism in which we are caught up is part and
parcel of the global economy and political climate of our time.
There is no reason why the new modes of representation need to be
conservative in ignoring contemporary state terror and in taking for granted the
political economy of global capitalism that continues to drain wealth out of Third
World countries and to hold them bonded in debt, that pauperizes hinterland
communities and generates ecological deva~tation.~ Yet what remains unsaid in
much current anthropological writing speaks deafeningly, if we only step back to
listen (Said 1989).
The not-so-hidden agendas in anthropological conceptions of culture take
me to a further expansion of my argument. I have suggested that conceptions of
culture n m w e r than those conventional in anthropology are being developed in
the field of 'cultural studies' as a burgeoning concern in social and critical theory.
I have further suggested that the theoretical developments in this area could
usefully illuminate anthropologicalunderstanding of the communities in which we
work - 'tribal', peasant or urban.
'Cultural studies' is very much contested ground and it is being entered
from a number of directions. One incursion comes from critical theory. Critical
theory in its various forms has as its central concerns literature and 'the arts'. I
would include here much of post-modemism and much of continental post-
structuralism, especially its American manifestations ('deconstruction' in literary
criticism, etc.). The key intellectual sources for contemporary critical theory are
extremely diverse in terms of 'traditional' disciplinary compartments and include
not only literary critics, but also philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists,
linguists, and semioticians. 'Cultural studies' in this mode -as represented, say,
in the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin -
takes as the 'core' of the 'cultural' the literary and artistic productions of complex
contemporary 'societies', hence builds on a conception of culture against which
anthropology's encyclopzdic conception has been opposed for decades.
However, the concept of the cultural in 'cultural studies', as envisioned by critical
theorists, has been broadened considerably; on the one hand, by a pervasive
concern with language in all its manifestations (the influence of semiotics and
structuralism), and on the other, by post-modernism's transgressions of the 'great
divide' between 'high' and 'popular' culture (see Huyssen 1986).
Other incursions into the realm of 'cultural studies' have come from various
forms of social theory. I will illustrate with what I shall (in the spirit of the time)
call 'post-Marxist' approaches. Here we can take as illustrative the work of the
University of Birmingham's Cenm for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the work
of Ranajit Guha and his Subaltern Studies colleagues: and the writings collected
in the recent volume on Marxism and the interpretation of culture (Nelson and
Grossberg (eds) 1988). The inspirations here in some cases come more directly
from Gramsci than Marx, but the ultimate origins lie in Marx's own insights
regarding symbols and ideology that have been overlain by a century of crude
economisms.
For most post-Marxist theorists, too, the core of the 'cultural' lies in
publicly developed symbolic productions. However, there is a second and more
anthropological reading of culture as concerned with the symbolic aspects of
'everyday life', notably in the work of Bourdieu, Guha and his colleagues, and
Willis. In any case, as with the critical theorists, concerns with language and
semiotics have led to a considerable broadening of conceptions of 'the cultural'.
Nelson and Grossberg write that
[clultural theory has now expanded the category of culture well beyond
'the best that has been thought and said,' beyond the general forms of
art, language, and entertainment, beyond the leisure (that is, nonlabor)
activities of the general population ... [A] foregrounding of issues of
language [has] promoted a broad concern with culture, symbolic
forms, communication, and meaning (19885).
Marxism began to ... [recognize] that cultural analysis needed to be
concerned with all the structural and meaning-producingactivities by
which human life is created and maintained (1988:6).
NOTES
The initial version of this paper was presented in a symposium convened by Professor
Robert Borofsky on 'Assessing developments in anthropology' at the American
Anthropological Association meetings in Washington DC, in November 1989. I am
grateful to George Stocking for helpful comments in his role as discussant. An expanded
version was presented as a lecture at the University of Manitoba in February 1990; for
comments and questions that led to further revisions I am indebted to Rod Burchard, Jean-
Luc Chodkiewicz, Yngve Thomas Lithman, James Urry and Raymond Wiest
58 CANBERRA ANTHROPOIDGY 13(2) 1990
Here I commend George Lakoffs book Women,fire and dangerous things (1987); the
new journal Cognitive Linguistics is also a valuable source.
* Yngve George Lithvin has usefully remined me that the anthropological conception of
culture was itself strongly influenced by wider intellectual developments (such as German
romanticism, as it became expressed both in intellectual debates and in cultural
nationalism); and George Stocking has commented in a similar vein on the
transformations in social theoretic vision that separate the Boasian tradition and its
invocations of 'culture' from the Tylorian conception and project.
See, for example, the recent writings of Michael Taussig on the culture of terror
(Taussig 1984,1987).
See Guha 1983a. 1983band Guha (4.) 1982-1987.
As Foucault rightly observed, to see ideologies as masking the truth assumes some
privileged access to truth which is no longer philosophically admissable. Marx himself
glimpsed in places much more subtle views of ideologies and their force, but it remained
for Gramsci and his contemporary successors to develop them coherently.
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