Chapter
VIII, part 1
VIII.A. The prospects for ‘wholeness’
1.
The chapter title recalls a sentiment of J.R. Firth, for whom ‘general
linguistics’ should study human beings ‘thinking and acting as a whole’
and ‘in association’. He advocated regarding ‘the whole of our linguistic
behavior’ as ‘a set of structures and systems’, and as ‘a network of
relations between people, things, and events’ to be described in ‘contexts
of situation’. Yet this advocacy was difficult to pursue as long as the human
sciences emulated the outlook of °classical science° in breaking down the
human being into a set of factors that could be parcelled out to separate fields
or disciplines — °taking out loans of simplicity to finance more determinate
results° (III.34, 39ff). Reassembling the results later on has been difficult,
e.g., as attested in the discourse of psychology:
When
‘faculty psychology’ was popular, the operation of the person was divided
into many separate categories, such as memory, perception, intelligence,
volition, and language. However, the more that psychologists divided functioning
into parts […] the more complex became the task of determining how those parts
might be reassembled into an integrated whole (Jay Efran, Michael Lukens, and
Robert Lukens)
The
situation was similar in the study of °language by itself, disconnected from
world and society° and divided up into °‘levels’ or ‘components’ like
phonology, morphology, lexicology, syntax, and semantics°, each to be described
separately by its own internal criteria and constraints (cf. II.29-50). Here
too, reassembling language to describe the interaction among ‘levels’ during
actual discourse seemed forbiddingly complex.
2.
The fragmentation of the sciences of humans and languages is most damaging in an
era when socialization and education are disintegrating into crisis (Ch. VII).
These sciences ought to be taking the lead in developing more °progressive,
cooperative, inclusive strategies of discourse° in order to help society resist
the °regressive tides of confrontation and exclusion in the wake of a
relentless modernization, when diversity and uniformity are being swiftly
rearranged, and when people are hugely interconnected but cannot understand how°
(cf. I.4; VI.41; VII.22f, 28, 69). Such discourse urgently is required to
reconnect the beleaguered unity of the individual person’s self
and role in modern experience
(VII.22). In particular, such discourse should welcome and advance the potential
of multicultural diversity as the
richest action space for °actualizing the ‘whole human being’, and for
integrating alternative modes of human knowledge and experience° (VII.27, 101,
112, 128; VIII.29, 123).
3.
This chapter will explore several domains which are richly connected to the
‘wholeness’ of human discourse but which have been neglected until recently
by °mainstream theories or models of language°. Culture
is the ‘whole fabric’ wherein a society or social group organizes its °behavioral,
cognitive, and social activities°, covering external acts, e.g., planting and
harvesting, along with its °beliefs and attitudes° about what the world is
like and how people should act. Ideology
is a cognitive and behavioral system that sets priorities among ‘ideas’
(concepts, meanings, actions, and so on), and legitimizes certain ones as
‘true’, ‘proper’, ‘natural’, ‘correct’, ‘valuable’,
‘respectable’, and the like (VII.18). Gender
is the system of rights and significances that elaborately ‘amplifies’ and
‘symbolizes’ biological sex roles throughout the culture (VIII.64). Emotions are the system of instinctual motivations and responses
that accompany human activities, including discourse, and regulate both the
material and the data of the human system through drifts like excitement or
depression (VIII.99). Admittedly, these domains are just a few of the ones
needing to be examined by a °transdisciplinary science of text and discourse
working to diversify and integrate our theories and methods°; and I can only
treat them here on a provisional and programmatic basis in relation to such a
science.
4.
Even more so than language, culture
is a pervasive human construct that seldom comes into clear, conscious focus for
its participants, and is easily equated with the ‘natural’ or ‘normal
order the world’ (cf. I.56ff). Many people who use the term ‘culture’
freely in their everyday conversation might have trouble defining what it means.
Its meaning is indeed contested among competing ideologies (VII.18), as we
readily see in a dictionary entry based on actual usage, such as that in the Collins
COBUILD: the split
between the neutral and inclusive
sense of ‘the ideas, customs, and art that are produced or shared by a
particular society’, versus the ameliorative
and exclusive sense of ‘the quality of being well-mannered and
well-educated’, especially when you have a ‘good knowledge of the arts’
(cf. VII.27). The two senses diverge sharply on the issue of whether everybody
participates equally in the culture or whether only specially ‘cultured’
people do. The exclusive meaning has a high adaptive value for the elites who
possess the approved ‘manners’ and ‘education’, and a maladaptive value
for everybody else; so elitist discourse thematically works to establish the
exclusive meaning as the ‘normal’ one, giving us such commonplace pairs of
terms as ‘cultured’ versus ‘uncultured’ or ‘high culture’ versus
‘low culture’, which would be perverse or nonsensical if the inclusive
meaning prevailed.
5.
If a valid scientific study of language must address a broad range actual
discourse and not just reproduce °prescriptive and proscriptive notions about
‘good’ versus ‘bad’ or ‘correct’ versus ‘incorrect’ language°,
then a valid scientific study of ‘culture’ must address the neutral,
inclusive sense. The exclusive ameliorative claims of certain participants to be
‘cultured’, ‘well-educated’, and so on, are not categories of our
description but social moves within the domain to be described in regard to
their adaptive value. We could describe, for example, how and why the °ideology
of ‘ancientism’ in ‘Western’ societies long valued the ‘culture’ of
Greece and Rome over ‘modern culture’° (VII.58), identifying a
‘cultured’ person as one conversant with Greek epics and statuary, Latin
orations or amorous poetry, and so on. We could inquire how this value
functioned to sustain the positions of the elites, e.g., by legitimizing
education with an ‘ancientist’ curriculum (VII.60), or by housing
institutions of power inside ‘ancientist’ architecture.
6.
In anthropology, a fairly neutral and inclusive definition of ‘culture’
might be: ‘the learned repertory of thoughts and actions exhibited by members
of social groups’ (Marvin Harris). The relation between ‘culture’
versus ‘society’ might be defined in parallel with the relation between °virtual
versus actual systems° proposed by Peter Hartmann and others for language
versus discourse (I.17), as in this account:
[whereas]
culture [is] an ordered system of meanings and of symbols in terms of which
social interaction takes place, […] a social system [is] the pattern of social
interaction itself (Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils)
culture
is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their
experience and guide their action; social structure is the form that action
takes, the actually existing network of social relations (Clifford Geertz)
In line with the arguments advanced in II.112,
this scheme too would be °dialectical,
since ‘culture’ and ‘society’ continually determine each other as they
evolve°. We might then explore some ‘intermediary control systems’ between
the two sides, including domains of ‘culture’ in the ameliorative sense,
e.g., the institutions that support ‘the arts’, and the groups that actively
participate as artists or audiences. We also might explore the liberating
potential of the arts for appreciating human talent and multicultural
experience, which deeply alarms °conservative guardians of mainstream culture
and conventional morality° (cf. VII.293).
7.
Another parallel between language and culture might be drawn in respect to origins. I have suggested that the origin of language was not a
sudden individual invention but rather a °threshold of ‘critical mass’
during the gradual ‘externalization’ of the already amplified internal
organization of life systems moving toward richer media for interaction° (cf.
III.106ff). Similarly, the origin of culture could have been a gradual
‘amplification’ building up ‘layers’ of interactions wherein material
and data jointly determined which actions would prevail and what those actions
would ‘mean’. Though modern humans pride ourselves on our data-rich brains
(however maladaptively we use them), our early culture owed a large material
debt to our feet and posture that enabled us to walk upright and freed our hands
to make, carry, and use tools in steadily more refined ways. This capability
helped material objects (e.g., stones, sticks) from the environment to acquire
cultural ‘meanings’ in social systems, which in turn indicated how the
material might be strategically modified (e.g., to serve better for hunting).
8. At cultural
take-off (the popular term for the °critical mass° in such evolutions), a
rich configuration of °emergent properties° could crystallize fairly rapidly
(cf. III.50, 70ff, 105ff). Like the much simpler critical mass from amino acids
to living protein (cf. III.58, 176), culture arose on a layered organic base and
proceeded to amplify it by enriching the constraints on basic activities like
eating, sleeping, or reproducing, and by elaborating adjunct activities to the
basic ones, e.g., hunting, building, or courtship. Culture supplied not just
material artifacts such as tools and weapons, but also data stores far greater
than one individual person, family, or generation could collect and organize
from the sensory data of seeing, hearing, and so on. ‘Cultural artifacts’,
whether they were ordinary objects like cooking utensils or ‘artistic’ or
‘religious’ objects like clay statues or cave-wall paintings, offered
amplified media for ‘external data storage’ (cf. V.98f). The notion that the
‘meaning’ (as data) of artifacts can be grasped apart from their
construction and use (as material) is a rather ‘modern’ one (VIII.15),
encouraged by the elaborate technological mediation between what commodities
‘mean’ (e.g., social prestige) versus how they were constructed and used —
an endemic factor in obscuring the °interconnectedness of ‘modern culture’°
(VIII.2). The widest mediation prevails in electronic data-processors which,
during their use, actually can ‘generate meanings’ quite independently of
the construction of circuits and switches, all the way up to the ‘virtual
realities’ we can organize however we wish while leaving ‘actual reality’
in the same sorry state.
