To ask ‘what it means to be human’ is radically personal - answered only by unique individuals finding their way in the world. Yet it is also intensely social: of the thousands of different communities and languages on Earth, almost all of them have compellingly different ways of understanding the human experience.
"We are a wildly imaginative and creative species," declares Wade Davis in the video below. Davis, a renown anthropologist and explorer, backs up his claim in this video with fascinating accounts and photographs of humanity plumbing the depths of their cultural experience, psyche, flesh and environment in search of meaning and survival.
The genius of human culture is how we use it to understand and cope in the world, often surviving in impossible conditions. Far from viewing the world in a “romantic” or “nostalgic” way, Davis concludes with the provocative argument that without cultural diversity we may not be able to survive as a species.
I believe we simply cannot afford to diminish our ancestral repository of lived-experience and ways of being-in-the-world. Not only do we become culturally impoverished when diversity vanishes but we can also drastically decrease our capacity to imagine the world anew - thereby diminishing our ability to adapt to our gravest challenges in novel and humane ways. In short, without diversity in thought and deed we become terribly vulnerable to extinction.
Please take a moment to watch this fascinating presentation about how cultural diversity and human difference promotes human flourishing and ultimately protects us against the savagery and weakness of our greatest enemy: our own arrogance.
Wade Davis is a noted Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author and photographer whose work has focused on worldwide indigenous cultures, especially in North and South America and particularly involving the traditional uses and beliefs associated with psychoactive plants. Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book, The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti - which was subsequently adapted into a Hollywood film on the same title. Davis has published numerous scholarly papers and popular articles in for National Geographic, Time Magazine and Fortune, among others.
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12 comments:
Nice video. It resonates well with the Ghassan Hage video you posted a couple months ago.
I'm realizing more and more that complete cultural homogeneity is not possible. There are certainly culture (infamously the West) which try to homogenize and project an image of uniformity, but the image is always false and the homogeneity is always contested. Our job as anthropologists, I think, is to reveal that complexity, to resist those "world making" attempts and to show, to borrow from Hage, that we can be other than what we are. Or in the word of the World Social Forum "Another World is Possible."
It's easy, when faced with a world full of war, hunger, disease and environmental destruction, to become depressed. For me it is these complexities, these small victories multiplied a million times, that encourage me - not Obama taking the White House or COP15 or the Democrats gaining (and losing) a super-majority (although all of those reveal complexities in their own ways).
It's a great time to be an anthropologist!
LOL! Looks like you've been toking up with a bit too much of Wade's "zombie powder"...
@Jeremy
In one sense I agree with you: because each individual must assemble her or his own 'understanding' (cognitive orientation) about the world by starting from infancy to childhood to adult life and beyond, human behavior and cultural expressions can never be completely uniform. Each of us develops into a uniquely embodied amalgamation of experience, epigenesis and social coding. I really resonate with what Levi-Strauss wrote about how we are bricoleurs: creatures who "make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". In other words, we build ourselves out of the resources at hand but in necessarily individual ways.
Deleuze called these complexly expressed embodiments “becomings”, Lacan theorized it as the unfolding interaction between three registers: the Symbolic, the Imaginal and the Real - and I agree with both these fellas in that we are all creatures with layers and of inherent multiplicity and therefore also of ‘difference’. Thus as creatures of difference we are always somewhat heterogeneous.
That said, I think there are two things that make the issue even more complex:
1. Homogeneity is a matter of degree: people can have more or less degrees of difference between each other, and there are more or less degrees of difference between groups of people.
2. Even if unique individuals are always re-making the social world anew, with more or less contested identities and cultural practices, the material and environmental life-conditions in which people exist, and ‘become’, CAN be dominated, structured, made uniform and controlled enough to produce relatively homogenous modes of being and thinking.
