6. Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropologists immerse themselves in a culture, live with the people, and study them in as wide a perspective as possible. Raymond Firth went to the island of Tikopia in the South Pacific and studied the culture and people there—writing We, the Tikopia. Robert and Helen Lynd studied Muncie, Indiana, and wrote about it in their book Middletown. Hortense Powdermaker studied the culture of Hollywood and wrote about it in Hollywood, the Dream Factory.
Cultural anthropology, then, is the study of living cultures—most often tribal cultures, but not necessarily. A culture is usually defined in anthropology as the learned behavior of a people. As I said before, I think this definition is too restrictive, because everything we do has both a biological source and a learned source.
The Ordinary and the Strange
Anthropology is a good way of putting together ordinary daily life and the exotic or strange. Most anthropologists take part, in an everyday way, in a culture that most often seems exotic or very different—and then write about it. Anthropologists who don't go to tribal cultures often go to non-tribal places far from home. Someone interested in non-western music might study it in Egypt or China. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson studied dance in Bali. Someone who grew up in Washington and is interested in farming communities might study a village in India [see, for example, http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/RDF/Village_India.htm].
In every instance, when we study culture we're studying mind and what comes from it; because culture is the result of mind. That is why I value a working definition of anthropology given by Eli Siegel in an Aesthetic Realism lesson on anthropology in 1970. This definition differentiates anthropology from every other study:
Anthropology is the study of mind where it begins and in places where it begins.
"Mind where it begins": You can be in a library cubicle in Harvard and yet your mind where it begins, your deepest hopes and fears, has the same basis as anyone's in a prehistoric culture or a culture 10,000 miles away. And that's why the study of your mind where it begins is part of anthropology. Our minds, at their beginnings, are often surprisingly unknown to us, like a continent waiting to be discovered.
"And in places where it begins": And you can be an anthropologist in central Australia or deep in the tributaries of the Amazon—where people's culture, their thoughts and feelings, have similarities to people who lived thousands of years ago, closer to the time when humanity began.
The Need for Self-Knowledge
In cultural anthropology we do our observing without instruments like a microscope that make invisible things visible. We use our own eyes and minds as the instruments of observation and analysis. Certainly videotaping and other recording devices are an invaluable part of anthropology. Computers and statistical formulae are also wonderful analytic tools. But in the long run, the mind—that primitive and sophisticated tool—is the anthropological instrument of choice. So, just as an astronomer has to understand his telescope or he can't use it very well, the better we understand our own minds the better we can use them as scientists.
Quite the contrary of making the anthropological scientist emotionless, the finest anthropologists, such as Lewis Henry Morgan, Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas, A.R. Radcliffe-Browne, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, have feelings about the people he or she studies. Some of these feelings can be criticized, certainly, and some can be applauded.
Since our feelings affect our observations, they must be the most accurate feelings possible. Otherwise they interfere with the scientific usefulness of our observations; we change the facts to suit ourselves. They can be, for example, presented too coldly or wrongly "heated," or both. The observations of Reo Fortune in his intense book The Sorcerers of Dobu, have been questioned by some anthropologists. Dr. Fortune seemed to make the Dobu too "paranoid." Earlier observers (like Malinowski) saw the Dobu as cooperative and affable. Was there some error in how Fortune saw that slanted his observations? Or had there been a change in Dobu, a sudden scarcity of food, for example, that soured the Dobuan view of the world? Maybe Fortune experienced the result of that change. We do not know.
This dilemma is one of the reasons that we know self-knowledge must be part of anthropology. And that which adds to self-knowledge must be part of the anthropology curriculum.That is why I regard Aesthetic Realism, which is the preeminent science of self, as indispensible.
A Culture Consists of Selves
Consider the fact that every culture consists of selves. The Samoan culture consists of selves in Samoa. And at this time, the study of self in anthropology is barely beginning.
Do we need to study what the self is, to understand every aspect of culture? Do we need to know what emotion is? What pleasure is? What pain is? Indisputably, we do.
