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Chapter Two 104 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory105exposing reality to view. The human power of bestowing meaning-ofexperiencing as meaning-constructs another kind of world:Man differs from the apes, and indeed all other living creatures so faras we know, in that he is capable of symbolic behavior. With wordsman creates a new world, a world of ideas and philosophies. In thisworld man lives just as truly as in the physical world of his senses.Indeed, man feels that the essential quality of his existence consists inhis occupancy of this world of symbols and ideas-or, as he sometimescalls it. the world of the mind or spirit. This world of ideascomes to have a continuity and a pennanence that the external worldof the senses can never have. It is not made up of the present only butof a past and a future as well. Temporally, it is not a succession ofdisconnected episodes. but a continuum extending to infinity in bothdirections, from eternity to eternity. [White 1942, p. 372]But then from this symbolist perspective-as opposed to the positivistand utilitarian consciousness through technological disclosure-the tool isitself an idea. It is "not merely a material object, or even a sensory imageas it may be to an ape. It is also an idea" (White 1942, p. 373). If a stoneax generates a given type of philosophy, nevertheless the ax itself is aconcept whose meaning and use, as is true of all concepts, are fixed not byits objective properties but by the system of relationships between symbols.Thus the technological detennination of culture in White's evolutionarytheory lives side by side with the cultural detennination of technologyin his symbolic theory:An axe has a subjective component; it would be meaningless without aconcept and an attitude. On the other hand, a concept or an attitudewould be meaningless without overt expression, in behavior or speech(which is a fonn of behavior). Every cultural element, every culturaltrait, therefore, has a subjective and an objective aspect. But conceptions,attitudes, and sentiments-phenomena that have their locus WIthinthe human organism-may be 'considered for purposes of scientificinterpretation in an extrasomatic context, i.e., in tenns of their relationto other symboled things and events rather than in tenns of their relationshipto the human organism .... [Thus an axe may be considered intenns of its relationship] to other symboled things and events such asarrows, hoes, and customs regulating the division of labor in society.[White 1959a, p. 236]3636. In this anicle, White unnecessarily gives culture a contextual definition; namely, "symbolates"viewed in the context of other "symbolates," which puts the burden of thedetennination on the anthropologist-even as the locus of the symbolic remains in theAs against the fundamentally practical and technological paradigmwhich connects him with Morgan, White is thus capable of a symbolicperspective-which puts him in unlikely company. Allow me to juxtaposea passage previously cited from Levi-Strauss with a text from White'spresidential address to the anthropology section of the AAAS:WhiteThus [with symbols] man built anew world in which to live. To besure, he still trod the earth, felt thewind against his cheek, or heard itsigh among the pines; he drankfrom streams, slept beneath thestars, and awoke to greet the sun.But it was not the same sun! No-thing was the same any more. Everythingwas "bathed in celestiallight"; and there were "intimationsof immortality" on every hand.Water was not merely something toquench thirst; it could bestow thelife everlasting. Between man andnature hung the veil ofculture, andhe could see nothing save throughthis medium. He still used hissenses. He chipped stone, chaseddeer, mated and begat offspring.But permeating everything was theessence ofwords: the meanings andvalues that lay beyond the senses.And these meanings and valuesguided him-in addition to hissenses--and often took precedenceover them. [1958 ms; emphasismineJ31Uvi-StraussIf, as I have said, the conceptualscheme governs and defines practices,it is because these, which theethnologist studies as discreterealities placed in time and spaceand distinctive in their particularmodes of life and fonns of civilization,are not to be confused withpraxis which ... constitutes the.fundamental totality for the sciencesof man.... Without questioningthe undoubted primacy ofinfrastructures, I believe that thereis always a mediator betweenpraxis and practices, namely theconceptual scheme by the operationof which matter and form, neitherwith any independent existence arerealized as structures, that is as entitieswhich are both empirical andintelligible. [1966. p. 130; emphasismine]human subject-and ignores the real process by which human productions are reified or"objectivized," i.e., become "extrasomatic." See Berger and Luckmann (1967) for arecent discussion of "objectivation," tied, however, to just-so origins in praxis.37. The comparison is admittedly mildly disingenuous, for the final sentence of White'sparagraph is a proposition which Levi-SlraUSS would nol endorse, although it is Ie propreof Boasianism: "Man had become the irrational animal."
