I've just finished reading Culture and Practical Reason by Marshall Sahlins, a cozy 400 pages of a theoretical debate between materialism and symbolism in Anthropology. It was a highly actual book when it was written, but I must admit it seems a little bit dated now. However, the book has some extremely well-written and interesting passages and forms a persuasive and coherent arguement in favor of symbolic analysis in the social sciences. I wrote this paper as a critical reading of the book for a course in Symbolic Anthropology, and this is my original text. You'll notice my references to Wolff in the middle part, cleverly recycled from an earlier blog post. Work smarter, not harder folks!
I hope you'll save yourselves some time in reading this instead of the whole dusty tome that is Culture and Practical Reason. I highly recommend always reading the Introduction and Conclusion chapters first when faced with any text. This applies especially when you don't plan to read in its entirety due to constraints of time, effort, delight or the enticing call of a nice Valpolicella. Enjoy!
Introduction
This paper will function as analysis of
Marshall Sahlins’ seminal work Culture
and Practical Reason (1976). I will proceed to outline Sahlins’ main issue
and discuss his arguments, supplying with what I deem to be interesting points
and references, but keeping a firm focus on Sahlins’ own points and writings.
Terms
I will use (historical) materialism, Marxism and utility or praxis theory interchangeably, as does Sahlins. I regard idealism, “cultural order” and symbolic structure
as near-synonyms as well. I do not distinguish between terms such as the West, bourgeois
or capitalist society, either.
The Main Point
The point of
departure for Sahlins’ work is the theoretical debate between idealism and
materialism. Arguably, this dualistic distinction has existed at least since
Plato’s contrasting of phenomenon to idea, continuing up through European
thought for over 2000 years, manifesting clearly in Cartesian dualism. Sahlins
argues that much if not all of Anglo-Saxon anthropological debate centers on
the relationship between utilitarianism and culture, whether cultural order is
the codification of actual and pragmatic action and so determined by material
circumstances and action; or conversely, whether human action in the world is
mediated by cultural design (Ibid.:55).
Which shall we as anthropologists use best
to describe human culture, a focus on material production or cultural order? Praxis
structured by symbolic schemes and culture or vice versa? These two cannot be
dialectic and the answer does not lie in between, maintains Sahlins (Ibid.). I
find this starting point to be lacking, as Bourdieu had already synthesized
these two analytical viewpoints in a mix of French structuralism and practice
theory: “Structured structures
predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1972:72).
Too easily Sahlins brushes away the idea of
a synthesis, positioning himself in the symbolist camp; his main opponent being
the utility theory’s presumption that culture is the product of individuals
pursuing their best interests through rational actions (Sahlins 1976:vii).
Instead, Sahlins argues that although there might be a materialist “base” for
culture, such as natural constraints, the quality of culture is that is always
adapts to these constraints with a specific
cultural scheme that is never the only one possible, never determined
exclusively by material forces (Ibid.:viii). The reason why (Western) society
believes itself based on material rationality is because our symbolic structure
is hidden within consumption; a point Sahlins uses both a whole chapter and the
conclusion to illustrate.
Marxism and Anthropology
Before formulating his main points and
critique, Sahlins sees the need to outline the debate between anthropological
analysis and historical materialism, doing so through the examination of the
two schools of structuralism, British and French.
Sahlins argues that the materialist (that
is, Marxist) view of culture and history cannot be transferred without friction
to understanding tribal culture. Why? Firstly, if we could simply transfer the
conclusions of Marx’ study on 19th century European culture to
tribal societies, we wouldn’t have learned anything about human culture in our
anthropological studies all around the world. There would have been no
surprises in cultural variation and over a hundred years of thought and fieldwork
wouldn’t have mattered:
“On
the contrary, anthropology (...) would
reveal itself as a grand intellectual distraction, bourgeois society scratching
its head” (Ibid.:2).
But we were
surprised, there was cultural variety and tribal societies were difficult to
describe with a materialist analysis. Even Marx and Engels themselves had their
cautions about the universality of the materialist interpretation in archaic
societies, when the producers were not alienated from the forces of production,
but rather part of a “natural bonds of
blood” governing economic action (Ibid.:2).
The main issue between Marxist materialism
and British structuralism is precisely this:
“The
relevance of the Marxist analytic frame to a society that does not know an
organizational distinction between base and superstructure; that is, where the
two are formally the same structure” (Ibid.:3).
In tribal societies, since the “natural
bonds of blood”, that is, kinship, structure production, how could we separate
culture from material production?
