Barnard President Judith Shapiro Speaks About Shared Culture and Cultural Differences at Higher Education Symposium

Culture (s.), Cultures (pl.), and the Meaning of Education

(prepared for the Forum for the Future of Higher Education, 2002 Aspen Symposium)

Judith Shapiro
Barnard College
September, 2002

"What fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes."
--Edward Sapir, "The Grammarian and His Language"

Two years ago, on the occasion of the Aspen Institute’s 50th anniversary, Jimmy Carter participated in a symposium here on globalization and the human condition. In his concluding address, President Carter told a story about "Ma" Ferguson, who succeeded her husband, "Pa" Ferguson, as governor of Texas in 1925.

At one point in her political career, Ma Ferguson was addressing the issue of whether Mexican children coming across the border into Texas should have any opportunity to get schooling in Spanish while they were in the process of learning English – an issue that is still with us today. Ma Ferguson’s way of resolving the debate was to hold up the Holy Bible and say, "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us’."

Although Ma Ferguson couldn’t have given two hoots about elite academia, she reminds me of those academic conservatives who refer to the classical works of Greek and Roman antiquity as "our" cultural legacy. In their attacks on so-called "multiculturalism", these polemicists usually forget that understanding what we think of as the cradle of Western Civ is itself an exercise in cross-cultural study. This is a lesson that the philosopher and classicist Martha Nussbaum taught Allan Bloom quite devastatingly back in 1987 when she took apart the account he presented of Greek civilization in The Closing of the American Mind (Nussbaum 1987).

At this point, in 2002, most of us have grown battle-weary of the so-called "culture wars," though the struggles they involve are by no means over. The University of Chicago’s revision of its core curriculum, for example, and the heated responses it has provoked in such quarters as the National Association of Scholars, recently merited a front-page story in The Chronicle of Higher Education. At the same time, there is a sense of ennui that the general subject has come to elicit, which -- issues of attention span aside -- is, in large part, a result of the repetition of polarized viewpoints by opposing sides in an argument that has too rarely risen to the level of good conversation. This is disconcerting, given that we ought to be able to have a more interesting and fruitful dialogue about something so central to our vocation as educators. Besides, those of us who have been boring one another to death need to think about what we might be doing to our students.

I realize that there is a great risk in my making this last observation: I have at least implied, and perhaps even asserted, my own responsibility not to bore you today. I can go even further out on this limb by noting that my job here is to talk and yours is to listen, and by inviting you to raise your hands if you finish first. But let me do better than that. Let me promise to be brief and leave plenty of time for discussion.

Let me also say right off that I am certainly not posing as a lone voice in the wilderness, seeking to bring nutrition and commensality to what has too often simply been an academic food fight. Healthy meals have been provided by others, including Martha Nussbaum. Her book Cultivating Humanity is especially valuable in that it is based on comparative fieldwork in a range of educational institutions, and shows us what is actually going on in our classrooms. In her study, we meet a number of highly intelligent, thoughtful and dedicated teachers who are seeking to provide an intellectually sophisticated education for their students.

The overall argument of her book is that there is a deep convergence of the Socratic, democratic ideal of an educated citizenry and the various curricular initiatives that go under the heading of "diversity" and "multiculturalism" in today’s colleges and universities. One does not have to agree with her on all points in order to appreciate the reasonableness, good will, and erudition lightly worn that she brings to central issues facing the liberal arts curriculum in our times. And she is quite persuasive on a number of these issues.

Just as Nussbaum traces her view of education back to a founding father of her discipline, so have I been inspired by a founding father of my own field: Franz Boas, the father of academic anthropology in America. (You have to give the patriarchy its due.) The perspectives on culture that inform my own understandings, values, and commitments as an educator have been shaped by my encounter with the Boasian intellectual and moral heritage, and I believe this heritage – when its message and purposes are well understood – has much to offer current thinking about the meaning of a liberal education. It is, moreover, like the Socratic tradition, one that needs rescuing from those who have done it wrong.