9. The
scientific study of human culture is also a fairly ‘modern’ enterprise,
helped along by the need of European and American colonialism to gather data on
diverse cultures in order to control them. As with early fieldwork linguistics
(II.31, 37), the most impressive studies of early anthropology — e.g., on the
Trobrians by Malinowksi, on the Nuer by Evans-Prichard, on the Tallensi by Meyer
Fortes, or on the Samoans by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson — were
conducted on remote cultures where the investigators were thoroughly °defamiliarized
from their own culture and ideological assumptions°. This situation seemed
ideal for attaining neutrality and objectivity and presenting an organized
collection of exotic data just as they were observed and recorded, rather like
photographs (e.g., those reproduced in Bateson and Mead’s Balinese
Character). Yet the authority of these studies cannot be based on their
data-driven quality alone; some distinguished studies, such Edmund Leach’s
work on the Political Systems of Highland Burma, presented relatively sparse
data. Authority also hinges decisively on presenting oneself as the outsider
who has become, to a significant degree, conversant
with the world of the insiders as they experience it themselves (cf. II.33).
This dual role also validated the investigators’ Western rationality as the
framework in which even the most ‘exotic’ cultural practices and rituals can be comprehensibly explained
(cf. IV.174; VIII.18, 24). A science
endowed with such powers can purport to be culturally and ideologically neutral
and universally valid, just as our modern economy and technology can pose as the
valid model for worldwide control (VIII.54ff).
10. It
was unclear whether and how cultural studies might adopt or adapt the methods of
‘normal’ °classical science, which approached ‘reality’ in
self-conscious opposition to common sense°. The classical project seeks to
reveal a °fine-grained convergence among objects and events in reality° and to
attain a °consensus about their properties and relations above and beyond the
coarse-grained, rich details and accidents of ordinary experience° (III.11;
VIII.46). As we recall, this project was best achieved in °classical physics by
connecting the material substrate with highly sparse data relating to quantities
such as mass, force, or velocity, gauged by specialized means°. In the
discourse of the human sciences, the same project contradicts the need to
establish rich contacts with ordinary experience. In cultural anthropology, the
contradiction was evident in the conflict between older °physicalist approaches
like behaviorism seeking culture in chains of stimulus and response° [772],
versus newer °cognitivist approaches like discourse analysis seeking culture in
arrays of meanings° [773].
[772] Whether a man believes in Christ or Buddha,
Genesis or Geology, Determinism or Free Will, is not a matter of his own
choosing. His philosophy is merely the response of his neuro-sensory-muscular-glandular
system to the streams of cultural stimuli impinging on him from the outside.
(Leslie White)
[773] Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an
animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to
be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of laws but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
(Clifford Geertz)
Each position set clear imperatives for actual studies
and resisted integration with the contrary one.
11. The
fieldwork for cultural studies was advanced by a strategic alliance
between two disciplines: linguistics describing language constraints, and
anthropology describing cultural constraints. The linguistic contribution was
the sparser one, because some aspects of language, such as the systems of
phonemes and morphemes, seem easier to °disconnect from cultural knowledge of
world and society° (cf. II.29-37). Also, the ‘meanings’ of language seem
easier for reaching °consensus°, e.g., which animal the word ‘cow’ refers
to among speakers of Indian English versus what the animal itself ‘means’
within the multicultural diversity of India. Indeed, some studies have exploited
well-behaved areas of °lexicogrammar° as a means to analyze a cultural system,
e.g., the set of terms for naming kinfolk or the set of patterns for addressing
kinfolk. In the culture of Bali, whose naming system was mentioned in I.56f,
‘nearly everyone in Bali bears a title’ that ‘represents a specific degree
of cultural superiority or inferiority’: ‘from a man’s title you know,
given your own title, exactly what demeanor you ought to display toward him and
he toward you in practically every context of public life’, including
‘speech style’. Thus, the language that helps participants sort out social
roles and cultural meanings in daily life can also help anthropologists to sort
them out in their descriptions.
12. Yet
cultural studies were perplexed by the aspiration of °mainstream linguistics to
describe language by itself apart from language in use°. This aspiration has
naturally favored formalism, which
abstracts away from the constraints of cultural contexts, witness the proclaimed
interest in language universals
applying across all cultures (III.129). So the cultural studies sponsored by
formalism have typically been static, abstract, and idealized, assigning to
formal patterns some free-standing life of their own, divorced from social
practices in the dynamic, concrete contexts of culture. The data substrate is
filtered away from the material substrate of culture and from its constraints
such as the ecological environment and the modes of production and subsistence.
Explanations have proffered abstrusely symbolic assignments of ‘meanings’ in
a manner reminiscent of the linguistic thesis of the ‘arbitrary’ relation
between signifier and signified (cf. II.48, 90).
13. The
best-known formalist approach has been called anthropological structuralism, due to its close affinities to
‘structural linguistics’, as described in II.114ff. Its chief cognitive
moves are easy to detect in typical studies. One study by Mary Douglas proposed
that the pig was tabooed by the ancient Hebrews on semantic grounds because it
‘defied the classification of ungulates’ by having cloven feet yet not
chewing the cud like proper livestock. But, as Marvin Harris has shown, the
decisive factor was surely the destructive land use that had transformed the
Middle East ecosystem from forests to grasslands to deserts, making pigs too
costly to rear. They needed shade and moisture; they could not give milk, carry
riders, or pull plows; they could not be herded over long distances, swim across
rivers, or subsist on grass; and they competed with humans for limited grain
supplies. A religious taboo effectively stopped pig-raising by peoples who might
otherwise have destructively continued it against the community’s best
interests.
14. Or,
Claude Lévi-Strauss set up a ‘binary opposition’ between ‘nature’
versus ‘culture’ and aligned it with roasted food (direct contact with
flame) versus boiled food (separated from flame by container and water) —
meals as messages (cf. VIII.20, 41). From there he argued that roasted food
would be served to guests or strangers, who come in from the ‘natural’ world
outside, and boiled food to close kin, who are directly within the culture. But
this account too has been debunked by Marvin Harris by adducing the availability
of fuels and utensils, e.g., the Asiatic tradition of rapid stir-frying of small
chopped foods in broad pans (‘woks’) being enforced by fuel shortages in
heavily populated deforested regions.
15. Rather
like the °classical mainstream linguistics that furnished its inspiration,
anthropological structuralism was a theory disconnected from practice° (cf.
VII.78). When blandly asserted as ‘universals’, abstract categories and
oppositions grant the theorist unduly wide latitude for ‘explaining’ issues
while neglecting the elaborate culture-specific mediations whereby the
categories might get translated into cultural practices. Conversely, members of
the culture are asserted to be not consciously aware of these ‘universals’,
so their own explanations of why they act this way need not constitute
counter-evidence. If you asked people why their religion forbids the consumption
of pork or how they decide whether to roast or boil, they certainly won’t tell
you they are obeying theoretical semantic categories or binary oppositions,
because these simply do not offer criteria for making practical decisions. Quite
plausibly, such categories are merely specialized constructs of modern Western
academics who freely choose how their food will be prepared, and who see
‘nature’ in binary opposition to ‘culture’ because their own culture has
overlaid natural subsistence with technological impositions (artificial
foodstuffs, synthetic fibers, etc.) (cf. VIII.8). In pre-modern non-Western
cultures, the same opposition might lead to utterly impractical policies, e.g.,
if wild animals get domesticated, presumably moving from ‘nature’ into
‘culture’, you’d have to stop roasting and start boiling them regardless
of their size or the supply of fuels and utensils.
16. Why
should anthropologists devise or welcome such top-heavy theory-driven
explanations for cultural practices, ranging across kinship, diet, government,
or religion, and giving so little heed to data-driven material conditions? Like
formalist linguistics, anthropological structuralism has exploited the trend in
our own society of valuing theoretical knowledge over practical knowledge (cf.
II.41ff, 52, 57; VII.125). It has also exploited the prestige of formal systems,
such as logic, to disconnect tidy small concerns from the messy rich ones we
encounter in ordinary cultural life (II.10ff; III.167ff). Scientists seeking
academic accreditation and institutional support see a high °adaptive value°
in pursuing ‘disinterested’ and theoretical research that °fails or refuses
to make connections with practices and eschews ‘ideology’ as a contamination
of scientific principle° (cf. II.59; VIII.43). The West offers special material
rewards such as academic salaries and promotions for embracing idealism as a
bulwark against ‘materialism’, which is associated with °left-wing projects
for demystifying sources of power and inequality°, and with the official
‘Eastern’ ideology of the former ‘socialist’ countries. So it’s
popular to charge materialist explanations with being ‘reductive’, and to
propound mystifying idealist explanations which, like ‘generative’
linguistics, conceal their own much greater reductiveness behind elaborate
technical terms and notations (II.27, 42, 57).
17. Moreover,
formalism and structuralism seem to suspend a central problem in the human
sciences: how to explain human
phenomena like language or culture by showing why people say or do things. Unlike the objects of inquiry in the
non-human sciences, our ‘objects’ are human beings, who reason about courses
of action and give explanations for their own practices. Especially when the
human sciences were still seeking accreditation, they self-consciously sought
scientific explanations conspicuously unlike those ordinary people might give
(cf. VIII.10). People certainly wouldn’t explain their own cooking practices
in terms of a symbolic theoretical opposition between ‘nature’ and
‘culture’; if we proposed it to them, they might well claim that strangers
are not close to nature but are prone
to do unnatural things, which supplies
a good practical reason for shunning them or for taking away their hunting
grounds or cultivated fields. Such an explanation has a °clear adaptive value
wholly missing from formalist explanations°, which imply that people think in
universal categories merely because their brains are designed to do so. We
detect yet another variant of the category
mistake of construing logic to be the model of human reasoning (cf. II.13).
18. We
saw back in Chapter II how the quest for °language by itself impelled formalist
theorizing, especially in homework linguistics, to offer a description of what
native speakers know while silencing them as actual agents of description and
explanation° (II.27; VII.165; VIII.22). Similarly, anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss,
who was influenced by phonology with its tidy phonemes (II.29), could construct
oppositions which just wouldn’t occur to the participants in the cultures, yet
which purported to be controlling what they thought, said, and did. So culture
got converted from being a source of ordinary explanations — the reasons people give when
asked to ‘explain’ why they do what they do — to being the object of esoteric explanations only structuralists can give. The
conversion was abetted by the tradition of selecting remote cultures whose
ordinary explanations are easy to discount, e.g., when the Azande culture
‘explained’ misfortunes such as a granary collapsing on people inside it as
the workings of evil sorcery rather than of material forces like gnawing
termites. Structuralist theories further vindicated Western rationality (VIII.9,
24) by accounting for outlandish beliefs, rites, stories and so on, as formal
patterns working themselves out in the realm of pure ideas — even when, like Lévi-Strauss,
the anthropologists themselves were sharp critics of Western culture invading
the spaces of °pre-modern cultures° such as the Caduveo of Brazil. °Classical
science, with its allegiance to disinterested objectivity°, is exquisitely
suited to °disconnecting its theories from their social and geopolitical
implications and consequences° (cf. III.163).
19. In
recent cultural studies, at any rate, the brisk confidence in Western modes of
explanation has dimmed. Colonialist attitudes such as those once professed, say,
by Evans-Pritchard in a military journal (‘the Anuak’ ‘were a dreadful
nuisance most of the time but they were good to have around in a fight’) or
confessed by Malinowski in his diary (‘on the whole my feelings toward the
natives are decidedly tending toward “exterminate the brutes!”’) are
impossible to accredit. Also, the scientific credentials of anthropology have
been deeply unsettled by the recognition of how far its data have in effect
subserved the further colonization of once-isolated cultures that are now
suffering the agonies of a °modernization° we have compelled them to import
(cf. VIII.41, 55). Meanwhile, the swift rise of °multiculturalism in the West,
and our painful failure to greet it with a progressive ecologist program°, have
°demystified our claims to objectivity and unmasked our techniques for
perpetuating the dominance of mainstream culture by making it appear invisible°
(VII.27, 41, 58: VIII.43).
20. In
this situation, cultural studies come under forceful pressure to vacate their
classical stance of neutrality and objectivity and to engage with the
problematics and controversies in societies that have been modernized or are
about to be. °Multicultural diversity and its implications for human rights,
including linguistic human rights°, present urgent challenges we can no longer
evade (III.116; VI.61; VII.342ff; VIII.25). Formalist or idealist explanations
only underwrite another selfish °failure to make richer, more relevant
connections° (II.59). Interpreting meals as messages (VIII.14, 41) elides the
material fact of worldwide hunger —
the real message to scientists, especially to anthropologists who can explain
how various cultures go about producing and distributing foodstuffs and how
hunger can result from changes in material conditions. Colin Turnbull’s deeply
disturbing study brought to public attention the plight of the Ik of northern
Uganda, who had been turned out of their hunting grounds and forced to become
farmers, for which they had no cultural aptitude, and this during a record
drought. The whole cultural edifice regressed into chaos as they slowly starved,
and all cooperation yielded to bitterest confrontation. Friendliness,
hospitality, even family ties were stripped of any adaptive value; infants and
the elderly were left to fend for themselves or die. Turnbull saw sinister
parallels to the °Western drift toward disconnected selfish actions and
voracious consumerism with no heed to environment, society, or posterity°.
21. The
central problem of explanation (VIII.17) might be re-engaged within a °post-classical’
approach elaborating the essential dualism
between material and data proposed as our ‘first principle’° back in
III.16f. As a ‘material field’, culture evolves strategies for producing and
distributing things to meet the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter. As a
‘data field’, culture evolves strategies for deciding what such things
‘mean’ and what your diet or your clothes ‘say’ about your social status
or group membership (e.g., foods being kosher or taboo). The really ‘universal
principles’ state that such things always get produced and distributed and are
always made meaningful, but each culture goes about these two tasks in its own
way, depending on how it assigns °adaptive values°. The values of specific
customs can vary considerably among different groups in a culture or across time
and location; but the customs that survive during long-range evolution usually
hold some material value for those who are empowered to maintain them and to
control and cultivate the ‘meanings’ they prefer.
22.
Here, we can
return to the prospects for a theory of
adaptive meanings raised in III.81ff and offering a counterpoint to the
largely ‘realistic’ or ‘logical’ theories’ of conventional semantics.
Like socialization and education (VII.5), language and discourse are conceived
to be °adaptive action spaces° wherein the participants in a culture deploy,
negotiate, and contest the meanings of things within the interaction of material
and data. As a culture becomes diversified or contacts other cultures, the
control over meanings undergoes ‘complication’. Empowered meanings get separated from disempowered ones by a
widening ideological wedge, which is usually expressed as a dichotomy between
‘cultivated’ people with ‘high culture’ versus ‘uncultivated’ people
with ‘low culture’ (or no culture), neatly tallying with the dichotomy
between ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ language versus ‘incorrect’ or
‘non-standard’ language (cf. VII.212, 228, 234, 340, 342). ‘High
culture’ abets ‘standard language’ in controlling yet carefully mystifying
the contest over meanings. Ironically, science proceeds on the hypothesis that
°all meanings are frozen in ideal oppositions and definitions like the ones
offered by structuralist linguistics, anthropology, and logic°, even though this
same hypothesis has °blocked those fields from attaining coverage, convergence
and consensus°. However stagnating for a ‘science’, this blockage has the
°adaptive value of helping abstract disconnected explanations and theories to
gain accreditation without the empirical data-driven demonstrations genuine
science demands°. Moreover, consensus is not
even desired by would-be scientists whose main talents lie in academic
polemics rather than in the analysis and description of authentic data (cf.
II.39-43).
23. Yet
the alternative functionalism cannot
be the brand diagnosed by Michael Apple in a range of social theories ‘where
all things work relatively smoothly to maintain a basically unchanging social
order’; the ‘order is assumed and deviance from that order is
problematic’. Such an approach cannot ‘do justice to the contradictions and
competing class interests both within the state and between the state and the
economic and cultural spheres of a society’. Instead, such ‘functionalist
accounts’ become ‘part of the very processes of ideological reproduction’
that must be counteracted by critical studies of culture. Our functionalism
should rather view ‘order’ itself as ‘problematic’ — a °surface layer
of stability and determinacy masking the fluctuating dynamics within such
dualisms as power versus solidarity, authority versus resistance,
monoculturalism versus multiculturalism, management versus labor°, and so on.
Within this dynamics, cultural things and their meanings are °multi-functional
for differing adaptations°. Our own descriptions and explanations must in
turn be closely scrutinized for their adaptive value, e.g., for the project of
°freeing access to cultural knowledge through discourse° and °opposing the
privilege of science to quietly incorporate mainstream monoculturalism into its
‘true facts’ about ‘nature’, ‘reality’, and ‘society’° (cf.
II.27).
24. A
concerted move toward a dualistic functionalism can already be seen in the
widespread distinction between the emic
perspective determining what actions ‘mean’ within a culture or cultural
group, versus the etic perspective
bearing on concrete human actions and their motives and consequences (II.92).
