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

Chapter Two 84 CUlture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory85some lesser claim to existence and analysis than the behavior motivated byan enlightened self-interest. Still the act-the "wild dances," the exchangesof kula ornaments that could not be possessed-remains peculiarin observable properties, and to privilege it over the rule in the name ofrational interest would require a second distinction: between that outward,incongruous form and the practical attitudes the people bring to it. Thetruest data of ethnography consist not in facts of cultural order but in theway that order is subjectively lived, the famous "imponderabilia of everydaylife." Anthropologists are too frequently taken in, Malinowski insists,by the natives' retailing of "legal fictions" such as the solidarity ofthe clan,rules ofclan exogamy, and the like, which represent only the''intellectual,overt, fully conventionalized aspect of the native attitude." But "thenatural, impulsive code of conduct, the evasions, the compromises andnon-legal usages are revealed only to the field worker who observes nativelife directly, registers facts, lives at such close quarters with his 'material' asto understand not only their language and their statements, but also the hiddenmotives of behaviour, and the hardly ever formulated spontaneous lineofconduct" (Malinowski 1966 [1926], pp. 120-21). The importance of this"natural, impulsive code" is that in the end it prevails over the conventional:in the end, the cultural form submits to the "spontaneous" praxis."The true problem is not to study how human life submits to rules-itsimply does not: the real problem is how the rules become adapted to life"(ibid., p. 127).23By thus separating the cultural order from the human subject as fiction isseparated from real life, Malinowski introduces a type of ontologicalschizophrenia into ethnology-which happens to be the normal social sciencethought of our time. Human social life is taken to be divided against23. Fones acutely describes the opposition between "ideal" norm and "real" practice inMalinowski's work, and documents its transposition into a contrast of form and senti·ment, which left no possibility of understnading kinship, for example, as a system in itsown right: "What is significant is the emphasis on practice (the activity; the behaviour;the concrete mutual services; the exhibited self·interest, ambition, and vanity; the factsof mother love and paternal affection; in shon the actions and feelings and thoughts ofindividuals in social situations, as directly observed by the ethnographer and as admittedby the actors) as the 'reality' of social life, as against 'ideal,' or 'theory,' the merelyverbal formulation (Fortes 1957, p. 160) ... The facts of social relationship and socialgrouping are, in his scheme, merely facts of custom and motive broadly on a par with,for instance, magical beliefs. and springing in the last resort from such universal humaninstincts as those of parenthood or such common human sentiments as vanity and ambi·tion. So we have nowhere a connected analysis of Trobriand local organization, kinship,and political structure" (p. 164).itself, composed of two different kinds of object standing in relations ofcounterposition and competition. On one hand, there are the conventionalrules and forms which amount to "the culture" ofthe situation. They alonehave the right to that status, as they alone are described by specificallycultural properties: matrilineal descent, clan exogamy, mortuary rituals,affinal payments of valuables, yam production, classificatory kinship. Inprinciple they might also be comprehended that way; that is, by a logic atonce of significance and action. developed from the symbolic attributesasthe valuation of goods and the division of labor, for example, may berelated to kinship classifications or marriage practices. But the identificationof the cultural attributes as the "norm" or the "ideal" vis-a-vis "reallife" must condemn such an effort as metaphysical. Culture is insteadsubordinated to another logic-which as it does not preserve the symbolicproperties cannot either give an account of them. 24 Opposed to the culturenorm, on the other hand, is the' 'actual behavior" of the people. And this,as specifically human, must be described and understood in terms drawnfrom another universe of discourse: the people's needs, drives, motives,desires, feelings, and sentiments. At this point, in a sort of basic inversionof Durkheimian principles, although still in agreement with the premisethat "man is double," Malinowski displaces the social dynamic onto thenatural level, seeking to account for it by forces emanating from the organismitself. We have to deal with the struggle of the individual subject toachieve his own ends in the face of constraining cultural conventions.Meaningful analysis thus gives way to manipulative rationality, to theformal analysis of means-ends relations based on an eternal teleology ofhuman satisfactions. From this alternate vantage, culture appears simply asa medium or an environment of the constituting dynamic of human purpose.It is a medium in the sense of a set of means at the disposition of thesubject, through which he achieves his self-appointed ends. And it is anenvironment, not merely as a set of constraints external to the individual,but as something upon which he works his intentions and in so doing ordersthe properties of this milieu. 25 So conceived, the interaction between24. Sorokin correctly characterizes the procedure as "the fallacy of logical inadequacy"­cited with approval by Parsons and described thus: "It is to explain a body of fact withproperties clearly differentiating it from others, in terms of a schema applicable to theothers in the same way" (Parsons 1968 [1937) 1:354). The same fallacy applies toecologisin as well as economism (utilitarianism), as we shall see in a moment.25. "The problems set by man's nutritive, reproductive, and hygienic needs must be solved.They are solved by the construction of a new, secondary, or artificial environment. This