Chapter Two 106 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory107It seems that wherever one turns in American anthropology one meets, ifnot precisely this ambivalence of White's, some incompleteness in theappropriation of the cultural object by meaning. The impressive ethnosciencedeveloped by Goodenough, Lounsbury, Conklin, and others, especiallyout of the linguistic legacy of the Boas school, has been shackled bya positivist concept of culture as behavioral competence or ethnography,therefore of meaning as referential significance and of analysis astranslation-in terms of an apparently objective code whose "objectivity"encodes a theory. Or to take examples of a very different kind (if equallyimpressive in intellectual quality), the efforts of Geertz or Schneider, eachin their own way, have likewise turned on a specific limitation of thesymbolic, as is built into the distinction between action and ideology,society and culture. This particular distinction has been more characteristicallyEuropean, and more immediately the tenet of British than of Americansocial anthropology. Since its implications reach back to Durkheim,then on again to the modem French structuralism-which also incorporatesthe Boasian tradition through Uvi-Strauss-it has seemed to me mostvaluable to give the most attention to the playing out of the relation betweenutilitarianism and culture in this tradition. I begin with Durkheim.Although the hero of a certain later "functionalism," Durkheim developedhis own position on society in contradistinction to just the kind ofeconomism and radical individualism we have seen embedded inMalinowski's project (cf. Parsons 1968 [1937]; Lukes 1972). Durkheimchose Spencer as his particular sociological antagonist on these issues,most notably in The Division ofLabor (1949 [1893]). Hence, parallel to thecontrast between Morgan and Boas one might formulate a paradigmaticcomparison of Spencer and Durkheim, the latter debate centering onutilitarianism proper or economistic action, thus on the opposition of individualand society, where the former concerned the material logic of productionand thereby the global opposition ofculture and nature. For severalreasons, however, the exercise on Spencer and Durkheim would not be asuseful. One is the large residual resemblance between Spencer's "superorganic"and Durkheim's "society." More important, Durkheim framed hisconcept of the social in a general confrontation with classical politicaleconomy, not just with Spencer, so that it is most effectively understood asa broad critique of the self-conception ofcapitalism parading as a theory ofsociety. It was a general objection to the adoption of the rationalisticformula of the economizing individual as the model ofsocial production, amodel that would place society in the status of predicate to presupposedhuman needs and purposes. As against such voluntarism and intentionalism,Durkheim posed the social fact. The overwhelming propertiesand powers he accorded it in relation to the individual represent a directcontraversion of the liberal economist's idea of society as the public outcomeof private interest.So the celebrated admonition ofThe Rules ofthe Sociological Method to"treat social facts as things" was something more than a lesson inpositivist reification. To stress the facticity of the social fact was preciselyto remove it from individual production: "For everything that is real has adefinite nature that asserts control, that must be taken into account and isnever completely overcome, even when we succeed in neutralizing it"(195Oa [1895], pp. Iv-lvi). All the affirmative features ofsociality in Durkheim'sscheme are in the same way negatives of individuality. It is notmerely that the social fact is collective. Besides, it is conscience as opposedto desire, conventional as opposed to spontaneous; and rather thanoriginating in wants, which are internal, it imposes itself as constraints,which are external. "Indeed, the most important characteristic of a 'thing'. is the impossibility ofits modification by a simple effort of the will" (ibid.,p. 28). Similarly, the true source of Durkheim's strictures on psychologylay in his attack on economy. As he saw it, the real origin of reductionismwas the ideology of calculating man:In fact, if society is only a system of means instituted by men to attaincertain ends, these ends can only be individual, for only individualscould have existed before society. From the individual, then, haveemanated the needs and desires determining the formation of societies;and, if it is from him that all comes, it is necessarily by him that allmust be explained. Moreover, there are in societies only individualconsciousnesses; in these, then, is found the source of all social evolution.Hence, sociological laws can be only a corollary of the more generallawsof psychology. [Ibid., pp. 97-98]From early on, as Lukes observes, Durkheim took the position thatpolitical economy was a stage in the development of social science that hadto be overcome. Forced to conceive that "there is nothing real in societyexcept the individual," such a science would offer no theoretical room forsociology. And as for this eternal individual from whom society had beenabstracted, Durkheim could only hold him in the same kind of contempt ashad Marx. This "individual" was himself abstract. Deprived of all coordinatesof time, place, and history, all that remained was''the sad portrait ofthe pure egoist" (Durkheim [1888], cited in Lukes 1972, p. 80).Neither Malinowski nor Weber: Durkheim refused to conceive society
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