[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Fri Aug 7 16:28:23 PDT 2009


c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:


> For example, incest taboos are universal in human society. Also, all
> societies have marriage rules, categories of marriable and unmarriable
> people. In all societies, the people are conscious of these rules and
> that they guide their "behavior".
>
> Charles

Didn't we just go through this about six months ago? According to effectively all coherent, materialist anthropological research... well, Geertz says it nicely in his critique of stratigraphic or Maslowian searches for universals (in a chapter where he expressly takes on the idea of the universality of "incest" and "marriage"):

"Whether it can or not depends on whether the dualism between empirically universal aspects of culture rooted in subcultural realities and empirically variable aspects not so rooted can be established and sustained. And this, in turn, demands (1) that the universals proposed be substantial ones and not empty categories; (2) that they be specifically grounded in particular biological, psychological, or sociological processes, not just vaguely associated with “underlying realities”; and (3) that they can convincingly be defended as core elements in a definition of humanity in comparison with which the much more numerous cultural particularities are of clearly secondary importance. On all three of these counts it seems to me that the *consensus gentium* approach fails; rather than moving toward the essentials of the human situation it moves away from them."

............

"My point, which should be clear and I hope will become even clearer in a moment, is not that there are no generalizations that can be made about man as man, save that he is a most various animal, or that the study of culture has nothing to contribute toward the uncovering of such generalizations. My point is that such generalizations are not to be discovered through a … search for cultural universals, a kind of public-opinion polling of the world’s peoples in search of a *consensus gentium* that does not in fact exist, and, further, that the attempt to do so leads to precisely the sort of relativism the whole approach was expressly designed to avoid. … What, after all, does it avail us to say, with Herskovits, that “morality is a universal, and so is enjoyment of beauty, and some standard for truth,” if we are forced in the very next sentence, as he is, to add that “the many forms these concepts take are but products of the particular historical experience of the societies that manifest them”?7 "



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