 |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Source: (consider it)
|
Thread: Christians, anthropologists, and human nature
|
Tea
Shipmate
# 16619
|
Posted
“The image of a constant human nature independent of time, place, and circumstances, of studies and professions, transient fashions and temporary opinions, may be an illusion; what man is may be so entangled with where he is, who he is, and what he believes that it is inseparable from them… Modern anthropology asserts… that men unmodified by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist, have never existed, and most important, could not in the very nature of the case exist.”
A lightly edited extract from the 1966 Clifford Geertz essay, "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man".
Must Christians disagree with Geertz?
Posts: 66 | From: USA | Registered: Aug 2011
| IP: Logged
|
|
Evensong
Shipmate
# 14696
|
Posted
It's a case of universals vs particulars isn't it?
Are there universals that transcend space/time/place/age?
--------------------
a theological scrapbook
Posts: 9481 | From: Australia | Registered: Apr 2009
| IP: Logged
|
|
Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Tea:
Must Christians disagree with Geertz?
No. Christians on the whole don't have the investment in tradition-independent rationality and human nature that pre-modernist secular humanism did.
--------------------
we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
| IP: Logged
|
|
Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Tea:
Must Christians disagree with Geertz?
Why would we? Or am I mistaken in not seeing anything remotely controversial in what he says here?
--------------------
"What is broken, repair with gold."
Posts: 9779 | From: Manchester | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged
|
|
Elemental
Apprentice
# 17407
|
Posted
Would there be a conflict between this anthropological view and the views of the Catholic Church on Natural Law (being discussed here)?
--------------------
If anything is sacred, everything is
Posts: 16 | From: On the water | Registered: Nov 2012
| IP: Logged
|
|
Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757
|
Posted
How far does a 1966 essay reflect modern anthropology? (I mean obviously it was modern at the time, but ...)
Somewhere I have a book by Steven Pinker complaining about the way humanities interpret human beings. According to Pinker, since the 1930s the humanities have imagined that people are born as 'blank slates' and all their attitudes and habitual behaviours are a result of social conditioning, i.e. of the society in which they're brought up.
According to Pinker and the authors he cites with approval this is not true and there are all sorts of things that come 'built in', as it were, when you're born. The most important of these for Pinker (a specialist in psycholinguistics) is language, or at least the capacity for language, but there are others.
[ 02. November 2012, 10:38: Message edited by: Ricardus ]
--------------------
Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)
Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged
|
|
Adeodatus
Shipmate
# 4992
|
Posted
I don't think I'm getting blank-slate-ism from Geertz's statement, Ricardus. He only talks about people being modified by their local culture.
If anything, I would go further. I tend to enthuse about social constructionism.
--------------------
"What is broken, repair with gold."
Posts: 9779 | From: Manchester | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged
|
|
Elemental
Apprentice
# 17407
|
Posted
The capacity for language acquisition is a basic function of the human brain, but is time limited.
A child can acquire as many languages as they receive sufficient exposure to in the relevant period (generally viewed as from birth to about 5yrs), so the languages gained are dependent entirely on circumstances, not unlike other societal conditioning.
However, the capacity for language acquisition is not a guarantee that it will be used to its full extent.
There have been (thankfully very rare) cases where children locked in almost complete isolation until beyond prime language acquisition age do not achieve native tongue status in any language.
In this case, based on my understanding of your premise, Pinker seems to have this wrong, as the ability is built in, but to use the potential ability, external influence and, essentially, practice and interaction with some form of society is required.
Am I misinterpreting you, Ricardus?
[ 02. November 2012, 11:20: Message edited by: Elemental ]
--------------------
If anything is sacred, everything is
Posts: 16 | From: On the water | Registered: Nov 2012
| IP: Logged
|
|
que sais-je
Shipmate
# 17185
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Tea:
[b]
Must Christians disagree with Geertz?
Does the piece imply every feature of human nature could change? Could we stop sinning? Or doesn't that count as human nature?