Culture Has Many Aspects: From Geography to Family to Religion & More
How the opposites are at the center of cultural anthropology can best be seen if each aspect of culture is looked at individually. Every human society has a number of divisions because every self is related to the world economically, socially, scientifically, aesthetically, and in terms of religion.
Consequently an anthropologist, living right now in the mountains of New Guinea or the Upper Amazon in Brazil, has to learn these things about the people:
1. The geography they live in, how it affects culture and mind.
2. How they make a living: their economics.
3. How they are organized; family structure, political divisions.
4. Their scientific knowledge: what they make and know.
5. Their aesthetics: art, dance, mythology, song, poetry.
6. Their religion: the names and powers of the gods; their magic and rituals and beliefs.
1. Geography or environment
In describing a culture one must first describe the environment. A child growing up in the desert, hunting small game and carrying bows and arrows every day has a different life from a child of the rich mountain valleys of New Guinea, where sweet potatoes are the main food and farming is the way of life.
Some anthropologists have shown that farming people, because they must work together, conserve seed, store their grain or yams, tend to be conservative and docile. While on the other hand hunters, working as individuals, tend to have more initiative. Well, perhaps. But some relation of environment and person is always present.
Because every self has a relation to the world, every culture has art showing the world, the environment, has meaning. The ancient Egyptians felt this about their environment; it is respect and love:
Thy dawn, O Ra, opens the new horizon.
The cattle roam again across the fields;
Birds flutter in the marsh, and lift their wings
Also in adoration, and the flocks
Run with delight through all the pleasant meadows.
(The World's Best Poems, Van Doren and Lapolla)
The opposites one feels most saliently are Self and World—a self revering reality. This is present in every culture on earth and must be looked for, consciously.
2. Economics
All people have to make a living: produce things, distribute them, and use them. This is economics. World and self are the biggest opposites here too. There is a drama of world and self: The earth has usable plants, animals, wood, stone; and then— selves do all kinds of activities to get these things, work on them, distribute them, and use them.
In economics the things of the world are used by women and men to sustain life, and sometimes, it must be said, to end it. The two important opposites are, (1) What the world provides or the resources, and (2) What selves do with the resources—how selves dig in the earth, plant gardens and weed them, gather seeds, berries, roots; hunt meat, carve wood, shape stone: or labor.
I learned this from Eli Siegel, who wrote about the vital importance of understanding these two elemental factors in one of his earliest essays:
The land here is used to mean things like air, water, animals and so on belonging to nature....From the land come violets, automobiles, books, watches, silk, and foods of all kinds...everything comes from the land...but there is something else to, let's say, a household knife. That thing is altogether labor.
Although it's a bit easier to see in "primitive economics," it's true that our own economic system only has the same two factors, land and labor: for the third factor so often made much of,
capital, is made up of land and labor—and nothing more:
Capital, as even the college economic books say, is wealth that can be used to produce more wealth. But this wealth comes from the land, just as wealth directly consumed does, and comes from there through labor.
If we see the primacy of these two factors, and the secondary, derivative nature of capital, rent, and so on, the ethics of any economy become clearer. I will only touch on this now. It arises from the question, Who should own the land? Land tenure has taken many forms historically, but perhaps the earliest feeling, and certainly the most truthful and ethical feeling, is that land belongs to no individual but all the people living on it. Similarly to the question, Who should own the things a person makes with the labor of his or her own body? there is evidence that the earliest, and deepest feeling is that the person who made a thing owns it.
In any system of economics, as I said earlier about Oksapmin, New Guinea, there is an ethical and dialectical situation that is very intense. Once a person gets beyond having made his house, his arrows, her net bag, and planted their sweet potatoes or killed his antelope or gathered her roots, berries, nuts, it is necessary to distribute what one has got. The ethical question arises when we have to decide what to keep for oneself and what others deserve.
In every culture a person who keeps too much is considered selfish. And a person who gives away too much and does not take care of oneself is considered a fool. The right relation of care for oneself and consideration for others is looked for by all cultures. The opposites, as before, are Self and World: oneself and the other people of this world. The big dilemma in human life, and that includes economics, is that
between the self as for the world and the self as against it.
