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to the dispositions of thought and action learnt by indi- is created and regulated by formal institutions, often as viduals. This occurs through processes of condition of access to otherwise exclusive positions of or socialization that an individual goes through as they privilege. Examples include degrees, awards, titles, or grow up within a social context. Some of the charac- qualifications, which may afford entry into professional- teristics of transmitting embodied capital are that its ized practices such as teaching, architecture, law, and learning cannot be delegated (I cannot outsource, for medicine; access to clubs and associations; or simply instance, the process of learning dinner table etiquette provide honorary symbols of one’s social position. in the same way that I can for the making of my clothes), Institutionalized acts as a social marker its learning is time intensive and cannot be transmit- in the same way as other form of objective capital; ted instantaneously like a gift or commodity, and can however, it has added effect of conferring lasting mark- involve the same deliberation over opportunity costs ers of difference beyond one embodied state. A person that comes with any kind of investment. This last point can still hold a Bachelors qualification, for instance, relates not only to choices made between different even if the knowledge and skills used to acquire it have cultural activities (watching television vs attending an art long been forgotten. gallery), but also the length of time and economic capital that an individual or family can devote to “accumulating” References and further reading cultural capital. As Bourdieu puts it, embodied cultural capital represents “external wealth converted into an Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In J. Richardson integral part of the person.” (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Objective cultural capital refers to material objects of Education. New York: Greenwood, 1986, such as books, artworks, musical instruments, etc., the pp. 241–58. consumption of which presupposes an already existing Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction level of cultural capital. The possession of a book, for in Education, and . Trans. Richard Nice. instance, presupposes an ability to read, just as display- London: Sage Publications, 1977. ing an artwork presupposes some degree of artistic Matt Kiem appreciation. Finer social distinctions are possible in each case. A celebrity magazine, for instance, is appre- See also Aesthetics; Class. ciated by its readers on terms that are different to that of a novel or a travel guide. What is perhaps even more significant, however, is that different modes of cultural consumption are relationally constituted and not neces- /Cultural sarily fixed or inherent to the objects themselves. Thus Difference the same celebrity magazine may be read more or less ironically depending upon how conscious the reader is Cultural relativism, like cultural absolutism or cultural of it being “trashy,” and at the same time an artwork pluralism, refers to a theoretical system for classifying may be derided for being out of touch with the tastes of and understanding human variation. The concept of a particular social group. In each case the social position cultural relativism emerged as a set of descriptive and of the consumer, meaning where their relative degree of epistemological precepts within American cultural or economic capital places them within the social in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, field (rich philistine, poor bohemian, conservative work- more broadly, in the course of the decline of polygenetic ing class, etc.), becomes a key factor in how an object and biological-racial explanations for human variation. is encountered, interpreted, and used. In this sense, More recently, it has become central to debates over depending on the social context, the disposition of the legal and political norms, particularly around multicultur- group or person, and their relative social position, the alism, the politics of race and racism, and international same object may be appropriated as a marker of social law. As a taxonomic system, cultural rela- privilege and domination, empowerment and resistance, tivism involves a culturalist iteration of some key tenets or an object of embarrassment and social domination of earlier, biological accounts of race, such as essen- (what Bourdieu would call symbolic violence). tialism, fixity, comparability, and ranking. Because of As Bourdieu describes it, institutional capital can be this, while cultural relativism is often associated with thought of as a form of objectified cultural capital that valuing cultural differences, it does not necessarily draw