So -- let us return this morning to those stirring days of yesteryear when Boas was the Lone Ranger of the modern culture concept – a concept that has since been so much used, and abused. The best single source for my purposes is the historian of anthropology George Stocking, who analyzed the major transformation in the concept of "culture" wrought by Boas, and who noted, "[M]uch of the social science of the twentieth century may be seen as the working out in detail of the implications of the culture idea" (Stocking [1966] 1968: 232).

Stocking described the pre-Boasian use of the term "culture" as follows:

Prior to about 1900, "culture" both in the German and in the Anglo-American tradition still had not acquired its characteristic modern anthropological connotations. Whether in the humanist or evolutionist sense, it was associated with the progressive accumulation of the characteristic manifestations of human creativity: art, science, knowledge, refinement – those things that freed man from control by nature, by environment, by reflex, by instinct, by habit, or by custom. "Culture" was not associated with tradition – as weighted, as limiting, as homeostatic, as a determinant of behavior. In general, these connotations were given to the ideas of custom, instinct, or temperament, and they were often associated with a lower evolutionary status, frequently argued in racial terms. (Stocking 1968: 201-2)

Stocking also noted that the term "culture" was invariably used in the singular: "It was still a singular phenomenon, present to a higher or lower degree in all peoples" (1968: 202). He found no use of the plural form in any writer other than Boas before 1895.

It was Boas, Stocking argued, who gave the term "culture" its distinctive anthropological meaning, combining the elements of "historicity, plurality, integration, behavioral determinism, and relativity" (1968: 200). What do these terms mean? "Historicity" indicates that cultures develop over time, and that one needs to understand their past in order to understand their present. "Plurality" means that there is not a single culture, but many. "Integration" means that the parts of a culture fit together in some significant way, and that cultures should therefore be viewed as systems. "Behavioral determinism" means that we are less the masters of our culture than we are its servants. And "relativity" means that cultures must be understood from the inside, on their own terms, and not just from the outside, in the cultural terms of a foreign observer. Relativity also means that there is no simple, royal road to objectivity in comparing cultures.

Boas taught us that we cannot understand what is common to human beings unless we take the full measure of how they differ. Moreover, he strongly argued against racial explanations for differences that should be understand through cultural and historical study. Indeed, he showed the essentially flawed nature of the concept of "race" as it was commonly used. He also emphasized the unconscious nature of cultural beliefs; that they are held implicitly and commonly not questioned is indeed the source of their power. He tended to view the conscious explanations we give for our habits as mere secondary rationalizations. To return to Stocking’s account, Boas’s approach to culture

involved the rejection of simplistic models of biological or racial determinism, the rejection of ethnocentric standards of cultural evaluation, and a new appreciation of the role of unconscious social processes in the determination of human behavior. It implied a conception of man not as a rational so much as a rationalizing being. (Stocking 1968: 232)

If we put Boas in his own historical context, as Stocking did, we see that he was addressing the kind of dominant social evolutionist thinking that had become a barrier to knowledge by the late 19th century. Social evolutionists of the 18th and 19th centuries (and here it is important to remember that evolutionary thinking in social theory preceded Darwinian evolutionary theory in biology) presented unilineal schemes of humanity’s steady march upward, with Europeans at the top. It was these schemes that Boas was deconstructing (if we may use a later term of art), along with uncritical notions of progress. The decadent state of social evolutionary thinking by the turn of the 20th century was described by Stocking as follows:

Evolutionism in 1896 was no longer a fresh and innovative point of view, but had hardened over a quarter of a century into a sometimes almost rococo elaboration. What was actually at issue was not simply the general evolution of culture but the extrapolation of evolutionary stages in every area of cultural life – the presumed sequences of art forms, of marriage forms, of stages in the development of myth, religion, and so forth. (1968: 211)I think we can see a strong parallel here with late 20th- to early 21st-century sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, in which Procrustean efforts are made to fit various culture-specific behaviors into rigid, universal, formulaic biological terms.

