Culture In Practice by Marshall Sahlins, Introduction

1. Culture in Practice
Selected Essays
Marshall Sahlins
METU Faculty of Architecture Department of Industrial Design
ID501 Advanced Project Development
Nur Yıldırım

2. Overview
• From a historical point of view, Sahlins covers the
movements and ideas that effect understanding of notion of
culture through late history
• From anthropologic and sociologic literature, various
determinist views on culture are evaluated
• Economic, ideologic and political reasons that influence
culture studies are examined

3. Keywords
• Culture studies, anthropology, modernity, imperialism, capitalism,
• New Criticism, relativism, historicism, poststructuralism, structuralism,
cosmography
Aim and Scope
• written over the course of thirty years, text collected here represent a
temporal succession of interests and topics
• cultural integrity of indigenous peoples; marginal to history and modernity,
their struggle to encompass what is happening to them in the terms of their
own world system: peripheral culture of modernity.
• cultural distinctiveness of the peoples, not apart from or before Western
capitalism but even as they endure world-capitalist juggernaut.

4. Reviewed Literature
60s and 70s cultural studies,Vietnam War with its transitional role, White's
anthropology, structuralist and functionalist approaches and Boas's cosmography
Leslie White; (positivist materialism and foundationalist symbolism), Culture is an
independent, self moving order, of which human action could only be the
expression. Culture is determining, individual subjects determined.
‘Discourse’: the process through which social reality comes into being.
Anthropology serves to Western imperialsm: ‘Cultural diversity: a hegemonic act
of differencing. The concept of culture is an instrument of discrimination,
incarcerate the peoples otherness.’
How people indigenize their modernity and their history?

5. Symbolic side of White’s anthropology: The symbol is the origin of human
behavior,
Ways in which people meaningfully construct their existence,
Ordering and disordering,
and not genetically determined: different cultures as various human forms of life.
Along White's determining technology, Sahlins mentions Ferdinand de Saussure
and John Locke among the determination of human signifying.
Ideas determine how people classify and relate to objects in different ways.
White as technological determinist: Hunters and gatherers with axes and simple
tools should have a correspondingly simple social order and limited ideas of
cosmos.

6. American cultural anthropologists vs British social anthropologists
Anglo-French tradition of ‘civilization’ as something of an ideological overlay on
the more basic stuff of human behavior and interaction.
Structural functionalists, culture was the ideational and representational
complement of the real object
Culture is the expressive and customary means by which a social system is
maintained (common in Western social sciences)
Culture, in positivism before 60s, is difference in customs.
Culture and society relation, former is historical, where latter is generalizable
across societies, (therefore one can have a science of society but only a history
of culture.).
Cultural forms as abstractions, and what is the anthropological object, cultural
order or social structure? Inclusive of system of social relations.
With inclusion of social relations, culture concept encompasses any kinds of
human practice, everything organized symbolically.

7. Culture of a people includes their social structures as well as their economy,
their technology, language and ideas.
Culture of politics or economy is misuse according to Sahlins, since they are
culture themselves.
Material and the symbolic contradiction,
60s, antithesis between domestic ideas of cultural ecology and the importation
of French structuralism,
Structuralist approach reduces everything to utilitarian behavior.
Utilitarian economics and rational-cultural logics on economic bases to explain
the values and uses of things.
Levi-Strauss (The Savage Mind) with due homeages to Marx; there is always a
mediator between praxis and practice, namely 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 (1966:130)

8. Tension between utilitarian determinism of culture and cultural determinations
of utility: symbolic has resolved partly.
Sahlins continues with Boas's point of view, cosmography: in opposition to
scientific generalization, it emphasizes single facts. Law searching and fact-
dominating physicist vs cosmographer with his object of affiliation.
Cultural relativism; the practices must be placed in their own context and
positional values in order to be understood.
Vietnam War - transformed a cultural physicist to cosmographer: Antiwar
movement in University of Michigan in 1965.
‘Historical agency is a relationship to the cultural order: an embodiment of
collective powers in individual persons.’
Social take up of individual doings whose consequences were due to the society,
not the intention, a social-historical conjuncture.

9. Teach-in in Michigan University is contingent and idiosyncratic, a special case
that depends on persons and situation. It was logical but not logically
determined.
Sartre, personification of cultural universals; individuality had only a mediated
relation to the totality. ‘Valery is a petit bourgeois individual, but not every petit
bourgeois individual is Valery’. Social formation does not determine the
individuality of the leaders it gives itself.
Different expressions; practices whose reasons are sufficient to their existence
but never necessary.
Anthropological cosmography, history of structures through the understanding
of a particular and distinctive things.

10. 'Cultures are relative and historical forms of life with particular validity without
some universal necessity'.
According to Sahlins, anthropology is a science that examines the reasons
behind human things, not causes, therefore it is a different science that uses its
object as its method.
Symbolic and material expression of things; anthropologist recapitulates
symbolic operations by which customs are produced.
Also referring to 'culture and nature' idiom, he states that anthropological
science should respect the specificity of the cultural object in order to
understand its through its attributes that can be found in human mind.

11. Sum up
In his introduction, Sahlins evaluates the notion of culture historically, and
discusses the movements that effect approaches to culture through time.
Culture as a concept has been examined through social sciences by
anthropologists and sociologists. They tried to come up with determinants that
shape culture such as biological, economic or utilitarian.
History, societies and specificity of cultures in context are evaluated in relation,
where the role of individual is also questioned.