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antithetical prescriptive or organizational inferences is retained in contemporary biology (as in “tissue from those of cultural absolutism or genetic-racial theo- culture”), and in its figurative association with ries of human difference. or improvement, as in “cultured.” There are immense and ongoing debates in a range of scholarly fields about what culture means (Bottomore, 1962; Harris, Cultural difference 1968; Nelson and Grossberg, 1988; Taylor, 1989; To understand how cultural relativism emerged and Keesing, 1990; Donald and Rattansi, 1992; Young, works as a system of classification, it is important to 1995; Malik, 1996; Fowler, 1997; Castro-Gomez and understand what is distinctive about the basic unit into Johnson, 2000; Muller, 2005). Across the twentieth which it groups and through which it comprehends century, culture has been used to refer to anything from human variation. It often pertains to debates regarding the extrasomatic, environmental influences, beliefs, and the ascription and arrangement of particular and univer- customs, through to art, literature, emotions, or ideas. sal cultural traits within a larger classification system. The argument that culture is determinative is neces- Yet the use of “culture” as a way of grouping and sary but not sufficient to establish an argument for either then comparing, ranking, or relating human variations cultural relativism or cultural absolutism. To be able to both is historically recent and has particular implica- posit a relative (absolute, or other kind of) ordering tions. Among other things, it posits that —as between singular and discrete cultures it is necessary to with races—can be attributed with unique, preexist- assume the factual existence of indivisible, transmissi- ing properties, and that the question to be answered ble, or heritable, nonbiological human variations. In this (through relativism, absolutism, pluralism, etc.) is that sense, cultural relativism is, as with cultural absolutism, of the organizational or evaluative rules of a subsequent premised on the anthropological concept of as encounter with external differences. a key causal mechanism of cultural transmission, in The word “culture” is derived from the Latin contrast to that of genetic theories of racial inheritance. “cultura,” meaning “cultivation.” This agricultural sense For the American cultural Margaret

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Mead (1901–78), culture is “the systematic body of methods that would serve as the template for subse- learned behavior which is transmitted from parents to quent debates about cultural relativism in the field of children” (Benedict, 1934, p. vii). The European anthro- international and national law. pologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) similarly Prior to and beyond Benedict’s contribution to defined culture as “the organisation of human beings the formalization of a theory of culture, it was the into permanent groups,” involving “inherited artifacts, confluence of European Enlightenment ideas about goods, technical process, ideas, habits and values” universal human progress, the decline of polygenetic (1944, pp. 621–46). As with cultural absolutism and and biological explanations of human variation across , theories of cultural relativism are the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the search predicated on the historical emergence of a distinctively for alternative accounts for the persistence of inequality cultural understanding of the following: theories of the that “culture” began to assume a central explanatory causal mechanisms and origins of human variation; importance (Young, 1995; Lentin, 2005). It is these explanations of the persistence of those variations as historical shifts that gave rise to debates around the a set of unique habits or customs over time (as herita- normative or prescriptive dimensions of cultural rela- ble or transmissible); and operating principles or rules tivism (and cultural absolutism), specifically around the regarding the trans- or intracultural ranking and ordering formulation of legal principles or rules regarding the of anthropic diversity. trans- or intracultural ranking, ordering, and explanation The first two of these founding assumptions of of human differences. cultural relativism, often referred to as descriptive or It should be noted that not all studies of culture or epistemological cultural relativism, came to be seen as uses of that term define it in these ways. Cultures are facts during the period of the European Enlightenment, not always understood in anthropic or human-centric the French and American , the enormous terms, as heritable, homogeneous, and scaled-up expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, mass versions of singular personalities. A number of stud- migrations, industrialization, the rise of the British ies of culture are either critical of or do not follow the empire, and the growth of settler colonies. It is in these key elements of this approach (Nelson and Grossberg, tumultuous times that the use of the term “a culture,” 1988; Mayer, 2000; Barber and Clark, 2002; Jones, in the sense described above, first appears in eight- 2003; Thacker, 2005; Berlant, 2008). It is because eenth-century Europe (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952, Benedict’s definition of culture facilitates comparability, p. 145). reproduction, and ranking that the framework of cultural By the early twentieth century, ’s relativism (or absolutism) can serve as a means to Patterns of Culture had established the canonical— diagram political representation that remains modeled and arguably the current, popular—definition of on theories of racial reproduction. Roderick Ferguson culture as a coherent system of psychosocial beliefs, has argued, “by rejecting biology as the domain of values, and practices. This definition is a method- difference in favor of culture… rather than neutralizing ological and taxonomic one, in that it renders the racism” a “liberal social science” in the object of ethnographic research amenable to the “inscribed the racial difference of African American methods of comparison and ranking. It also implies culture as one that