These terms too originally came from linguistics, where the abstract system of
phonemic sounds was distinguished from
the concrete phonetics of sounds in
articulatory and auditory events (cf. II.29). How to reapply these terms to
culture has been an issue of vivid disputes. Operationally, the ‘emic’ might
be associated with the insider’s
viewpoint (usually the native participant’s) and the ‘etic’ with the outsider’s
(usually an observer’s). Or, the ‘emic’ might be more ‘data-based’
and the ‘etic’ more ‘material-based’.
Or again, the ‘emic’ might be culture-specific
and the ‘etic’ shared by all cultures
in highlighting the primary human needs such as food, shelter, and production of
goods. Yet all these distinctions are problematic. The same person may have an
insider’s viewpoint in some situations and an outsider’s in others. The
insider is more prone to assume that practices have an obvious and undeniable
meaning fixed by the natural order itself; the outsider is more prone to draw
premature conclusions that an observed practice is typical for the entire
culture or even represents a cultural ‘universal’. The anthropologists’
claim to have gone from outsider to insider (VIII.9) is complicated by already
being insiders in another culture, usually the one they will write their reports
for. As a procedural principle, anthropologists are cautious about judging the
cultures they study by the cultures they hail from; but their claim to have
grasped the studied culture on a higher plane is linked to their social status
as outsiders applying Western rationality (VII.9, 18). This link holds
especially if, like Malinowski, they salute °classical science° by vowing that
‘in the field one has to face a chaos of facts’ which ‘are not scientific
facts at all’; they ‘can be fixed only by interpretation, by seeing them sub
specie aeternitatis’ — ‘only laws
and generalizations are scientific facts, and fieldwork consists only and
exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic social reality, in
subordinating it to general rules’. Yet he conceded how this outlook projects
an ‘enormous distance between the brute material’ of ‘tribal life’ and
‘the final authoritative presentation of the results’. And he
knew as well as any anthropologist or ethnographer that for cultural insiders,
social reality is usually not chaotic,
and its ‘rules’ may be quite specific and local. In my own terms, social
reality is always both °intersubjective and interobjective° (III.84).
25. Still,
the distinction between emic and etic, however problematic, remains essential
for paying careful attention to the participants’ openly asserted cultural constraints on what they say they do and
why, but also to the underlying social and
material constraints on what might lead them to do it. We do not assume that
material conditions dictate the details of culture, but that material and data
interact throughout all aspects of culture. Emic and etic frequently ‘do not
match’ because ‘much of social life, even in band and village societies, is
a product of intersecting and often conflicting meanings and intentions’
reflecting an adaptive ‘struggle for power between men and women, social
classes, factions, and ethnic or religious and racial groups’. Every culture,
whether pre-modern or modern, entails some connections that are not officially
acknowledged because powerful people do not wish it. The most sensitive hidden
connections concern human rights: who
officially has them (emic) versus who can actually claim them (etic), and why
(VII.17; VIII.20).
26. Emic
and etic sharply diverge whenever social problems such as poverty become intense
and foster regressive solutions (cf. VII.7ff). In Alto do Cruzeiro in
northeastern Brazil, for example, severe material conditions are ‘forced on
pauperized mothers who, on average, experience 9.5 pregnancies and have to cope
with 4.5 living children’. The high rate (20%) of babies who die within the
first year is emically interpreted in the discourse of the mothers as the
workings of incurable afflictions (‘fraqueza’ or ‘doença da criança’)
and of ‘God’s will’; death is a ‘blessing’ because the ‘baby has
been called to heaven to become a little angel’. Etically, evidence reported
by Nancy Scherper-Hughes for ‘the symptoms of severe malnutrition and
gastro-enteric illness, further complicated by selective inattention’, points
to practices of ‘indirect infanticide’. The °adaptive value of the emic
interpretation is to mystify the regressive solution° and to exonerate the
unfortunate mothers from moral or legal sanctions. Ironically, the etic
destruction of life is emically reversed into an affirmation of the sanctity of
life (‘God’s will’), just as the legal or religious laws banning birth
control, contraception, and abortion lead to starvation in poor areas but are
presented as a ‘pro-life’ stance — the connection between an uncontrolled
birth rate and starvation is repressed because cheap labor ranks high on the
hidden agenda (VII.30; VIII.48, 77). Or, in Nazi Germany, where such bans were
passed quite early (May 1933), the official emic message of a high birth rate
was the superiority of the German (‘Aryan’) race; the etic message was to
build a vast population for sustaining a global war that curtailed the human
rights of ‘inferior races’, including the right to be alive at all.
27. To
say that the northern Brazilians are ‘primitive’ or the Nazis were
‘barbaric’ is a discoursal evasion offering our own emic judgements as
‘explanations’ for cultures under etic conditions that differ from ours.
Because the official ideology of Western emics won’t admit it, our cultural
documents like approved history textbooks don’t mention the etics of
regulating population pressure through direct and indirect infanticide of the
unwanted or abandoned children of pauperized parents in the ‘civilized’
Center countries of Europe right down into modern times. In the 18th century,
contemporary sources reported corpses of infants lying on the streets or
dunghills of large cities. When governments opened foundling hospitals but
failed to fund them adequately, these too became death-traps as lethal as Nazi
concentration camps: between 80% and 90% of the children died in the first year.
The situation did not change dramatically through the emics of ‘humane
policy’ but through the etics of advancing production that made child labor
profitable; and it was still deemed no great loss if they later died of
tuberculosis in the factories. The cherished emics of directly identifying
‘modernization’ with ‘progress’ (III.43, 103) must be weighed against
the regressive etics of replacing one form of human misery with another that was
primarily more profitable and only secondarily less harsh. Genuine etic progress
had to wait upon the °critical mass° when concentrated energy sources like
steam, electricity, and fossil fuels, had made it feasible to sustain °economic
growth° with a steadily falling birth rate (VIII.72). So far, this phase has
not reached most of the world’s population, including Brazil (VIII.63).
28. The
task of mystifying discrepancies
between etic and emic is entrusted to legitimizing
ideologies in the sense of VII.18. The task is often done so well that many
people never imagine their actions could ‘mean’ anything but what the
ideology stipulates. For centuries, the emic °ideology of colonialism°
explained domination over the colonized as the natural outcome of an irreducible
cultural superiority [774], including that of the colonizers’ language [775]
— an attitude by no means uncommon today (VI.61; VII.342ff). The legitimizing
discourses of colonialism were formerly quite frank:
[774] Probably everyone would agree that an Englishman
would be right in considering his way of looking at the world and at life better
than that of the Maori and the Hottentot, and no one will object in the abstract
to England doing her best to impose her better and higher view on these savages
[…] Can there be any doubt that the white man must, and will, impose his
superior civilization on the colored races? (Earl Grey, 1899)
[775]
Our language […] stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West [and
is] likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East.
[…] Whoever knows that language has a ready access to all the vast
intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and
hoarded in the course of ninety generations (Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1835)
An etic account would explain the historical processes
through key material differences, such as ‘the absence of traction animals in
the Americas’ (where they had been hunted to extinction) that ‘inhibited the
development of the wheel, thereby slowing the pace of all mechanical inventions
and assuring the eventual subordination of the New World populations to European
armies’ (Marvin Harris).
29.
A critical science of culture
can help °demystify the discrepancies
between emic and etic and develop counter-legitimizing
discourses for multicultural practices
to enhance equality and human rights and to integrate alternative modes of
experience° (cf. VII.27 101, 104, 112, 122, 128; VIII.2, 123). Our focus will
surely be the contest, explored in VII.B between the °monoculturalism of specious cultural uniformity versus the multiculturalism
of genuine modern diversity°. In the so-called Center countries like the U.K.
and the U.S., the militant public discourse campaign claiming to reimpose
monoculturalism is a colossal °failure to connect°; its °adaptive value lies
in mystifying etic dominances among competing emic systems°. Either
multiculturalism gets denied so that the mainstream can monopolize political and
economic policies; or else it gets deplored as a ‘decline of standards’ and
an attack on ‘national identity’, which must be resisted by excluding the
outsiders or making them conform (VII.33ff).
30.
The situation
in the societies at the °Periphery° is vastly worse, after centuries of
violent interventions and dispossessions by the °Center° (to use Jon
Galtung’s terms). In Asia, Africa, and South America, multiculturalism has
always been a social reality, despite the cultural arrogance of tiny white
minorities. Indeed, colonialist policies expressly created multicultural states
by drawing up geographical units across linguistic or cultural groupings in
order to prevent consolidated resistance (VI.48). After independence, the
pattern became even more diverse, as economic hardships, unemployment, droughts,
and military oppression sent swarms of migrant workers and refugees off in
search of the rare zones of relative prosperity. Meanwhile, indigenous elites
who have internalized ‘Center’ life-styles and constructed monstrously
lopsided economies to finance them (VIII.38)
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls the ‘comprador bourgeoisie’
— have imposed a palette of
imported ‘Center’ cultures whose artifacts (appliances, automobiles, etc.)
assume a far more elite ‘meaning’ there than at the Center, and are far more
maladaptive for the community as a whole.