Marxism and British Structuralism
In tribal societies, argues Sahlins, there
exists a totality ordered by kinship. Economy, polity, ritual and ideology are
not separate systems functioning autonomously as in the West. Social
relationships are not assigned to a certain sphere, be it economical or
political – they are totalized in one system (Ibid.:6). In primitive societies,
there is no superstructure as there are no institutions. It is
“multifunctional” and all activities, which in the West are ordered in
institutions, constitute a holistic system among “the primitives”. Kinship is
not is superstructure understood as a specialized institution. It is the sole design of tribal cultures and
the main relations of production, jural-political and ritual relations all take
place within this same scheme (Ibid.:6).
So, in using Marxist analysis, British anthropologists
have tried to adapt and shape the logic of historical materialism to a
generalized cultural order it was simply not made for. Sahlins argues that
British anthropologists, citing Worsley as an example, try to fit Marxist
analysis to tribal society by seeing kinship as an expression of economic
activities. For example, as a practical measure for organizing labor in the fields,
the sharing and dividing of food, determining demographic limits on household
size and the like (Ibid.:8). The dynamics of the tribal lineage structure was
seen as following obviously from objective conditions of production (Ibid.:8).
By fragmenting kinship into component
systems, the totality of one society, the tribal, is “made to fit” the
divisions of another, the West. Making kinship equal to practical reason is a
logical transformation of Marxism, trying to fit a generalized cultural order (Ibid.:7). But this is seeing it all
backwards and missing the totality of the tribal system, argues Sahlins:
“Tallensi
farmers are not related as father and son by the way they enter into
production; they enter thus into production because they are related as father
and son” (Ibid.:9)
Kinship and lineage are not relations of
objective cultures, but sui genesis and symbolic attributions: It is
no more in the ecological nature of agricultural production that father and son
cooperate than “mother and daughter,
mother's brother and sister's son, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza”
(Ibid.9). It might be true that demographic economic forces act on societies in
truth; but as Sahlins argues, the only effect of the pressure would be that the
society had to act. The response
could be intensification of production, segmentation or many other paths;
different societies react differently, determined by culture:
“Economic force as such has no social significance or effect.
There can be no predicative relation between the indifference of the material
function to the form of its realization” (Ibid.:13).
We see here that the specifics of culture cannot be determined by counting social
organization as a practical measure. There quite simply is not a 1:1 relation.
Natural forces might account for movement,
but they would not specify to where, with what means, how fast etc. This point
is one of Sahlins’ main critiques of utility theory and ecologic anthropology.
Sahlins concludes that the use of Marxism by
British anthropologists fail because the attempted use of historical
materialism in analyzing a generalized tribal system morphs the analysis into economistic
and technological determinism (Ibid.:17).
Marxism and French Structuralism
The issue of a lack of divide between super-
and infrastructure is however only one aspect of the “deeper controversy” between Marxist materialism and French structuralism,
what Sahlins is really interested in. He writes that the French see symbolic
order in material activity, whereas a Marxist reading of cultural theory
subordinates social norms to an instrumental logic of work (Ibid.:3). The main
problem is outlined by Sahlins as the relation between productive action in the
world and the symbolic organization of experience (Ibid.:3).
Structuralism is systemic thought;
circumstances are given significance and effect by the system in place. Action
takes meaning as examples of a cultural scheme, which forms the specific
context for any action. Any event is a symbolic relation, between this context
and the existing symbolic order (Ibid.:21).
It's not that material forces are without real effect, but they have no specific
effect beyond that of integration in a pre-existing symbolic scheme:
“Change
begins with culture, not culture with change” (Ibid.:22).
This is opposed to materialist theory, where
the act in itself generates cultural form and significance through the process
of man working on what is essentially ‘real’; “human self-creation trough labor” (Ibid.:22). Utility theory would
have us believe that the construction of culture is the product of some
concrete activity, shaping to adapt to the actuality of the material world we
inhabit.
In a materialist analysis, then, the
existing culture loses its constituting function, functioning only as what Sahlins
terms a “dead hand”; the analysis
positions itself in initial creation, the creation of culture from external
forces, seeing history or existing symbolic schemes merely as residue. On the
other hand, (French) structuralism tends to favor the conservative and
paradoxical concept “that history begins
with a culture already there” (Ibid.:23)– that every new act, force or
situation is incorporated into existing schema. Sahlins argues this
structuralist trait stems from the origin of the discipline: Created in meeting
a so-called “primitive” society capable of perpetually absorbing new events
without changing the existing system of cultural order – allowing for the
persistence of structure (Ibid.:23).
