^^^^^^^ CB: OK smile. I'm not Marx though I do try to play him on email often. Lets call the other species glorious animals, and humans warring and ecologically destructive animals.
That humans are culture bearing is an objective fact, not something that bestows all glory and no opprobium on humans. Consider all the inhumanity of men and women towards men and women down through history, pretty much all of it based in our culture and not in our natures.
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Why is it so important that we have culture and animals don't? Why does all this have to hang on something as materially incoherent and violently abstracted as "culture"?
^^^^^^^^^ CB: That we have culture and other animals don't is an objective scientific fact. Scientific is synonymous with "materially coherent". Scientific theory and fact are abstract. "Violently" is interesting thought that you might want to elaborate.
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Is it better/more important than an argument that we share just about all of our characteristics with different animals but to differing degrees and that it is our complex of overlapping socionatural relations that makes us qualitatively different than them not something abstract like "culture"?...
^^^^^ CB: You seem to be using "abstract" as meaning "vague". The anthropological concept of culture is not vague. Need not go in quotes. Being abstract is not a "fault" in terms of the material status of the concept of culture. It doesn't make idealist in contrast with materialist.
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That in fact the social, cultural, and biological aspects of human nature/culture are evolving co-products of these relationships... here, what differentiates us is not a single something, culture, violently abstracted from materially and symbolically incommensurable social systems but the evolved networks of capacities which have resulted from our diverse ways of laboring - enabled and constrained by social, cultural and ecological conditions directly found by us (nodding the 18th Brumaire) to produce the worlds we find ourselves able to envision ourselves constructing.
^^^^^ CB: Now I see how you are using "violently" abstracted.
No culture is concept that has been methodically, patiently, _peacefully_ abstracted from empirical observation of the enormous diversity of human societies by anthropologists, ethnologists.
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If all the products of human activity in the past that we find in the present - and here I include landscapes, flora, fauna, machines, cities, technosciences, social, political and economic institutions, etc. - contribute to enabling and constraining our future development then why not define ourselves in relation to those things and our coevolution rather than in relation to ourselves in opposition to those things?
^^^^^ CB: Yes, lets define ourselves in relation to them based on objective evidence. Based on that we have commonalities and differences in relation to those things. So, objectivity dictates that we define ourselves in part in "opposition" to those things because in some ways we are different than those things. Culture is a way in which we are focussedly different than "those things" , other species.
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Your stance on culture doesn't get us anywhere, as I see it.
^^^^^ CB: Does get you anywhere (smile). It gets some of the rest of us a long way.
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If there are good things about culture and bad things about culture then there are cultures worth having and others not worth having... something closely related to your argument that the war part is a bad part... but how do we determine whether or not a war is necessary?
^^^^^ CB: Good questions , and a project worth undertaking. It depends in part on how you are using "necessary". For one meaning of necessary, i.e. fulfillment of the necessities of physiological life, clearly war is not only not necessary, but undermines what is necessary, in that it involves mass destruction of human physiolgoical life. It is anti-materialist in one level of the senses of materialism ( See post to Marxism thaxis on levels of materialism from several months back)
^^^^^^^ how do we determine which kinds of gender relations, or technologies or medicines or religions are good and others not so good if having a culture, any culture, is what makes us all human and therefore all equally human and therefore all equally....? ^^^^^ CB: This is a difficult task. But an important caveat is that Europeans and Americans should not play such a leading role in this determination as they have in the last 500 years.
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Hasn't an awful lot of universal human rights stuff been foisted on cultures who don't believe a word of it - in the name of development or progress or....?
^^^^^ CB: I think probably yes.
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There is a modernist critique of racism that is pretty imperialist... "Africans are humans, qualitatively different from apes, you ignorant fools, because they have culture..., its just that their culture is backward and once they learn of the glories of modernization they'll be just like us in every way." Oy. Arguments like this almost NEVER engage Africans in the fight against racism.
^^^^^^^ CB: Sure. But that doesn't change that fact that at an earlier stage of the struggle against racism, the concept of culture played a critical role in the critique of "scientific" racism.
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Your stance w/r/t environmentalism and ecology is typical in its focus on warning us about dangers to humans...
^^^^^ CB: Typical of what ? Not of a lot of ecologists I read.
^^^^^ but what if our species being is not to have a post-natural culture, unlike Marx's mere animals, but to have complex and rich set of relations with wildly differentiated social ecological phenomena?
^^^^^ CB: We have always had said complex and rich set of relations. Our culture and species-being always had to pass a fundamental natural test of survival, the test of natural necessity which underlies level one materialist thinking. Culture has never been post natural. We are never utterly supernatural beings, though the history of culture has been to find new natural possibilites for us that are not evident looking at our earliest ancestors. For example , human flight. We could say that humans flying is unnatural, and that planes are supernatural in a non-religiious and non-mystical sense. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber wrote a famous essay on the "superorganic" elucidating this point in one sense. Dare I say that culture had always evolved in a dialectic with nature, from the beginning.