--------------------
"controversies, disputes, and argumentations, both in philosophy and in divinity, if they meet with discreet and peaceable natures, do not infringe the laws of charity" (Thomas Browne)
Posts: 794 | From: here or there | Registered: Jun 2012
| IP: Logged
|
|
Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
I don't think I'm getting blank-slate-ism from Geertz's statement, Ricardus. He only talks about people being modified by their local culture.
Not sure - it's possible I'm misreading him. He talks about 'constant human nature' being illusory. If Pinker is right then one could identify the 'stuff that's built in' as the constant part of human nature, even though no individual solely displays the default characteristics.
(Analogy: nobody just runs 'Linux', they run Debian, Ubuntu, etc. But that doesn't mean the Linux kernel is illusory.)
If, OTOH, Geertz is simply saying that no-one is unaffected by their culture, that seems to be so obviously true as to barely need saying. quote:
In this case, based on my understanding of your premise, Pinker seems to have this wrong, as the ability is built in, but to use the potential ability, external influence and, essentially, practice and interaction with some form of society is required.
Am I misinterpreting you, Ricardus?
I think Pinker would agree with all that. His idea, though (following Chomsky), is that certain processors are built into the brain that allow children to pick up and develop languages, and this determines the sort of languages that societies are able to develop. So languages aren't solely a social construct: they reflect the way the brain works, and it's possible to propose a language that no human society could ever use.
It is also possible for children to develop their own language independently of adults - e.g. deaf children put together in a special school in Nicaragua are known to have invented their own sign language without any input from staff. There are some controversial hypotheses that suggest Creole languages arose in a similar way.
--------------------
Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)
Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged
|
|
Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
|
Posted
Right a while back I heard a liturgist take a quote out of theorist of liturgy who took it to mean that formal set liturgy was good, free liturgy was bad. The quote had used historical which the person had taken to mean formal liturgy. The big problem was the scholar he was quoting was a Congregationalist, and historical Congregational liturgy is free in style. In other words taking Geertz saying out of context can be misleading.
Two things before I explore more deeply what Geerta was saying. First in the theological sense of 'human nature' Anthropologists are usually silent, what they tend to mean is ways of classifying humans and that is more commonly referred to as identity. So I will deal with identity rather than human nature. Secondly I am going to use Ethnography rather than Social Anthropology. Ethnography and Social Anthropology are sometimes used as synomyns. The difference is perhaps best characterised in that Social Anthropology is characterised by discourse on Culture within specific pecise setting (normally a village), while Ethnography is a methodological approach using detailed written accounts based on participation observation. However there is no clear boundary. My thesis is an ethnography, it may well also be seen as fitting within the general discipline of Social Anthropology. My supervisor is a Social Anthropologist but I am not working in a Social Anthropology department.
Right, this is part of a debate, a big debate about what it means to be aa person within the Social Sciences of which Social Anthropology is a part. You can get some overview of this debate if you work through Identity in Question. I warn you the actual course D853 had a huge amount of reading in it and doing a related doctorate it only covers a decent proportion of the debate. What may be important is one view that is not covered in that theory is that of the Social Anthropologist like Geertz.
It is very useful if you realise what Geertz is arguing against. That is the idea that someone's human nature can be perfectly categorised by a set of uncontroversial lables e.g. gender, class, race, age, familial relationships, religion etc which are the stock tools of traditional anthropologist. Thus you get
quote:
Ethnography: A critical Turn in Cultural Studies by Joost van Loon in Handbook of Ethnography published by Sage in 2001 (paper back edition 2007) pg 297
The impact of such an unsettled notion of 'identity' as an intertextual-intersubjective construction pn ethnography within cultural research has been enormous. It radically undermines the authority of identification which the traditional ethnographer had to impose to delineate 'his' or 'her' subjects.
The above writer then goes on to cite Marcus and Clifford who were writing in response to something Geertz had written. Geertz is there, just beneath the surface, he is hugely influential and his influence stretches to any qualitative analyst. If a person values detailed careful description (often called thick) then they are influenced by Geertz. However his influence is rarely on the nature of identity.
