Too Many Cultures -- Part 2

Before the work of 20th-century ethnographer Franz Boas, culture was still a matter of human freedom, variously expressed in terms of corporate or particular acts of creativity; after Boas, the twentieth century entered a debate as to free or determined action of human beings; namely, does a culture create its members or do they create the culture? For example, within Ruth Benedict's work, cultural relativism took only an absolutist quality and strangely is no final authority for the cultural interpreter. Yet she judged cultures on their ability to satisfy personal gratifications and avoid personal suffering. In other words, despite her relativist stance, she had overriding assumptions about the nature of human life and suffering.

Thus, despite the claim to be objective, anthropological studies were freighted with their personal worldviews and value judgments. Indeed, how could they not be? Alfred Kroeber, famously identified 171 definitions in 13 subsets, concluding that to describe without evaluation is simply impossible. Leslie White in 1959 would hold that culture is a mentalist notion of the symbolism of material objects, a supra-organic system that resides outside of any one individual. Culture is not "intangible, imperceptible, and ontologically unreal abstractions" but "real, substantial, observable subject matter" (234). In other words, the culture of the observer inevitably shapes his or her findings about another culture. By 1960, the term culture had the quality of what Mikhail Bakhtin has called heteroglossia; the word's history carried conflict within its unstated assumptions, which only when challenged, revealed themselves as contestable traditions as to what "culture" actually warranted.

As Terry Eagleton observes, "Culture is said to be one of the three most complex words in the English language, and the term which is sometimes considered its opposite--nature-- is commonly awarded the accolade of being the most complex of all." Culture fluctuates between referencing

1. the immaterial culture that transcends and informs physical civilization;
2. the high culture or aesthetic cultivation that makes one "cultured;"
3. the educational training of the intellectual and moral abilities;
4. the sociological and anthropological use of the word, that is the beliefs and life-ways of a group of people.

Culture can, thus, carry resonances of the loft elite and the broadly popular, of the pristinely spiritual and the socially constructed, of the intellectually astute and the unthinking mass appeal, of the traditional and the experimental. In short, it is can everything and nothing. One is reminded here of Walt Whitman's quintessential claim to bragging rights: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

This leaves those who claim that cultures can be understood and compared via a set of scientific claims with several questions to answer:

• How does one coherently speak of an ethic of anthropological (i.e. cultural) description, given that an ethic is always the product of a social way of life?
• What guarantees a good, fitting, or well-done analysis of one culture from that of another?
• Likewise, how does one cultivate culture and why should one? Can one?
• Or does the lifeway of a people set the terms for anything like significant meaning to begin with?
• Can the "culture" of science or the "culture" of literature observationally offer truth about another's rituals, arts, and words?