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Who cares if there are bears or elephants or tigers or spotted owls or ash trees or land races of maize or... so long as human beings are in danger, plants, animals, feh! For that matter, what if some of those human cultures greatly value some of the ecological stuff and feel endangered by their disappearance... are they just examples of backward premodern subcultures?
^^^^^ CB: OK , but this is not a question for me. I haven't said anything implying such cultures are backward. In fact, I have an essay " Indigenous Knowledge in Aboriginal Land Recovery" in which I argue for the superiority of the Darwinian fitness of primary cultures over civilization , in the Morganian sense of civilization, including in civilization American culture, with its enormous nuclear weapons arsenal.
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Everything I know from science studies and cultural studies tells me that the idea (and materiality) of nature is inextricable from the idea (and materiality) of culture and yet you write as if the two were distinct, in fact you write as if the difference is what defines humanity.
^^^^^ CB: That would be your interpretation of what I write.
I said that humans are animals. So, I am not saying that lack of naturalness is what defines us. We are natural and cultural. Other species are only natural. So, what differentiates us is not lack of nature, but presence of culture.
For example, I have emphasized often on this list, and said on this thread that like other animals species we necessarily have females and males, in the biological sense.
Anthropology has two main divisions: ethnology and biological anthropology. I subscribe to both. Biological anthropology elaborates at length our natural and animal aspects, our physiologies and biological origin and evolution. At Michigan there was not only Kottak, but the late Frank Livingstone, Frischanco, C. Loring Brace, and Wolpoff.
On your point of the co-evolution with the environment, the ecological school of ethnology is prominent at Michigan, including in archaeology. Kent Flannery is a leading scholar in the ecological school of archaeology, as was the late Roy Rappaport. Rappaport's ethnography, _Pigs for the Ancestors_ on the Tsimbga of Papua New Guinea treats that society's culture as integrated within its ecology, and the cultural principles concerning relations with pigs as an ecological regulating mechanism, a system, with negative and positive feedback loops, and all the rest. Flannery analyzes the fall of Mayan ( I think; his specialty area is the Valley of Oaxaca) civilization based on ecological hypotheses in significant part.
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I don't think you gain a fundamental refutation of racism by your move since racism isn't about biology or culture, its about power.
^^^^^^^ CB: Well, racism in this area arises out of use of an invalid biological category of "race" in the context of White imperialism's imposition of power on the Colored peoples of the world ( See Dubois' _The World and Africa_). In the history of the struggle against this fraudulantly scientific use of "race" , the concept of culture, with Boas and others, was very important in refutation of anti-scientific racism. The fraudulantly scientific use of "race" played a role in the imposition European power around the globe, so its refutation helps in the struggle against that power.
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Look at The Culture of Poverty, its not being Black that was the problem, it was Black culture... poor urban blacks and poor rural whites weren't naturally inferior, they were culturally inferior and therefore needed reformation/modernization. Gould and Lewontin et al needed no move like yours to explode the idea of scientific racism - all they needed was to look at the science closely and to look at genes closely, voila.
^^^^^^^ CB: That the concept of culture has been used in racist coverups, does not refute the fact that in different context of the struggle and arguments against racism , culture was very important. I'd have to go back and reread , but I'm not quite sure that Gould and Lewontin do not use cultue in their arguments. Gould and Lewontin are general biologists, not biological anthropologists. Race is refuted earlier by bio anthros like Ashley Montague and C..Loring Brace , and they use the concept of culture.
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Marx's work on labor, that you excerpted, serves as an abstraction that allows him to show that the essence of modern steel workers is in fact qualitatively different than that of ancient hunters because they labor in qualitatively different ways under qualitatively different social structures for qualitatively different reasons.
^^^^^ CB: I interpret Marx's quote as pointing to the commonality of planning and imagining the project among steelworkers and ancient foragers in contrast with bees and spiders
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Our genes can only be understood to make our bodies/nature if you see our genes as, i the final analysis, a partial product of our sociality... we made ourselves in metabolic relation with the non-human world, a world we socialized along the way, and before we were homo sapiens sapiens. Levins and Lewontin note, along similar lines, that the ideas of ecological niche and species are usually taught as if niches and species pre-exist each other when the science of ecology tells us that species make their niches and niches and species coevolve in metabolic relations with laterial and higher/lower order phenomena. If we're going to approach the world relationally, it seems to me that we should follow the Old Mole and approach ourselves in the same way and, for me, that means dereifying culture and the nature/cultural dualism.
^^^^^^^ CB: I'm not reifying any nature/cultural dualism. Culture is objectively not identical with nature.
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Last, my putting nature and culture in quotes is a product of spending the last twenty years reading material on the historicity and diverse meanings of both terms. The best, quick and dirty introductions are RG Collingwood's The Idea of Nature (or Raymond Williams' chapter of the same title) and Terry Eagleton's The Idea of Culture.
^^^^^ CB: I'd suggest that probably , at least Williams' use of "culture" is not mainly in the anthropological sense, but in the sense of art, the anthro sort stole the term from the "high culture" usage.
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Thanks for this, its very useful for my teaching... that must be three, I'll hold off until tomorrow now.
-A
^^^^^^^ CB: Yes , good show , ole chap (smile). Tell your students I said hello.