Boas’s anthropological concept of culture had within it two strands that seemed to point in different directions and were at times difficult to reconcile, as Stocking noted. On the one hand, Boas viewed cultures as integrated wholes, having a distinctive integrity – often viewed in aesthetic terms by Boas and his followers – that held their parts together. This trend reached its strongest and best-known expression in the work of Ruth Benedict, particularly in her widely read Patterns of Culture. One the other hand, Boas viewed cultures as the contingent outcome of historical accident and specific, fortuitous contacts between societies, and others of his students and successors followed this more particularistic bent.

An illustrious anthropologist of the generation after Boas, Ralph Linton, who made significant contributions to the study of cultures both as systems and as crossroads, wrote a popular piece on the complex and inextricable ties linking human societies throughout the world. The article, entitled "One Hundred Per Cent American," was written in the late 1940’s as an antidote to the parochialism and xenophobia that was widespread in our country at the time. It has since been read by students in countless introductory courses in anthropology, and I’ll share just a bit of it with you:

There can be no doubt about the average American’s Americanism or his desire to preserve this precious heritage at all costs. Nevertheless, some insidious foreign ideas have already wormed their way into his civilization without his realizing what was going on. Thus dawn finds the unsuspecting patriot garbed in pajamas, a garment of East Indian origin; and lying in a bed built on a pattern which originated in either Persia or Asia Minor. He is muffled to the ears in un-American materials: cotton, first domesticated in India; linen, domesticated in the Near East; wool from an animal native to Asia Minor; or silk, whose first uses were discovered by the Chinese. All these substances have been transformed into cloth by methods invented in Southwestern Asia . . .

This passage is followed by an account of the hero’s trip to the bathroom, where the objects he makes use of take him (and us) on a journey through Egypt, the Near East, China, ancient Gaul, and Turkey, among other places. Similar cross-cultural encounters await over breakfast. We leave him reading the newspaper on the train on his way to work, where, Linton concludes, "As he absorbs the accounts of foreign troubles, he will, if he is a good, conservative citizen, thank a Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language that he is 100% American" (Linton 1947).

To be sure, this is a charmingly sunny, apoliticial account of culture contact, one that leaves out all the wars, conquests, and colonizations. In recent years, things have gone in the opposite direction. Those in the "cultural studies" movement who have focused on encounters between societies have tended to view them exclusively in terms of oppression and domination. Humanists who belatedly made the discovery that power is a central factor in human relations came to focus on it with an exclusivity that reduced the complex history of contact between societies to a predictable common script. In the process, they created their own cottage industry of cultural analysis with a minimal sense of obligation to become versed in the relevant social science literature.

A more significant distortion regarding culture and cultural difference has been perpetrated by those who regard "cultures" as separate islands unto themselves, a view that has had unfortunate consequences both for the curriculum and for campus life. In its most extreme form, it has involved the assumption, or assertion, that only those who are themselves members of a culture can speak of it with integrity and authority. As this approach has converged with the praiseworthy desire for greater tolerance of difference, the result has been a naïve and uncritical concept of cultural relativism.

Relativism, as it developed in anthropology, was about learning and understanding as much as possible about those who are very different from us – whoever "we" may happen to be. The enterprise had a strong moral and political impetus, as well as an intellectual one, since anthropologists were seeking respect for the kind of societies generally considered "primitive" and inferior. The primary goal, however, was not to approve of and validate every possible form of human behavior. It was certainly not about proposing that we all retire to our respective cultural corners. That, indeed, would be the opposite of the anthropological enterprise.

The true message of relativism is, I think, most clearly revealed in the context of anthropological linguistics, the study of those unwritten languages long ignored by scholars and generally believed to be "simple" and lacking the intellectual resources of languages belonging to so-called "civilized" peoples. As anthropologists in the United States turned their attention to the languages of the earliest North Americans, they found all kind of complex, intricate, and refined grammatical structures hitherto undiscovered by linguists who had focused on a narrower range of languages.

