Session 2: Culture and Community: Genealogies and Contestations (Summary and Qs)

6th sept 2017

We begin the note by accounting for key points from all texts we are reading for the class. We then respond briefly, by highlighting what we think are similar strands across the different readings, and some questions that could help structure our conversations. 

Genealogies (Parsons et al):

These readings bring up the construct of concepts of ‘community’, ‘culture’, ‘society’, ‘ethnic groups’ in social theory – around the time of sociology’s origins as a formal discipline in the 19C.

In household communities, Weber attempts to analyse the progressive differentiation of various types of communities in various directions starting with the “household”, based on example from different civilizations. He focuses on the economic sphere and ideal types while noting that in reality the examples maybe a combination of these ideal types.

Toennies proposed ‘Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft’ translated as ‘community and society’, to categorize social ties into two dichotomous sociological types which define each other. He appears to have posed it as a purely conceptual tool rather than as an ideal type in the way it was used by Weber to discuss historical / social changes.

Durkheim uses the terms Mechanical and Organic solidarity to indicate undifferentiated and differentiated societies. He uses mechanical in the sense of the term mechanics in physics – homogenous groups and organic based on need for each other’s services.

Basic to his social theory of religion is to stress religious phenomena as communal rather than individual. He considered religion as one of the forces that created within individuals a sense of moral obligation to adhere to society's demands.

Appadurai:

The principal argument in the paper is that the new global cultural economy is complex, overlapping and disjunctive. It cannot be explained by simple models. In the paper, he proposes an elementary framework to explore this disjuncture. i.e. by looking at the relationship between 5 dimensions of global cultural flow which he defines as ‘scapes’ - ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, finanscape and ideoscape. He uses ‘scape’ to indicate that they are perspectival situated constructs (he calls them imagined worlds by extending Anderson). He then attempts to characterize these flows and concludes that globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization (though it uses the instruments of homogenization). For him the central feature of global culture today is “the politics of mutual efforts by sameness and difference to cannibalize one another”.

Lughod:

She starts her paper in the context of Clifford and Marcus’s ‘Writing Culture’ which is considered an influential text with its attempts to re-imagine anthropology. She argues that this text excludes two groups – feminists and ‘Halfies’ because of Western (=white male?) anthropology’s unease with feminist and half-native or ‘halfie’ anthropology. Both groups are not considered objective enough (professional) because they are unable to construct the “other” that is central to Western anthropology - in presenting the other they end up presenting themselves. This is often a result of belonging to communities or groups they "study", and the knowledge produced through such engagements being expected to answer not only requirements of the professional discipline, but also the belonging within such groups. The second related reason given is that they are only able to present a partial picture (i.e. unable to speak for the male or the non-native).

Her argument is such a construct of culture – us / them – is the essential tool in the making of the “other”. It overemphasizes coherence and brings up the perception of community as bounded and discrete. It thus operates to enforce separations that inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy and power. 

Gupta and Ferguson:

They are urging for greater consciousness about space within anthropology. Specifically, a clear mapping between place and culture, long assumed in anthropology, is being questioned. Such consciousness about space relates to concerns about location, displacement, community and identity. At the outset, they problematize linking territory to culture through: 1. the case of those who occupy border spaces, such as migrants, 2. accounting for cultural differences within a locality, 3. accounting for colonialism and cultures created through the colonial encounter, and subsequently the postcolonial situation.

The crux of the argument is that space and place are never a given, and the process of their socio-political construction needs consideration. Physical territory, or location which has long been the only grid on which cultural difference was mapped “needs to be replaced by multiple grids” that “enable us to consider various factors such as class, gender, race and sexuality”.

Taylor:

In considering what a politics of equal recognition has meant or could mean, Taylor compares a politics of universal dignity vs politics of difference. Despite the fact that both these are based on notions of equal respect, they can come into conflict. While the politics of universal dignity, espoused by many liberal thinkers emphasizes the need for all humans to be treated equally, the politics of difference criticizes this position and demands differential treatment based on power inequalities etc. Many proponents of the politics of difference allege that the universal dignity remains a façade with its assertion of hegemonic cultures as universal. Against such criticisms, Taylor asks the question- "are all politics of universal dignity bound to be equally homogenizing?”

Overall the readings call into question the idea of culture as mapped on to territory.  While Appadurai questions cultural homogenization through processes in the global economy, Gupta & Ferguson interrogate idea of space as neutral. Lughod writes against the production of anthropological knowledge as bounded. She specifically offers three modes of ‘writing against’ such a construct of culture – theoretical, substantive and textual. Particularly, her textual mode which emphasizes a particular style of ethnographic writing - ‘ethnographies of the particular’ as she calls it, is useful to counter the danger of generalization (Clifford calls ethnography a partial truth but she labels it positioned truth). Some questions that we think can structure our conversations about these readings are: 

1. How is Taylor responding to the position that “lack of recognition is oppression”?
2. How can the notion that “lack of recognition is oppression” be thought through in the debates between the politics of universal dignity as against the politics of difference?
3. When Gupta and Ferguson urge for multiple grids beyond location, what remains the place of place?
4. What does Lughod’s textual suggestion offer us as we write up our “fields”? How could her suggestion on “ethnographies of the particular” help?
5. All the pieces appear to write against a (historically) dominant anthropological position of interpreting culture as homogeneous and bounded. Does this come from their own social locations? (multicultural, ‘halfie’, ‘native’)

- Krupa and Savitha