Preface

18
this reason, the ragbag theory of culture seems to me incoherent. It leads
however to a more radical thesis.
Taken further the ragbag argument dispenses with culture altogether in
almost all the senses outlined above. Customs may not be coherent or
compatible with one another by any given set of criteria. More important,
we need not presuppose the intellectual practices of scholars are necessarily
commensurable either. The degree and kind – indeed occasions – of
compatibility would become a major problem, which would have to be
addressed instance by instance, and would require a great deal of work.
Any results would be provisional, because there is no guarantee that how
people do things or think about them will remain the same, nor even that
everyone will think the same in the first place. On the contrary,
understandings are likely to change – the faster for being thought about! 17
It is not a vision for generalists, nor for armchair theorists. And it requires
an unnerving ability to live with provisionality, rupture and uncertainty.
There are several conventional answers to the general problem of
commensurability. Most consist in postulating a priori conditions of
thought, which are postulated as being part of human nature (see Chapter 2)
like structure (Lévi-Strauss 1970), the capacity for symbolization (Geertz
1973c, 1973a; White 1949), a shared intersubjectivity (Chapter 6). 18
Another version is that we are dealing with the necessary conditions of
thought itself (Chapter 3) like reason (Hollis 1970, 1982) or knowledge
(Chapter 4). Recourse to culture is peculiar in that its proponents usually
manage to appeal to all of these to a different degree on different
occasions. 19 Cynically, of course, ‘culture’ in many senses is supposed to
be increasingly globalized, as academic and Euro-American popular ideas
of culture become imposed, packaged with aid programmes and marketed
as desirable as commodities, in music, films and television programmes. 20
17
As Collingwood elegantly remarked: ‘if the human mind comes to understand itself
better, it thereby comes to operate in new and different ways’ (1946: 85). I consider the
implications of such arguments in detail especially in chapters 2, 5, 6 & 7.
18 The position is put clearly by Clifford Geertz.
The doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind, which so far as I am aware, is today
not seriously questioned by any reputable anthropologist…asserts that there are no
essential differences in the fundamental thought process among the various living
races of man (1973b: 62)
The problem is that, if culture intervenes, it becomes hard to separate mind from the
history of human practice. So you cannot use the psychic unity argument to postulate
universals of thinking without claiming mind to be somehow prior to culture.
19 This should be evident if you read carefully Geertz (1973e, 1983b) or (1976a, 1999).
20
The localization of global terms and trends is a well developed theme, not least for
Indonesia (e.g. Vickers 1996; Rubinstein & Connor 1999). For some reason, no one seems