Relativism in linguistic study means that we approach each language with care and respect, ever on the alert for something unexpected and unfamiliar -- something that lies beyond what we already know. Learning not simply to speak, but to describe and analyze a new language is a challenging voyage of discovery, with its failures as well as its successes. The goal of a comparative study of languages that is as broad as possible is to develop categories of analysis that truly work for the full range of human linguistic behavior. The alternative is simply to impose our own grammatical categories on other languages -- in other words, to remain trapped in our own linguistic provincialism.

The clearest and most eloquent description of linguistic relativity remains, in my opinion, Edward Sapir’s classic essay, "The Grammarian and His Language," which I have included in the conference packet. Especially engaging is the passage in which he presents the way in which different languages express the English utterance, "the stone falls." Moving from languages relatively close to our own – like French or German – and expanding out into Russian, Chinese, and some Native American languages, he arrives at Nootka, a language of the northwest coast of North America. Here he shows us a more radically different way of representing experience, where direction is marked separately, as opposed to being incorporated into the verb, while what we think of as the noun (a thing, or object) is part of the verb itself.

Having provided a Nootka utterance that is the general equivalent of "the stone falls," he proceeds to offer another gloss for the Nootka version: "It stones down." This second version, which is not a well-formed utterance in ordinary English, preserves more of what Sapir calls the "form-feeling" of the very different language in question. It has always seemed to me that the phrase "it stones down" might make an intriguing, creative and beautiful expression in a poem in English – stretching our minds beyond the semantic possibilities to which we are accustomed. (It is no accident that Sapir, with his deep and brilliant ability to analyze highly exotic languages, also wrote poetry.)

The linguistic moral of the story is that translation is possible, including translation that accurately conveys the sense of the original utterance. The point is that what is coded in one language may require a non-idiomatic paraphrase in another, sometimes a rather lengthy one. Thus, the Navaho utterance "ná’íldi-l" (forgive my pronunciation) can be translated into English as "you are accustomed to eat plural, separable objects one at a time" (Kluckhohn and Leighton [1946] 1962: 270). The act of "eating" would not be categorized the same way for objects of a different type, or if the ingestion were being performed in some other manner. Learning Navaho means encountering a whole new universe of noun classes and aspect. This is the kind of thing that gives linguists a major thrill – and it has thrilled my students over the years, as their eyes were opened to new ways of describing the world.

Given the success and satisfaction that I have experienced using examples of this kind to initiate students into the mysteries of relativism, and the enlightenment that relativism can bring when practiced with rationality and a love of learning, it is especially disappointing that comparative linguistics has become a rare and marginalized item in the general undergraduate curriculum. I might note, as an aside, that much of the blame is to be laid at the door of academic linguists themselves. Enamored of the esoteric formalism required for certain kinds of analysis, they have too often neglected the kind of intellectual outreach to undergraduates that can bear much fruit and should form part of the study of language and culture generally. They have thus made themselves easy targets for administrators faced with hard decisions about cutting costs.

In addition to helping us think about relativism, the field of linguistics can also help us think about the respective advantages of a shared culture, on the one hand, and the benefits of crossing cultural boundaries, on the other. Speakers of a common language can engage in the kind of sophisticated, multi-layered communication that is possible when a great deal of shared knowledge can be presupposed, providing the context for allusion, ellipsis, metaphor and wordplay, among a host of other linguistic resources. Encounters between speakers of different languages, on the other hand, have to pass through an awkward and frustrating stage of linguistic impoverishment, which we can call "pidginization."