Jules Henry tells us enough to see that the Pilagá Indians of Argentina have two opposed attitudes to the world which is the beginning point for this dilemma in economics. First, there is a tremendous, pervasive against feeling toward the world, including people.
Here is some of Henry's evidence that the Pilagá feel the world is against them: Women see men as against them: "Pilaga women show considerable hostility to the men and say the men are 'no good.'" People feel other villages are against them: "Men and women of strange villages are always felt to be sorcerers." And very early the feeling of a hostile world occurs: "When the baby at last comes into the world it is received with great warmth but as time passes it is gradually rejected." When toddlers try to like the world, already something in them opposes it and they are afraid: "During the period when the baby is investigating the outer world it is almost continuously in tears."
And yet, deeply the Pilagá want to share. They have an ethical demand, everything must be shared among all relatives. Since frequently there may not be enough to go around, resentment is engendered. There is a terrific conflict in selves.
Meanwhile, Ruth Benedict, commenting on the Pilaga, says they are like us: "The behavior shown is in detail analogous to the behavior described from our own society."
3. Social Organization
Every society has a group structure; that is, people are differentiated into sub-groups which, together, make the whole society. The opposites here are whole and part. Questions about whole and part are: Do we belong to parents? Spouse? Children? Church? School? Town? Country? World? All at once? Do we play one against the other or see them as going along together?
Technically, in just about every culture, the smallest group is the nuclear family—mother, father, and children. They are a whole unit. They are also part of the next larger unit—the extended family. The extended family is really a cluster of overlapping nuclear families. They are the nuclear families of the inlaws, the aunts and uncles and cousins, the grandparents.
In turn each of these extended families come together to make up a larger unit called the clan or the kindred.
Now the units get even larger. Several related clans make up a phratry. A tribe is a number of related phratries.
This means that a tribe of six thousand people living in Africa is really a big family. It's like a family of five living in a house in Mt. Vernon, NY, or Elmhurst, IL. Our families even have tribal chiefs (that's Grandpa). And when the family comes for a holiday we say, "Here comes the whole tribe."
A useful way of thinking about a society is called the organic metaphor. It comes from Herbert Spencer. He described how every society is like a human body: it is a whole, but it divides into smaller and'smaller parts: organs, tissues, and cells. It is subdivided and integrated at the same time. The parts fit together and help each other. If they fight, the body is ill. And every society has conflict and even social pathology.
Every group, including a family, is a number of people who are together for a particular purpose. That is, the group has a function. It does something. When you describe how groups are organized, and what they are organized to do, you are describing social organization.
The purpose of any group is to provide what each individual needs and at the same time provide what all people need. It is a profound attempt to put together the opposites of one and many, which is an aesthetic purpose. The best description of society that I have seen is in Eli Siegel's definition Definitions, and Comment:
Society.—Society is selves seen as together, or one.
Wrote Mr. Siegel, "The question about society is whether the existence of other "I's" and their apprehension by a single "I", makes for the growth of the "I" apprehending the others."
So in terms of the family, does the existence of other members of the family, and our understanding of them, make us more ourselves or less?
Most often the family is said to have these functions: it provides new members for society (via reproduction), it takes care of them until they grow up, and it teaches them the way of life. These three functions concern parent and child.
Concerning husband and wife, the family is said to fulfill and regulate sex needs, to provide a means of giving and receiving affection, and to be an economically independent unit.
The cultural anthropologist looks at these things.
How the family accomplishes all this would be its organization: male and female roles, division of labor, division of food, and so on. All this is quite well worked out in anthropological description. However, anthropology has just begun to understand the effects of family life on the deepest self of an individual, both constructive and destructive.
Some of this can be seen in Jules Henry, where the conflict in self between liking the world and disliking it has been documented for the youngest members of Pilagá society. When the baby at last comes into the world it is received with great warmth. As time passes it is gradually rejected. A fundamental confusion results as to whether the world is friendly or not as the child generalizes about the whole world from its limited experience.
