Posts com a Tag ‘GOULET Jean-Guy (Res)’
Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account – KUPER (CSS)
KUPER, Adam. Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. 299p. Resenha de: GOULET Jean-Guy. Canadian Social Studies, v.38, n.3, p., 2004.
American academics are waging culture wars. (Not many dead.) Politicians urge cultural revolution (p. 1). Thus begins the introduction to a fascinating exploration of a recent chapter in the intellectual history that gave rise and prominence to ‘culture’ as a professional specialty and as a taken-for-granted concept in terms of which the citizenship at large discusses politics, economy, management, industry, media, and so on. One of the impulses from which this book has been written is the abuse of culture theory as a source of legitimization for apartheid in South Africa, where Kuper was an undergraduate in anthropology in the late 1950’s. Culture then superseded race as the objective fact on the basis of which to argue that those who shared a culture ought to live and breed together. To this day Kuper is suspicious of arguments that deny individuals the possibility to associate with whom they choose and so develop in ways that are not determined by their ethnicity and ancestry.
To expose the historical roots of cultural theory the book is divided into two parts. The first consists of two chapters. The initial chapter presents particular traditions of thinking about culture as seen in the work of Lucien Fevre (1878-1956), Norbert Elias (1897-1990) and Raymond Williams (1921-1988). Whereas German intellectuals advocated Kultur above the artificial civilization of the cosmopolitan, materialistic French, British intellectuals tied their notion of culture to the processes of industrialization and its ensuing socio-economic transformations. The second chapter focuses on the American tradition. Kroeber and Kluckhone are credited for constructing a distinctively American genealogy of the concept of culture. Parson built on this foundation to divide the intellectual labour between sociologist, psychologist and anthropologist giving to the latter, as a specialty, the concept of culture as a system of symbols.
Part II of the book focuses on the central project in postwar American cultural anthropology as developed by Geertz (chapter 3), Schneider (chapter 4), Sahlins (chapter 5), and by Sherry Ortner, Renato Rosaldo, George Marcus and James Clifford (chapter 6). These scholars who were granted tenure in the 1980’s promote a postmodernist anthropology born out of the recognition that the imperial project operated within the United States itself (p. 204). In a final chapter Kuper argues against the value of the concepts of culture and multiculturalism in discussions of identity. When difference becomes the basis for a claim to collective rights of those who share gender, race, ethnicity or disability (p. 224), Kuper sees a political agenda that constrains individuals to belong to the group to which they are assigned a priori..
In his criticism of the American project, Kuper operates from a number of vantage points. He chastises Geertz, who hails culture as the essential element in the definition of human nature and produces thick descriptions of local knowledge in Indonesia and Bali, for failing to understand local events in the light of what politicians, soldiers, and CIA operatives did when they not only shaped history but too often tortured and eliminated their enemies (p. 120). Kuper looks at Schneider through the psychoanalytical lens and identifies Schneider’s choice of kinship as a subject for deconstruction that becomes a way to perpetrate not only parricide but a wholesale slaughter of the ancestors(p. 132). Kuper presents Sahlins as Leslie White reincarnated as Lvi-Strauss (p. 198), a view that effectively captures Sahlin’s career path from Michigan to Paris and back to Chicago. In the end Kuper’s objection to the American project as a whole is a moral one, for It tends to draw attention away from what we have in common instead of encouraging us to communicate across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries, and to venture beyond them (p. 247).
First published in 1999, Kuper’s book was in its third printing in the year 2000, a clear indication of its importance. Against American anthropologists, Kuper argues that we ought to avoid the hyper-referential word culture altogether. Better, he claims, to talk more precisely of knowledge, or belief, or art, or technology, or traditions, or even of ideology (though similar problems are raised by the multivalent concept) (p. 10). This suggestion will not do. In the end, Kuper has not found a way out of the anthropological intellectual conundrum that he so elegantly explores. His book will remain, nonetheless, a masterpiece against which to measure the quality of other contributions in the enduring intellectual debate about the core business of anthropology.
Jean-Guy Goulet – Faculty of Human Sciences. Saint Paul University. Ottawa, Ontario.
