Kleinman, Arthur - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

[KLEINMAN] Experience and Its Moral Modes 361symbolic apparatuses of culture elaborate these meanings and constrainhow individuals remember and act upon them so that localworlds can be (and often are) greatly different cultural spaces.”Even in the same world, there can be (and often are) conflictsford University Press, 1985); Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge and Further Essaysin Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Catherine Lutz, UnnaturalEmotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and <strong>The</strong>ir Challengeto Western <strong>The</strong>ory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) ; Ganneth Obeyesekere,<strong>The</strong> Cult of the Goddess Pattini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1985); Michelle Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self andSocial Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Bruno Snell, <strong>The</strong> Discoveryof the Mind (in Greek Philosophy and Literature): <strong>The</strong> Greek Origins ofEuropean Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953) ; Unni Wikan, Managing TurbulentHearts: A Balinese Formula for Living (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1990). See also Jean Delumeau, “Sin and Fear”: <strong>The</strong> Emergence of a WesternGuilt Culture in the Thirteenth-Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Peter Gay, <strong>The</strong> Naked Heart (New York: Norton,1995); Carlo Ginzburg, <strong>The</strong> Cheese and the Worms: <strong>The</strong> Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Writer (New York: Penguin Books, 1982); Irving Hallowell, Culture andExperience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967) ; Jackson (Paths) ;Fred Myers: Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self (Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian InstitutionPress, 1986); E. Schieffelin, <strong>The</strong> Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of theDancers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976).10 <strong>The</strong> concept of culture has been used in different ways and is hotly debatedin the 1990s both within and without anthropology. Susan Wright (“<strong>The</strong> Politicizationof Culture,” Anthropology Today 14, no. 1 [1998]: 7-15), writing in theofficial publication of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland,puts it: older views of culture emphasized its boundedness, defined characteristics,unchanging, shared, and homogenous elements, while newer views emphasizethat culture is an active process of meaning making, is contested, involvesindividuals who are differently socially positioned, has local, national, and global connections,is not closed or coherent, and can be used hegemonically. <strong>The</strong> appropriationsof the idea of “culture” in politics, commercial practices, and internationaldevelopment programs show that its uses are salient as its content. In this lecture,I draw upon elements of both newer and older definitions, as will soon become apparentto the reader; but at both local and global levels I use “culture” to meansymbolic apparatuses of meaning making, representation, and transmission. Cultureis closely connected with political and economic processes and changes in relation tothem; it is both shared and contested; it is differentially distributed across the divisionsof class, ethnicity, religion, gender, and age cohort; it is realized in localworlds yet extends beyond them; and it contains coherences and incoherences. <strong>The</strong>idea of culture’s appropriation as part of political and economic processes that arehistorically shaped and consequential for human futures is one I am particularlyinterested in and seek to develop in this lecture. Indeed, although treated as astrawman in the guise of “cultural relativism” in moral theory in the 1980s andearlier, in the 1990s culture has been taken up in moral debates, but more often ina manner that strips it of its economic, political, and historical aspects. (See <strong>Arthur</strong><strong>Kleinman</strong>, “<strong>The</strong> Anthropology of Bioethics,” chapter 3 in Writing at the Margin,pp. 41-67.)