Anthropological perspectives

In contrast to this ‘bird’s eye view’ of culture and development, anthropological debates on culture take us, as one might expect, somewhat closer to people’s lives and to their everyday social practice. In his discussion on ‘the capacity to aspire’, Arjun Appadurai discusses how development ‘needs’ are always grounded in culture. Aspirations, he claims, ‘form parts of wider ethical and metaphysical ideas which derive from larger cultural norms’ (Appadurai, 2004, pp67–68).

Appadurai identifies three levels that ground people’s aspirations in culture.

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The first and most immediate level consists of a ‘visible inventory of wants’. These contain the specific wants and choices for this piece of land or that marriage partner that people consciously identify and seek to pursue. It is this level that commonly appears – though usually in a rather more generalized way – when people are asked to itemize their goals or needs by development agents. At the next level are the ‘intermediate norms’, which may not be explicitly expressed but nevertheless structure specific wants through local ideas about marriage, family, work, virtue, health and so on. These in turn relate to ‘higher order normative contexts’, which comprise a larger ‘map’ of ideas and beliefs concerning such matters as life and death, the value of material goods versus social relationships, this world and other worlds, peace and conflict, etc. ‘Culture’ is thus not something separable from everyday life, but instead structures material and relational desires through a cascade of associations that make them meaningful and even, at times, pressing and urgent.

The relationship between culture and materiality in human welfare is discussed at length by Marshall Sahlins in his Culture and Practical Reason (1976). For Sahlins, the construction of meaning is the key distinguishing characteristic of humankind. It is not that materiality does not matter, he argues, but that social and cultural life are in fact shaped by ‘nature’ and the economy rather than the other way around: ‘No society can live on miracles . . . None can fail to provide for the biological continuity of the population in determining it culturally. . . Yet men do not merely “survive”. They survive in a definite way’ (Sahlins, 1976, p168).

That ‘definite way’ – the aspiration, as Appadurai might put it – not just for shelter but for a particular kind of house, not just for calories but for a particular kind of food, is mediated by culture. The material and cultural are thus not separable, such that one can separate ‘objective reality’ from ‘cultural values’, but are in fact inextricably linked:

It is not that the material forces and constraints are left out of account, or that they have no real effects on the cultural order. It is that the nature of the effects cannot be read from the nature of the forces, for the material effects depend on their cultural encompassment. The very form of social existence of material force is determined by its integration in the cultural system. (Sahlins, 1976, pp205–206)

As an example, he offers the fact that, in the US, dogs are considered inedible, unlike cattle, which is considered to be ‘food’ (1976, p169). The fondness for beef in the North American diet has major material outcomes, in terms of prices of meat, land use, agricultural subsidies, health issues and so on, with effects that tend to ricochet around the world. But the basis for choosing cattle over dog meat – the root cause of all these different effects – is neither ‘nature’ nor ‘utility’ but culture.

Veena Das (2000) explores how culture and agency interact at the

individual level. She describes how a Punjabi woman, named Asha, responds to the disasters that the partition of India and Pakistan wrought on her family life. She shows the practical work that Asha conducts in building a sense of self and a life worth living out of a context of violence and subjugation, ‘not through an ascent into transcendence but through a descent into the everyday’ (2000, p208). Culture, in this reading, can be deeply imbued with power: the overall cultural terms that have defined Asha’s identity were patriarchal ones, and even in pursuing the relationships that were important to her (with her dead husband’s sister and her son), she had to adopt a patriarchal idiom. At the same time, Das stresses how Asha did not allow her life to be simply defined by the power of patriarchy, but actively worked instead to achieve a positive way of being in the world. This involved careful repair work over many years of damaged relations with her first husband’s family, guided by her love for key individuals and the way in which she saw her relationships as being fixed in the long term. The meaning of this was inscribed by culture, since she saw in her first marriage the connections that she would carry into eternity. But the settled cultural world to which these meanings belonged was smashed by the disaster of Partition and the fracturing of family relations that followed. Critically, therefore, this cultural meaning and these relations were also re-claimed by her, and re-inhabited as a long act of witnessing to the hurt she had suffered through them. The cultural ‘work’ that she took on was transformative – not sweet and easy, but hard and painful – not simply an inflection of goals, but rather a lived experience achieved through a lifetime of struggle.

Building on Das’s approach, it may be useful to consider culture not so much as a lens but a form of ‘work’. The idea of ‘the work of culture’ was first proposed by Obeyesekere (1990). Writing at the boundary between psychoanalysis and anthropology, he saw the ‘work of culture’ as the process whereby the deep and often darkly painful sides of human existence rooted in the unconscious could be symbolically transformed into publicly shared meanings and imagery. In terms of development, approaching culture as a form of work has four main advantages: first, it sees people as agents of culture, who use the resources culture has given them and reproduce or transform them through their actions. In addition to bringing culture to the ground, this emphasizes its flexibility and capacity to change over time. Second, it recognizes that culture is at once material and symbolic. As Pierre Bourdieu (1977) has recognized in the notion of ‘habitus’, it is expressed in how we hold our bodies, how we decorate our houses, how we bring up our children – all parts of life, not limited to ideas, values or meaning. Third, it puts power into the picture. The work of culture, like other kinds of work, is clearly conditioned by broader social and cultural structures of class and patriarchy. As Roger Keesing remarks, criticizing the widely used and somewhat idealist formulation of culture by Clifford Geertz: ‘Cultures do not simply constitute webs of significance, systems of meaning that orient humans to one another and their world. They constitute ideologies, disguising human political and

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economic realities . . . Cultures are webs of mystification as well as significance’ (Keesing, 1987, p161). Finally, viewing culture as a form of work recognizes that it is not free-floating, but is shaped by the specific institutional context in which each encounter takes place. ‘Culture’ can thus be seen to be affected as much by institutional setting – legal, therapeutic or educational – as by national or religious contexts (e.g. Spencer, 1997).

Taking culture seriously means analysing it always in the context of social structure and political economy. Without due attention to material resources and the power relations that govern them, a focus on ‘culture’ could obscure as much as it enlightens. For those not driven by ideology, simple declarations about ‘culture’ as a homogenous entity shared by large collectivities of people are no longer available. Appadurai (2004, p61) helpfully summarizes the current points of consensus on culture in anthropology: relationality – cultural meaning lies in the relationship between different elements, rather than inhering intrinsically within a particular item considered in isolation; dissensus – culture is non- unitary, subject to considerable internal negotiation and dispute; and leakiness – the boundaries of culture are highly porous, such that flows, borrowings and interactions across borders are the norm rather than the exception.

Does this complexity suggest that culture is no longer a useful analytic cate- gory? Attractive though such an option might appear to be, it does not do justice to much that can be gleaned from cultural readings. But, just as explanations of ‘culture’ make no sense in the absence of an awareness of the social structures and political economy that inform them, cultural analysis cannot be done in abstract terms. While class, gender, ethnicity, disability and age may be common axes of differential advantage, they do not always and everywhere mean the same things. This links back to Sahlins’s statement above – that people do not only survive but do so ‘in a particular way’. But it also goes beyond this because the making of social difference is not simply coloured by culture: culture, in fact, lies at the heart of social difference. The current enthusiasm for cultural cele- bration in development circles notwithstanding, it should be noted that the creation of differing value, the affirmation of some and the debasement of others are absolutely central to the work of culture itself. As Sahlins (1976, p102) puts it: ‘the creation of meaning is the distinguishing and constituting quality of men – the “human essence” of an older discourse – such that by processes of differential valuation and signification, relations among men, as well as between themselves and nature, are organized.’

Anthropological perspectives