Social Anthropology, Radical Alterity And Culture (original) (raw)

1992, Canberra Anthropology

If not millions, at least thousands of first-year anthropology students have encountered the discipline through two editions of Roger M. Keesing's book Cultural anthropology: a comparative perspective (1976 and 1981). In it the author suggests a definition of culture in phrases which by now must have been almost endlessly quoted. Cultures are ideational systems which comprise systems of shared ideas, systems of concepts and rules and meanings that underlie and are expressed in the ways that humans live. Culture, so defined, refers to what humans learn, not what they do and make (Keesing 1981:68-69).* Later in the same chapter, under the heading 'The danger of reification', Keesing warns: 'A culture' is always a composite, an abstraction created as an analytical simplification ... But there is a danger of taking this abstraction we have created as having a concreteness, an existence as an entity and causal agent 'it' cannot have. Both specialists and nonspecialists are prone to talk about 'a culture' as if it could be a causative agent... or a conscious being ... as if 'a culture' could do things ... We need to guard against the temptation to reify and falsely concretize culture as a 'thing', to remember that 'it' is a strategically useful abstraction from the distributed knowledge of individuals in communities (1981:72). In his recent paper, 'Theories of culture revisited', Keesing observes that his warning has not been heeded. 'With our all-inclusive conception of "culture", as it has passed into popular discourse, have gone our habits of talk that reify, personify and essentialize' (1990a:48). Moreover, '[i]f radical alterity did not exist, it would be anthropology's project to invent it' (1990a:46). This view echoes perspectives which meanwhile have been propagated in such widely cited works as Anthropology as cultural critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986), Writing culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and Culture and truth (Rosaldo 1989), to mention just three. While few anthropologists would disagree with the view that we ought not to reify culture, it seems to me important to retain the concept itself. Responding in this article to Keesing I would warn therefore against its total deconstruction. It is true, but presumably superfluous to state, that people (within a defined area or tradition) are not one hundred per cent 'cultural' in the sense that they have learned