More thoughts on Culture and World Systems

More thoughts on the “culture”/World System issue –

So, culture’s “don’t exist” as self-contained essentialisms, but “culture” can exist as a system of meaning (provided that structure is primary, the WORLD SYSTEM is ultimate, and its elements are linkages and connections among people through their activities and material exchanges/productions within the greater System, and culture-as-meaning is secondary to culture). Fair enough, if that’s what’s being said.

However, if that is what’s being claimed here, (then) what really is “culture” and “structure” in the human community? Is culture really just a fancy social convention we pull out of whole cloth and invent for ourselves in our social groups as if we could “make it up” like we do with literary fiction? Or is culture, in fact, something a little more solid, crystallized over time into our habits and recurrent social behaviors? If the latter’s the case, then it seems culture does have a real structure of sorts and is not just a daydream willy-nilly wisped into the fabric of our social existence by the willful suspension of disbelief.

Yet, I believe a middle ground exists between culture being dreamed-up/nonexistent and the “culture is real” argument of more classical social thinkers. Let me suggest that we must think about culture is terms of group-psychological dynamics. People share culture; not out of some vague ‘let’s get together and make up these values for our group’ sentiment, but out of specific processes of social altering and group fantasy dynamics. The psychohistorians do a good job of defining what these processes are (plus how they come about) as many of such principles are presented at www.psychohistory.com, Lloyd DeMause’s site for the Institute for Psychohistory. Basically, it comes down to childrearing and the impression this creates on a younger generation and thus the societies of future generation. The effect of this can manifest in, let’s say, three major ways – poor childreaing/neglect/abuse leads to negative social alters and their cultural effects in peoples’ meaning systems. Good childrearing … can lead to good social effects; and/or, cultural products can also arise from people denying the effect of psychopathology and its products in society. Culture in this instance would act like a kind of denial-projection of our human fallibilities, a monument to the fact that we cannot face our finiteness, our dis-equilibrium, our psychological fragmented-ness, and the speckled past of turbulent childhood … histories. Therefore, culture isn’t just some mere conventional mechanism we cook up to suit our fancy; it truly is the product of psychodynamics around which our shared behavioral tendencies revolve. And, these tendencies/this shared typology of meaning is crystallized over time in longstanding behavioral trends and habits of people in communities. Thus, culture truly is real (socially, psychologically, structurally, and behavioral-habitually). (At least, that’s my own perspective on the matter; yet this take comes from considering the inputs of many disciplines in their study of the issue – including World Systems, Psychohistory, and classical sociocultural thought systems).

POINT IS: Culture/shared meaning is a little more complex than just common superficial consensus or surface conventionalisms between people in their groups. Cultures even have a “distinctive structure” all their own, I would argue, besides that of just the World System or its linkages. Hence, we must be prepared to consider its basis in both structural/social conventional terms and in the systematic grid of psycho[historical]-dynamical mechanisms.

All the best! (Luke R.)