The field of culture
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| Dancers and Flutists, with an Egyptian hieroglyphic story |
In everyday language it is
so common to refer to the term culture yet it is difficult to find a concise
definition for this word. The concept of culture became almost a passé-partout
for most of social or psychological phenomena, and its meaning became so broad
that as of today there are hundreds of different definitions, many of which are
very distant from each other. To mention some important thinkers, Kroeber and
Kluckhohn (1952) state that “Culture consists of patterns, explicit and
implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting
the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in
artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e.
historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values;
culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on
the other as conditioning elements of further action”. Clifford Geertz (1966)
claims that the culture concept “denotes an historically transmitted pattern of
meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in
symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their
knowledge about and attitudes toward life”. For Foucault (2001) culture is “a
hierarchical organization of values, accessible to everybody, but at the same
time the occasion of a mechanism of selection and exclusion”.
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| Dionysos et satyres. Intérieur d'une coupe |
The concept of culture
seems to be so clear, and so concrete, that it is almost measurable. But having
so many different definitions of what culture is, it maybe because it is too
abstract. Every definition is in fact too broad and unsatisfactory as it tries
to grasp a concept which indeed does not exist anywhere, even though it is commonly
considered as a matter of fact. Considering culture as a set of values, for
example, does not help in understanding the process undergoing the formation of
such values, or how the culture is changing. It can give a picture of the
moment, but it does not help to understand the conditions which brought it to
that state and how things are changing. Following Park (2005) the very concept
of culture is more likely employed as a signifier of difference, where “this
difference is written as a particular marker for ethnic minorities and people
of color. All of the reviewed articles employ the labels minority, people of
color, and ethnic as synonyms for the culturally different, and the culturally
diverse”. Culture has also largely replaced the categories of race and
ethnicity as the preferred trope of difference. But then the question is
“different from what?”
For overcoming these
impasses it may be the case to start from the etymology of the word culture,
which refers to “cultivating, to cultivate”[1].
This clearly indicates an ongoing process, and not something concluded. On the
contrary, trying to define what culture is kills the culture; it gives a
representation of the culture, which is no longer culture. It may be better to
shift from considering culture as a concept, a noun, to considering it as a
verb. Both terms culture and cultivation have their root in the Latin cultus, which
refers:
“not only to cultivation in
the agricultural sense, but also to training, style of dress, refinement,
sophistication, and civilization. […] our current terms culture and cultivation
retain these many figurative echoes. They also clearly retain these interesting
double sense or ambiguity of the original: on the one hand, cultivation is the
dirty work of tilling the soil. This is what those sweaty farmers do out in the
fields, outside of the town, far from the opera house and the fine dining
establishments. On the other hand, cultivation is sophistication, refinement,
gentility, keeping your hands clean, pursuing the life of the mind, acting
civilized” (Toadvine, 2005).
Rather than focusing on the
fruits of the tree of the knowledge, it should be better considered how the tree is cultivated. Rather than
measuring culture by what is transmitted, what is perpetuated, what is achieved
(the content), the focus should shift on how knowledge is produced
(cultivated).
It is also interesting to
note that “the terms culture and cultivation harbor the seeds of an entire
series of oppositions like mind vs. body, city vs. country, theory vs.
practice, culture vs. nature. Cultus,
our Latin starting-point, is related to culter,
blade, as in the blade of the plow. This is a blade that cuts two ways”. And for
remaining in the plowing metaphor, it is to be reminded that “going of the
furrow” is synonym of delirium
“madness, be crazy, rave”. The Latin deliriare
means in fact going off the track, the furrow. As to say that cultivation is the
blade makes the furrows, and sets the tracks that define a culture. This is why
different (sub)cultures are generally intended in terms of deviance from the
track, lack, or even madness. This blade can be intended, more radically, as
the speech, as the language. Indeed, the very distinction between nature and
culture is fictional, as before the language there exist none of them. The very
idea of agriculture, for example,
means that the two terms are not in antithesis, they are an oxymoron that
cannot be solved, but quite on the contrary they can only coexist. The field of culture is then
of pertinence of the field of language.
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| painting from Hasht-Behesht palace, Iran, from 1669 |
The study of the knowledge a population
shares is particularly interesting; its beliefs, its myths and values; but one cannot
limit it to a descriptive, phenomenological level. As Patterson (2004) says,
this would correspond to making some dangerous oversimplification and
categorization that will only lead to a collection of prejudices and
stereotypes. Stereotypes are for example the identification of identifiable
markers of a culture, or the conceptualization of culture as a category defined
by essential, fixable traits. Marc Augé in his long interview with Anthony
Molino (2004) says that this is already
a reified concept
of culture, fixed difference rather than positional divergence, which moreover masks individually identifying
it with cultural collectivity. Cultures are then
presented as characteristics that “can be attributed to groups of people, who
in turn can be identified by those essential attributes. Such essential
definitions of culture are usually modified, appended often with caveats […]
These caveats, do not, however substantively affect the functional
conceptualization and deployment of culture […] Remaining embedded within the
caveat is the identification of a static core culture which can be modified and
differentially adhered to, since variance must center around something, and
modification presupposes a core entity which can be modified but remain
discernible as itself.” It is then
contradiction to say that there
are many differences in the world,
that “we should respect every culture”, and then deal with these so-called cultures one man or
one woman at time, whose identity
bends to the demands of a presumed collectivity.
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| Captain James Cook, sailors against native Hawaiians. |
This
definition of culture is just one of the many aspects
of the dominant ideology and it doesn’t allow to know a real person
in the totality of
his human experience.
Furthermore, if there culturally diverse, it means that a standard is set, and
the standard is the Caucasian mainstream, inscribed in its turn as the
culture-free norm. The paradox, revealed by Park (2005), is that then the
others are in the position to have culture, but a culture conceptualized as
deficiency. “Culture in this arithmetic is a marker for the periphery, a
contradictory descriptor for a deficit, since to have culture, in this schema,
is to be assigned a position subordinate to that of those inscribed without
culture. As the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo puts it, the more power one has,
the less culture one enjoys, and the more culture one has, the less power one
wields”.
The question of cultural differences is
rather the question of the “culture of differences”: the culture itself cannot
be a problem; culture comes as an added value to the relation. Why should
cultural differences represent a barrier? If there is a value, if there is
culture, how could this represent a minus in the relation?
The limit
is the phantasm for which all should be the same (defense of the race), or
different (discourse of anthropology), two variants of paranoid discourse
(Verdiglione, 1980).
What is normally called culture should
not just answer the question “where do we come from?”, as this remains of
marginal interest. More interestingly, studying how things are cultivated, how
things are said and done, culture should answer the question “where we are
going to?”.
[1] mid-15c.,
"the tilling of land," from M.Fr. culture
and directly from L. cultura "a cultivating,
agriculture," figuratively "care, culture, an honoring," from
pp. stem of colere "tend, guard, cultivate,
till". The figurative sense of "cultivation through education"
is first attested c.1500. Meaning "the intellectual side of
civilization" is from 1805; that of "collective customs and
achievements of a people" is from 1867. Source: www.etymonline.com
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