Over the last months, I have been devouring audiobooks, given their easy accessibility through my formerly-local public library. Since I am still working on the 'culture' section of my research, these books mostly deal with what I think of culture and notions of its contours – or, rather, the lack of such contours. In particular, I have been reading/listening to books about the histories of Islam and Muslims, largely focused on the Middle East.
A departure from that is the book that I am currently reading: Gods of the Upper Air (Charles King, 2019). It dovetails perfectly with the idea of culture's contested contours. Essentially, the point that I raised in the previous post – Indiscrete Culture – can be illustrated by the work of Franz Boas, one of the central figures of early cultural anthropology. It is, however, illustrated by doing to his discipline's subject what he did to physical anthropology and eugenics in his day.
Below the fold I take ideas from my current reading – about Boas, from Ruth Benedict (whose Patterns of Culture I read last November), and drawing on my readings about the history of Islam – to continue building the case against cultures on behalf of culture. In short, I argue that culture is too multi-faceted, and those facets are too poorly aligned with one another, to make any typological sense. It should therefore not be used as a concept that can be divided into particular groups. Doing so is only a latter-day reification of physical anthropology's race theories. That's not to say that making distinctions cannot be useful, but it should be done carefully.
Do unto Cultural as Boas did unto Physical
In his day, Boas fought against the idea that races were distinct breeds of humans. The physical anthropologists of the late 18th century and 19th century sought to define a racial typology. In this typology, humans could be categorized by race – skin colors, bone structures, and intellectual ability. This culminated in the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. By demonstrating the malleability of the human physical form due to environmental and nutritional factors, Boas reduced the degree to which grouped borders – degrees of skin color, the length of skulls, or IQ – could be considered permanently aligned with one another. If all the different aspects of a population's physique (and brain power) varied differently from one aspect to the next, then there were no identifiable 'stocks' of humans.
Boas undermined the very idea of races as categorizable physical entities. Instead, he shepherded the idea that culture makes the person. Unfortunately, in our day, culture serves much the same purpose that race did a century ago. It is too often assumed that 'cultures' also form types of humans, even if cultures are learned rather than genetically inherited. Just like bone structures, skin colors, and brain powers, however, different cultural phenomena are not necessarily learned together as separate package deals. One does not get Islam, authoritarianism and misogyny as a special combo at the cultural drive-thru, just like "Western," democratic, and feminist is not necessarily a thing. These are all traits that are available separately, and therefore defy attempts at correlative typology.
That is not to say that correlations do not exist, just that correlation is not causation. The correlation is more than likely due to the accident of co-location, rather than one trait making another trait more likely to be expressed. A number of studies argue that many gender norms in Muslim societies of the Middle East were learned from the surrounding empires (e.g. Byzantine and Sasanian/Persian empires) by the people living in the caliphates after the period of Mohammed and his immediate successors. The teachings of Mohammad and those around him represented a relative improvement for women as compared to the surrounding and contemporary gender norms of the Middle East and Mediterranean region (see Keddie 1990 for a classic discussion on the matter).
Integration of Culture
Different cultural traits – such as language, faith, cuisine, fashion, other arts (e.g. music, architecture, literature, etc.) and ideology – can easily vary independently. On occasion, they do not. In Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict (1934) described the rare case of the Zuni of New Mexico. She argued that Zuni culture was relatively integrated. In other words, its institutions, together, seemed to serve similar goals. The Zuni were compared to the Kwaikiutl of the Pacific Northwest based on Boas's research, and the Dobu of New Guinea, based on that of Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune and, of course, to Western civilization. These other 'cultures' (including Western civilization) she interpreted as much less integrated. Hoyt (1961) describes this 'integration' as implying "some congruity of the parts of a culture" (p.407), and takes Benedict to task for arguing that this integration means that a society's institutions are guided by a dominating idea (p.409). Essentially, Hoyt argues that Benedict is saying that an integrated society is a totalitarian one – led by an ideology.
The lesson that should be taken from this is that cases like Benedict's Zuni or the Kim dynasty's North Korea, 'integrated' or totalitarian 'cultures' are few and far between. The Kwaikiutl, the Dobu, Western Civilization, and the post-Mohammed caliphates, were not culturally-integrated societies. While anthropologists may look for 'cultures' (plural) in faraway corners of the earth, most of the world cannot be so divided. Most of the world's people have 'much culture', not 'many cultures'. Allowing for the exceptions, the world is awash in culture; it is not divided into cultures.
The Gods of the Pigeon-holes
It is analytically dangerous to attempt typology. Any attempt at typology requires an arbitrary selection of cultural traits. Those may be useful, but only depending on the use to which they are put. Too frequently, they are put to the same uses as the racial sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries were: pigeon-holing people into this or that category. Usually this/our category is good, beautiful, righteous, and that/their category is evil, ugly, and depraved, or poor, benighted, and in need of 'our' tutelage. That is not anthropology, it is the stuff of sociology.
In Gods of the Upper Air, Charles King (the author) also draws on another one of Boas's disciples: Zora Neale Hurston. She considered herself the child that questions the gods of the pigeon-holes (King 2019, p. 195, but see also here: God and Other Big Stuff). It's exactly that, which global thinkers - or people living with 'multiculturalism' - need to understand. The gods of the pigeon-holes are just paper gods. While the pigeon-holes are powerful, they are not 'culture'.
Works Cited
Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hoyt, E.E. (1961). Integration of culture: A review of concepts. Current Anthropology, 2(5), 407-426.
Keddie, N.R. (1990). The past and present of women in the Muslim world. Journal of World History, 1(1), 77-108.
King, C. (2019). Gods of the upper air: How a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century. New York: Doubleday.
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