31.
The discourse
of multiculturalism in these Peripheral societies applies two °complementary
and alienated strategies of
commodification°. One strategy makes indigenous culture into exotic
commodities for ‘Western’ visitors (IV.244ff). Some discourses are brutally
exploitive, as when a Brazilian jewelry firm offered a ‘collection of beauty
in tupi-guarani’, ‘transforming the legends and traditions of our Indios
into jewels for the urban woman’ (e.g., gold feathers to stick in your
earlobes), just when the Indios are being slaughtered with impunity by
gold-miners. The tourist industry in Hong Kong took a subtler approach in its
1984 travel brochure recommending the use of ‘rickshaws’, a traditional
Chinese conveyance marginalized by modernization. The brochure evidently was not
just to promote local color but to warn outsiders that this cultural artifact
was strictly ornamental: you could use it as real transportation only ‘if you
can stomach the idea of being pulled through the streets by an emaciated
grandfather’. And you should give generous fares and tips because ‘it’s no
fun hauling overweight tourists around in the hot sun’. The really humane
thing would be to just ‘mount the rickshaw for a souvenir photo to show the
folks back home’ and dismount without riding anywhere. The refined irony of
this discourse both encourages a fun ride and rebukes the Western visitor as an
‘overweight’ exploiter of the aged and famished, amusing yourself at the
risk of ‘driving’ them into a heat stroke with your Himalayan bulk. You can
thus ease your conscience by paying well to appropriate the cultural artifact as
an image-building commodity while appearing in a stereotypical photo portrait
recalling the colonial ‘Western’ master with ‘Eastern’ servant spanned
to your chariot like a mule.
32.
The converse
strategy caters to the ‘Westernized’ local elites and their imitators by
making exotic commodities out of ordinary ‘Western’ culture, such as
‘fast’ food and ‘casual’ clothing. The economics are more problematic
here, since, unlike tourist attractions, this flashy overpriced junk does not
start off with any demand, and must compete with cheaper and better local
products. The solution is a °discourse of
alienated multiculturalism° to convince the local cultures that their own
products are inferior for reasons that need no explanation. Implicitly, these
cultures are being cynically degraded by association with local economic
hardships brought forth by those same Center powers that now come cheerfully
back to peddle their shoddy wares as status symbols at exorbitant prices. Of
course, this degrading cannot be openly done in the public discourse of
marketing, but can easily be achieved by displaying huge posters of gaudy scenes
of ‘American prosperity’ that contrast with the local settings almost as
starkly as they contrast with the reality of many Americans.
33.
Our
demonstration discourse was recorded in July 1989 in the Republic of the
Philippines, a textbook case of a post-colonial nation where ravenously
larcenous governments and omnipotent multinational corporations, mainly in
cash-crop sectors, have been gobbling up the remaining resources and beggaring
the populace far worse than colonialism had done (cf. VIII.55ff, 63). Its multi-culturalism
has had a long history as waves of immigrants came from China and Southeast Asia
or rode along on the trade routes reaching to Spain in one direction and to
western Mexico in the other. As remarked in VI.84, Spanish language and culture
were largely reserved during the colonial occupation for priesthood and the
aristocracy. The encroachments of the American occupation were more extensive,
to the point of making English the compulsory language of instruction in public
education, from where it has subsequently proved hard to dislodge. Equally
persistent is the demand for English as a tool for social and economic
advancement — a typical reflex of °post-colonial linguicism in the sense of
VII.342 and of the consumerism that erases memories of the culture to stimulate
appetites for ‘modern’ commodities° (I.13).
34.
Recently,
another culture has been gaining high prestige. Japan, in 1989 clearly the
pre-eminent economic power in Asia, has been taking control of various sectors
of the Filipino economy, bringing in Japanese management, and drawing away
throngs of qualified Filipino professionals as migrant workers in Japan, often
for unskilled menial jobs. In certain aspects of business and consumerism,
Japanese culture has itself been soundly ‘Westernized’, which may only
reinforce its appeal for Filipinos. But Japanese cuisine has retained its clear
identity and provides the topic for our sample discourse [779]. It was recorded
by Marites A. Khanser, one of my students at the University of the Philippines,
Diliman, who was working part-time as an interviewer (‘INV’) for MOD Filipina Magazine. In this capacity, she taped an interview with
a prominent Filipino attorney (‘ATY’), who had a reputation for being a
‘gourmet’, in the Hotel Nikko’s Benkay Restaurant, one of the most
‘upscale’ dining places in all Manila.
[776.1] INV: it’s not, po naman [‘please’,
respectful] purely a women’s interest / but August 9th to 11th is the Food
Festival // are you aware of that sir?
[776.2] ATY: yes we’re aware of that
[776.3] INV: Mod would
like to have a special issue on the food festival / and so one of the topics or
subject matters is for the five-star hotels and restaurants to identify those
famous Filipino gourmets so that the people will know also about them / about
Filipino gourmets nationwide […] kasi ho [‘because’, also respectful] /
it’s some sort of a personality sketch because it’s not very usual that
Filipinos develop a fine taste for food / may I know what your concept of a
gourmet is?
[776.4] ATY: well / I say that he’s one who is
particular with food / some kind of food / who has a special taste in food / he
can easily determine whether it is a good food / average / mediocre / just by
merely tasting / somebody who has developed a taste for fine food
[776.5] INV: how is that developed sir? // how’s that
developed in a person ? / is that a skill?
[776.6] ATY: no / I guess not // maybe / there are
really people who love to eat / especially when I travel / I always look for a
good restaurant so by means of eating in a restaurant / now / especially here in
Manila / you can easily determine if the chef is good or not // my friends will
always tell me that there’s a new restaurant and you try to see the restaurant
/ now if it’s a good restaurant it’s authentic / so / okay // like for
instance let’s take the case of laing [vegetables cooked in coconut oil with
crab, shrimp, or dried meat, jalapeños, ginger, and onion] / if it’s a
Bicolano who cooks laing / its different
[776.7] INV: I’m a Bicolana
[776.8] ATY: you’re a Bicolana and you taste a laing
/ you know whether the laing is cooked by a Bicolana or not or whether it is
cooked by a Tagalog / you know / because you can easily determine by the taste /
like the pinakbet [vegetables with eggplant, pork, garlic, onion, green peas,
okra, squash, and shrimp] for instance / if the pinakbet is cooked by a Tagalog
/ it should taste the way a Tagalog cooked / you know / if you have tasted an
authentic cook / okay? / if you have not tasted that authentic pinakbet you
could not distinguish
[776.9] INV: and so we cannot qualify as a gourmet
[776.10] ATY: no you cannot / just take Japanese food /
if you’re not used to eating Japanese food
[776.11] INV: what are the characteristics of Japanese
food? / do you have a standard that you look for?
[776.12] ATY: yeah / like for instance / let us say /
if you are fond of eating Japanese food / you will notice that there are / so
many restaurants here in Manila / but then // if you are really familiar with
Japanese food you can easily determine whether it is Japanese food Filipino
style […]
[776.13] INV: so that’s what makes a gourmet
different from an ordinary person?
[776.14] ATY: yeah / that’s what I mean
[776.15] INV: you can determine just by the taste
[776.16] ATY: alam mo [‘you know’, informal] /
it’s very hard to describe Japanese food / or having a fine taste for food //
it’s something you have to develop in you / para bang [‘as if’] it’s
something [pause]
[776.17] INV: innate? / it’s in the person?
[776.18] ATY: yes innate / na iyon [‘that’s it’]
[776.19] INV: but for Japanese food
[776.20] ATY: you should have been eating Japanese food
for years for you to be able to distinguish
[776.21] INV: for how many years?
[776.22] ATY: for / say / ten years / you develop the
taste
[776.23] INV: how do you find the Japanese food here in
Benkay?
[776.24]
ATY: well / one of the most authentic Japanese restaurants in Metro Manila
As
is typical of multicultural discourse, the economy and agenda fluctuate as the
various cultural contexts shift, interact, or compete. ‘Being a gourmet’ and
‘Japanese food’ are the explicitly declared topics, yet strikingly little
knowledge about them is in fact made accessible. We hear nothing about specific
Japanese dishes or the ways they might be prepared in the ‘authentic’ way a
‘gourmet’ would recognize. The question ‘what are the characteristics of
Japanese food?’ [776.17] goes unanswered; the remark that, like ‘fine taste
for food’ in general, it is ‘very hard to describe’ [776.16], could be
made by somebody who wasn’t a ‘gourmet’ at all.
35.
When the
declared topics of a discourse are not in fact systematically pursued, some °adaptive
political goal is probably dominating the agenda and overriding the content°.