@Jeremy (continued)
Take Capitalism for example: where I live, the consumer culture thrives and encourages ‘differences’ in hair cuts and music and breakfast cereals, all for the sake of promoting difference among people between individuals. Capitalism is actually geared to provide enough superfluous resources (products) for people to participate in the larger identity game – as the production of superficial difference. And this produced ‘identity game’ is a major feature of this general ‘culture’. This is the evil genius of capitalism: it systematically allows capitalists to tap into all too human capacities (e.g., for differentiation and ego-role taking) and exploits them in order to extract profit.
This is a situation where individuals are “free” to remake themselves within their capitalist-consumer culture but they never truly ‘escape’ it. Even if there are degrees of difference within a group there are still important (‘deep’) ways people remain similar. We remake ourselves under very specific conditions. The very LIFE CONDITIONS within which we ‘become’ are generated, produced and shaped by various forces, symbolic exchanges and material assemblages, and in often in competing and/or dominating ways. Therefore people living under very similar life-conditions become more homogenous than they would otherwise.
And this is what I, Wade Davis and others are warning against: the disintegration of different forms of life to be replaced by the false ‘production’ of difference under the life-conditions of Capitalism (conditions engineered for the sake of profit extraction by controlling elites).
In short, what I’m talking about is the erasure of ‘actual difference’ in forms of life and thought by the institutionalization of superficial differences produced by the ‘machines’ of profit and resource extraction.
If I was a responsible intellectual I would talk more about the nuances and contradictions inherent in my own perspective here but I’m not that responsible… But I’ll add, just as provocation perhaps, that in my understanding “culture” is not a thing at all – it is not an actually existing object or even group of objects in the world – but a concept that seeks to reify a whole network of processes, objects and relationships. And Anthropologists would do well to talk and theorize and investigate the actual relations, materials and assemblages that occasion any given human activity, and to let the concept of ‘culture’ fade in our interpretations.
Thanks for reading the blog!
m-
@ Yul
What specifically do you think interpret as 'drug-induced' illusion here? Do you have any specific criticisms?
Sure... the "value" of the diversity in "imagining" Wade's "zombie powder".
Sure it has "entertainment" value that anthropologists can milk dimwitted uneducated Western gawkers for and line their pockets with... but it has no value, other than an erroneous and self-enslaving sense of "meaning" to the Haitian people who practice these half-baked rituals.
Perhaps we should encourage Indonesian aboriginals to pursue head-hunting and cannibalism ALL in the increasingly sacred name of "cultural diversity"...
...after all Mr. Rousseau, "One feels like crawling on all fours after reading your work."
YUL: Sure... the "value" of the diversity in "imagining" Wade's "zombie powder". Sure it has "entertainment" value that anthropologists can milk dimwitted uneducated Western gawkers for and line their pockets with... but it has no value, other than an erroneous and self-enslaving sense of "meaning" to the Haitian people who practice these half-baked rituals.
ME: You make a good point, albeit with an ethnocentric (you knew the word would come out somewhere…) slant. Why protect cultural practices that are, for lack of a more technical term, stupid or useless, or harmful? Just for the sake of diversity? I think not.
But the problem is I don’t think we need to preserve or protect the entire corpus of cultural practices and beliefs of any given ‘culture’. I don’t think about it as a “all or nothing” issue. As an increasingly global society we can promote diversity everywhere and protect the integrity of any given culture, AT THE SAME TIME as encouraging the moral and intellectual development of all cultures. We can protect people’s customs AT THE SAME TIME as holding them to the highest standards of ethical judgment.
I am not as much as a cultural relativist as you may think. I adore science and have high hopes for certain kinds of human technology. And there are aspects of every ‘culture’ – including yours - that we should be content to let die out and then only remember with astonishment and credulity. But that does not mean that we should wipe out all the indigenous languages and ways of being and replace it with an individualistic homogenous consumer culture. Does it?
The way I see it, it’s not simply about choosing headhunters over marketing executives. It’s not about believing in Zombies vs. resurrected Jewish carpenters – it’s about the preservation and cultivation of various forms of life and multiplicity in order to maintain some semblance of resilience as through diversity. The more diverse we are as a species the more cultural resources we have to call upon in our efforts to adapt and thrive on this planet.
