Clifford Geertz

Between them, anthropology and psychology have chosen two of the more improbable objects around which to try to build a positive science: Culture and Mind, Kultur und Geist, Culture et Esprit. Both are inheritances of defunct philosophies, both have checkered histories of ideological inflation and rhetorical abuse, both have broad and multiple everyday usages that interfere with any effort to stabilize their meaning or turn them into natural kinds. They have been repeatedly condemned as mystical or metaphysical, repeatedly banished from the disciplined precincts of serious inquiry, repeatedly refused to go away.

When they are coupled, the difficulties do not merely add, they explode. Either more or less complicated, equally implausible reductions of the one to the other or the other to the one are proposed and elaborated, or some theoretically intricate system of interaction between them is described that leaves their separability unquestioned and their weight indeterminate. More recently, as the cognitive sciences have developed, there has been a tendency to finesse the terms more or less entirely, and talk instead of neural circuits and computational processing, programmable systems artifactually instructedóa tactic which renders both the question of the social habitation of thought and that of the personal foundations of significance untouched and untouchable.

So far as anthropology is concerned, these ill-framed or elided doubled questions, the mental nature of culture, the cultural nature of mind, have haunted it since its inception. From Tylor's ruminations on the cognitive insufficiencies of primitive religion in the 1870s, through LÈvy-Bruhl's on sympathetic participations and prelogical thought in the 1920s, to those of LÈvi-Strauss on bricolage, mythemes, and la pensÈe sauvage in the 1960s, the issue of ìprimitive mentalityîóthe degree to which so-called natives think otherwise than the (also, so-called) civilized, advanced, rational, and scientific doóhas divided and scrambled ethnographical theory. Boas in The Mind of Primitive Man, Malinowski in Magic, Science, and Religion, and Douglas in Purity and Danger have all wrestled with the same angel: bringing, as they and their followers variously put it, inner and outer, private and public, personal and social, psychological and historical, experiential and behavioral into intelligible relationship.

But it is, perhaps, precisely this presumptionóthat what is at issue and needs to be determined is some sort of bridging connection between the world within the skull and the world outside of itówhich brings on the problem in the first place. Since Wittgenstein's demolition of the very idea of a private language and the consequent socialization of speech and meaning, the location of mind in the head and culture outside of it no longer seems to be but so much obvious and incontrovertible common sense. What is inside the head is the brain, and some other biological stuff. What is outside is cabbages, kings, and a number of things. The cognitive philosopher Andy Clark's subversive question, ìWhere does mind stop and the rest of the world begin?,î is no more answerable than its equally unnerving correlate, ìWhere does culture stop and the rest of the self begin?î ¹

Much of the recent work in what has come to be known as ìcultural psychologyî has consisted of attempts, some rather impressive, some rather less so, all of them fumbling confusedly with the materials of several disciplines, to navigate around this double dilemma by reconceiving mentality and meaning in less border-drawing, this is this, that is that, terms. The very titles of the studies in this emerging genreóCulture in Mind, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Thinking through Cultures, The Discursive Mind, The Inner Life: The Outer Mind, How Institutions Think, Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind, Ways of Worldmakingósuggest both its expansive reach and its uncertain grasp.² ìPutting,î to quote Clark again, this time from his title, ìbrain, body, and world together againî is a bit of task, diffuse and ambitious. But it is one which is, at length, now genuinely begun. Or, as the title of Michael Cole's recent survey of this motley subject, Cultural Psychology: The Once and Future Science, suggests, rebegun.³

As is so often the case with necessary departures from familiar procedures, the first step in this effort to relate what inside-focused psychologists have learned about how humans reason, feel, remember, imagine, and decide, to what outside-focused anthropologists have learned about how meaning is constructed, learned, enacted, and transformed, has been obvious for some time, but curiously difficult for either sort of inquirer to face up to. This is the abandonment of the notion that the homo sapiens brain is capable of autonomous functioning, that it can operate effectively, or indeed can operate at all, as an endogenously driven, context-independent system. At least since the circumstantial description of the incipient, prelinguistic stages of hominization (small skulls, erect stature, purposed implements) began about a half century ago with the discovery of prepithecanthropine fossils and early Pleistocene sites, the fact that brain and culture coevolved, mutually dependent the one upon the other for their very realization, has made the conception of human mental functioning as an intrinsically determined intracerebral process, ornamented and extended, but hardly engendered by cultural devicesólanguage, rite, technology, teaching, and the incest tabuóunsustainable. Our brains are not in a vat, but in our bodies. Our minds are not in our bodies, but in the world. And as for the world, it is not in our brains, our bodies, or our minds: they are, along with gods, verbs, rocks, and politics, in it.