4. Art and Science.
Exactness. Science consists of a body of knowledge. People study the world they are in and gather knowledge of its soil, medicinal plants, sources of food, and more. This is called "ethnoscience," tribal science.
Usefulness. Science also consists of practical, dynamic procedures. As people study the world, they also make objects based on knowledge, including aerodynamically sound arrows, chip-proof stone axes, sturdy clothing and snug houses. Science is exact and useful.
Art. Science and art stand for opposites. Science stands for knowing and art stands for feeling. In terms of current psychology, science leads with cognition and art leads with affect. Of course both art and science make a one of emotion and logic.
Not only do people want to know the world, they want to feel it—the beauty of a sunset or of Bird of Paradise plumes is appreciated in New Guinea. And people want to express their feelings in art: by dancing, singing, drawing, speaking poetic words.
It is clear that all people care for art, and want to make their useful water-gourds, bows, arrows, and utensils as beautiful as possible. In his Primitive Art Franz Boas, who has been called the father of American anthropology, tells that a useful object becomes an art object when something called form is added to its usefulness.
A lopsided, crudely made bowl can
hold a fish. It is useful. But when it is symmetrical, graceful, carefully made, it is more than useful: it is beautifully useful. It has what Clive Bell in his historic essay Art has called significant form. It causes what Benedetto Croce calls the aesthetic emotion.
There are bowls from the Trobriand Islands that cause such feeling, and from Sweden, and from Japan, and from elsewhere. Art is universal.
Exactly what causes this emotion? Exactly what is form? Eli Siegel explained it: " All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves" (Four Statements of Aesthetic Realism).
I gave one example earlier (see above), a dance of the Nyakyusa of West Africa—in which the opposites of Freedom and Order are made one. And we can ask, is this what we are going after in ourselves?—Do we hope to be free, excited? Do we hope to be orderly, organized, reposeful? you will see the only answer to both is yes. The two alternatives are to be orderly, restricted, and bored—which is bad; or to be excited, wild, sloppy, and even hurtful which also is not good. We want to be BOTH free and orderly in our lives!
In Oksapmin Society and World view I gave a survey on the subject of opposites in tribal art. Here are some sentences:
A number of anthropologists have observed that opposites are put together in "primitive" art and mythology in particular objects of art and particular myths, and sometimes it has been observed that inner turmoil is assuaged by particular works of art or particular rituals, but it has not been said that the central purpose of culture is to solve this aesthetic problem. George Devreux (1964:362) writes:
Ideally the dynamic criterion of art is the straining of pure affect against pure (culturally structured) discipline.
Raymond Firth observes in "primitive" art as a whole, which he believes to be essentially like any other art, an expression of self-conflict and a resolution of it in the composition of the work of art itself:
For the resultant work of art to be effective there must not be merely conflict and tension, doubt and anxiety, but also a resolution of these in the personality. The chisel or the brush alone is not the solvent. Some fusion of the elements, some hierarchical order in the stimulus they give, must be arrived at for aesthetic creation to take place. (Elements of Social Organization, 1959, page 181)....
....[Therefore] we can see, in the art that particular peoples have traditionally liked for generations, a union of conflict and repose (Fernandez, 1966, 1968); a joining with tension of emotion and restraint (Devreux, 1964:362); a combination of aggression and nurturing, of male and female (Forge, 1965:8); a presentation of anxiety and its resolution (Firth, 1959:181); a resolution of the conflict between love and hate (Muensterberger, 1950:317); and a logical model to overcome such contradictions as that between life and death (Levi-Strauss, 1963:217, 226).
But it has not been said that the central purpose of culture is to solve this aesthetic problem. That remained for Eli Siegel to observe and prove.
5. Religion
The Basis
Every culture has religion. Arising from a consideration of this definition of religion, also by Mr. Siegel— "Religion is the attitude one has towards what one sees as the biggest or most powerful thing in the world," we can ask what, in each culture, is seen as the biggest or most powerful thing in the world? The common 20th century phrase "money is his religion" is a critical comment on what a person living in Western industrial capitalism can see as the biggest and most powerful thing in the world.