To be honest with you, what I would like to have happen is for all cultures to develop hybrid forms of life that embody the notion of Unitas Multiplex – or ‘unity in diversity’. These societies would be locally enmeshed and situated, culturally self-determinate, bi-lingual (promoting their own language while being fluent in a internationally supported vernacular - probably Mandarin Chinese or English) AND incorporating scientific knowledge and a global-cosmopolitan political sensibility and practical participation. I know that might sound awkward but it’s the shortest version I could give you without typing up another 1000 words. I will explain if you are interested.
Besides, you think we westerners don’t have stupid rituals? Believing that bread turns to flesh, or wine to blood, or the angels walk among us, or college hazing, or whatever…? So why can’t the Haitians, for example, believe in zombies at the same time as participating in a globally connected world?
YUL: Perhaps we should encourage Indonesian aboriginals to pursue head-hunting and cannibalism ALL in the increasingly sacred name of "cultural diversity"...after all Mr. Rousseau, "One feels like crawling on all fours after reading your work."
ME: Again, your point is a good one (even despite your overtly racist and primitive belief that people in non-capitalist cultures are like animals). “Cultural diversity” for its own sake would be stupid. But it’s not for its own sake.
First and foremost it should be encouraged on moral and ethical grounds – as a way to prevent imperialism, exploitation and domination. If an ethnic group has their way of life and systems of meaning destroyed they have no way of being self-determining, or as libertarians call it, “freedom”. They would not have the ability to remain free.
And secondly, as I outline above, diversity increases our species’ capacity for resilience and adaptation.
First and foremost it (cultural diversity) should be encouraged on moral and ethical grounds...
The very things (moral/ethics) which you are prevented from determining when applying an overly strict cultural relativist's interpretation (since they're NOT "universal" standards). The "prime directive" seems only to be a standard applied by the west... how 'bout we just wipe them out instead?
That would likely to be the more "culturally moral/ ethical" thing to do if one applied the moral/ethical standards of a "less enlightened" culture.
We can protect people’s customs AT THE SAME TIME as holding them to the highest standards of ethical judgment
Which you would deem to be "ours", of course. Sounds like YOU are perhaps the more "ethnocentically racist" one amongst us. Do you judge that our "prime directive" makes us culturally "superior"?
After all, you would likely allow brave savages and warriors to be transformed into helpless neurotics and doom them to an existence of alcoholism and drug dependency as happened with many native American tribes forced to live side-by-side and in close proximity, the veritable the "shadow" of "whites."
But that does not mean that we should wipe out all the indigenous languages and ways of being and replace it with an individualistic homogenous consumer culture. Does it?
I'll admit, our science does inform us that we require "genetic" diversity, a "by-product" of "cultural" diversity. But it looks like that perhaps we shall soon master the genome and perhaps eliminate, thereby, ANY need for culturally determined genetic diversity (which doesn't "necessarily" have-to-be "consumerist").
As for "cultural harmony".... as Plato determined 2,500 years ago in his "Statesman"...
STRANGER: The courageous soul when attaining this truth becomes civilized, and rendered more capable of partaking of justice; but when not partaking, is inclined to brutality. Is not that true?
YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly.
STRANGER: And again, the peaceful and orderly nature, if sharing in these opinions, becomes temperate and wise, as far as this may be in a State, but if not, deservedly obtains the ignominious name of silliness.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Quite true.
STRANGER: Can we say that such a connexion as this will lastingly unite the evil with one another or with the good, or that any science would seriously think of using a bond of this kind to join such materials?
YOUNG SOCRATES: Impossible.
STRANGER: But in those who were originally of a noble nature, and who have been nurtured in noble ways, and in those only, may we not say that union is implanted by law, and that this is the medicine which art prescribes for them, and of all the bonds which unite the dissimilar and contrary parts of virtue is not this, as I was saying, the divinest?
YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true.
STRANGER: Where this divine bond exists there is no difficulty in imagining, or when you have imagined, in creating the other bonds, which are human only.
YOUNG SOCRATES: How is that, and what bonds do you mean?
STRANGER: Rights of intermarriage, and ties which are formed between States by giving and taking children in marriage, or between individuals by private betrothals and espousals. For most persons form marriage connexions without due regard to what is best for the procreation of children.
A "cultured" garden generally requires some pretty strict walls of separation from the outside and an uber-seer/gardner to hoe between rows and periodically rotate crops. Is that the role you envision for us?
If not, the I'm all for a "naturally" Nietzschean, "that which does not kill me makes me stronger," ethic and let THAT principle "impartially" tend to maintaining the natural cycles of hoeing rows and performing crop rotations.
Michael -
Sorry for the delayed response. I think you're absolutely right. There are degrees of homogeneity, and domination is possible. But it's important to recognize the limitations of even the most stringent form of domination. Power is not easy to maintain and never fully permeates. Capitalism is unique in that it allows us to reconstruct ourselves within certain consumer-based limits, but even capitalism is not as monolithic as we claim (see J.K. Gibson-Graham). In some ways, by resisting "Capitalism" as a thing that's out there, that exists beyond the relations which constitute it, we can only make things worse.
That's not to say that domination, homogeneity or Capitalism aren't threats, but that's why we need to be there pointing out the cracks in the facade and clearing the way for alternatives.
Also, no argument from me on the concept of "culture." Although, I do think it's still useful as a term for reference purposes.
Keep up the good writing!
@Jeremy
YOU: I think you're absolutely right. There are degrees of homogeneity, and domination is possible. But it's important to recognize the limitations of even the most stringent form of domination. Power is not easy to maintain and never fully permeates.
ME: Agreed. Power is dynamic and dispersed. One of my favorite books is James C. Scott’s ‘Domination and the Arts of Resistance’. No social system is ever uniform – ‘difference’ always exists as an ontological constant.
YOU: Capitalism is unique in that it allows us to reconstruct ourselves within certain consumer-based limits, but even capitalism is not as monolithic as we claim (see J.K. Gibson-Graham).
ME: I wouldn’t be so sure. I think the ‘superficial differences’ generated by advanced capitalist modes of production seduce some commentators into a false sense of flexibility. I think, more and more, Capital encroaches upon the very life-conditions from which people make sense of the world and their lives – and within which they survive. If we underestimate the machinations of exploitation and capitalist production we have lost the ability to demand alternatives. And we thus fulfill Fukayama’s dream of a utopian-apocalypse.
YOU: In some ways, by resisting "Capitalism" as a thing that's out there, that exists beyond the relations which constitute it, we can only make things worse.
ME: I agree, but when I talk about Capitalism, I am referring to all the variously assembled “relations”, institutions, technologies, procedures, juridical codes, and mentalities that combine to create the actual (and actualizing) apparatus of productive and destructive activities. Capitalism is no pure monolith, true, but the actual sprawling, patch-worked apparatus that this term denotes is REAL ENOUGH in its effects.
YOU: That's not to say that domination, homogeneity or Capitalism aren't threats, but that's why we need to be there pointing out the cracks in the facade and clearing the way for alternatives.
ME: Exactly. It’s vitally important to not only point out the “cracks”, brutalities and pathologies of Capitalism, but to also exploit, engage and attack these various weaknesses in intensely practical and tactical ways. And this is also why the ‘preservation’ of indigenous forms of life are so important… We need all the alternatives available in order to come up with effective forms of resistance and transform the dominant advanced consumer culture.
YOU: Also, no argument from me on the concept of "culture." Although, I do think it's still useful as a term for reference purposes.
ME: It does have some use, true, but as a dominant trope for our discipline I think we can do better…
Thanks again Jeremy!
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