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

Chapter Two 100 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory101reorder nature by its own purposes-because, for Steward, all purpose butthe practical disappears at the moment of production. Ecological wisdomconsists in forgetting the cultural ordering of nature at every decisive point.The interaction of technology with the environment according to determinaterelations of production-on which is erected a cultural morphologyistaken by Steward for an instrumental fact. Hence the order that istransmitted through action into structure is the eco-Iogic of effectiveadaptation.Steward's problematic is a design for the neglect in theoretical principleof ecology as a cultural system. Partly this is a matter of omission, failureto develop in concept what is recognized in fact. Steward is well aware thatthe particular character of technology stipulates the character of theenvironment-that is, gives significance to resources by a criterion ofcultural relevance. But in Steward's mode of argument this is a given,along with the relations of family and of production (division of labor bysex: men hunting, women gathering). The cultural ordering of nature isthus disguised as the premise to a naturalistic ordering of culture. Indeed,the entire intentionality of the productive process is neglected in the assumptionthat this is a "subsistence" economy, condemned by the povertyof technical means to whatever meager existence can be squeezed out.Such naturalization of the hunter-gatherer economy is, of course, thereceived anthropological wisdom. 34 And it plays directly into an "ecological"explanation of the total culture. For in ignoring the historical characterof the economic objectives, both in quality and in quantity, both theparticular goods that are sought and the intensity of the process, it missesout on the cultural organization of the relation to culture. 35 Not evenhunters are engaged in a mere subsistence economy. Every such groupdistinguishes the edible from the inedible, and not only for the population34...A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or movingfrom one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself' (Braidwood1957, p. 122; cf. Sahlins 1972, chap. I; Lee and DeVore 1968).35. Specifically missing is the cultural intentionality embodied in the code of desirableobjects. As Baudrillard explains, properly speaking an "object of consumption [henceof production] does not exist any more than a phoneme has an absolute meaning inlinguistics. This object does not take meaning either in a specific relation with thesubject ... or in an operative relation to the world (the object-utensil); it only takes onmeaning through its difference from other objects, according to a hierarchial code"(1972, p. 61). Such being the case, there are "no needs save those of which the systemhas need," and it is not that consumption is a function of production, but that "comsummativite"is a structural mode of production (ibid., p. 89).as a whole but for specific classes of age, sex, and ritual condition as theseare locally defined. Moreover, a host of examples from Australianaborigines are enough to show that different types of intergroup exchangehave corresponding implications for the intensity and social patterns ofwork. The Australians are even capable of a concrete totemism, in whichneighboring groups specialize in producing different utilitarian objects fortrade from materials that are equally available to all, in this way duplicatingon the economic plane the increase rites and the interdependence ofgroups imagined in the totemic system. In brief, what Steward neglects isthe organization of work as a symbolic process operating both in therelations of production and in the finalities. The activity of production isinstead culturally deconstituted, to make way for the constitution ofcultureby the activity of production.The real issue posed for anthropology by all such practical reason is theexistence of culture. The utility theories have gone through many changesof costume, but always play out the same denouement: the elimination ofculture as the distinctive object of the discipline. One sees through thevariety of these theories two main types, proceeding along two differentroutes to this common end. One type is naturalistic or ecological-as itwere, objective-while the second is utilitarian in the classic sense, oreconomistic, invoking the familiar means-ends calculus of the rationalhuman subject.Naturalism understands culture as the human mode of adaptation. Culturein this view is an instrumental order, conceived (according to theparticular ecological school) as engaged in reproducing itself as culture orin maintaining the human population within limits of biological viability.In either event, the praxology is "objective" in the sense that explanationconsists of determining the material or biological virtues of given culturaltraits; there is no theoretical demand that the actors calculate directly inadaptive utilities-on the contrary, the most triumphant "eurekas!" willbe reserved for demonstrations that they do so malgre eux. The disappearingact performed on culture consists of its absorption, one way or another,within nature. Either cultural practice is a behavioral mode of appearanceof the laws of natural selection, just like any •• species-specific behavior,"or else it is subsumed within a more general ecosystem which alone and asa totality enjoys the powers of self-regulation or "mind" and whose constraintsare realized in cultural forms.Rather than a pragmatics of cultural forms, the subjective utilitarianism