The critique of structuralism by Marxists is
precisely this immobility of the structure, ignoring any knowledge of change of
events. But in structuralism, distinctions between infrastructure (the
material) and superstructure (culture) don’t really make sense; “the so-called infrastructure is appears as
the manifestation of a total system of meanings in action upon the world, a
process that predicates also the meaning of practical experience as a
relationship in that system” (Ibid.:39). In this, the infrastructure also
embodies the superstructure as any cultural order produced by material forces
also implies a cultural ordering of these very forces (Ibid.).
We must also bear in mind, that there is some dynamic in (structuralist)
structure, argues Sahlins. Structural contradiction leads to slow, but sure
change. The build-up of inconsistencies in the system from successfully
incorporating new circumstances can lead to a change of structure from within,
accommodating the future in the present: “Before
a new [formula] has finished ousting
the old ones, another new one is arising to supplant it” (Ibid.:46, quoting
Hocart 1952).
Here again, Bourdieu was very aware of
changes in structure, writing about his structuring structures 4 years before
Sahlins. The habitus, or embodied
symbolic structures of a society, shift and adapt to current life, producing
and reproducing over the course of generations, turning history into nature (Bourdieu
1977:78). The structure might seem without history, but “each agent (…) is a producer
and reproducer of objective meaning” (Ibid.:79). For Bourdieu, the
structure might be solid, but never rigid. But Sahlins chooses to ignore
Bourdieu in favor of older French structuralism.
Summing up his views on the lack of history
in structural analysis, he writes: “In
the end, the principles of classification by which a society deals with events
are themselves specific and historical; they cannot be read out directly from
the given qualities of the world but must be empirically discovered” (Sahlins
1976:47). Sahlins here tackles the critique of structuralism’s lack of history;
in no analysis will we be able to “read” history from a current society or
culture. There simply is no general theory of cultural systems from which we
can deduce history. Furthermore, Marx himself saw differences in the way
bourgeois and primitive society react towards history and their mode of
organization, argues Sahlins.
More specifically, primitive societies
lacked the structural differentiations that give bourgeois society its
dialectic movement, according to Marx. These differentiations are “the separation of the means of production
from the producers, of the producers from the products, of production from the
“needs” of the producers and of the individuals from the collectivity”
(Ibid.:49, quoting Marx 1973).
To conclude using Marx’ own terms: There
exists no alienation from the means of production or commodity fetishism in
primitive societies, accounting for their stability. They are “natural”,
without historical movement or natural forces (Ibid.:50).
Summing up
Sahlins concludes that the debates between
Marxism and both British and French structuralism “imply cultural discontinuity. One structures itself by events and
another structures events by itself” (Ibid.:50). The divide between British structuralism and Marxism is the lack
of super- and infrastructure in tribal societies. The debate between Marxism
and French structuralism goes deeper, however, touching on the key opposition
between material action and symbolic order. Which one structures the other?
It seems Marxism and anthropology are
destined to remain apart, as each is the truth of a different social order. We
might also say very simply, that the analysis is centered on different
societies, that anthropology and Marxism have different empirical objects.
Two Societies – Or?
According to Sahlins, Lévi-Strauss keeps to
his side of the (struturalist) line, arguing that the class differentiations of
“hot” (complex, moving) societies
power movement and that the egalitarianism of “cold” (traditional, static) societies guarantee stability
(Ibid.:51). To the West in general and to the social sciences, our society
appears as a system giving people license to do the best with what they have,
that we see the nature of man as a restless desire for power, society ordered
only as an aggregate of individual action. In the west, “Organization is the socialized realization of desire” (Ibid.:52)
and society is a set of relationships formed by the pursuit of private
interests.
When comparing
historical materialism to the two structuralisms, Sahlins sees a distinction
between the West and the Rest, but he doesn’t agree (Ibid.:54). We see
ourselves as radically different in the West because we ignore the symbolic
qualities of our own institutions. We believe ourselves to be without a
specific culture, instead thinking ourselves apart, above and beyond. Sahlins
argues that the real issue between Marxism and anthropology is the relation
between praxis and symbolic order, and that this issue is best studied through
anthropology, because anthropology is a Western science of other cultures, in
itself a contradiction.
Lévi-Strauss
interestingly makes the point that practices
do not follow directly from praxis,
but that there is always a mediator; “the
conceptual scheme by the operation of which matter and form, neither with any
independent existence, are realized as structures, that is as entities which
are both empirical and intelligible” (Ibid.:56, quoting Lévi-Strauss 1966).