How much easier it is – and certainly more rewarding in the short run – to stay with familiar forms of communication. This can be especially so for those who are members of a highly educated speech community. A good example can be found in Carolyn Heilbrun’s description of her academic role models in her recent book When Men Were the Only Models We Had, in which she focuses on the inspiration provided her by such scholars and writers as Lionel Trilling, Clifton Fadiman, and Jacques Barzun. At one point, she speaks of Barzun quoting the philosopher William James:

When two minds of high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of transitions.(William James, cited in Heilbrun 2002: 140)

She goes on to quote a related observation by James:

I’ve been meeting minds so earnest and helpless that it takes them half an hour to get from one idea to its immediately adjacent neighbor. And then they lie down on it with their whole weight and can get no farther, like a cow on a doormat, so that you can get neither in nor out with them. (James, in Heilbrun 2002:140)

This must surely be what most people feel when they are working with an anthropologist who is struggling to understand their culture. We should therefore never take for granted the infinite patience and generosity that such work involves on the part of those we study.

To be sure, not all conversations among in-groups are like those Heilbrun, Barzun, and James are describing. In the ordinary course of life, they are far from, say, having dinner at High Table with Lewis Carroll. In New York, for example, they might take the following form:

Gorgeous!

Thanks.

Where?

Bergdorf’s

.In Maine, we might hear something like this:

Saw Sally.

Ayeh.

New Porch.

Ayeh.

Or, a couple of faculty members, either in Maine or New York:

Down another 200 points today!

My TIAA-CREF is tanking…

A large amount of background information can be presumed in such conversations between familiars. Moreover, repetition is the essence of long-term relationships. (For the theatre buffs in the audience, that is the central message of the perennially revived and repeated Thornton Wilder play Our Town.) We readily acknowledge the intellectual limitations of our daily repetitive, ritualized forms of conversation, as comforting and basic to the human condition as they may be. Even the most sophisticated forms of in-group discourse impose firm limits on our imagination and knowledge. And thus the higher education involves going beyond them.

In terms of how we are to think about a liberal arts curriculum, I believe that we must find the right way to combine the benefits of a shared culture with the necessity of preparing our students to travel across cultural boundaries. Places where we may reap the advantages of a shared culture include programs for first-year students and majors, where we can provide our students with a common knowledge base upon which fuller and richer communication can be built.

As far as first-year programs are concerned, we might include some components that are shared either by all students in the class or, at least, by significant sub-groups. Admittedly, there will be arbitrariness in the choice of which materials to share widely, but arbitrariness does not absolve us from the responsibility of making decisions and establishing priorities. Our choices need not be perfect; they only need to be good enough. They should give our students the wherewithal to have interesting discussions and arguments about topics of depth and significance.

Students who major in the same field should come to constitute a sophisticated intellectual community. This is most reliably the case with majors in the natural sciences; the social sciences and humanities are more hit or miss. Many observers of the academic scene have noted the flattening of the curriculum in these fields, especially in the humanities, as prerequisite structures have been giving way to a tendency to have students of all levels of preparation enroll in the same courses. I think much has been lost in terms of an instructor’s ability to build on presupposed common knowledge. Within this more general problem is the specific one of having students confront complex critical theories without an understanding of the context for their emergence or the major texts that they address.

The experience of a shared culture is also central to student life issues at our colleges and universities. When students belonging to groups that have historically been under-represented in the academy form their own in-groups, this is not only so that they can be relaxed and comfortable, or enhance their self-esteem, but also so that they can engage in the rewarding type of communication that William James was talking about. They can make jokes that do not have to be laboriously explained; their conversations can skip lightly over a rippling surface like stones thrown skillfully across a pond.

But birds of a feather cannot spend all of their time flocking together – because, if they do (to beat this avian metaphor entirely into the ground), the educational experience they receive will be strictly for the birds. As Diane Ravitch noted in a recent special issue of Daedalus, devoted to education in the pre-college years, a multiculturalism that separates us rather than brings us together will simply end up reinforcing the stereotypes we hold about others in the absence of true knowledge (Ravitch 2002:10).

As for the college curriculum, much has been written about the danger of balkanization as programs like African-American Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Latino Studies have been established, in the context of pressure from students themselves belonging to these groups. Still, the positive side of this curricular development is one that we must understand and defend, since it is central to the aims of education: namely, that all of our students -- not only some of them -- learn to locate themselves in history.