rotated around the centrality of homogeneity. Culture, according to Benedict, takes heteronormativity” (2004, p. 88). the typological and isometric form of an individual “personality-writ-large.” Each individual is a fractal or scalar instance of a larger-scale culture that, in turn, is Early cultural relativism both figuratively personified and understood as having The term “cultural relativism” was coined by the African- a personality. Moreover, arguing from comparisons of American philosopher Alain Leroy Locke (1885–1954), “primitive” cases (the Zuni in the southwestern United in a critical review of the States, the Dobuans in Melanesia, and the Kwakiutl ’s book Culture and (1929). in western Canada), which she suggested existed at Students of the German-American anthropologist lower orders of complexity, Benedict contended that it (1858–1942), such as Lowie and Ruth was possible to infer from such cases what is “specific Benedict, expanded on Boas’ argument that “civi- to local cultural types and those that are general to lization is not something absolute, but … relative, … mankind” (1934, p. 20). It is these anthropological our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our

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civilization goes” (Powell and Boas, 1887, p. 156). argues, “Herder’s relativism was itself a sign of the Unlike pre-eighteenth-century accounts of human Romantic questioning of the dominant Enlightenment variation, Boas’ argument highlights the growing ethos of civilization, [universal] progress, perfectibil- importance of a question about variation over time. It ity—and equality” (Young, 1995, p. 40). In this sense, is a question that would be increasingly posed in linear Boas in no way could be said to have supported slav- or teleological terms as a question about civilization, ery; but with its abolition and the decline of polygenistic progress, or, alternately, as one of decline and degen- accounts of human origins, the systems of segregation eration (Young, 1995). In this respect, the definition of that emerged in the wake of the American Civil War, culture recalls its association with the temporal and officially at least, were increasingly justified through progressive understandings of “cultured.” Thus, while arguments of cultural relativism. The “Jim Crow” laws A. L. Locke took issue with Lowe’s “extreme cultural enacted in the American South after the Civil War, relativism,” both nevertheless agreed on the premise which remained in force until 1967, mandated the of unique cultures situated within a framework of single segregation of public spaces and utilities on the basis origins and an aspirational tendency toward universality of the doctrine of “separate but equal” (Massey and (Helbling, 1979). Denton, 1993). During Boas’ time, the prevailing view of human origins and variation in was one of racial polygenism (Bernasconi, 2002), whereby Cultural relativism in the twentieth human variations were explained in terms of separately created species constituting discrete lineages, immuta- century ble, and positioned within an ontological hierarchy, From the perspective of a formal, legal emphasis on often referred to as the “Chain of Being.” The “Chain of cultural differences, cultural relativism could be seen as Being” (or scala naturae) was a neo-Platonist taxonomy a way of representing through the state, developed by Catholic theologians in Classical Antiquity as with . On the other hand, cultural (Lovejoy, 1936). The neo-Platonism of the physical relativism could be proffered as an argument for “sepa- anthropologist Josiah Clark Nott (1804–73) was largely rate development,” as with Apartheid in South Africa, turned toward the legitimation of slavery in pre-Civil or “Jim Crow” laws in the southern United States; or War southern American states: “the negro achieves his it could be invoked as the premise of cultural national- greatest perfection, physical and moral, and also great- ism (or ethno-nationalism). This is not to suggest these est longevity, in a state of slavery” (Dewbury, 2007, p. are the same; rather that versions of cultural relativism 124). Conversely, slavery abolitionists such as Frederick can be invoked to argue for any of these as state-le- Douglass argued from a Biblical theory of monogenesis gal responses to preexisting cultural differences. While (single creation), countering polygenetic argument for cultural relativism, then, can often imply the suspension slavery by insisting that “what are technically called the of judgments about cultural differences, varieties negro race, are part of the human family, … descended of cultural relativism can have both ambivalent and, at from a common ancestry,” and, furthermore, that the times, vastly disparate consequences when given legal progressive annihilation of “time and space, in the or normative form. intercourse of nations” would give rise to a “common The combination of anthropological methods and humanity” (1854, pp. 10–11). normative legal arrangements reached its height in the Boas’ cultural relativism largely accords with the wake of Second World War, and in attempts to counter progressive argument put forward by Douglass and and replace biological theories of race, particularly since given credence by the rise of the evolutionary theories these were regarded as conducive to the rise of German of (1809–82). Significantly, Boas reread National Socialism and the subsequent Holocaust these through the prism of the cultural nationalist theo- (Lentin, 2005). While some have argued that National ries of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Socialism adhered to nonbiological, neo-Platonist and theologian . According understandings of race (Forti, 2006), as Martin Barker to Herder, nations did, and should, represent the has illustrated, within the United Nations (and UNESCO) authentic and ultimately incommensurable cultural a Boasian view of racism as founded on biological heritages. These differences could be integrated under theories of race prevailed and shaped the uptake of a “common humanity,” up to a point. As Robert Young cultural relativism (1982). For Barker and others (Barker,