Lévi-Strauss also
stresses that anthropologists study superstructure, not infrastructure. But as Sahlins
writes, in analyzing the organization of material production, we find ourselves
in the economic base as well, dissolving the classic dichotomy of the
“material” and the “conceptual” (Ibid.:56). Sahlins argues that the material causes
must be the product of a symbolic system, since the general determinations of
praxis are always subject to the specific formulations of culture (Ibid.:57).
Moreover, since culture is a symbolic system, it maintains a fundamental
autonomy.
Studying Culture
Sahlins uses a
very lengthy discussion of the debate between materialism and idealism in
anthropology to expose the lack of consensus in (his) present. It all comes
down to a defense of symbolist analysis and focusing on culture in analysis. If we don’t study the symbols and the
system in cultural practice, argues Sahlins, culture is eliminated as the
anthropological object:
“Without distinctive
properties in its own right, culture has no title to analysis as a thing-in-itself. Its study
degenerates into one or another of two common- place naturalisms:
the economism of the rationalizing individual
(human nature); or the ecologism of selective advantage (external
nature)” (Ibid.:82)
For Sahlins, the real issue with theories aligning themselves
along the lines of the
material, utility, practical reason etc., is the disappearance of
culture as the distinctive object of anthropology (Ibid.:101). If culture does
not warrant any special understanding distinct from a biological explanation,
as in ecological functionalism, culture simply disappears from analysis, argues
Sahlins (Ibid.:87). He sees this juxtaposition of praxis vs. cultural order as
introducing schizophrenia to anthropological study: The rational individual
driven by inner forces, acting to achieve his own ends in the face of
constraining cultural conventions (Ibid.:85). Normative structure stands in
opposition to pragmatic action, making culture merely the backdrop; a medium
and environment for action:
“It is a medium in the sense
of a set of means at the disposition of the subject, through which he achieves
his self-appointed ends. And it is an environment, not merely as a set of
constraints external to the individual, but as something upon which he works
his intentions and in so doing orders the properties of his milieu” (Ibid.:85)
That is, we continually formulate and reformulate our cultural
order according to our best interests and that society is the means and our
individual lives the end. But a society build solely on individualism has never existed, as the individual itself
lives on social ideas (Ibid.:87, quoting Dumont 1970).
Western Society as a Culture
In rebuking the basis of bourgeois society as rational individualism
lies what I would argue is Sahlins most important point: That the West is no
different from the Rest in the use of symbolic structure. When looking at the production
and movement of items and goods from a strictly monetary perspective, as that
of exchange-value, the cultural code of properties governing utility is ignored,
the economy appears as the consequence of practical action rather than the
product of social organization (Ibid.:166). That is, we’re forgetting Western
symbolic order, the very rules and order that govern schemes of appreciation,
value and production.
For us in the West, the perception is that the economy takes place
in an arena of pragmatic action, the formal outcome being society itself, a
rational pursuit of material happiness (Ibid.:167). However, as
anthropologists, we know that the rational and objective schemes of a given
group are never the only ones possible, and that cultural orders may vary even
in very similar material circumstances (Ibid.:168).
Of course nature acts on us in objective ways, says Sahlins. We
cannot neglect to produce food or shelter, to survive. But the point is, that
we don’t merely survive, we survive in very distinctive
ways, reproducing ourselves as specific types of people, social classes and
groups - not just as biological organisms (Ibid.:168). Within the very vide
limits of viability, that of physical-natural necessity, any human group has
the potential for a great range of rational economic actions, the adaption
being very specific and not pre-determined by environment alone.
So, argues Sahlins, production is not just practical logic with
material effectiveness, it’s cultural intention. And the material process of
human existence is made to be a meaningful process of social being, in short,
culture. When giving a cultural account of production then, we must first
note that the social meaning of an object and its value in exchange cannot be
deduced from its physical properties, because it's culturally produced in a
symbolic system. No physical thing has any being in society except by the
significance, we give to it (Ibid.:170).
All production also requires consumption, else the object does not
complete itself as a product – a house in which no-one lives is not a house,
it’s a merely a building. Thus we must consider use-value, which cannot be
natural, as humans do not produce “shelter” but different types of houses; a
castle being different from a peasant’s hut, for example. This determination of
use-value is a process of dialectically categorizing and defining objects in
terms of ourselves and ourselves in terms of objects (Ibid.:169).