Familiarity with Japanese culture is a symbol of a high social role: hobnobbing
with citizens of an incomparably wealthier nation and eating ‘five-star’
meals at Japanese prices that would stagger most Filipinos. A prominent attorney
can hardly be inarticulate, but this one is highly uninformative here, giving
answers that are vague, evasive, rambling, and at times contradictory. His
discourse has °adaptive value°, however, if his goal is to establish and
maintain his elite status in a multicultural society and does not call for
providing ‘insider’s secrets’ to help ordinary people refine their tastes.
Also, giving a detailed public portrait of authentic Japanese food in a national
magazine could a draw criticism from native Japanese gourmets and cooks, who
really do know what he only says he knows. It is much safer to bestow vague
praises on Japanese cuisine, enough to signify elitism and to ensure friendly
treatment from Japanese circles in Manila, perhaps including complementary meals
in restaurants like the one he is sitting in.
36.
The
interaction of the interview is constrained by the power constellation of older
man plus prosperous attorney addressing younger woman plus student journalist.
The ‘gourmet’, co-referring with ‘he’ Pro-Nouns in [776.4], is
implicitly a male role, as opposed to the female role of kitchen domestic
invoked when the ‘food festival’ is excepted from being ‘purely a
women’s interest’ [776.1]. He allows that the interviewer is knowledgeable
about the cuisine of her home province Bicol (e.g. about ‘laing’) [776.6-8]
but includes her shortly after among the ‘you’ who ‘cannot qualify as a
gourmet’ because of not being ‘used to eating Japanese food’ [776.9-10].
37.
MOD Filipina Magazine
is an accredited ‘power channel’: a Western-style consumerist fashion review
boasting an audience of ‘chic’ women who spend their time and money
cultivating their wardrobe and appearance. Less affluent readers are invited to
identify with this elite group by purchasing the commodities the magazine
presents or advertises (cf. I.8, 12). The ‘Food Festival’ in Manila too was
designed to intensify consumption, ironically staged in a turbulent metropolis
where many people go hungry or eat garbage. The concept of ‘gourmet’,
handily displayed here as a further elite to identify with, was (like
‘five-star restaurant’) itself an import from Western societies where, in
contrast to Asia, special food can easily be distinguished from routine food,
which is carelessly and tastelessly prepared — whence the full irony of using
intensive advertising to foist junk food onto Asians (VIII.32).
38.
Rich irony
also pervades the remark ‘it’s not very usual that Filipinos develop a fine
taste for food’ [776.3], set against the background of rampant poverty in the
Philippines. Though (as the cited dishes indicate) traditional Filipino cuisine
is spicy and variegated, many Filipinos today must be happy just to get food at
all. Still, my informants, including the interviewer, agreed that the economic
hardships have lent many Filipinos a gnawing insecurity about their own nation
and culture, which makes them all the more vulnerable to the appeal of pricey
imports. The cycle worsens when °economic growth° is directly identified with
a life-style based on imports, and the expense of sustaining it for the elites
must be ruthlessly squeezed out of the already overstressed social and economic
fabric (VIII.30). So the term ‘Filipino gourmet’ is a starkly political term
of submerged violence against the mass of the population living in chronic
malnutrition (cf. VII.63; VIII.26).
39.
We begin to
appreciate the °adaptive value of mystifying° the concept ‘Filipino
gourmet’ rather than clarifying it. ‘Loving to eat’ or being ‘fond of
eating’ [776.6, 12] are simplistic stipulations that could apply to most
people, especially gluttons. Being ‘particular with food’ and ‘having a
special taste in food’ [776.4] would apply to all picky eaters, including
small children who loathe vegetables and adore desserts. The crowning
contradiction falls between the claims that being a gourmet ‘is something you
have to develop in you’ versus that it is ‘not a skill’ but ‘innate’
[776.4f, 16, 17f], rather like that mysterious quality of ‘intelligence’
that is supposed to determine in advance how well children succeed in school yet
closely conforms to parental income (VII.81). However absurd, the criterion of
‘innateness’ has adaptive value for slamming the door on ‘ordinary
persons’ who could not aspire even if they devoted ‘ten years’ to it (cf.
[776.13, 20ff]).
40.
Whether food
is rated ‘good’ or ‘fine’ versus ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ is
vaguely related by the discourse to whether it is rated ‘authentic’ versus
‘not authentic’(cf. [776.3f, 6, 8, 24]). Filipino cuisine, such as
‘laing’ and ‘pinakbet’ is surely ‘authentic’ if well-prepared by a
cook native to the culture and recognized by a native diner [776.6ff]; so there
should be gourmets all across the Philippines. To foreclose that prospect,
‘Filipino style’ is put in opposition here to the authentic Japanese cuisine
recognized only by Filipinos who have the requisite ‘travel’ and
‘familiarity’ [776.6, 12], which admits only the wealthy elite concentrated
in the capital city and fits the age-old tactic of legitimizing socio-economic
privilege as a just reward for specialized knowledge (cf. II.5; VII.18, 60).
41.
°Critical
analysis of multicultural discourse° like sample [779] can aid °critical
cultural studies in exploring how cultural diversity is reflected and
appropriated by the tensions and contradictions in the ‘modernized’ social
and economic fabric°. In the ‘modern’ Philippines, Japanese meals are
indeed ‘messages’, but certainly not in the service of a universal binary
opposition (cf. VIII.14, 20). Instead, the key opposition falls between elitist
imported culture and ordinary indigenous culture locked in a °violent
dialectic, where the elite defines itself (and its adepts) by disempowering and
dispossessing the ordinary°. The ‘connections’ between these opposed
cultures are not elaborated within our sample discourse, where social
status is carefully not mentioned as a reason to pose as a gourmet by eating
Japanese food. Instead, the surface agenda to define the ‘gourmet’ by °individual
merit° is explicitly pursued over at least 11 turns [776.3-6, 9, 10, 13,
15-18] yet remains vaguely achieved. Still, the underlying ideological
connections hold the discourse together by setting its economy of priorities,
e.g., ‘fine food’ over ‘mediocre’, ‘authentic’ over ‘not
authentic’, Japanese over Filipino, and by achieving the ‘deeper’ agenda
to mystify elite insider status by claiming it without saying what specialized
knowledge confers it or how outsiders might become able to acquire it.
42.
Like
‘culture’, ‘ideology’ is a term whose meaning is contested among
competing ideologies (VII.18; VIII.4), but this time the neutral
and inclusive sense is opposed to a pejorative
and exclusive sense, not an ameliorative one. In the broader neutral
sense, ideology can be defined as a
cultural, cognitive, and emotive subsystem of beliefs and attitudes that
sets priorities among ideas, significances, referents, and so on, and legitimizes
certain ones as ‘natural’, ‘normal’, ‘proper’, ‘true’
‘correct’, ‘valuable’, ‘respectable’, and the like (VII.18; VIII.3).
This definition strategically connects with the broad one given for politics:
the °adaptive action space° where participant goals dominate over content
(I.7). Typically, ideology decides whose goals are worthy, while politics
decides how ideologies get put into concrete practice. Just as most discourses
are broadly ‘political’, most of their content is broadly ‘ideological’
in implying or presupposing a position from which the ‘natural and
‘normal’ can be taken for granted and built into the discourse, e.g., that
possessions define the status of the self (I.12; VII.10).
43.
In the
narrower pejorative sense, an ideology is a static array of ‘fixed ideas’
that impels people to view society and its subgroups in highly selective or
biased ways. This sense is popular but not fully stable, witness Napoleon’s
accusation of French ‘ideologists’ for not being fixed enough, namely:
‘abstract, nebulous, idealistic, and dangerous to power because of their
ignorance of concrete problems’ (which sounds more apt for idealists!).
Symptomatically, an ‘ideology’ is always somebody else’s rigid position,
while your own remains invisible (cf. VIII.19). Like the pejorative sense of
‘political’ reflecting widespread ‘cynicism, skepticism, and mistrust’
cited in [780], this ‘dirty’ sense opposes ‘ideology’ in a rigid
dichotomy against ‘fact’ [781].
a
recognizably ‘political’ statement [is often considered] a strategic
utterance and an evasion of the truth. ‘Politics’ is, then, a ‘dirty’
word associated frequently with self-seeking behavior, hypocrisy, and the
manipulation of attitudes. (David Held)
thought
determined by social fact is like a pure stream, crystal-clear, transparent;
ideological ideas are like a dirty river, muddied and polluted […] From the
one it is healthy to drink; the other is poison (Werner Stark)
Like
the ameliorative sense of ‘culture’, these pejorative senses have an
adaptive value for people ‘closest to power and privilege’, who ‘have the
most interest in political life and regard it most favorably’ (Held), through
two handy means: first, by promoting the myth that social life can be conducted
free of ‘politics’ and ‘ideology’ if you just join our group and not
theirs; and second, by fomenting a general resignation and cynicism that keep
you from getting involved in politics or developing an ecologist ideology. So
politicians can have the field to themselves and keep their own ideologies
invisible, pretending to act out of common sense, high-minded disinterest, and
civic concern for informing the public of ‘the facts’ that the
‘politically biased’ opposition is trying to ‘distort’ or ‘cover up’
(cf.VII.33, 41; VIII.33).
