|
From George Orwell's 1984, the words of the "Two Minute Hate":
Benjamin Franklin (1784)--an early cultural relativist? Civilized versus savage--what makes us one and not the other? "Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs. Perhaps, if we could examine the manners of different nations with impartiality, we should find no people so rude as to be without any rules of politeness; nor any so polite as not to have some remains of rudeness". From Eric R. Wolf, 1974. Anthropology. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: Role of Anthropology in Defining WHAT IS HUMAN: “latter-day anthropology is an offspring—though marked by mutation—of ‘philosophical anthropology’, the enterprise of the Enlightenment aimed at understanding the inherent capabilities and limitations of man….To arrive at a general definition of man, however, it was first necessary to examine the numerous varieties of men, and to decide whether they, too, were to be included within the limits of a definition of what it takes to be human. This need inevitably produced a new kind of anthropology that could include in the human account men till then not dreamed of in the repertoire of the philosophers” (Wolf 1974:9-10) – “Indeed, latter-day anthropology has brought to fruition an undertaking begun by the Renaissance, which rediscovered the worlds of the Greeks and Romans and rendered these worlds contemporary in the process of rediscovery. Equally important was the European encounter with America, and its ‘natural’ men….” (Wolf 1974:10) – “Thus, in the past centuries, the inventory of humanity has come to include many ‘significant others’; the originally unified image of man has splintered into a thousand different, equally valid, refractions” (Wolf 1974:10) Humans are Animals with Culture: “He [Man] is the animal with culture, that is, an animal equipped with the ability to create and use symbols to devise new, artificial worlds of his own making” (Wolf 1974:13) The Stranger Within: “No longer are primitive cultures seen as pristine crystals existing in their own right, but as aspects related systematically to the on-going process of civilization….In considering the effects of acculturation the problem is no longer primarily the primitive outside the pale of civilization, but the persistent groups of tradition-bound populations within the gates, ‘the internal stranger’….We are returning to ourselves, after fleeing from ourselves” (Wolf 1974:22) The Psychic Unity of Humankind: “In the 1860’s Adolf Bastian, a German ethnographer, had attempted to define a body of ideas common to all men, the so-called Elementargedanken or basic ideas”—psychic unity of mankind; Jung’s universal archetypes (Wolf 1974:36) Clyde Kluckhohn on Universal Human Mind: “ ‘the interaction of a certain kind of biological apparatus in a certain kind of physical world with some inevitables of the human condition (the helplessness of infants, two parents of different sex, etc.) brings about regularities in the formation of imaginative productions, of powerful images’” (Kluckhohn 1960:49)—“such as parricide, matricide, the search for the father, supernatural marriages, incest, sibling rivalry, castration, the Oedipus myth, the Orpheus myth, the concept of introjected magic causing illness and death, magical curing, magical means for overcoming space, the appearance of inexhaustible food supplies, magical weapons for the conquest of rivals, animals as characters in stories…creation myths, the myth of the hero, the myth of the eternal return, catastrophes, and androgynous deities” (Wolf 1974:37)—also true of dreams: “the ‘underlying psychological drama’ is seen as producing over and over again similar symbolic forms in the dreams of men born into quite different cultures. Examples of this are the equation of wealth with feces, of death with the loss of a tooth, of birth with water” (Wolf 1974:37) Engineered by the Expectations of Others: “Erving Goffman has, in his ‘The Nature of Deference and Demeanor’ (1956), painted a…picture of how the self is delineated continuously anew, as it presents an appropriate image of itself to others, who, by paying the image deference, complete it. He sees the self as a ceremonial thing, a sacred object that must be treated with proper ritual care and that in turn must be presented in proper light to others. Hence no man is an island, and society is forever engaged in the ceremonial labor of undoing and shoring up these individual fragile selves. For the self is seen as a fragile reed, easily broken when the appropriate ceremonial communication is brought to a standstill” (Wolf 1974:39) Commonality of Human Cognitive Capacities: “Anthony Wallace has argued in his ‘The Psychic Unity of Human Groups’ (1961), men must be able to perform several psychological functions, such as perception, memory, discrimination between perceived and remembered stimuli, continuous scanning of all such stimuli with respect to their meaning, and a capacity to match these meanings with overt responses. To accomplish this, man must maintain a minimal semantic capacity, a capacity for minimal distinctions; and Wallace suggests that there may be a low level of this capacity below which men could not maintain the complex tasks required of them in known human cultures” (Wolf 1974:40) Wallace and the Human as Robot: Wallace’s “model