[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Tue Aug 11 09:50:27 PDT 2009


This: http://www.wsu.edu/gened/learn-modules/top_culture/culture-definitions/geertz-text.html is a pretty decent take on Geertz' approach to defining culture/s.

My sense is that the key is that Geertz approaches the topic as one focused on the interpretation of historically accreted and locally-learned systems of meaning... with the emphasis on systems and interpretation. In answer to your question, and Chris' really interesting note about semi-feral subway dogs, there seems to me to that the biopsychosocial complex that cogenerate our bodies, minds and societies each grade (nodding to Bookchin) out of quantiatively diffferent animal processes and eventually - by combining quasi-bioevolutionary and semi-socioevolutionary processes - combine to generate the qualititatively new phenomena called humanity. Here its a question of complexity more than dualism.

I like Geertz' focus on systems but, given my Marxism, I find his focus on meaning tends towards the historicist idealism of Weber more than the materialist historicity of Marx. I've never been sure of the relationship between material culture and symbolic meaning in Geertz. They are closely connected but in the twenty years between Geertz' initial training and mine a greater emphasis has come to be made - in my world - on active materialisms which find dialectical relations between material conditions/phenomena, meaning making/interpreting and cultural institutions/trajectories. Here, the systems of meaning are more-than social in their provenance... as I implied in my response to Charles stance on environmentalism/ecology.

I think it is a mistake to try to define humanity in any kind of straightforward, transhistorical fashion... my sense is that human nature changes with modes of production, but that modes of production are never stable sets of relations expressed the same way across the territories said to fall under or within the spaciotemporality of any particular mode and its various forms of expression.

I hope that helps.

A

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com>wrote:


> iirc (i don't have it in front of me) geertz defines culture as essentially
> (in a nutshell) the use of symbols, for communication and for
> understanding.
> not just passing on of behaviors. in which case you have just explained
> precisely why the passing on of such behaviors does not constitute culture
> -- unless you want to disagree with this definition of culture.
> on the other hand, i admit it's not entirely clear to me
> (IAmNotAnAntrhopologist--although i admit i play one in class, sometimes),
> that imitation doesn't require a certain use of symbols, if only in a very
> rudimentary way. seeing someone else do something and then seeing how that
> might be something you yourself could
> do? doesn't this require at least a modicum of abstraction from the
> event to the possibility of a future event, and further, the use of
> the observed behavior as a model of one's own behavior?
>
> not a rhetorical question, and i'm thinking rudy has a handy answer to this
> that i would like to hear, since it keeps coming up in my own thinking when
> i think about, say, geertz, on the one hand, and peter singer, on the
> other.
>
> honestly, the alan-cb conversation has me thinking about the problem in
> "blade runner" -- that they've got this understanding of humanity that is
> grounded in the ability to feel empathy, but when it turns out that there
> are other beings (namely, replicants) who can feel empathy, then that's
> maybe not a god definition of humanity. and then the whole thing calls into
> question the value of defining humanity at all.
>
> sorry for the hit and run. off to meetings.
>
>
>



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