The Invention of Culture

Roy Wagner The Invention of Culture Revised and Expanded Edition The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1975, 1981 by Roy Wagner All rights reserved. Published 1975 Revised and expanded edition 1981 Printed in the United States of America 93 92 7 6 5 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wagner, Roy. The invention of culture. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Culture. 2. Anthropology. 2. Symbolism. I. Title. GN357.W33 1981 306 80-25482 ISBN 0-226-86934-2 (pbk.) 2 Contents Preface 5 Introduction 6 Chapter 1 The Assumption of Culture 12 The idea of culture, 12 Making culture visible, 14 The invention of culture, 17 Chapter 2 Culture as Creativity 22 Fieldwork is work in the field, 22 The ambiguity of "culture," 24 The wax museum, 28 "Road belong culture," 30 Chapter 3 The Power of Invention 34 Invention is culture, 34 Control, 37 The necessity of invention, 43 The magic of advertising, 49 Chapter 4 The Invention of Self 56 An important message for you about the makers of time, 56 Learning personality, 60 On "doing your own thing": The world of immanent humanity, 65 Learning humanity, 70 Chapter 5 The Invention of Society 76 Cultural "change": Social convention as inventive flow, 76 The invention of language, 77 The invention of society, 83 The rise of civilizations, 90 Chapter 6 The Invention of Anthropology 95 The allegory of man, 95 3 Controlling culture, 99 Controlling nature, 102 The end of synthetic anthropology, 106 Index 112 4 Preface The idea that man invents his own realities is not a new one; it is found in such diverse philosophies as the Muta'zilla of Islam and the teachings of Buddhism, as well as in many much less formal systems of thought. Perhaps it has always been known to man. Nevertheless, the prospect of introducing this idea to an anthropology and a culture that wants very much to control its own realities (as all cultures do) is a difficult one. An undertaking such as this one therefore requires far more encouragement than the more staid projects of ethnography, and I can safely say that without the strong and interested encouragement of David M. Schneider this book would not have been written. Its theoretical inspiration, moreover, owes much to his work, much that is too germinal to be easily acknowledged, as well as his very explicit insights into modern American culture, which are basic to what has become a consuming interest of my discourse. Friends at Northwestern University and the University of Western Ontario have added the considerable support of their ideas and interest. In particular, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to the members of my E70 seminar in the spring of 1972, Helen Beale, Barbara Jones, Marcene Marcoux, and Robert Welsch, and to John Schwartzman, Alan Darrah, and John Farella for the benefit of their counsel and conversation. John Gehman, Stephen Tobias, Lee Guemple, and Sandie Shamis provided a lively counterpoint of ideation during a strategically formative stage in the writing. A part of Chapter 2 was read in April 1972, at a Monday afternoon seminar of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and received the benefit of the inspired criticism and commentary that are so much a part of those occasions. A version of Chapter 3 was read at Northern Illinois University in April 1973, and I would like to thank particularly M. Jamil Hanifi and Cecil H. Brown for their helpful comments and insights expressed there. Terse but invaluable commentary and criticism was proferred by my colleague Johannes Fabian while casting (unsuccessfully) for fish at Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, in June 1972. My wife, Sue, displayed considerable forbearance during the writing of the book, and my daughter, Erika, proved a most valuable instructor for her daddy in her involvement with that most vital of all inventions of culture, the first. I am grateful, too, to Dick Cosme and Edward H. Stanford of Prentice-Hall for their patience and interest. Like many other aspects of modern American interpretive culture, anthropology has developed the habit of preempting the means and idioms through which protest and contradiction are expressed and making them a part of its synthetic and culturally supportive message. Exoticism and cultural relativity are the bait, and the assumptions and ideologies of a Culture of collective enterprise are the hook that is swallowed with the bait. Anthropology is theorized and taught as an effort to rationalize contradiction, paradox, and dialectic, rather than to trace out and realize their implications; students and professionals alike learn to repress and ignore these implications, to "not see" them, and to imagine the most dire consequences as a putative result of not doing so. They repress the dialectic so that they may be it. I have written this book, with its explicit tracing out of the implications of relativity, as a determined effort to counteract this tendency in all of us. 5 Introduction There are sciences whose "paradigms," blocks of theoretical precept and precedent that define the orthodoxy of what Thomas Kuhn calls "normal science," maintain a frozen immobility until their underpinnings are melted by the heat and pressure of accumulated evidence, and a plate-tectonic revolution results. Anthropology is not one of these. As a discipline, anthropology has its history of theoretical development, of the ascendancy and antagonism of certain orientations, a history that, indeed, manifests a certain logic or order (which is discussed in Chapter 6). For all the unanimity it commands, however, this flux of ideation might as well be described as a pure dialectic, a play of exposition (and denial) by disparate voices, or an eclectic accretion of all and sundry into the textbooks. What is remarkable about this is not so much the persistence of theoretical fossils (a persistence that is the stock-in-trade of academic tradition) but the failure of anthropology to institutionalize this persistence, or indeed, to institutionalize a consensus at all. If The Invention of Culture shows a tendency to assert its opinions, rather than arbitrate them, then this reflects, at least in part, the condition of a discipline in which a writer is obliged to distill his own tradition and his own consensus. Beyond this, the tendency relates to some of the assumptions in the first three chapters and to the raison d'etre of the book. A major concern of my argument is to analyze human motivation at a radical level — one that cuts deeper than the very fashionable clichés about the "interests" of corporations, political players, classes, "calculating man," and so forth. This does not mean that I am blissfully and naively unaware that such interests exist, or unconscious of the practical and ideological force of "interest" in the modern world. It means that I would like to consider such interests as a subset, or surface phenomenon, of more elemental questions. It would be, therefore rather naive to expect a study of the cultural constitution of phenomena to argue for "determination" of the process, or of significant parts of it, by some particular, privileged phenomenal context — especially when it argues that such contexts take their significances largely from one another. This, then, is the analytical standpoint of a book that elects to view human phenomena from an "outside" — understanding that an outside perspective is as readily created as our most reliable "inside" ones. The discussion of cultural relativity is a case in point. Something of a red herring for those who want to argue for the pervasiveness of socioeconomic pressure, or against the possibility of a truly antiseptic scientific objectivity, it has been introduced here in what appears to be a controversially idealistic manner. But consider what is made of this "idealism" in the ensuing discussion, where "culture" itself is presented as a kind of illusion, a foil (and a kind of false objective) to aid the anthropologist in arranging his experiences. It is, of course, possible that the question of whether a false culture is truly or falsely relative has some interest for the truly fastidious, but by and large the ordinary premises for a vigorous, satisfying debate about "cultural relativity" have been obviated. The tendency to sidestep, to obviate, to "not deal with" many or most of the chestnuts of theoretical hassling in anthropology, maddening as it may be to those who have their terrain scouted and their land mines set, is an artifact of the position I have taken. It is not, aside from this, part of a willful policy to rebuff anthropology or anthropologists, or to beg spurious immunity for a privileged position. In choosing a new and different terrain, I have merely exchanged one set of problems and paradoxes for another, and the new set is every bit as formidable as the old. A thorough examination of these problems would be helpful, as would a marshalling of evidence for and against my position. But arguments and evidence belong 6 to a different level of investigation (and, perhaps, of "science") than the one undertaken here. This book was not written to prove, by evidence, argument, or example, any set of precepts or generalizations about human thought and action. It presents, simply, a different viewpoint for anthropologists, adumbrating the implications of this viewpoint for a number of areas of concern. If some or many of these implications fail to accord with some area of "observed fact," this is certainly because the model was deduced and extended outward, not built up by induction. Although it goes without saying that some deal of circumspection is crucial in model making of this sort, that the "rapport" is in the model, not the details, the procedure is ultimately that of Isaac Newton's famous dictum: "hypothesis non fingo." "I frame no hypotheses," the founder (and latterly, it seems, the "inventor") of exact science is reported to have said, indicating that he wrote his equations and deduced the world from them.

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