44.
Inclusive and
exclusive senses also pertain to our two central terms for social relations. Power
can be inclusively and neutrally defined as a concentration
of control within an asymmetrical
relation between upper and lower strata in any complex system such as a
government or institution. Conversely, solidarity
can be inclusively and neutrally defined as a distribution of control within a symmetrical relation of mutually sharing and supporting goals among
a group whose interaction brings achievements no one could attain alone. The
exclusive, evaluative senses apply to conspicuous
displays. ‘Power’ is then pejorative, e.g., when the °empowered owners°
and managers of factories award themselves multimillion-dollar salaries while
forcing their °disempowered workers° to renounce cost-of-living increases or
else get laid off — showing just how ‘free’ the ‘free market’ is (cf.
VII.49, 54). ‘Solidarity’ is ameliorative, e.g., when a federation of labor
unions succeeds in protecting the human rights of its members against a
dictatorial government. For the powerful, the narrow exclusive senses have the
°adaptive value of portraying ordinary life, such as the family and the
schoolroom, to be free of power relations (VII.65), so that ordinary acts of
empowerment and disempowerment remain invisible and unanalyzed in regard to
human rights°. Reciprocally, attempts to make them visible and analyze them can
be branded irrelevant, intolerable intrusions of ‘politics’ or
‘ideology’ (cf. VII.41).
45.
In
‘Western’ culture — above all in the ‘sociology of knowledge’, a field
eager to shun ‘ideology’ in the pejorative sense — the opposite of
‘ideology’ is widely held to be ‘science’:
deviations from scientific objectivity
[are] the essential criteria of an ideology […] The problem
of ideology arises where there is a discrepancy
between what is believed and what can be [established as] scientifically correct […] The criterion of distortion is that statements are made about society which by social-scientific
methods can be shown to be positively
in error, whereas selectivity is
involved when the statements are, at the proper level, ‘true’, but do not constitute a balanced account of the available truth. (Talcott
Parsons)
Such
a discoursal move recalls the folk-wisdom of °scientism in suggesting that the
‘progress’ of science will eventually offer a correct, complete, and
balanced alternative to ideology°. The concept of a ‘scientific ideology’
should be a flat contradiction, and has often been evaded through discoursal
moves in modern sociology:
Claims
to impartiality have been advanced in the name of disciplined adherence to
impersonal research procedures, of the academics’ institutional isolation from
the immediate concerns of the day, of their vocational commitment to neutrality,
and of deliberately cultivated awareness of and correction for one’s own
biases. (Clifford Geertz)
The
elusive quest for ‘a non-evaluative concept of ideology’ among sociologists
like Karl Mannheim has a paradoxical flavor insofar as ideology is inherently
and intimately linked to setting values. Still, the °classical aspiration°
persists that such a concept will yet be found through ‘a more exact
apprehension of our object of study’ and ‘the perfection of a conceptual
apparatus capable of dealing more adroitly with meaning’ (Geertz). The °post-classical
move, in contrast, would project the human sciences to be enterprises for
correlating ‘scientific ideologies’ with the ‘non-scientific’ or
‘pre-scientific’ ideologies adapted to ordinary life and culture, similar to
the enterprise of ethnomethodology° (cf. V.55f; VIII.47). The key question
would then be how such a correlation can be °progressively managed for an
ecologist program of sustainable coexistence°.
46.
The °classical
control center in the ideology of Western science has been a specialized realism seeking to disconnect, from the ‘ordinary reality’ of
human experience (say, your explanation of ‘why the world is a mess’), an
‘underlying reality’ wherein the ‘laws of nature’ are worked out° (say,
an astronomer’s explanation of ‘why the universe is expanding’) (cf.
III.11; VIII.10). The disconnection succeeded best in the °natural sciences°,
whose ‘laws’ concern entities that are not registered by ordinary experience
and not motivated by ideology, e.g., the atoms of physics, the molecules of
chemistry, or the cells of biology (III.159ff). In the °human sciences°, in
contrast, the disconnection is so problematic that investigators keep devising
highly self-conscious tactics to disconnect their accounts from the ‘rich and
messy’ cultural experience and ideologies of everyday interaction. Two tactics
stand out: (1) restricting the terms ‘politics’ and ‘ideology’ to narrow
senses and conspicuous displays (VIII.44); and (2) oscillating between a
stringent empiricism for accumulating lists of observed ‘facts’ (VIII.24)
versus an abstract formalism or ‘structuralism’ of ‘binary oppositions’
that would require lengthy and unspecified processes before entering into
ideological and political practices (VIII.13-18). Studies of culture eventually
reached an intermediary dual ground that correlates an ‘emic’ view toward
the ideology in the culture with an ‘etic’ view based on the ideology of
‘critical’ science (VIII.24-29)
47.
This dual
strategy can also assist the human sciences in solving the problem of what
warrants being described in the first place. The two ‘main solutions’ cited
by Manny Schegloff have been the °classical positivist
one, wherein ‘any description the investigator chooses is warranted if it
yields “results”, statistically significant or otherwise attested’ and
‘theoretically interpretable’°; versus the °ethnomethodological
one, wherein a description is warranted if ‘the investigator’ can adduce
‘evidence of its relevance for the participants in the setting
characterized’°. The classical solution hides its own ideological base,
whereas the ethnomethodological develops an ideology that can be correlated with
the ideology of the ‘participants’ (VIII.45). The second solution is plainly
more auspicious for a °critical science of text and discourse, which must
steadily determine its own social relevance when setting priorities among large
tasks and when deciding what is relevant among its mass of ‘rich and messy’
data° (cf. I.53; II.88; III.186; IV.10,
163, 252; V.49).
48.
To preserve
the broad neutral senses of ‘politics’ and ‘ideology’, we can subsume
their narrowly exclusive and pejorative senses as °mystifications
that serve goals by obscuring or denying connections°
among people and their actions. Mystifying facts is a simple and crude transaction and can be overcome just by
making them public, e.g., the involvement of government leaders in criminal
activities like laundering money. Mystifying connections among facts is more complex and subtle, e.g., between
documented differences among language varieties versus high failure rates among
minority schoolchildren (VII.167, 170ff, 176); or between ‘right to life’
restrictions on contraception and abortion among the poor versus the goal of the
wealthy to ensure abundant cheap labor (VIII.26, 77). The subtlest of all and
the easiest to mystify are connections
among concepts, such as the see-saw ratio built into in the ‘free-market
economy’ between ‘inflation’ (spurned by right-wing interests of the
wealthy) versus ‘unemployment’ (spurned by left-wing interests of labor
unions) (cf. VII.18; VIII.63).
49.
The chief
function of mystification is to protect social relations from criticism or
change, e.g., °justifying social and economic discrimination by transforming
victims into victimizers° (VII.31ff, 35, 44ff, 54):
Ruling
groups throughout history and prehistory have always promoted the mystification
of social life as their first line of defense against actual and potential
enemies; in the contemporary political context, […] obscuring the very
existence of ruling classes shifts the blame for poverty, exploitation, and
environmental degradation from the exploiters to the exploited. (Marvin Harris)
Mystification
is strongly abetted by myths, i.e.,
by shared ideas, often in the Narrative Aspect of stories, telling how the
‘world’ came to be what it is (I.9). In °pre-modern societies°, the chief
myths focused on the distant past, the creation of the world, and the deeds of
ancestors, heroes, animal spirits, and so on. In °modern Western societies°,
the dominant myths disconnect memories of the past and exalt the present (I.13),
such as the myths of ‘economic growth’, ‘free market’, and the
‘free individual’, which underwrite ‘freely’ exploitive ideologies and
‘freedom’ to amass private capital (I.7, 11f; VIII.54). ‘Progress’ has
been the central Narrative myth for °legitimizing uncontrolled advances in
population and production, and mystifying the direct connection between the
‘economic growth’ of a few ‘individuals’ versus the economic stagnation
or shrinkage of the rest° (VII.31; VIII.55). Connecting ‘progress’ to
broadening ‘human rights’ mystifies the actual historical evolution that
merely connected more inclusive human rights to more general property rights in
place of divine rights, aristocratic privileges, and so on, e.g., when the Déclaration des droits de l’homme in the French revolutionary
period listed ‘the right of property among the indefeasible natural rights’
and ‘retained slavery and property qualifications’ for ‘voting rights’;
or when the American Declaration of
Independence ‘held it to be a self-evident truth that all men are created
equal’, and excluded women and slaves.
50.