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1982; Taguieff, 1988; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; resurgence of anticultural relativist campaigns that seek Gilroy, 1991, 1993), contemporary racism emphasizes to reinstate a form of cultural absolutism (1984). intractable cultural differences, or presents cultural In summary, “cultural relativism” is a placeholder differences as explanations of social and economic for circumstantial or localized debates about power, inequality (Leacock, 1971; Lewis, 1981), diverging from racism, and proposed or current laws and political multiculturalism less in the way of its premises than in arrangements sifted into the language of cultural differ- the status it accords to progressive integration under ence and suppositions about cultural universality and more or less abstract legal-political rules of cultural inter- transcendence. For instance, Michael Brown argues action or uniformity or the explanatory status it accords that cultural relativism overstates “the internal coher- to heritable cultures. In the latter sense, Dinesh D’Souza ence of individual cultures” while underestimating “the has argued that Boasian relativism has been complicit possibility of transcending these differences” (2008, in the perpetuation of racial injustice in the United p. 371). While the project of “transcendence” might States (1995). According to Alana Lentin, “culturalist be queried, his remarks illustrate the ways in which approaches to explaining and proposing solutions to “culture” has become a prevailing framework through racism are inadequate because they avoid the political which political and legal questions are posed and relationship of ‘reciprocal determination’ between ‘race’ contested in a simultaneously temporal and culturalist and state” (2005, p. 392). Moreover, as Michael Brown register. In this form, they are reliant on a classification notes, extrapolating legal forms of representation from systems hinged around a slippage from “race” to terms theories of cultural difference inclines toward “[in]sensi- such as “culture” or “ethnicity,” with many of the same tivity to the rights of minorities within larger social units” premises, namely: fixed assumptions about what are (2008, p. 366), and inasmuch as “cultures” are seen as considered to be universal or particular (and there- homogeneous entities. fore internally homogeneous, bounded, and heritable) cultural traits.

Cultural relativism in contemporary References and further reading debates Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston, MA and New More recently, it is in the context of debates over inter- York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934. national (human rights) law, the “War on Terror,” and Brown, Michael F. “Cultural Relativism 2.0,” Current humanitarian military interventions that cultural rela- Anthropology, 49.3 (2008): 363–383. tivism (and the role of anthropology) has once again Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of become a matter of significant debate (Hastrup et al., Identity and Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 2000; Brown, 2008). In the case of the “War on Terror,” Press, 2006. William Bennett has argued that cultural relativism Dewbury, Adam. “The American School and Scientific “implies that we have no basis for judging other peoples Racism in Early American Anthropology,” Histories of and cultures, and certainly no basis for declaring some Anthropology Annual, 3.1 (2007): 121–147. better than others, let alone ‘good’ or ‘evil’” (2002, p. Douglass, Frederick, Western Reserve College (1826–1882), 46). By contrast, Wendy Brown has argued against the and African American Pamphlet (Library of Congress). The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically precept of “liberal tolerance” as an instance of “Western Considered: An Address before the Literary of superiority” that seeks to “legitimate Western cultural Western Reserve College, at Commencement, July 12, and political ” (2006, p. 7). 1854. Rochester, NY: Press of Lee, Mann & Co, 1854. Cultural relativism has been criticized for legitimat- Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer ing human rights abuses and defended as a counter to of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota those abuses (Hastrup et al., 2000; Cowan, Dembour, Press, 2004. and Wilson, 2001). Lila Abu-Lughod has suggested, Lentin, Alana. “Replacing ‘Race,’ Historicizing ‘Culture’ in in the case of assumptions about the status of Multiculturalism,” Patterns of Prejudice, 39.4 (2005): Muslim women, for people to be “respectful of other 379–396. paths toward social change” (2002, p. 788). Similarly, Malinowski, Bronislaw. A Scientific Theory of Culture. for , there are far fewer adherents of Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, cultural relativism than there has occurred, in politics, a 1944.