What I have found is actually the debate seems to concentrate on specific labels of identity within anthropology. Therefore you get Fredrik Barth's work on racial identity and the sustaining of boundaries or you get Gerd Baumann on Ethnic discourses in Southall, or perhaps Judith Butler on the Perfomativity of gender. Perhaps the most sustained investigation is that of V Crapanzano in his Tuhami: Portrait of a Morroccan which looks at the individual Tuhami and explores western theoretical ideas of what it is to be an individual and ends up finding problems with all of them.
I have just recalled that in some of the older texts there is stuff that actually does question the western idea of what a person is. Perhaps the most accessible of these is the Hindu and Buddhist idea of incarnation. The person does not stem across one life but across many, some of those are animal rather than human. The native Americans seem equally to have had an understanding which associated a person far more strongly with a role in the community and saw continuity as moving down the occupiers of the role (this is crass statement of that belief system, due in part to my simplification and also due to my lack of understanding)
What Geertz is saying from within the setting of primarily talking to anthropologists works out as something along the lines of "You can't take your categories from your culture (Western Academia) that you apply to human beings and apply them without thinking to people from another culture. The terms are likely to have different boundaries within that culture."
This is uncontroversial and yes it has implication for theology, particular for theology that attempts to cross cultural barriers. Let me take a real example. Many Chinese Christians struggle with the Lord's prayer. They basically hear the "forgive us our tresspasses" as saying "forgive us our acts of treason". That in the Chinese state where treason is seen to be far more serious an act against your identity than it is in the West. That idea when compared to walking on someone else's property when if caught all you need to do is apologise has a totally different feel to it.
Jengie
Jengie
--------------------
"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
Posts: 20894 | From: city of steel, butterflies and rainbows | Registered: May 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
ken
Ship's Roundhead
# 2460
|
Posted
...and the idea that the Lord's Prayer refers to walkign on somebody else's property without permission is a serious mistranslation anyway, caused by the word "trespass" shifting its focus over the centuries. Doesn't the Kirk use "forgive us our debts"?
Anyway, that aside, even ignoreing the deep background Jengie was relaying to us, "men unmodified by the customs of particular places do not in fact exist..." et.c is surely obvious and non-controversial? What possible problem could it be for Christianity?
The opposite, its the basis of Christianity. We believe that God guided the customs and laws and traditions and history of a particular chosen people and chose to become incarnate in the world as one of those people!
--------------------
Ken
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
Posts: 39579 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2002
| IP: Logged
|
|
Timothy the Obscure
Mostly Friendly
# 292
|
Posted
To boil Geertz's point down to its core (which was radical in 1966, but is pretty well accepted now, in anthropological circles--and I will say I'm a big enthusiast of his ideas): culture is a feature of human biological evolution. There is no such thing as human nature without culture--the kind of "stratigraphic" model, where you have biology as the base, psychology built on that, and culture as the frosting on the cake is not really defensible. Human beings are biologically adapted to require culture (Geertz's definition: "organized systems of significant symbols"), and cultures are necessarily quite variable.
He was also arguing against an earlier anthropology that looked for "cultural universals," with the idea that there was a fundamental human culture of which all extant cultures were variations.
I don't see how this is a problem for Christians unless Christians believe that God endorses only one particular culture... which certainly has been a problem in the past, but I like to think we're beyond that.
--------------------
When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
- C. P. Snow
Posts: 6114 | From: PDX | Registered: May 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
|
Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
Somewhere I have a book by Steven Pinker complaining about the way humanities interpret human beings. According to Pinker, since the 1930s the humanities have imagined that people are born as 'blank slates' and all their attitudes and habitual behaviours are a result of social conditioning, i.e. of the society in which they're brought up.
I don't think Pinker commands widespread agreement.
There are two questions your account of Pinker raises. The first is whether or not 'the humanities' all really take the blank slate principle as far as Pinker says they do. The second is whether, on the scale between extreme anti-innatism and extreme innatism, Pinker's position is the one best supported by the evidence as a whole.
[ 03. November 2012, 08:58: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
--------------------
we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
Contact us | Ship of Fools | Privacy statement
© Ship of Fools 2016
UBB.classicTM
6.5.0
|
|
|
|
|
| |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Printer-friendly view
