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

Chapter Two 112 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory113ter of the sign directly, as a logical consequence of the distinction betweenthe individual fact and the social-exactly because individual sensation isonly a fleeting fact which as social beings we have the means and theliberty to represent in other tenns:A sensation or an image always relies upon a detenninate object, orupon a collection of objects of the same sort, and expresses themomentary condition of a particular consciousness; it is essentiallyindividual and subjective. We therefore have considerable liberty indealing with the representations of such an origin. It is true that whenour sensations are actual, they impose themselves upon us in/act. Butby right we are free to conceive them otherwise than they really are, orto represent them to ourselves as occurring in a different order fromthat in which they are really produced. In regard to them nothing isforced upon us except as considerations of another sort [namely socialconsiderations] intervene. [Durkheim 1947 (1912), p. 14]42It must follow that for Durkheim the social fact, above all the collectiveconsciousness, is no simple recognition of material circumstance. Oppositionto this reduction would carry Durkheim, at least momentarily, beyondhis own sociological reflectionism. From the detennination of the meaningfulscheme by the social morphology, he moved to a detennination ofthe social morphology as meaningful-and of the meaningful syntax as suigeneris. "The ideal society," he insisted, "is not outside of the realsociety; it is part of it. ... For a society is not made up merely of the massof individuals who compose it, the ground which they occupy, the thingswhich they use and the movements which they perfonn, but above all is theits place; for each civilization has its organized system of concepts which characterizesit" (ibid., p. 435).42. Elsewhere Durkheim writes ofthe alienation involved in such appropriation ofindividualexperience with a regret something like Marx's in the /844 Manuscripts: "We understaJldonly when we think in concepts. But sensory reality is not made to enter theframework ofourconcepts spontaneously and by itself. It resists, and, in order to make itconform, we have todo some violence to it, we have to submit it to all sorts oflaboriousoperations that alter it so that the mind can assimilate it. However, we never completelysucceed in triumphing over its resistance. Our concepts never succeed in mastering oursensations and in translating them completely into intelligible terms. They take on aconceplUaJ fonn only by losing that which is most concrete in them, that which causesthem to speak to our sensory being and to involve it in action; and. in so doing,they become something fixed and dead. Therefore.we cannot understand thingswithoutrenouncing the understanding of it. Doubtless, we sometimes dream of a science thatwould adequalely express all of reality; but this is an ideal that we can approachceaselessly, not one that is possible for us to attain" (Durkheim 1960 (1914), p. 329).idea which it forms of itself" (1914 [1912], p. 422). In disagreement withthe going historical materialism, Durkheim counterposed a "whole worldofsentiments, ideas and images which, once born, obey laws all their own.They attract each other, repel each other, unite, divide themselves, andmultiply, though these combinations are not commanded and necessitatedby the condition of the underlying reality" (ibid., p. 424; compare, however,the earlier remarks on Labriola, in Lukes 1972, p. 231). Note thateven within the sociological epistemology a fundamental twist appeared inthe relation of society and nature that could lead away from all reflectionism.Society, Durkheim was wont to say, comprises the "molds"within which are fonned the human experience. Consequently, the worldas known to man was a social world-precisely not a reflection, but insidesociety. The history of the world was the narrative of the tribe's existence,just as geographic space might be laid out from the central point of avillage. And the objects of this social existence were not merely classedisomorphically with man, in correspondence with the categories of men,they were thereby given a place within the human groups. ("For theAustralian, things themselves, everything which is in the universe, are apart ofthe tribe; they are constituent elements of it and, so to speak, regularmembers of it, just like men they have a determinate place in the generalscheme of organization of the society" [Durkheim 1947 (1912), p. 141 ].)If, as Durkheim put it, the universe does not exist except insofar as it isthought, then it has been encompassed within an even greater order; so thatit can no longer itself be thought to act simply from outside, in a purelynatural way. And in that theoretical event, the opposition to Marxism wasoverdrawn. Just as Durkheim would accord with Marx on the recognitionthat "man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world," so theymust come together on the corollary proposition of a socialized orhumanized nature. Lukacs's description does for both: "Nature is a societalcategory. That is to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage ofsocial development, however this nature is related to man, and whateverform his involvement with it takes, Le., nature's form, its content, and itsobjectivity are all socially conditioned" (1971, p. 234).This concept of the social appropriation of nature, of the natural order asa moral order, continues to inform the best structural anthropology, Britishor French. It was essential to Radcliffe-Brown's early work on Andamanesebelief and ceremonial, as well as his studies of totemism, taboo,and religion in general. It has been central also to the ethnographic enterprisesof Evans-Pritchard and his students, as well as to more recent