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Powell, J. W. and Franz Boas. “Museums of Ethnology sense of cities as centers of culture. The spatial effect— and Their Classification,”Science , 9.229 (1887): the demarcation of occupied land, the physical and 612–614. symbolic construction of boundaries, and the estab- Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, lishment of land-based property systems—set early and Race. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. formations of culture in antagonistic relation to nomadic peoples, a rift previously encoded in both classical and Angela Mitropoulos biblical thought (the citizen of the Greek polis versus the external barbarian, and the slaying of the sheep herder Abel by his crop farming brother, Cain). Culture, Theories of Culture as “improvement” and As Raymond Williams (1983) states in Keywords, the complexity of “culture” derives from its intricate histor- “civilization” ical development across multiple European languages The modernist notion of teleological improvement over as well as how it is used in different and often incom- time added a temporal dimension to culture’s spatial- patible ways by distinct systems of thought. As Robert ity. “Culture” became synonymous with Eurocentrically Young (1995) reveals, any reference to either “culture,” defined conceptions of “civilization” that were used as “a culture,” or “our culture” has always presupposed justification for imperialist domination. This began in the or posited an “other” whether that be the uncultured, sixteenth century when the concept of cultivating land the lesser-cultured, or the other-cultured. Young insists shifted into the notion of human development or the that “culture” was “invented for difference,” arguing “cultivation of the mind.” In the eighteenth century this that the first anthropological use of the word in English was further abstracted into the process of becoming was in the context of the American Civil War in which “cultivated” or “cultured” in the sense being “refined” Anthony Trollope recorded a cultural difference between or “educated.” Culture as civilization was unilinear and North and South. This divisive logic of culture has been teleological in the sense that it posited a singular and significant to the experience of , particularly ideal end-point upon which all humans were said to be in terms of the material and ideological contradictions converging. European identity was shaped by histori- that unfolded in the interplay of Enlightenment thinking, cal narratives of developmental stages, intellectual capitalism, social elitism, and . and economic, that mirrored and interweaved ideas of natural , organic growth, childhood devel- opment, and racial hierarchy. This, for example, was The etymology of “culture” the intellectual scaffold that Adolf Loos (1908) would Complications with the term “culture” are reflected in use to construct his polemic against ornamentation: its Latin derivation. Cultura and colere had a range “The human embryo in the womb passes through all of meanings, including to inhabit, cultivate, attend, the evolutionary stages of the animal kingdom. When protect, and honor with worship. These meanings gave man is born, his sensory impressions are like those of a rise to additional concepts that often retain uncanny newborn puppy. His childhood takes him through all the and revealing connections. The “honor with worship” metamorphoses of human history. At 2 he sees with the theme was refined to cultus, from where both “cult” and eyes of the Papuan, at 4 with Teuton, at 6 with those of the French couture are derived, and the “inhabit” mean- Socrates, at 8 with those of Voltaire.” ing developed into colonus (farmer), from where the Loos’ reference to Voltaire reflects the ambivalent term “colony” is derived. This is significant to the history influence of Enlightenment thinkers. While acknowledg- of colonialism, particularly as this relates to and incor- ing the damaging consequences of their Eurocentricism, porates the political function of the city. Early English Young still notes the presence of radically egalitar- uses of “culture” related predominantly to agricultural ian ideas, including the notion that every individual, practices of the tending to or cultivation of plants and regardless of ethnicity, was both capable and entitled animals. The sedentary economic practices of farming, to “improve” themselves through education. What it the surpluses they produced, and the hierarchies that meant to “improve” oneself, however, was ethnocentri- appropriated them, were a condition for the develop- cally determined and imposed. The “civilizing mission” ment of urban social forms. This is retained today in a thereby became a foil for imperial expansion. Methods

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