This leads to the understanding that bourgeois society also has a culture, arbitrary symbolic codes of objects
and socially produced meaning (Ibid.:170. Totemic symbolism is still prevalent
in capitalist society; we use the varieties of manufactured objects as totemic
categories in social classification. In this, exchange and consumption have
become our means of social communication (Ibid.:177). Because exchange-value
and consumption depend upon utility in a capitalist economy, the social
significance of the objects become highlighted, making them differentiated from
other objects and thus useful as totemic categories. Also, in producing
objects, we solidify thought; the object becoming a human concept outside
itself "as man speaking to man
through the medium of things" (Ibid.:178).
Sahlins novel and interesting argument is that goods are the
object codes for valuation of persons, events and situations in capitalist
society. Production becomes the reproduction of culture through a system of
objects. When we produce, we objectify social categories and in so doing, we
make them constituting categories in society: the differentiation of the
category differentiates the social classes of the goods system. Therefore,
capitalism is not just rational
production. Bourgeois society also has symbolic order and specific cultural
form (Ibid.:185).
Interestingly enough, the anthropologist Eric Wolf has
made a somewhat similar critique, although from a decidedly Marxist point of view. He argues,
through the use historical examples ranging from Greek mercenaries in Persian
armies to Iroquois importation of British cloth, that we must not look at
societies, cultures or populations as being isolated socio-cultural systems,
but rather as being in constant dialogue and connection with Others in the
world (Wolf 1983:5-6). He criticizes the capitalist and liberal West for
writing its own history as unbroken line of progress from Ancient Greece to the
expansion west of the US and the present, counting ourselves end products of
rational action – having shed the proverbial yoke of irrational thought and
cultural constraints.
For Wolf, the separation of social sciences from
politics and economy, keeps us from studying interconnectedness and the “embeddedness” of social relations to
only individuals acting towards other individuals: “they predispose one to think of social relations not merely as
autonomous but as causal in their own right, apart from their economic,
political, or ideological context” (Wolf 1983:9). Wolf opposes the
dualistic, Western way of looking at us, the developed and free versus the
Other, underdeveloped and in servitude. In this his argument is even related to
the Orientalism of Edward Said
(1979); namely the argument that the West sees and defines itself in relation
to a culture of opposites, the quintessential Other being a gap or list of deficiencies. The west is
rich, the east is not; the west is democratic; the east is not; in the west the
people are free, in the east they are not. But as Sahlins attempts to show us,
the divisions are not so clear.
When objects form
a scheme of communication based on unconscious codes, it is precisely the type
of totemic thought normally reserved for primitive societies. In the West, we
tell people apart from their appearance, making a cohesive society of total
strangers where much information is available at a glance – as they say,
clothes make the man. Likewise, in
totemic thought there is no time between observation and interpretation, no mental
process other than that meaning follows sign (Ibid.:203, quoting Lévi-Strauss
1966). Rationality, on the other hand, implies time elapsed, thought-over
comparison and the weighing of alternatives.
This implies, argues
Sahlins, that even in the West, rationality takes a backseat to symbolic order
and totemism.
Discussion
Sahlins maintains the symbolist ground
firmly in Culture and Practical reason. Anthropologists must study culture and
symbolic order in order to understand society and the people living in it. Material
aspects cannot be separated from the social, as if the first referred to
satisfaction of natural needs and the second referred to governing relations
among people (Ibid.:205). We cannot divide cultural components into subsystems,
but must look at that complex whole with the same holistic analysis. How else
would we see the relations between analytical objects, we mark as distinct? The
reason why we wish to analytically distinguish cultural domains such as symbol
order and production builds on a model from our own society, that we cannot
immediately transfer to others. There is a unity in cultural order based on meaning, which defies simple
functionality: “[N]o functional
explanation is ever sufficient by itself; for functional value is always
relative to the given cultural scheme” (Ibid.:206).
This same point is argued by Mary Douglas in
Purity and Danger, stating: “It is one
thing to point out the side benefits of ritual actions, and another thing to be
content with using the by-products as a sufficient explanation” (Douglas 1966
[2003]:30). This would be treating Moses like an enlightened public health
administrator, rather than as the spiritual leader, he was. Ritual action
cannot be sufficiently explained by rational action.
