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

Chapter Two 68 Culture and Practical ReasonTwo Paradigms of Anthropological Theory69Much of Boas' later work, and that of his students after him can bevi~wed si~ply as the working out of implications present in ~hisarticle. [Ibid., p. 159; emphases mine]. In fact, the paths by which Boas reached the cultural concept werediverse and sometimes circuitous (cf. Stocking 1968, pp. 195-223; 1974,p~. 1-20). One ~f these is of special relevance here, as it developed fromdirect confrontation with Morgan on the issue of general laws of socialevolution. Modem anthropology tends on balance to consider this particularcontroversy unfortunate, for the nominalist fragmentation operated byBoas on the content of cultures to prove the diversity of developmentalprocesses .enshrined that "shreds and patches" conception of the objectthat Amencan ethnology would spend decades in expiating. Indeed, Radinearly and vigorously criticized the "quantitative" notion of the detached~ulture tra.it ~hich Bo~s had developed out of his obsession with disprovmgevolutIOnism (Radm 1966 [1933]). Yet the negative dismemberment ofculture had to generate a contradictory and synthetic result. What hadrationalize~ for Boas the disparity of apparently similar traits, as theyactually eXisted .in various societies, were the differences in meanings anduses locally assigned. If these meanings implied dissimilar processes ofdevelopment, and hence proved Morgan wrong, it was by their implication.also of a total and oriented context: a culture that patterned the traitsacc~rding to its own unique genius. Since Boas argued that the masks ofsociety A, used to deceive the spirits, were not comparable to the masks ofsociety B whi~h commemorated the ancestors-and similarly that clans,totems, or mOiety systems varied the world over-he had to conclude theexistence of cultures: of totalities whose "dominant ideas" or patternscreate this differentiation (Boas 1966b [1940], pp. 270-89, and passim). Ina well-known article, "History and Anthropology," Levi-Strauss observesthe conceptual eventuality of the method:Are we then compelled to carry Boasian nominalism to its limit andstudy each of the cases observed as so many individual entities? Weshould be.a":are, first, that the/unctions assigned to dual organizationdo not comclde, and, second, that the history of each social groupdemonstrates that the division into moieties stems from the mostdifferent origins. T~us, ~epending on the case, dual organization maybe ~he result of the invaSion of a population by an immigrant group; offusion b~tween two neighboring groups, for any of several reasons~ec~no~mc, demographic, or ceremonial); of the crystallization, inInstltutlOnal form, of empirical norms designed to insure marriageexchanges within a given group; of the distribution within the group-­over two parts of the year, two types of activity, or two segments ofthe population-of two sets of antithetical behavior, each of which isconsidered equally indispensable for the maintenance of social equilibrium;and so forth. We are therefore forced to reject the concept ofdual organization as a spurious category and, if we extend this line ofreasoning to all other aspects of social life, to reject institutions exclusively,in favor of societies. [Levi-Strauss I963b , pp. 10-11]Boas's general problematic thus differs radically from Morgan's. WhereMorgan had understood practice and its customary formulation by the logicof objective circumstances, Boas interpolated an independent subjectivebetween the objective conditions and organized behavior, such that thelatter does not follow mechanically from the former. On the psychologicallevel, where it was first announced, the intervening term may be characterizedroughly as a mental operation, generated by context and previousexperience, which in governing the perception specifies the relation betweenstimulus and response (fig. 7). On the cultural level, toward whichBoas's thought was in continuous development, the mediating term is thetradition, the Volkergedanken or the dominant pattern, which orders atonce the relation to nature, the existing institutions, and their interaction(fig. 8).The similarity of both formulas to Levi-Strauss's is unmistakable(above, pp. 56-57). Indeed the terms of Levi-Strauss's statement of hisposition-in opposition to a certain Marxism-perfectly describe Boas aswell, even to the specification of the tertium quid between praxis andpractices as a "conceptual scheme" (or code). Adopting these terms, thetheoretical contrast between Boas and Morgan might be generally set out asshown in figure 9.Of course "conceptual scheme" has a different quality in these twoperspectives. For Boas it is the encoding, while for Morgan it is thecodification, of distinctions external to itself. For Boas the significance ofthe object is the property of thought, whereas for Morgan thought is therepresentation of objective significance. If in Morgan's conception, then,thought and language function as sign, Boas's is essentially a problematicof the symbolic. Indeed the structure of the symbolic as Boas developed itwould account for empiricist-rationalist views of the kind Morgan entertained:that is, as a characteristic form of cultural self-reflection, a postfactumappeal to the reasonableness of practices whose true logic is inexplicitand whose true sources are unknown.