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

Chapter Two 88 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory89takes environmental factors into consideration in its attempts to elucidatecultural phenomena, but that it gives biological meaning to thekey terms-adaptation, homeostasis, adequate functioning,survival-of its formulations. [1971, p. 243]The theoretical practice might be called "ecology fetishism," Nothingcultural is what it seems; everything is mystified as a natural fact which hasthe ostensible virtue of being basic and exact although it is essentiallyabstract. Marriage becomes "an interchange of genetic materials," ashunting is "an interchange of energy with the environment," com, beans,and squash are an "unbalanced diet," society a "population" of humanorganisms, and cannibalism a "subsistence activity." ("In examiningcannibalism, we are operating from the premise that all activities whichmake food available for group members, food which they then actuallyconsume, are 'subsistence activities' and that they can then be comparedindividually and/or taken together as constituent activities in an overallbehavioral repertory called 'food-getting pattern' "-Domstreich andMorren 1974, p. 3). The same way of thinking as applied to the discoveryof sanitary values in dietary tabus Douglas (1966) has called "medicalmaterialism." It is only a particular anthropological or ecological versionof the exchange of meaningful content for functional truth that Sartredescribed as the vulgar Marxism. 26 This petty metaphysical commerce in26. As for Marx himself, far from being implicated, it was he who gave such fetishism itsmost general criticism and explanation: "The apparent stupidity of merging all the manifoldrelationships of people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysicalabstraction arises from the fact that, in modern bourgeois society, all relations aresubordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation. This theorycame to the fore with Hobbes and Locke.... In Holbach, all the activity of individualsin the mutual intercourse, e.g., speech, love, etc., is depicted as a relation of utility andutilisation. Hence the actual relations that are presupposed here are speech, love, thedefinite manifestations of definite qualities of individuals. Now these relations are supposednot to have the meaning peculiar to them but to be the expression and manifestationof some third relation introduced in their place, the relation of utility or utilisation.... All this is actually the case with the bourgeois. For him only one relation isvalid on its own account-the relation of exploitation; all other relations have validityfor him only insofar as he can include them under this one relation, and even where heencounters relations which cannot be directly subordinated to the relation of exploitation,he does at least subordinate them to it in imagination. The material expression ofthis use is money, the representative of the value of all things, people and social relations.Incidentally, one sees at a glance that the category of 'utilization' is first of allabstracted from the acttlal relations of intercourse which I have with other Jleol?le (butby no means from reflection and mere will) and then these relations are made out to bethe reality of the category that has been abstracted from them themselves, a wholly metaphysicalmethod of procedure" (Marx and Engels 1965, pp. 4~1).ethnographic details would hold no interest were it not for its avowedintention of engrossing the concept of culture.Malinowski opposed "culture" to behavior; for ecology, it is "behavior."It may be learned behavior, but it is not by that characteristicworthy of different treatment than the "species-specific behavior" of anyother group of organisms. Think of it simply as a "cultural repertoire"(Collins and Vayda 1969, p. 155). Thus understood, the phenomenon assuch does not distingUish man from any other species, nor anthropologyfrom biology. As "behavior"-or even more abstractly, "bodilymovements" -culture can be studied in the same way as the actions ofanyanimal, that is, as good for the species or bad for it under the selectiveconditions as naturally constituted:Attention to cultural ideas, values or concepts cannot, however, besaid to be a sine qua non of the analysis of ecosystems including man.One may choose rather to place emphasis upon the actual physicalbehavior or bodily movements through which man directly effects alterationsin his environment . ... Indeed, a possible approach,suggested by Simpson ... among others, is to regard human culturesimply as the behavior or part of the behavior ofa particular speciesofprimates. By so regarding it we are enabled to study and interpret itas we do the behavior of any other species: for example, with respectnot only to its interaction with environmental variables but also to theeffect of this interaction upon natural selection. The fact that humanbehavior is complex, varied, variable, and, to a considerable extent,population-specific may make observation and description formidabletasks, but it does not mean that basically different principles must beused in the study of human behavior and the study of behavior in otheranimal species. [Vayda 1965, p. 4; emphasis mine]The ecological functionalism puts culture in double jeopardy. It isthreatened with liquidation because it cannot be specified as such bynatural reasons, and because consideration of its specific quality wouldinvite in a reason of another nature. The crisis then becomes ontological inits proportions. Culture is exchanged for "behavior. " Its concrete qualitiesare only the appearance of "bodily movements" whose wisdom is theirbiological effect. Ontology thus recapitulates methodology. And anthropologyloses its object. The properties of culture having been ignoredin the practice of its explanation, it is presumed that these properties haveno autonomy or value as such-which is a rationalization of the fact thatthe explanation cannot account for them: