Three Conceptions of Culture

I found much to agree with in Hogan’s wide-ranging essay, particularly concerning an explanatory overreliance on “culture” in literary and more broadly humanistic research. However, I want here to suggest that Hogan conflates two misconceptions of culture against which a modern, biocultural perspective supplies a more adequate and explanatory alternative.As referenced by Hogan, the first misconception of culture is “as if it were some sort of encompassing force or at least some thing” (255). It is a view in which “meanings [are] imagined to inhere somehow in the group, rather than in the minds of the individuals who compose the group” (244). Some such hypostatic conceptions of culture have their intellectual roots in German idealism, finding their form in something like a Hegelian Zeitgeist. An example is Oswald Spengler’s historical determinism, which conceives cultures as organismic entities with determinative life cycles. Another intellectual tributary is social Darwinist theory, which inspired Herbert Spencer’s ideas about goal-directed cultural evolution. So far as I can tell, such ideas about culture have never been given a coherent formulation by their various proponents. It has not been explained how ethereal social forces or principles could make individual human beings do what they do and think what they think.Hogan is also concerned with a different conception of culture—or, more accurately, of the human cultural subject—that is better described as “constructivist.” This view comes out of classical empiricism: the idea that our knowledge and concepts derive from experience. In the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, cultural anthropologists made this proposal their maxim. They claimed that humans possess no innate psychological structure that would cause them to think and act in species-typical ways. In this view, our natural social endowment amounts to a disposition to imitate and to assimilate, such that, as Ruth Benedict put it, “The vast proportion of all individuals who are born into any society always and whatever the idiosyncrasies of its institutions, assume . . . the behavior dictated by that society.” They do this because of “the enormous malleability of their original endowment” (183). In fact, however, humans come into the world with a species-typical, biological repertoire of capacities, desires, aversions, and predispositions that structure their lives and cultures (Brown). Hogan’s essay examines how this repertoire helps to explain the cultural and historical prevalence of certain literary genres.These two misconceptions—of culture as an autonomous causal force, and of the cultural subject as a passive receptacle—are logically distinct but psychologically related. For one thing, to conceive of culture as an autonomous causal force in human life and history is also to discount the roles of human nature and individual variation. Such a force can effectively and arbitrarily compel us only if we have no universally human or peculiarly individual motivation to resist it. Conversely, to deny the existence of universally human and peculiarly individual motivations is also to appeal to some other motive force in human history, which may then be found in culture. Consequently, these views easily mix in a strange sort of dualism that posits, as the ontological horizon of humanistic inquiry, a self-subsisting realm of self-differentiating culture. This is the view that former MLA president Robert Scholes has defended by stating that humans “were natural for eons before we were cultural . . . but so what? We are cultural now, and culture is the domain of the humanities” (Hoff et al., 298). In a large-scale survey study, my colleagues and I found evidence for the prevalence (though not the predominance) of this view among humanists and social scientists (Carroll et al., “Cross Disciplinary”).Necessarily, erroneous conceptions of culture have “limited explanatory value” (243). But a modern, biocultural conception—based on recent and convergent developments in anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, linguistics, cognitive psychology, history, and evolutionary aesthetics, among other fields—avoids the hazy metaphysics of the organismic view and the false reductionism of the constructivist view. From a biocultural perspective,In this view, one can meaningfully examine various processes and effects of culture without losing sight of their biological preconditions and ramifications. To take a stock example, lactose tolerance in European and other populations evolved because of these populations’ increasing reliance on dairy farming. I think this counts as a meaningfully “cultural” explanation of a salient fact about population-level human differences. Or take the question of why philosophy prospered in Classical Greece. Commonly cited explanatory factors include a civic life marked by intellectual openness and debate, the relatively recent development of the Greek alphabet, as well as increasing contact with the peoples and ideas of different places. These factors help to explain the “cultivation” of specifically human capacities of analysis and abstraction. A final example comes closer to Hogan’s primary subject matter: In the past, the villains in Disney’s animated movies were typically marked out for the audience by a strongly divergent appearance or a foreign accent; more recently, however, they have begun to present like the sympathetic characters in the same movies. I explain this fact by appealing to shifting cultural norms about social representation. Selfish and power-hungry villains persist because of deep-seated human antipathies toward such types, but it is no longer socially acceptable to represent villainy in terms of identity-based difference or “otherness” (Kjeldgaard-Christiansen and Schmidt).To say that “culture” does no real work in these explanations because it is an abstraction or “shorthand” (255) is to miss the point of the concept’s invocation. The point is not to specify a particular causal event or principle, but to identify an explanatory domain—roughly, of shared or inherited forms of human social organization and transaction—where another might have been posited. I suspect Hogan would agree with this, and that he means for his professed skepticism to target explanations based on such misconceptions of culture as I have already discussed. But we should aim to be clearer about these things than are the views we criticize

Epistemology · Sociology · Cultural Differences and Values · Philosophy

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