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What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes – MARKS (CSS)
MARKS, Jonathan. What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes. Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA & London, England: University of California Press, Ltd. 2002, 312p. Resenha de: GOULET, Jean-Guy. Canadian Social Studies, v.39, n.1, p., 2004.
Imagine a Planet of the Apes on which a single specie, over seven million years, evolves into three related but distinct species: Homo, Pan (chimpanzee and bonobo), and Gorilla. Unique among them are human beings who ask What does it mean to be 98% chimpanzee? The answer is found in Jonathan Marks’s witty, insightful and critical essay.
In this book Marks accomplishes two important tasks. First, he convincingly argues that the reduction of important things in life to genetics is a recent cultural, non-scientific, phenomenon that calls for serious critical analysis. In a stance that some may find polemical he states unambiguously that technical sophistication and intellectual navet have been the twin hallmarks of human genetics since its origins as a science in the early part of the twentieth century (p. 2). Second, he challenges a wide range of taken-for granted views on race, inequality, sexual orientation, funding for research projects, and many other salient topics of public interest. In the process Marks offers refreshing insights into the fallacy of arguments put forward by authors, some of them scientists, who inappropriately use science to promote their social agenda.
While reading this book one comes to appreciate the kinds of questions and statements Marks come up with to get the reader to think. Consider the following: When a human skull encases 1400 cubic centimetres of brain, a chimp is luck to have a third of that. Is that 67% different? (p. 23); If we are similar but distinguishable from a gorilla ecologically, demographically, anatomically, mentally indeed every way except genetically does it follow that all the other standards of comparison are irrelevant, and the genetic comparison is transcendent? (p. 43); We are apes, but only in precisely the same way we are fish (p. 45); The overwhelming bulk of detectable genetic variation in the human species is between individuals in the same population. About 85% of it, in fact (p. 82); Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are indistinguishable genetically, but they know who they are and who they are not, by virtue of their cultural difference (p. 87).
Observations such as these cut to the heart of the matter. In the same vein Marks reminds his readers that Races aren’t there as natural facts, they are there as cultural facts, which overwhelm and redefine the relatively minor biological component they have (p. 136). He writes: I’m always astonished to find it asserted in the sociobiological literature that humans have a deep hereditary propensity for ‘xenophobia,’ fear or hatred of others, or more grandiosely, a genetic basis for genocide (p. 141). Marks, who notes that the simplest answer to such assertions is to point out that genocide policies are carried out between people biologically very similar but culturally very different, such as the Hutu and Tutsi, Bosnians and Serbs, Israelis and Palestinians, Huron and Iroquois, Germans and Jews, English and Irish (p. 142). It is cultural values and social agendas that shape human lives as historically situated humans strive to promote this or that social and political agendas to create a world more to their liking.
Of the twelve chapters in the book, four are based on previously published papers and three, chapters 6, 7 and 8, are based on published reviews of books. These are: Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It by J. Entine (2000); Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by R. Wrangham and D. Peterson (1996); and, The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity by P. Cavalieri and P. Singer (1993).
From one chapter to the next, Marks continuously keeps his sight on the ambiguous relationship between science and society. To illuminate the pitfalls of the uncritical and unwarranted misuse of poorly understood scientific knowledge he engages in lively discussions of the sociobiological view of males as naturally inclined to violence (chapter 7), of the Great Ape Project which promotes extending human rights to the great apes (chapter 8), of the Human Genome Project (chapter 8) and the Human Genome Diversity Project (chapter 9), of the controversy around the cloning of human beings (chapter 10), of the Creationist agenda (chapter 11), or of the eugenic movement (chapter 12).
In brief, this is a great book for all interested in contemporary debates in which claims are made about the social and cultural significance of genetic markers in humans and non-humans. The range of topics covered is wide. The writing is lively and thought provoking. The quest for sorting out science from pseudo science is relentless. In this way Marks accomplishes his purpose which is to challenge not science but scientism, an uncritical faith in science and scientists (p. 279).
Jean-Guy Goulet – Faculty of Human Sciences. Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Ontario.
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