Meanwhile, the very cause of existence, the cause of the world, is seen as the biggest and most powerful thing by people in every culture I know. And that cause is generally seen as friendly: after all, it made us; it made the world we're in. It may be represented by one God or many gods, or godlike beings (such as Coyote or Old Man in the Native American thought).
Our attitude toward the cause of the world in any culture, is a compound of for and against. In ever so many ways, there is a feeling that the world, in its beginnings, is friendly to people. The feeling that the weather, and crops, and the health of the tribe, and its success in both war and peace, are governed by forces friendly to people is in every religion I know. Meanwhile, there are also feelings that these forces can be inconsiderate and malignant. People have burnt, thrown away, or broken their gods to punish them; and have given offerings to gods or spirits to appease them or please them.
This brings us to perhaps the most important opposites in religion: Personal and Impersonal. Natural forces are given personality. They are seen as men, and women, and animals with the power to be angry or pleased with us. The thunder in the sky is seen as the Thunderbird in the Native American pantheon. The Earth Mother, the Sky Father, the Corn Maiden, and the Cloud people of the New Mexico Pueblos are all representations of the power of Earth to be friendly to humanity; and even as part of that friendliness, to avenge sin.
These forces are personal and impersonal at once. The impersonal orb the Sun was also a person: the Greek god Apollo. The cereal growing in the field, a plant, was represented by a human—a girl named Ceres in ancient Rome. Fire—a chemical reaction—was inhabited by the god of ancient India named Agni.
The impersonal earth—once given the name of a woman, the goddess Gea—provides all growing things, all rivers, all animals, all clouds and skies. Indeed, the power of causing growth is chemistry and biology as friendly to humanity.
Often, however, spirits or gods are seemingly unfriendly. According to Melford Spiro, for instance, the spirits of the Ifaluk atoll in the Southern Pacific are both good and bad; and the bad ones are very bad.Malevolent ghosts, called alus, delight in causing evil. They are seen as responsible for any immoral behavior committed by the Ifaluk, and they cause illness by the indiscriminate possession of any member of their lineage. ("Ifaluk Ghosts," Personalities and Cultures, p. 240.)
The presentation of gods, spirits, ghosts as friendly and unfriendly corresponds to humanity's divided view of the world as on the one hand radiantly friendly and on the other hand the cause of smallpox, the black death, floods, droughts, earthquakes.
Spiro explains this belief in bad ghosts as the result of childhood confusion. While this may be the case, I believe that the idea which I have just expressed, arising from the Aesthetic Realism method—that the human self has two ways of seeing the world itself—is a more fundamental explanation and goes deeper. This is from Mr. Siegel's description of the diametrically opposed pleasures every self goes after:
There are two means, as Aesthetic Realism sees it, of bringing some satisfaction to ourselves. The first is, the seeing of something like a sunset, a poem, a concerto, which can stand for the world and which pleases us through what it is...This is the aesthetic victory, which is the most sensible of all victories. The other victory is our ability to depreciate anything that exists. To see the world as an impossible mess—and this is often not difficult at all—gives a certain triumph to the individual (Self and WorldI, p. 11).
There is evidence that the existence of malevolent spirits in many cultures has two causes. First is the disposition to think the world is an unfriendly, disorderly mess. Second is the feeling that the gods are angry because we ourselves have been hateful, sinful, unjust—that is, the feeling of guilt. In contemporary New York City, this guilt can show itself as excessive suspicion, depression, even an anxiety attack. On a Pacific Island it can show itself similarly—as the belief that punishing influences or evil ghosts are in the world ready to attack.
On the whole, we can conceive of both friendly and unfriendly forces as incitements to have a fair view of reality. Their essential purpose, as people from the Arctic to Tierra del Puego evidence, is to encourage man's deep like of the universe. They represent the deepest unconscious of human beings, shown in religious form.
