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

Chapter Two 56 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory57meaningful one in the "conceptual scheme." In the first case, culture is aninstrumental system, in the second the instrumental is subject to systems ofanother kind.The relevance of this parochial controversy to Marx's invocation ofpraxis is patent-although, as we shall see, Marx's position cannot besimply assimilated to the received empirico-materialism in anthropology.Still, it is by a moderate distinction from Marxism, "if not Marx himself,"that Levi-Strauss most succinctly states his own perspective:If, as I have said, the conceptual scheme governs and defines practices,it is because these, which the ethnologist studies as discreterealities placed in time and space and distinctive in their particularmodes of life and forms of civilization, are not to be confused withpraxis which-and here at least I agree with Sartre-constitutes thefundamental totality for the sciences of man. Marxism, if not Marxhimself, has too commonly reasoned as though practices followed directlyfrom praxis. Without questioning the undoubted primacy of infrastructures,I believe that there is always a mediator between praxisand practices, namely the conceptual scheme by the operation ofwhich matter and form, neither with any independent existence, arerealized as structures, that is as entities which are both empirical andintelligible. [1966, pp. 130-31]Levi-Strauss goes on to explicate the contrast, as if it were a matter ofcomplementary pursuits:It is to this theory of superstructures, scarcely touched on by Marx,that I hope to make a contribution. The development of the study ofinfrastructures proper is a task which must be left to history-with theaid of demography, technology, historical geography and ethnography.It is not principally the ethnologist's concern, for ethnology isfirst of all psychology. [Ibid.]The seriousness of Levi-Strauss's criticism seems only disguised by thismodest disclaimer. And perhaps he concedes too much of his science. Ifthe conceptual scheme encompasses matter in the terms of a human existence,still it does not come upon the scene of practical action merely toadd the appropriate interpretation of material facts or instrumental relations.Nor would the decoding of the scheme be confined to "superstructure." This scheme is the very organization of material production; analyzingit, we are in the economic base itself. Its presence there dissolves theclassic antinomies of infrastructure and superstructure, the one considered"material" the other "conceptual." Of course, it does not dissolve the"material" as such. But the so-called material causes must be, in thatcapacity, the product of a symbolic system whose character it is our task toinvestigate; for without the mediation of this cultural scheme, no adequaterelation between a given material condition and a specific cultural form canever be specified. The general determinations of praxis are subject to thespecific formulations of culture; that is, of an order that enjoys, by its ownproperties as a symbolic system, a fundamental autonomy.MorganThe issues involved in the option between the practical and meaningfullogics have been fought, as I say, on a dozen battlegrounds over a hundredyears of anthropological war. A reflection on that history will go a longway toward clarifying them. But I must warn that the excursion will be ahistory "for us"-a way of taking consciousness of ourselves inhistory-without any pretension to the status of a "true" diachronic account.Thus I set up the contrasts between Lewis Henry Morgan and FranzBoas as a paradigmatic opposition, without reference to other figures of theintellectual context and background whose influences were surely criticalto the controversy thus personified. Again, I leave aside or consider summarilymany serious thinkers of later times, both in anthropology and inkindred disciplines, whom others might justifiably consider more importantand exemplary. Perhaps such cavalier treatment may be excused bylikening it to a history with which anthropologists have become familiar: aversion of the past as it is actually lived by one segment of the society, asthe charter of its present condition (see Pouillon 1975).I begin with Morgan-and with the further qualification that the choiceis in some measure equivocal. As with every founding father, Morgan'sthought tends to be more generalized than the views that have differentiatedfrom it, containing within itself the "germs" of almost every succeedingposition. This means the man may be submitted to many theoreticalreadings, anyone of which, precisely as it becomes a charter of presentcontention, may be guilty of less than adequate respect for the originalgenerality. So Morgan has been categorized by later scholarship as an"idealist" for his emphasis on the unfolding of original "germs ofthought"; as a "materialist" for his grounding of social evolution ondevelopments in the arts of subsistence; and then again, as a "philosophicaldualist" for his simultaneous dependence on both. An allusion to the"natural logic of the mind" has led some to consider him a "mentalist,"while others hold him guilty of "racism" for referring culture to the