Geertz's whole point is that, and I think the point for all folks with materialist conceptions of history, is that the categories "kinship", "marriage", "incest","shelter", "food", "clothing" or "morals" are metacategories which are in point of historical and anthropological fact so widely variable on the ground as to have no substantive meaning as empirically substantial, grounded and defendable cultural universals.
^^^^^ CB: The point is rather subtle, but perhaps you will see that I have understood Geertz's point for a long time if I tell you that my senior thesis as an anthropology major in 1972 was an effort to demonstrate that "marriage" in certain "primitive" societies is not the same thing as "marriage" in "modern" society. That's the exact point Geertz and you are making here.
Fully understanding that point, I go on to say an aspect of _all_human societies in contrast with the societies of other species is that there are rules regulating who mates or has sexual intercourse with each other. That's it very simply. It is universal in human societies and universally absent in all non-human societies that mating and other relationships between members of society are regulated by abstract principles, as Miles put it. If Geertz were alive he would agree with that. Sahlins agrees with that. Name your famous anthropologist and they will agree with it : Margaret Mead, Franz Boas, Claude Levi-Strauss. Conrad Kottak probably has a statement like it in his anthropological text book.
> "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.... 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 "
>
> ^^^^^^^^
> CB: All humans have language. That's a universal. I think Geertz
> seems to be playing the "interesting" universal game. The thing sought
> has to not only be universal, but interesting to the professor. He
> seems to admit that morality is a human universal, or enjoyment of
> beauty or some standard of truth, but these facts don't "avail" us
> (smile).
> Well, they avail us in the discussion on this thread, because all
> three examples are the application of abstract principles, including
> abstract moral principles to behavior. In fact, come to think of it,
> here Geertz mildly , impliedly contradicts Miles claim that
> "morality" or application of abstract moral principles to behavior is
> not universal in human society. Geertz doesn't say that Herskowitz is
> wrong. Geertz just says that Herskowitz doesn't avail us.
What Geertz is, and I am, saying is that claiming that "language" or "morals" are universals when the particulars of the diversity of languages and moralities over time and across space make them wildly divergent, staggeringly malleable and always culturally specific means that assertion is useless as a substantive claim of universality.
^^^^^ CB: No the particular differences between languages and moralities do not mean that they do not also have fundamental aspects in common. Those fundamentals are symboling. _All_ human languages and moralities, whatever their differences, have symboling and abstract principles, and no other species have this. This is a substantive claim to universality. Geertz would not deny this if alive. And Sahlins will say it if you ask him.
^^^^^
In short, and this is what the whole exchange around Chomsky was about, I think, claims about the universality of language or abstract/guiding moral principals indicate the pursuit of a fools errand if the form, content and meaning of languages, morals, incest, etc. across space and time are more qualitatively different than quantitatively similar.
^^^^^ CB: They have one critical quality that is exactly the same: symboling and use of abstract principles. That the particular set of abstract principles or grammars of the different peoples are different does not mean that the fact of using abstract principles and grammars itself is not qualitatively the same when contrasted with other species. _All_ humans - it's universal - use abstract principles, culture, to order their activities. No other species use abstract principles to order their activities
That's all Sahlins writes about these days - how all humans have culture, symboling , abstract principles.
^^^^^^^
I think the earlier conversation on this topic included some reference to love... and if feminists have taught us anything it is that appeals to the universality of love - claims that love is a substantive human metacategory - implode VERY quickly once comparative historical research begins.
>
> The point is not that there are no specific moral principles that are
> universal, sort of, but that there are always some form of moral
> principles, i.e. abstract ideas guiding conduct in every human society
> that Geertz and the rest of us know about. Other species can't
> organize themselves based on abstract ideas. Humans can and do
> universally.
You see, Geertz' point (and Marx's about class relations and feminists' about love, family, etc.) is that it is contradictory to say that a universal category like "abstract moral principals" has any material, social or political utility when - in order to generate the category - the content placed within it always ends up being qualitatively dissimilar.
^^^^^ CB: I'm disagreeing with this. When looking at the species level, defining the human species in relation to other species, it is critical to say that all humans use abstract principles in language, kinship etc, that the use of abstract principles, symbols differentiates the human species from all others. (See Kottak's basic text in anthropology, for example). This point has scientific, anthropological and social validity.
^^^^^^^^
Geertz' point, and that of Marx - per Bertell Ollman, Derek Sayer, Neil Smith and many others - is that abstract moral principals are always grounded in spatio-temporally specific material circumstances and that this central historically material diversity is decentered, at best, and rejected (in some kind of "we're all the same under the skin, and therefore, we ought always to be able to rationally come to agreement across our differences) at worst.
^^^^^ CB: That abstract moral principals vary based on their grounding in specific historical and material circumstances does not contradict the point that all human societies have them and no other species do, thereby constituting a universal and defining characteristic of human societies.
^^^^^^^^
Something close to this last issue that Geertz doesn't raise is the question of where universals end and particulars begin. If all human (and alarm bells go off every time I see this last word for these very reasons - since it almost always indicates an implicit appeal to some kind of transhistorical human nature)
^^^^^ CB: There is transhistorical human nature. It is culture or the use of abstract principles/symbols in organizing society. This is how paleoanthropologists decide where the human species begins - by finding evidence of culture , symbol use. Humans are the culture bearing animal. All humans have culture. Culture _is_ the use of abstract principle to organize society.
It's like the sameness and difference of English and Chinese. The sameness is that they both involve use of abstract grammars. The difference is in the particulars.
^^^^^
societies operate based on "abstract moral principals" laid out in "language" - perhaps tied in some way to "kinship" and "social reproduction", and all human societies have men and women, does this mean that all men and all women are more the same, across societies (or should that be cultures, or civilizations, or tribes, or class structures.... what IS the right metacategory here) than they are different?
^^^^^ CB: That problem with coming up with the correct metacategory is a problem for your argument, not mine. You have no way of saying what is common between different cultures, peoples , societies, civilizations, because you and Geertz take a true point to far. I don't have to put quotes around every other word, you do because you have taken a valid point to the absurd extreme. Anybody in anthropology has been over this exercise many, many times. Like I say. I dealt with it in my senior thesis in 1972.
^^^^^^^
Upon what basis ought we to decide that morals and languages are substantive universals meaningfully similar across space and time but that men/manhood/masculinity and women/womanhood/feminity (or any other classical "universal") are different.
^^^^^^^ CB: All human societies do have males and females as defined biologically, but that isn't the differentia specifica of the human species , because all animal species have males and females. So, male/female is a human universal , but not a unique human universal. Any society that didn't have both males and females would have gone extinct, because it couldn't reproduce.
Culture is the differentia specifica of the human species.
^^^^^^^
I know most there are not anthropologists, but this is the core question. What Marx found was that the material investigation of history exploded the Western philosopy's reified claims of universality... and this is what, just about 100 years later, finally became the mainstream norm in anthropology, though not yet in sociology (outside of some who are more feminist, queer or cultural studies-ish than sociological) or, often, on the laborist or environmentalist left (where Maslow and Malthus continue to have way to much sway [as I see it].)
-A
^^^^^^^^ CB: Marx is correct that the principles of capitalism are not universal in human society.
Here's Marx discussing what he considers a human universal: labor. He pre-supposes labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively and universally human.
"Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be. "
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm