File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0208, message 18


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gis.net>
Subject: Re: BHA: Culture as structure
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 19:52:34 -0400


Hi Viren--

Thanks for the comments.  A couple of resposes:

>                    [Sewell] basically
> says that we should think of culture as both system and practice.

Well, yes, just as economic activity involves both system and practice.  The
reservation I have here is that this statement *could* be taken as akin to
Giddens' notion that structures only exist as instanciated in practice.  I
think Archer's critique of this view -- which belongs to what she calls
"central conflation" -- is pretty solid.

>                He would not recognize your distinction between cultural
> structures and social structures, since in his view, cultural structures
> are always also social structures.

There are some serious ambiguities here, which I'll get to in a second, but
this sounds much like a slide into central conflation.  (To be sure, I may
be mistaken, since I'm relying only on your brief comments.)

>                Hence he does want to affirm the
> primacy of the social, but this does not imply necessarily subordinating
> culture to some other structure.

How can something have primacy yet not subordinate other structures?  Or
does he mean that other structures have a greater or lesser degree of
partial autonomy (i.e., he's simply warding off determinism)?

> Your comments seem to be more in line with people like Adam Kuper, who
> tries to argue that we should get rid of the concept of culture, because
> it really refers to a number of different things.  Sewell's article was
> written in response to this trend and tries to clearly demarcate the
> contours of the concept of culture.

I'm certainly not interested in getting rid of the concept of culture, but
it's true that it refers to a number of different (but overlapping) things.
In defining culture, however, one must also define what a social structure
is.  The fact that something is social may or may not mean it is a social
structure, depending on how one defines the latter.  For example, a car is
obviously a social product, but I don't think I'd consider it a social
structure as such, since as I understand it (and I think this concurs with
RB's view), social structures are *relationships*.  Thus a car is produced
through a system of social relationships (commodity production, wage labor,
private property, etc), and people have social relationships with cars (such
as ownership, need, affection), but these social qualities attaching to (or
invested in) cars does not mean cars are of themselves social relationships.
Cars are not capitalism.  Cars are physical structures produced by and
utilized within societies.

Similarly for culture, I think.  Clearly, societies and social groups
produce culture.  But what makes something cultural is not the sole fact
that is socially produced -- all sorts of things are socially produced.  As
I see it, what makes something cultural is its investment or expression of
*meaning*.  A cultural structure, then, is a structure of meaning (strictly
speaking, semioses).  So a car is also a cultural object, insofar as it is
meaningful to people (for example, it can be a status symbol, a sex symbol,
a sign of independence, etc).  But being a cultural object is not the same
as being a cultural structure: a particular object is an element (a sign)
within a cultural structure (or several cultural structures), where
"structure" refers once more to a system of relationships.

All social activities and products involve meanings.  All meanings are
produced socially.  But I think it's important to distinguish what we might
call the "weight" of meaning within any particular activity or relationship.
That's the basis on which I think one must distinguish -- analytically --
between social structures and cultural structures.  (Archer also argues for
this distinction, though on somewhat different terms.)  That's an analytical
distinction, not an existential one (I think that's the right word), since
everything in society has both material and meaningful aspects.  But without
the analytical distinction, one risks conflating social and cultural
structures.  That has led to treating social relationships as simply
semiotic (so that wage labor, exploitation, imperialism, slavery,
homelessness etc are just sign systems), or to treating meanings as wholly
under the control of politics (if the ruler says 2+2=91, then it does, the
logic of number systems be damned), and so forth.

In short, as I see it, cultural structures pertain to meanings; social
structures are materially-oriented relationships.  Capitalism concerns
property, that is, the ownership of physical objects (and lately, ideas
treated as objects); Urdu is a language, a system of meanings.  Cars are
made by people, but they fit within social structures insofar as they belong
to people's relationships to material entities, and they belong to cultural
structures insofar as people make them meaningful.  Cultural structures are
not social structures: they are social products (necessarily marked by the
social structures which produced them), but also -- and more crucially --
they are meaning structures and the product of semiotic activities (logic,
analogy, etc), and would not be cultural otherwise.  Finally, it is only by
making an analytical distinction between social and cultural structures that
we are able to understand how the two interact.

Thanks,

T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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