13 Cultural Idealism in the American Century

1. Introduction: cultural idealism

By 1960, the neo-evolutionary materialism advocated by Leslie White, Julian Steward, and Marvin Harris was transforming American anthropology. But other developments were happening as well, especially in cultural anthropology. A growing number of cultural anthropologists were developing an interest in art, religion, worldview, and language, building on developments in the humanities, especially fields adjacent to the philosophy of language and linguistics. These developments can usefully be gathered together under the label of cultural idealism.  That said, it is probably worth noting that no one doing humanistic anthropology labeled their work as cultural idealism. The preferred labels were symbolic anthropology, humanistic anthropology, interpretive anthropology, and structuralism. The distinction between cultural idealism and cultural materialism that Harris utilized built on a distinction that goes back to the work of Karl Marx in the 19th century. Marx noted that German philosophers like Hegel and Kant focused on ideas, while the Scottish political economists – including Adam Smith – focused on technologies and economics. The Germans favored philosophical idealism – history as the history of ideas – while the British favored philosophical materialism – history as the history of technological change. Marx favored the British approach. But the distinction is useful because the differences are real, they align with Marx’s reading, and it lets us reduce the many anthropologies that emerged in the 1960s to just two categories.

The developments leading to cultural idealism were varied and complex. Independent initiatives arose in the United States, France, and Britain, and then mixed together. It was sometimes observed that the British read French thinkers, while the French read the Americans, and the Americans read the British. Thus ideas might begin anywhere, and soon enough were everywhere. By 1970 these national traditions were well blended. As a result they can be difficult to tease apart. What unified these approaches – making the general label of cultural idealism appropriate – was that they all conceptualized culture as symbolic meanings or semiotic relations. That conceptual emphasis quickly led to shifts away from scientific research methods toward humanistic methods aligned with literature, history, art, and philosophy. In this chapter we will briefly introduce the conceptual foundations of cultural idealism, and then examine humanistic research methodologies.

2. Semiotic Concepts of Culture

At the heart of all idealist approaches is the concept of symbolic meaning. Semiotic concepts help us understand the idea of symbolic meanings (semiotics is the study of how information is created and transmitted). From a semiotic perspective, information can take varied forms, and can be transmitted in varied ways. Semiotics attempts to express what is shared and what varies in information systems using a common set of concepts.

We will combine the work of two thinkers to develop a definition of symbolic meaning.

The first thinker is a Swiss linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure developed a semiotic approach to the study of human languages that influenced the development of structural linguistics. Saussure began by noting that all information requires material expression to exist: without material expression using voice, gesture, or writing, language has no existence. Information must take material form. To explain this we can start with three concepts: signs, signifiers, and the signified. We begin with the concept of a sign – a material entity that “carries” information. Each sign has two facets: its materiality, which makes it what Saussure called a signifier, and the meaning of significance that the sign carries, which Saussure called the signified.

Sign relations bring together signifiers and their significance: their materiality, and what they convey or mean. Importantly, sign relations can be created in varied ways. To grasp sign relations, we need to shift our discussion to an American philosopher named Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Like Saussure, Peirce made fundamental contributions to semiotics and the philosophy of language. For our purposes, his thinking on sign relations is most important.

Among the varied ways that a signifier can be connected to the significance it carries, Peirce identified three.

• Indexical sign relations involve a direct connection between the signifier and its meaning. Hence, when you smell or see smoke, you know there is a fire.
• Iconic sign relations require no direct physical connection. They are instead established by the work of resemblance.The resemblance can find varied material expression, such as auditory or visual.
• Lastly comes symbolic sign relations. There is in this case neither any direct connection nor any work of resemblance. The relationship between the signifier and its significance is purely arbitrary and conventional: it exists because a community of people agree it exists.

If you look at this page, or have a screen reader read it, you will encounter arrangements of material signs in print and sound. Every aspect of this arrangement is symbolic in a Peircian sense. Every letter, every sound, the grouping of letters into words, and the arrangement of words broken into sentences, which are ordered in rows arranged from top to bottom, broken into paragraphs – all of this is a symbolic system. The pattern is only there because we agree on it. We construct intelligibility through symbolic forms.

And that point is fundamental: semiotic approaches argue that culture is fundamentally constructed from symbolic meanings. While it is true that human beings like to stir limited amounts of iconic resemblance and physical indexicality into their symbolic systems, we overwhelmingly live in symbolic worlds that exist only because we participate in a community of people who agree on what the patterns are, and what they mean.

Recognizing the power of symbolic meanings was the most important contribution of linguistics and the philosophy of language in the 20th century. Anthropologists and others generalized and expanded this insight beyond language, applying it to everything cultural, to any and all things modified by human action. Or some of them did. Culture, from this perspective, is a symbolic system that is patterned and ordered in highly specific ways. To enter a culture is to enter a new world of meaning.

3. Structural Linguistics and the Ethnography of Speaking

Despite the conceptual power of semiotics, anthropologists found it problematic. The work of Saussure illustrates the problem. In addition to his concept of the sign, Saussure also made a basic distinction between language and speaking. Because he wrote in French, language is referred to as Langue, and speaking as Parole. You may recall that the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posited a realm of perfect, essential forms – such as circles that were truly circular – and the imperfect world we actually live in, which is filled with poorly executed circles. Saussure borrowed this distinction – between perfect essence and the imperfect actuality – and applied it to semiotics.

When we study a language, he argued, we encounter only imperfect, situated expressions of the essential code that lies behind it. Saussure called the rule governed, perfect, orderly and complete set of rules Langue. He named the imperfect expressions of that system in actual speech encounters, where people talk to one another in concrete places, parole. Saussure argued that the job of the linguist was to discover the perfect code that made imperfect speech events possible. This was not knowledge that most speakers could share. They generally could not explain how they formed sounds, nor the grammatical rules that shaped their utterances. Later, the linguist Kenneth Pike would call the study of Langue etic linguistics (Pike, 1955). If one took an etic approach, once you understood the formal code, you could decipher any particular act of speaking, because speaking a language basically required expressing the code and de-coding the code.

Anthropologists were skeptical of structural approaches. Even anthropologists who were excited about the idea of describing symbolic worlds that were culturally particular were uncomfortable with reducing them to etic codes. The British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski – widely considered to be the inventor of 20th century ethnography – was one of the first to respond critically. The job of the ethnographer, Malinowski argued, was to capture speech in its emergent forms, situated in conversations in concrete places among speakers who had shared histories and relationships. To study a language through ethnography meant interpreting parole not just as fragments, but as cooperative, collective creations. Malinowski’s approach later came to be known as the ethnography of speaking.

If we imagine a spectrum extending from Saussure’s focus on Langue to Malinowski’s detailed ethnographic descriptions of Parole, it can help us map the differences in approaches taken by idealist anthropologists in the twentieth century. Following Saussure, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) focused on discovering and working out hidden semiotic codes that lay beyond the awareness of their speakers and found expression only in fragmentary form. From these fragments, Levi-Strauss sought to reconstruct the full semiotic code. Appropriately, Lev-Strauss called his approach structuralism (Levi-Strauss, 1958 ). At the other end of the spectrum, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) stayed closer to Malinowski, producing ethnographic accounts of symbolic systems. As his work developed, Geertz turned his attention to methods for interpreting symbolic meanings, which he called interpretive anthropology (Geertz, 1973). Anthropologists, Geertz noted, capture fragments of speech or texts. A text is speech removed from its context of utterance. To interpret a text we must reconstruct the context that gave it meaning. Geertz followed a philosopher of language named Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) in discussing interpretive reconstruction as thick description. A thick description endeavors to describe or interpret symbolic meanings rather than objective behaviors.

Two British anthropologists carved out their own distinctive approaches that fell somewhere between Levi-Strauss and Geertz. Victor Turner (1920-1983) developed a unique approach that joined the study of symbolic meanings to the study of ritual. In the late 1960s, Turner became something of a counter-cultural hero, as he toured the United States giving lectures on how ritual, pilgrimages, and calamities like wars or natural disasters could give rise to the experience of communitas – an experience of one-ness as a community (Turner, 1969). At the height of enthusiasm for Turner’s writings on the ritual process he emigrated to the USA. Late in his life, Turner developed a new approach that he called the anthropology of performance (Turner, 1986) which integrated his studies of ritual with theater .

Mary Douglas (1921-2007) extended Levi-Strauss’s work, focusing on how social relationships and patterns shaped symbolic meanings, something Peirce might have called the social indexicality of symbolic systems. Douglas developed an analytical approach she called grid/ group analysis. For example, societies that stressed group were obsessed with maintaining boundaries between insiders and outsiders. They would use symbolic systems to express their claims to purity and their alarm about the polluting threats of outsiders (Douglas, 1966). Later in her career she extended her analyses to the perception of risk, arguing that risk had more to do with the symbolic expression of social structures than rational analysis (Douglas, 1980).

In addition to structuralism, interpretive anthropology, and symbolic anthropology, there were other developments related to the varied ways humans experience and understand the world around them. Prominent among them was American ethnoscience or ethnosemantics. The original promise of ethnoscience was its empirical value: it claimed to offer a way to identify and document how cultures think through people (Frake 1964, 1985; Goodenough 1956, 2002).  The core method was conducting structured interviews, and asking questions that could elicit categories of thought. One might, for example, point at a dog, and ask your participant what they call the dog (as a category). Perhaps they respond “an animal” or perhaps “a canine.” The ethnoscientist requests additional detail: “What are some other kinds of animals?” They continue working until they have elicited an exhaustive system of classifications. By 1970, however, ethnoscience had been largely abandoned by a new generation of cognitive anthropologists who drew more heavily on cognitive psychology than linguistics.

4. Idealists and Materialists, Humanists and Scientists

When anthropologists visit with scholars outside of anthropology, we sometimes represent anthropology as uniquely positioned to span and unify the natural sciences and the humanities. This is perhaps best captured by Eric Wolf:: “Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences, and the most scientific of the humanities” (Wolf, 1964). Yet, very often anthropology has come closer to being the central battlefield between the sciences and humanities than a  point of unity. Indeed, from the beginnings of modern Western anthropology – arguably since the Enlightenment generated the Counter-Enlightenment, and certainly since the field emerged with some consistency during the long decade of the 1860s – materialist efforts to apply scientific methods to the study of human society and behavior have met with theological, and later, humanistic resistance.

Edward Tylor, one of the most influential figures in civilizational anthropology during the late 19th century, captured the resistance to scientific materialism clearly in 1871, in the opening pages of his work Primitive Culture. Tylor wrote that “modern investigator’s recognize… the unity of nature, the fixity of its laws, the definite sequence of cause and effect….” – and this is the case in all of the physical sciences. However, Tylor continued, “when we come to… human feeling and action, thought and language, knowledge and art, a change appears….” Suddenly, science is not welcome. He concluded that “the world is [not]… prepared to accept the… study of human life as a branch of natural science” (Tylor 1871: 2). A century later, this reluctance to take a materialist, scientific approach to human culture remains as prominent in anthropology as it had been when Tylor was writing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the debates between cultural materialists and cultural idealists in the 1960s and 1970s.

The differences between cultural materialists and cultural idealists were both conceptual and methodological, and we can summarize them as follows.

Conceptually, the opposition is between idealist and materialist concepts of culture.

• Materialist concept of culture:
  • Culture is an extragenetic adaptation
  • Cultures vary in patterned ways that can be captured with a relatively small number of categories
  • Cultural variation reflects infrastructural influences
• Idealist concept of culture:
  • Culture is a system of symbolic meanings
  • Cultures are highly unique and difficult to classify
  • Cultural variation reflects the creative power of symbolic thought

Methodologically, the opposition is between scientific approaches modeled on the natural sciences (especially biology and geology), and humanistic approaches modeled on the humanities (such as philosophy and history). Cultural materialists sought to integrate anthropology with cognate sciences and transform anthropology into a science.  Humanistic anthropology is closely allied with cultural idealism. There is something about the study of cultural meanings that calls out for a humanistic response. Humanistic anthropologists are among the most vocal defenders of traditional ethnographic fieldwork. Their ethnographic goal is to capture the patterns of meaning that shape human experiences across cultures. They often focus their studies on language, art, and religion.

By 1970, these two orientations divided the field of anthropology, but they were not peculiar to anthropology. Universities as a whole were increasingly divided into two cultures – one consisting of the natural sciences, and the other the humanities. Anthropologists were pulled into these dynamics. These divisions continue to shape academic life 50 years later, but the situation became more complex after 1975/