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

Chapter Two 64 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory65entire cultural logic. For if, on one hand, the differences in linguistic valueeffect a particular decoupage of the external world, dividing it up accordingto certain principles, on the other hand, the elements so segregated areregrouped by meaningful correspondences between them. Here I speak notmerely of semantic distinctions but of cultural propositions. And the symbolicarbitrariness of the latter is even greater than that of the fonner. Atleast in theory there are natural limits on the semantic field of a singlelexeme: no single word, for example, is likely to signify, simultaneouslyand exclusively. the two species cattle and lobster. But the same examplewill suggest to Americans, among whom the peculiar combination "steakand lobster" is a definite category ofdining, that culture is not under a likeconstraint. There appear to be no theoretical limits assignable a priori as towhat will be classed with what else in the cultural scheme. "A relative bymarriage is an elephant's hip." The propositional logic is marvelouslyvaried and so, even within this one and the same world, are the cultures. 8In brief, by symbolic valuation and synthesis of the objective reality, wecreate a new kind of object, with distinct properties: culture. Language is aprivileged means of this project. But for Morgan, language is no more thanperception articulate. Hence the passage from nature to culture in Morgan'sview is no more momentous than, say, the reduction of the Odysseyfrom the spoken fonn to writing. As a leading Marxist recently wrote ofKautsky, so it can be said of Morgan that for him "human history ... is anappendage of natural history, its law of motion merely fonns ofappearanceof biological laws" (Schmidt 1971, p. 47).9I'instrument Ie plus important etle plus precieux pour la conquete et pour la constructiond'un vrai monde d'objets" (Cassirer 1933, p. 23).For a fine anthropological discussion of the cultural relativity of the distinction betweenbelief and experience, a distinction peculiar to those Western societies which undertakethe anthropology of others, see Needham 1972 (especially p. 173).8. In the same sense of a cultural construction, one may note of Saussure's sheep/mullonthat this animal takes its place in the Anglo-Saxon world as fit for butchery alongsidepigs and callie, which share a parallel declension of terms for the prepared state (pork,beef), while all differ in this respect from horses and dogs. History without structurewould not seem to explain the classification, since we have no Norman-inspired word for"cheval" by analogy to mUllon, beef, and pork. In chapter 4, I discuss the logic ofedibility/inedibility in the American scheme (pp. 170-79).9. I am indebted to Professor Paul Kay for most helpful discussion of the problem of the"arbitrariness of the sign." My indebtedness extends even to certain phrases which arehis-as any errors or misconceptions remain mine. Among the errors I would avoid is theclaim of an extreme linguistic relativism. I do not mean to suggest that thought mustcoincide with the grammatical distinctions of a given language. The whole idea seems toBoasAgainst this background, Boas's odyssey "from physics to ethnology"becomes significant as founding an opposition within which anthropologyhas cycled these many years. As George Stocking (1968) so welI describesit, that was a journey of many years in which Boas passed from a monisticmaterialism to the discovery that''the seeing eye is the organ of tradition";a journey of many stages in which he discovered that for man the organicdoes not foIlow from the inorganic, the subjective from the objective, themind from the world-and, in the end, culture from nature. The first stepswere taken within physics itself. In his dissertation on the color of seawater,Boas remarked on the difficulty of detennining the relative intensitiesof lights that differed slightly in color. Quantitative variation in theobject did not evoke corresponding variation in the subject. lo Boas waslater to repeat the experience on the linguistic level, when with NorthwestCoast infonnants he discovered that sounds considered the same by a. speaker of one language might be heard as completely different by speakersof another, and vice versa, as each perceived in the discourse of theother the distinctions appropriate to his own. 11 Between times he passednaturalIy through a phase of Fechnerian psychophysics that had the sameimport: sensory experiments in threshold phenomena which not only reiteratedthe conclusion that objective differences in stimuli engendered noparalIel differentiation of response-that the human reaction to quantitywas itself qualitative-but also that the response depended on situationalfactors and the person's mental set. Perception in the human subject isapperception; it depends, one might say, on the mental tradition. But thatitself is not decisive, not unique to man. For any given human group, theimply a suspension of the symbolic powers necessary to its postulation. There .i,s alsosome evidence that inner speech, which is "a distinct plane of ve~bal ~hought, has adifferent and more simplified structure than spoken language; nor IS thiS yet the mostprofound level of a complex. and largely unknown. relation between thought and word(Vygotsky 1962).10. "In preparing my doctor'S thesis I had to use p~ot~metric methods to ~ompare inlensitiesof light. This led me to consider the quantitative values of sens~tlons. In the .course of my investigation I learned to recognize that there are domams of our eXPc:r1­ence in which the concepts of quantity. of measures that can be added or subtracted likethose with which I was accustomed to operate. are not applicable" (Boas [1938J inStocking 1974, p. 42).II "The alternation of the sounds is clearly an effect of perception through the medium of. a foreign system of phonetics" (Boas 1966a( 1911 I. p. 14; cf. Stocking 1974. pp. 72 ff.).