Re: culture ... (aka there are/no cultures)

For those who read "the culture studies people", I suppose culture becomes
suddenly of importance on the agenda.  So what?  That does not detract from
the fact that it is anthropologists who have done the most painstakingly
creative work on culture and on cultures.  The point I raised referred as
well to the fact that at certain times, rather than at other times, cultural
studies start blooming as it were.  It is this that I argue ought to be an
object of investigation.  I think that culture is an over-inflated concept
- its inflated status is re-affirmed in the statement that 'culture is everything,
it is everywhere'.  To say that produces, for me at least,  no informational
value. Just as the concept of 'Western civilization' or 'Western culture'
in its monolithicity is an empty term, hiding more than it reveals, hiding
for instance all those borrowings and refusals that Braudel points out (actually
quite contra-Huntington).  Braudel - inspired by Mauss (the anthropologist)
and Lucien Febvre - in fact argues that there are civilizations within civilizations
(Frances within Frances) that need to be the object of study in order to
give content to the concept of cultures.  The affinity with anthropological
work is clearly present in this kind of exhortation.  

In any case, the point I want to make is the over-use to which the term 'culture'
is subject as well as the emptiness in bland assertions like 'culture is
everything, it is everywhere' - why would anyone make this kind of a statement
without the necessary research work that ought to accompany this generalization?
 And if it takes field work and research to make this generalization then
it is the anthropologists that one may want to learn from, or at least acknowldege
for the grounds that they uncover in their work.   I still think that the
most profound insights into culture and cultures, come from 'anthropological'
work.  Another way of saying the same thing: it is the 'lingering' with the
particulars, it is those  investments in particular places and peoples that
enable a 'coming to terms with'  the network of meanings and values and symbols
and religions and ideas and practices that combine to give the concept of
culture some referent.  It is to the credit of Wallerstein that he was a
student of Africa and African societies - it is from there that he came up
with the idea of an appropriate unit of analysis.  There is in short a method
of inquiry, a field of investigative work, that is productive of the insights
that Wallerstein is able to share with us regarding culture.  Those who praise
Wallerstein may also want to respect his attachments to the places from where
he cultivated his insights.  Wallerstein was also an admirer of Fanon.  None
of these aspects of Wallerstein seem to impress adequately upon his readers.
 Perhaps I ought to make stronger statements - many of the most profound
insights that scholars obtain, use, and earn academic capital from,  is through
their interaction with  the multitudes in peripheral spaces.  (Gunder Frank
- he was student of Latin America!  Giovanni Arrighi - he used to teach in
Rhodesia before having to leave.  I am not saying that any of these three
people that I just mentioned think in terms of academic capital to be made
- in fact one of the reasons for their intellectual appeal, to me at least,
is the fact that they have other agendas arising out of more solidaristic
outlooks, more wisdom arising out of a "field" acquaintance with the explotiation
and degradation of Third World spaces for Western civilization to continue
its progress). The anthropological venture, the encounter with other peoples,
also had transformative effects on these students.  So for instance, when
Polanyi speaks of culture, he speaks of the cultural degradation that was
imposed on Africans by the civilized West - and he compares this degradation
to the degrading experience of the industrial revolution in Britain.  Let
us not forget that Wallerstein and Hopkins were students of Karl Polanyi,
the cultural anthropologist.  And let us also, while we are still speaking
of cultures and civilizations, remember the power in Benjamin's remark -
that there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a
document of its barbarism.  The use of napalm bombs in Iraq today, and the
endless murder of civilians in Iraq and the Middle East, as well as the looting
of the 'cultural treasures' of one of the oldest civilizations in the world,
ought to make this reminder unncessary. Ganesh Trichur.

Threehegemons@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 8/10/2003 6:26:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time, tganesh@stlawu.edu writes:
>
> > 1) Let us not forget that it is anthropologists who had 
> > done the most extensive work in the area of "culture(s)".
> >   
>
> I would say its the cultural studies people--working from a convergence of English marxism (Hill, Thompson, Williams, etc) and Western Marxism (Gramsci, Althusser, Frankfurters) and a large dollop of French don't-call-them-post (Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard) who have been most responsible for pushing the question of culture onto the agenda of the social sciences.  Anthropologists have engaged intensely with this development, while sociologists have been much more stand-offish.  In its own way, Wallerstein's work represents one of the more considered responses to this development.
>
> Steven Sherman