Culture and Practical Reason Two Paradigms of ... - Moodle

Chapter Two 76 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory77because of some of the same theoretical scruples. Texts and the people'sstatements he held rather at a discount as mere formulations ofthe ideal, bycomparison with the real pragmatic motives that governed men's relationsto such rules and to each other (cf. Malinowski 1966 [1926]). In all this,Malinowski inverted not only the premises of a Boasian anthropology, butthe original relationship of the anthropologist to the people. True that Boaswould end with no more understanding of Kwakiutl kinship thanMalinowski had of the Trobriand system. In fact, Boas was a lot moreincoherent-out of a decent respect for the unintelligibiltiy of the Indian.Boas thought the facts would "speak for themselves." Nowadays this iscommonly taken as the sign of a naive empiricism. But what was intendedin the first place was a submission to the culture in itself, a commitment tofinding the order in the facts rather than putting the facts in order (cf. Smith1959). Boas's empiricist naivety was the delusion that the order wouldreveal itself just as presented. across the texts of a thousand salmon recipes,without benefit of any understanding on his part. 17 Here was atotally different relation to the object. The anthropologist was reduced tothe status of a recording device: not even his own intelligence was permittedto come into play. But for Malinowski, the "savage" was pure negativity.He did not exist; Malinowski would create him: "I hear the word'Kiriwana' ... I get ready; little gray, pinkish huts ... It is I who willdescribe them or create them" (Malinowski 1967, p. 140).Utilitarian functionalism is a functional blindness to the content andinternal relations of the cultural object. The content is appreciated only forits instrumental effect, and its internal consistency is thus mystified as itsexternal utility. Functionalist explanation is a kind of bargain made withthe ethnographic reality in which content is exchanged for an "understanding"of it. But a theory ought to be judged as much by the ignorance itdemands as by the "knowledge" it affords. There is an enormousdisparity between the richness and complexity of cultural phenomenasuch as the Intichiuma and the anthropologist's simple notions oftheir economic virtues. Only the most infinitesimal fraction of that richreality, and nothing of its specific content, is accounted for by its func-17. Radin succinctly put the Boasian principle-"No one has the right to obliterate theexact fonn in which his infonnation was received"-although Radin in the same worksoundly criticizes the master's temptation to cut up the culture into traits for diffusionisltreatment, among other imperfections of historicist method (1966 [1933 J). For an excellentdiscussion of Boas's altitude of circumspection toward the phenomenon in itself,however, see his anicle "The Study of Geography" (in Boas 1966b [1940]).tion. 18 When Malinowski set out to show that "the Intichiuma ceremoniesof the Australian aborigines, with their wild dances, their painted bodiesand their symbolically carved shields actually performed a function in theireconomic life"-namely, that they stimulated production in anticipationof the rites (Malinowski 1912)-what in fact do we learn of these wilddances, painted bodies, and a thousand other properties of the Intichiuma?Such conceptual impoverishment is the functionalist mode of theoreticalproduction. It is only exacerbated when the function is sought on thebiological level-as is often true not only of Malinowski but of more recentversions of ecological anthropology (cf. Vayda 1965, p. 196; Vayda andRappaport 1967). For the further removed the cultural fact from the sphereof utility to which it is referred-the organic, the economic, the socialthefewer and more mediated must be the relations between this fact andthe phenomena of that sphere; and consequently the fewer and less specificare the functional constraints on the nature of the custom under consideration.So the less determinate will be the explanation by functional virtues;. or, conversely. the greater will be the range of alternative cultural practicesthat could equally (or even better) serve the same purpose. There must bemany ways of stimulating production other than staging an Intichiumaceremony. Indeed, the explanation rather defeats its objective of renderingcustom reasonable; for that is a bizarre way of going about one'sbusiness. To satisfy ourselves on the indeterminancy of any such explanation,it is only necessary to turn the argument around: it is advantageousto increase production-therefore the Intichiuma? Malinowski'sfunctionalist understanding would have been more powerful if, it laRadcliffe-Brown, he had referred the ceremony to the level of social fact.The prevailing relations between totemic clans, men and women, initiatedand uninitiated would go a long way toward making the wild dances andpainted shields intelligible. Less is said when economic advantages areadduced. And still less would have been gained had Malinowski carriedthrough his project to the biological level. Then the cultural content, whosespecificity consists in its meaning, is lost altogether in a discourse of"needs" empty of signification.One is tempted to formulate a general rule of diminishing returns tofunctionalist explanation: the more distant and distinct the cultural practice18. I am indebted to Frithjof Bergmann on this point, and to Raymond C. Kelly for a firstfonnulation of "the law of diminishing returns to functionalist explanation" which followsfrom it.