It seems to me that curricular programs like African-American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Latino Studies should be viewed as area studies programs, like others that have been in the curriculum longer. And they are to be judged by the same academic standards. Unless they attract and serve a broad range of students from a variety of backgrounds, as any area studies program should, they are failing in their job. I think that the general rubric of "Ethnic Studies," which we see in some institutions and which reflects our folk use of the term, should be avoided. The notion that some people are ethnic and others aren’t is not, anthropologically speaking, a useful idea. Indeed, it is a mirror image reversal of the pre-Boasian "culture" concept, which designated something that the ones on the top have and the ones on the bottom lack. From either direction, the view is intellectually unhelpful, not to mention morally and politically regressive.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will share with you my own view that a concentration on some geographical area or special topic (and here I would include women’s studies) is best accompanied by initiation into a discipline that has a strong tradition of theoretical and methodological discourse. At the same time, it is important that the mainstream curriculum, and the full range of disciplines, be informed by material that has come out of multicultural and women’s studies. This is indeed what has been occurring over the past few decades.

To conclude (those are sweet words, aren’t they?): The purpose of cross-cultural study, as we generally describe it in anthropology, is to make the strange familiar and also to make the familiar strange. This latter exercise (which in German is referred to as Verfremdung and in Russian as ostranenie, for those familiar with those traditions) leads to moments of great disorientation and moments of profound, unexpected recognition. Since our own deepest assumptions are held unconsciously, we can come to see them consciously for the first time only after a troubling journey away from them. On the other hand, just as all cultural traditions are heterogeneous and complex, containing within them conflicts and contradictions, so different cultural traditions have significant points of attachment that serve as bridges between them. When we cross such a bridge, we wander into familiar territory. For example, when Christians or Jews encounter fundamentalism in Islam, they should be reminded of parallels closer to home.

The feeling of being alien to the society in which one lives is a condition that, in fact, comes naturally to a large part of the world’s population in these times. The migrant and the exile have become central tropes in scholarship and art. We see, in the pages of our professional journals and in the courses of our curricula, greater attention to the study of diaspora and to transcultural phenomena generally. Our students must be prepared to live in a world of displacement; many of them already do live in that world. Hence the other selection I have provided as background reading for today. In his essay "Reflections on Exile," Edward Said says the following:

For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgment and elevate appreciative sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be. (Said 2000: 186)

Note that Said says "acting as if" rather than "being" at home. In fact, there is no place – there should be no place – where one is naively, uncritically at home. Said places himself with Theodor Adorno, who said "[I]t is part of morality not to be at home in one’s own home" (Said 2000: 184). We pursue a liberal education so that we can dwell in a place -- not always a comfortable place -- where a German-Jewish philosopher and a Palestinian-American literary critic converse and argue, across whatever boundaries of culture and history, with one another and with us.

References
Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Houghton Mifflin, 1934.

Heilbrun, Carolyn, When Men Were the Only Models We Had; My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Kernan, Alvin, In Plato’s Cave. Yale University Press, 1999.

Kluckhohn and Leighton, The Navaho. Harvard University Press, 1946; revised edition by the American Museum of Natural History/Doubleday 1962.

Linton, Ralph. "One Hundred Per Cent American", American Mercury,

Nussbaum, Martha "Undemocratic Vistas", review of The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, by Allan Bloom. New York Review of Books, October 5, 1987.

Nussbaum, Martha C., Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Harvard University Press, 1997.

Ravitch, Diane, "Education After the Culture Wars", Daedalus, Summer, 2002, pp. 5-21.

Said Edward, Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, 2000.

Sapir, Edward, "The Grammarian and His Language", in Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, edited by David G. Mandelbaum. University of California Press, 1949; revised paperback edition, University of California Press, 1985.

Stocking, George, "Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective", in Race, Culture and Evolution, Essays in the History of Anthropology. The Free Press, 1968. (originally published in the American Anthropologist, vol. 65, pp. 783-799, 1963).