It follows then that no cultural form can be
deduced from a set of material forces as a dependent variable. This does not
mean however, that culture simply "walks
on the thin air of symbols" (Sahlins 1976.:206), with no consideration
to material forces and constraints. But the effects of these constraints cannot
be read from their nature, since “the material effects depend how these
constraints are integrated in culture. Any exterior force might be significant,
but any social existence of this force is determined by its integration in the
cultural system; there is no other logic than that of culture. The problem with
historical materialism, argues Sahlins, is that it takes (individual) practical
interest as the intrinsic starting point for analysis, as if it were inherent
in production and inescapable in culture.
Sahlins concedes that the material process
of production seems factual and fixed by nature - while symbolic logic is
invented, flexible and by its very definition, arbitrary. But all material
logic is practical interest and this interest in production is symbolically constituted:
the material means of the cultural organization and the organization of
material means are both cultural. Do
use Sahlins’ own examples, why else aren’t dogs eaten in the West or skirts
worn by men? (Ibid.:207). The material forces in production constitute only a
set of possibilities, where humans decide what to make of them. So, argues Sahlins,
there are not two logics in production; logic is the product of thought, itself
informed by meaning and social content – material forces in themselves are
lifeless and their motions and consequences are always social and symbolic
(Ibid.:207).
Having so seen that material forces become
so under the watchful eye of culture, Sahlins argues that ecology works in
culture as a set of limit conditions. Material forces exist as negative determinations, stating only
what can't be done and allowing anything that's possible: Nature is only raw
material, given meaningful form and content by human minds - like a block of
marble to a sculpture, argues Sahlins (Ibid.:210). Certain things you cannot do
with a piece of marble - but it is more important, that the sculptor decides
what the statue will look like.
In the same vein, Douglas maintains that
culture mediates the experience of individuals, acting as a “textbook reference”
for action: When deformed babies are born among the Nuer, this is a natural
event. But the Nuer treat these babies as birth-mistakes, baby hippopotamuses
born to humans. They are gently layed in the river “where they belong”,
re-establishing social categories of how humans look. (Douglas 1966 [2003]:40).
In this way, specific cultural form follows exactly from a natural event, and
could not have been deduced. Seeing how Westerners react to the birth of twins,
we could never have anticipated, for instance, that some West African tribes
kill babies at birth, to maintain the cultural order that only one human may
come from one womb (Ibid.:41).
Food on the plate is, well, food. But food
on my shirt is dirt. It’s the same
food, the same material, existing
only in different symbolic contexts. Culture shapes and mediates the ways we
interact with our environment, ordering experience and giving specific form to
material events and forces.
Conclusion
In Culture and Practical Reason, Sahlins
also objects to the presumption that the West is funded on material rationality.
Objects and persons of capitalist production are also united in a system of
symbolic valuations. Capitalism too is a symbolic process. In all societies
functions a symbolic process that imposes a classificatory “grid” on culture in
total (Ibid.:211). The only thing differentiating the West from the “rest” is
our belief that we are unique; the illusion that Western economy and society
are pragmatically constructed based on material rationale. It's just that the
production of goods is the main site of symbolic production and communication
in the West. It’s not that our economic system isn’t symbolically determined,
just that we use economic symbolism in structuring our society (Ibid.:211).
The processes are the same in both primitive
and complex societies; only the structures of symbolic integration are
different.
In the West, the logic of production is a
differential logic of cultural meaning. The grid is reproduced since 1) objects
are different and 2) the goods must sell, so they must have a preferred
utility, real or imagined for somebody. In this, by being different and always
"for" somebody, they are classificatory. Bourgeois society produces
social distinction through contrast in an object and differences in exchange-value.
Since economic relations permeate all social
relations in bourgeois society, the economy “produces
not only objects for appropriate subjects, but subjects for appropriate
objects” (Ibid.:216), acting as the classificatory grid for Western
society.
Material production is Western society’s
symbolic grid, whereas kinship fulfills this role in primitive society. We are
no less symbolic and use no less totemic thought in the West. If we as
anthropologists want to understand society, we must study culture first and
foremost, as it governs all other relations in society like a symbolic grid,
forming a veritable key to understanding human action.
The myth of rational production is a lie; it
is the production of symbols, classification – in short, the production of culture.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, Pierre
1977:
Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.
Douglas, Mary
1966 (2003): Purity and Danger. New York,
Routledge
Drummond, Lee
1979: Culture
and Practical Reason by Marshall Sahlins [Review]. Ethnohistory vol. 26
(1), pp. 81-83
Sahlins, Marshall
1976: Culture
and Practical Reason. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press
Said,
Edward
1979: Orientalism. Vintage
Books.
Wolf, Eric
1983: Introduction. In Europe and the People Without History. University of California
Press
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