Rituals and Such Matters: Thinking about the Opposites of Freedom and Order as One
In every culture there are an uncountable number of rituals, including very complex ones like the Easter services in American Christianity, and the Maturity rites of a girl in the Washo tribe of Nevada. Rituals can seem simple too, like when we toast the host at a party and when we shake hands with a new acquaintance.
Now it is clear that every ritual is inseparable from the selves of the people doing it. It is a self that (1) has knowledge, and learned the ritual; and (2) it's a self that has feelings during the ritual. Even if a ritual is a thousand years old, it came, once, from somebody's honest feeling that "this is the way to do it." During a ritual we often feel spontaneous and fresh emotion--even while the things we do and say have been taught, learned, cultivated, planned.
According to Fairchild's Dictionary of Sociology a ritual, among many tribal people, is pleasing to the gods—and deviations from the established ritual are punished. Punishing deviations indicates a great desire for order, uniformity. Yet descriptions of rituals show abandon too--both opposites are present. Usually this is not described, but it's so. Look at this description from West Africa. You can see order and freedom--"compulsion" and "leaping," for example--working together and intensifying one another:
Outside the drums and the gongs began their intricate compulsion of thud and clangor. The young men danced, feet wide apart, leaping and crouching, and rippling muscles of their backs highlighted by sweat and sun. The women danced, shuffling, swaying, subtle movements of the hips and stomach. (Elenore Smith Bowen, Return to Laughter, American Museum of Natural History, 1964, p. 176.)
In every dance, whether religious or not, we can see these opposites. And the subject of dance includes waltzing at a cotillion in 1812 and a circular Pine Nut Dance at Battle Mountain in Nevada in the fall. Both waltz and pine nut dance are planned and spontaneously felt at once.
I am writing now about a pair of opposites that are at the very basis of art. In Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?, for example, Eli Siegel asks:
1. Freedom and Order. Does every instance of beauty in nature and beauty as the artist presents it have something unrestricted, unexpected, uncontrolled?—and does this beautiful thing in nature or beautiful thing coming from the artist's mind have, too, something accurate, sensible, logically justifiable, which can be called order?
The particular form a ritual takes depends on the tribe, the culture, and it's learned. Yet the fact that every ritual is a oneness of freedom and order is not learned. It arises from the beginnings of every self. In African dance, the deep desire in every self to feel excitement, motion, freedom is satisfied. At exactly the same moment, the deep desire in every self to be orderly, contained, secure, is satisfied. Is the dance wild? Yes. Is it profoundly orderly? Yes. It is both.
Here's how Eli Siegel describes how these two deep desires are in every self, in his Self and World:
The question confronting everyone is: Is it possible for a human being to do truly as he pleases, to give adequate regard to the intense uniqueness of the moment, to show his instincts (including the primeval), his impulses, his drives, his untrarameled personality—and at the same time satisfy his sense of order, of precision, or stability, of responsibility, of justice? Aesthetic Realism says, Yes; and wants the yes implemented (page 106).
We can see what people have done to implement it in fundamental ways, in the stable, precise, responsible aspects of every culture which are at one with feeling, impulse, individuality.
I believe every culture can best be understood when opposites are honestly looked for and found from the Aesthetic Realism point of view. Two we have just looked at are Freedom and Order.
CONCLUSION
It is my view that Aesthetic Realism, founded by Eli Siegel, adds to the organization of anthropology in two essential, indispensable, and wonderful ways:
First, the Siegel Theory of Opposites provides a way to see how each aspect of anthropology has an aesthetic structure—is composed of philosophic opposites like order and freedom, part and whole. This gives us an underlying structure that we can see running through all our anthropological data. It is like Newton's Theory of Gravitation in which a single force is described running through all the data on stars, planet, asteroids, and uniting them. Such a theory is necessary to every science.
Second, in showing that the human self is an aesthetic structure composed of opposites such as for and against, as well as selfishness and altruism, this method provides a way of seeing what all cultures have in common. The reason for this is that cultures no matter how different all arise from the same possibilities of self. And previously, the possibilities or structure of the human self had not been known.
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