As societies
got °diversified by modernization°, so did the ideologies accompanying social
changes and competing to control the key factors. One key factor has naturally
been rates of change: slow for
‘conservatives’, moderate for ‘liberals’, and rapid or even cataclysmic
for ‘radicals’ (cf. VIII.66). A second factor has been equality: conservatives retain and reinforce inequality, liberals
promote equality without altering the socio-economic system, and radicals call
either for extreme elitism on the ‘right’, e.g., dictatorship, or extreme
egalitarianism on the ‘left’, e.g., communism. Even when the radicals have
small followings, they may influence the ideological spectrum by making the
conservatives and liberals seem more ‘moderate’ (VII.34, 48) and by
involuntarily supplying them with ideas and discourse strategies, as when the
Nazi discourse of male supremacy in the Hitler period found a congenial new home
in the °New Right discourse of ‘family values’° (VII.36; VIII.77).
51.
A third
factor has been human nature:
liberals
believe that all people are fundamentally very much the same, and that social
conditions create the observed differences; conservatives believe that people
are different in fundamentally important ways such as their laziness, their
tendency to take advantage of others, their willingness to break rules […]
what one side prescribes, the other regards as aggravating the harm (Philip
Heymann)
The
radicals split again. For the extreme right, human nature will work itself out
through the violent (white) male proving his merit in combat [777], because
warfare is nature’s way [778-79] (but see VIII.52f, 74). For the extreme left,
human nature will steer modern society toward an ultimate socialist democracy
where humans have the freedom and creativity to actualize their potential [780].
[777] A man who scrupulously avoids war will be
anything but a man. Because only the fight completes a man, only someone who
risks his own life, only someone who does not hesitate to give his own blood, is
a man. If he does not act like this, he is a slave and deserves fetters.
(Mussolini)
[778] To renounce fighting is the same as to renounce
life […] War cannot die for it is a law of life (Mussolini)
[779] Never has the birth of a new era been initiated
without sacrifice, just as young life does not emerge painlessly and
accidentally into the light of day. [The German people] stand at the forefront
of the emerging renewal with their blood that they possess to shed only once.
But they do so gladly, provoked by the plutocratic-bolshevist Jewry. (Deutsche
Zeitung in den Niederlanden, 10/5/42, m.t.)
[780]
For the socialist world as for modern civilization as a whole, a growing
diversity characterizes the forms of organization of production, of social
structures, and of political institutions. The thesis of Lenin is being
fulfilled that every nation in its own way will set its own pace of socialist
transformations into a democracy. […] The palette of creative possibilities
grows; the idea of socialism itself takes on an incomparably richer content
(Mikhail Gorbachev)
Fascist
discourse closely connects metaphorical with literal violence, e.g., calling
advocates of peace ‘slaves who deserve fetters’ [777] versus jailing
pacifists and conscientious objectors; or the pain and bloodshed of human
‘birth’ [779] symbolizing the heroism of readiness to ‘shed your own
blood’ versus shedding the blood of hordes of defenseless civilians, which
should be height of cowardice (cf. VIII.113). The unprincipled opportunism of
the Nazi °conspiracy theory° scapegoating the Jewish people is revealed in
ponderous buzz-words like ‘plutocratic-bolshevist Jewry’, making an
economically and politically absurd connection between opposites (capitalists
versus communists, Americans versus Soviets).
52.
By
controlling these three key factors, ideologies try to manage the °control
principles° stated in VII.16-20: how limited resources are distributed; how
human rights are claimed; how success is regulated; and so on. Each ideology
tries to legitimize one constellation of power or solidarity while remaining
invisible or else purporting to have quite different goals, e.g., to ‘seek a
better future for all humanity’ (VIII.58f). In our own century, ideologies
have proliferated while cataclysmic disasters — economic crises and local or
global warfare — have repeatedly toppled the ‘old order’ and left social
and political groups scrambling to attain some hegemony in a ‘new order’
that favors their competing interests. The steady broadening of human rights
during industrialization and modernization drove the traditional power elites to
unleash two World Wars. In World War I, the older European empires sought to
preserve themselves by conquering each other, but all collapsed together. The
ensuing surge in workers’ movements, ironically supported by the conditions of
the Treaty of Versailles, was met by new fascist empires built on a direct
alliance between capital and paramilitary labor organizations such as
Mussolini’s, which received enormous sums from large landowners and factory
owners and could thereby seize control of the state. These empires sponsored
more ruthless ideologies and technologies, but their surge for conquest and
genocide led to another collapse in the face of worldwide resistance.
Thereafter, geopolitics shifted to obey a new principle: not that peace is more
humane than war, but that ‘cold war’ is better for °economic growth° than
‘hot war’, especially by °legitimizing huge concentrations of capital in
the showcase industries° of ‘defense’ (VI.75) — public money going into
private hands on an unprecedented scale (V.79; VII.31). The new principle was
tested and verified with disastrous hot wars in Korea, Indochina, and Vietnam;
henceforth, a major hot war can be staged only when it directly secures a
crucial resource for profits, e.g., oil in the ‘Gulf War’. When the ‘cold
war’ threatened to evaporate after the collapse of the ‘socialist’ side in
the global recession, a new enemy of the ‘West’ was quickly found (as in
Orwell’s 1984), oil-rich Islam
obscurely linked to ‘Moscow’:
[781] Iranian and Sudanese officials say that these [Islamic]
fundamentalist movements spring from the poverty and desperation of the masses
— exactly what the Soviets used to say about communist revolutions. And they
did indeed have indigenous roots. They also, as we are now learning from the
newly opened Soviet archives, received money, arms and direction from Moscow.
Their dependence on Moscow is nowhere more evident than in the alacrity with
which these revolutionaries decided to stop fighting and accommodate their
enemies as soon as they lost their Moscow sponsors (see, for example, Nicaragua,
El Salvador, and Angola).
This
reasoning is self-contradictory: since Moscow can no longer ‘sponsor’
anybody, these ‘movements’ should collapse by themselves. Yet the culturally
and historically absurd analogies between Islam and communism have the adaptive
value of relieving the Western public of rethinking their habitual formula of a
world neatly divided into Us versus Them = Good versus Evil, and of dismantling
their genocidal military arsenals.
53.
In the long
run, however, warfare has been gradually made redundant as the °Center nations
have devised more efficient and more easily mystified civilian means of
extracting wealth from each other and from the Periphery° (VII.29f). The
glaring abuses of colonial imperialism
are
no longer needed, when huge standing armies
were
mobilized to massacre resisting populations and when whole villages, including
women, children, and livestock, were machine-gunned to ‘pacify’ them. Nor
need the Center resort to dispatching ‘advisors’, ‘intelligence units’
and ‘contras’ when local governments who redistribute land, raise wages,
encourage labor unions, or nationalize industries, must be bullied or toppled by
bankrolling political oppositions or subversive military factions and
masterminding bloodthirsty dictatorships (VII.36) — all of which might disrupt
the country too far to promote °economic growth for the Center° except of
course as a hungry marketplace for its weapons. However ‘friendly’ to the
business interests of the Center powers, the fancy-dress, goose-stepping
dictators and ‘strongmen’ of the Periphery have proven dismally incompetent
to manage the transition over to modern, complex global economies.
54.
Instead, the
Periphery is getting a massive (if not lethal) dose of the Western °free market
ideology, now applauded by conservatives and liberals alike, which
short-circuits social problems and glaring inequalities with the grand myth and
reconciliation fantasy that ‘human freedom’ prevails wherever ‘free
markets’ do° (but see VII.18, 30f, 36, 210; VIII.44). The term ‘free
market’ itself is the ideal label to mystify a worldwide economic system for
manipulating markets, currencies, and economies to shield the profits of large
industries and wealthy elites, who are the only remaining ‘free agents’ and
who are the only ones understanding its true meaning (cf. VII.30, 107, 167, 209;
VIII.44, 49). In the Periphery, the term specifically means using the leverage
of such multinational organizations as banks and monetary funds to break all
local resistance against exploitation by the Center and its local hirelings,
e.g., to ensure that worker benefit laws are not passed or else not enforced
(VII.29). Just as ‘conservative liberalism’ proclaims ‘the separation of
civil society and the state’, as described in political science, the nations
whose economies had already been devastated by imperialism and colonialism get
lured by easy loans and postponed repayment into ‘privatizing’ governmental
assets, such as corporations, services, and real estate, which the Center
corporations are waiting to gobble up, either directly or through obscurely
connected subsidiaries. This process is duly mystified as ‘liberalizing’ to
suit the spontaneous evolution of the ‘free market’, just as
‘liberalism’ ‘depoliticizes’ private ownership of the means of
production’; ‘the economy is regarded as non-political, in that the massive
division between those who own and control the means of production and those who
must live by wage labor is regarded as the outcome of free private contracts’.
This expedient ideology is being briskly exported:
this is indeed what the West recommends to t