of man is not that of the human sufferer, forever experiencing the regressive pull of early experiences, but the robot, possessed of a brain of sufficient capacity to function as a simple computer, responding to the particular discriminations of the cultural code to which it has been cued” (Wolf 1974:40) People as Computers? “If it is true, as Lévi-Strauss once said in conversation, that ‘anthropology begins with people and ends with people, but in between there is plenty of room for computers’, let us take heed not to reverse this dictum, to see men as the intervening links between machines” (Wolf 1974:52) Wolf on Computer Minds: “Only computers have completely open minds, and they must be put to work by minds that know what they want” (Wolf 1974:90) In Week 4, when summing up the discussions on colonialism, cannibalism, and anthropology, I made mention of "Orientalism". As the author of the work originally titled Orientalism has just passed away, and as the material is directly relevant to this course, I thought you might be interested in reading one of his last published pieces, available online at: http://www.counterpunch.org/said08052003.html The title of that piece by Edward Said is: "Orientalism 25 years later: Worldly Humanism versus the Empire Builders". Also, you might have a glance at: WHERE I'M COMING FROM You will find additional materials online by simply typing "Orientalism" as a search term in Google. A working definition of
colonialism, adapted from Horvath
Colonialism involves...
Some rough diagrams to exemplify diverse ways of establishing boundaries (based on values, perceived behaviour, or interpretations of human history):
Extract from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, on the "Manichean divide"--what happens to the notion of humanity in the context of colonial boundary-making? “The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesman of the settler and his rule of oppression. …the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native. “The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity….The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt….The settlers’ town is a town of white people, of foreigners. “The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, people by men of evil repute….It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs. The look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession—all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is the envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, ‘They want to take our place’. It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place. “This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. “The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with the beauty of morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces”. Society Not an Isolate: “the notion which abstracts a particular culture from its setting and then treats it as a quasi organism—as a singular, separate, highly bounded, self-maintaining and self-correcting system….The expansion of Atlantic civilization long ago undermined the singularity and separateness of the world’s population, as it undermined our own singularity” (Wolf 1974:xi) Nodes in a Network: “The tribes and peasants of the world are not so many independent cases, but nodes in a network of relations; and this network includes ourselves” (Wolf 1974:xi-xii) Cultural Relativism: “Cultural relativism, inferred from the enormous variety of existing cultures, remains a prerequisite of objective analysis: one must first understand a culture in its own terms, not in terms of theoretical or practical schemes imposed on it from the outside. But the moral corollary of cultural relativism—moral relativism—has been quietly discarded, except as a form of intellectual indulgence among those who claim the privileges of non-involvement” (Wolf 1974:21-22) De-Emphasis of Cultural Relativity since WWII: “the de-emphasis of cultural relativity….with the decline of the romantic quest for pristine alternatives to our way of life we have abandoned also the superevaluation of primitivism that we have treasured hitherto” (Wolf 1974:23) Engineered by the Expectations of Others: “The organizing element in tradition is no longer within the individual; it is outside him, in society. The new man of the new anthropology is an ‘organization man’ bending to the exigencies of his life situation. He is flexible in adapting to others and the requirements of others; indeed—in Wallace’s view—he needs these others to complete him, since he carries within his own mind only a small part of the total cognitions necessary to sustain the social network. The locus for cultural maintenance has been shifted from the individual to the social system. The relay runner, handing his torch on to future generations, has become a cog in a depersonalized social machine” (Wolf 1974:27) Engineer’s Image of Man in Anthropology: “Increasingly, we find ourselves using not the language of subjective involvement with the primitive, but the language of the engineer. The image of man projected by current anthropology is indeed an engineer’s image” (Wolf 1974:32)
PLEASE NOTE: THIS WEBSITE CAN ONLY BE
VIEWED PROPERLY WHEN USING INTERNET EXPLORER 5+. In most other cases,
the site design may appear to be fractured. Page last updated: Sunday, 16 November, 2003. |