All thisóthe coevolution of body and culture, the functionally incomplete character of the human nervous system, the ingredience of meaning in thought and of thought in practiceósuggests that the way toward an improved understanding of the biological, the psychological, and the sociocultural is not through arranging them into some sort of chain-of-being hierarchy stretching from the physical and biological to the social and semiotic, each level emergent from and dependent upon (and, with luck, reducible to) the one beneath it. Nor is it through treating them as discontinuous, sovereign realities, enclosed, stand-alone domains externally connected (ìinterfaced,î as the jargon has it) to one another by vague and adventitious forces, factors, quantities, and causes. Constitutive of one another, reciprocally constructive, they must be treated as suchóas complements, not levels; aspects, not entities; landscapes, not realms.

That much perhaps is arguable. Certainly, it is much argued. What seems less arguable is that as our understanding of the brain, of information processing, of individual development, of social communication and collective behavior, of perception, emotion, fantasy, memory, and concept formation, and of reference, sense, representation, and discourse severally advance in some sort of wary and sidelong, corner-of-the-eye awareness of one another, the possibility of reducing all of them to one of them, sorting them into sealed compartments, or bringing them into a comprehensive, theory-of-everything synthesis, grows steadily more remote. We are not, apparently, proceeding toward some appointed end where it all comes together, Babel is undone, and Self lies down with Society.

On the contrary, we are witnessing an increasingly rapid proliferation, an onslaught, actually, of what Thomas Kuhn called disciplinary matricesóloose assemblages of techniques, vocabularies, assumptions, instruments, and exemplary achievements that, despite their specificities and originalities, or even their grand incommensurabilities, bear with intensifying force and evolving precision upon the speed, the direction, and the fine detail of one another's development. We have, and for the foreseeable future will continue to have, a more and more differentiated field of semi-independent, semi-interactive disciplines, or disciplinary matrices (and of research communities, sustaining, celebrating, critiquing, and extending them), devoted to one or another approach to the study of how we think and what we think with. And it is within such a field, dispersed, disparate, and continuously changing, that we must severally learn to pursue not a common projectóSigmund Freud and Noam Chomsky, Marshall Sahlins and E. O. Wilson, Gerald Edelman and Patricia Churchland, Charles Taylor and Daniel Dennett, will never come close enough to one another to permit that to happenóbut a half-ordered, polycentric collection of mutually conditioned ones.

That in turn suggests that someone who is, as I am here, attempting, not to report particular findings or evaluate particular proposals, but to describe the general state of play, is well advised to try to look synoptically at the overall field, straggling, irregular, and resistant to summary as it is. We have in recent years become increasingly used to dealing with distributive, partially connected, self-organizing, systems, especially in engineering and biology, and in computer simulations of everything from ant hills and neuron assemblies to embryonic development and object perception. But we are still not used to looking at disciplinary matrices, or the interplay of disciplinary matrices, in such a way. A field, once or future, like ìcultural psychology,î concerned with precisely such an interplay between dissimilar, impassioned, even jealous and uncongenial, approaches to ìhow we natives think,î and between the ardent partisans driving them competitively forward, would seem well advised to become accustomed to doing so. It is not tightened coordination or negligent, to-each-his-own difference-splitting that we are going to find here. What we are going to find, and are finding, is exacting, sharpening, deepening argument. And if you think things are turbulent now, just wait.

To make all this a bit more concrete, rather than merely programmatic and hortatory, let me take, in way of brief example, some recent discussions in anthropology, in psychology, and in neurology of that most elusive and miscellaneous particularity of our immediate life, the one Hume thought reason was and ought to be everywhere the slave of, namely, ìpassionîóìemotion,î ìfeeling,î ìaffect,î ìattitude,î ìmood,î ìdesire,î ìtemper,î ìsentiment.î

These words, too, define a space, not an entity. They overlap, differ, contrast, hang together only in oblique, family-resemblance termsópolythetically, as the phrasing goes; the problem is less to fix their referents (something that is notoriously hard to doówhere is ìenvyî? what, ìhomesicknessî?) than to outline their reach and application. I will start with anthropology, not only because I know the material more exactly, but because I have myself been somewhat implicated in the matteróaccused, in fact, of having ìhelped to secure permission for cultural-symbolic anthropologists to develop an anthropology of self and feeling,î apparently an unfortunate thing.⁴ It is not my own work, however, which has been more advisory in this regard than authorizing, a word in the ear, not some sort of benediction or license to practice, that I want to discuss here, but that of the so-called culturalist, or symbolic-action, theorists of passion and sentiment.

Such theorists (and, as they all are, and primarily, field researchers), of whom Michelle Rosaldo, Catherine Lutz, Jean Briggs, Richard Shweder, Robert Levy, and Anna Wierzbicka are, inter alia and diversely, representative examples, take an essentially semiotic approach to emotionsóone which sees them in terms of the signific instruments and constructional practices through which they are given shape, sense, and public currency.⁵ Words, images, gestures, body-marks, and terminologies, stories, rites, customs, harangues, melodies, and conversations, are not mere vehicles of feelings lodged elsewhere, so many reflections, symptoms, and transpirations. They are the locus and machinery of the thing itself.

ì[If] we hope,î Rosaldo writes, with the groping awkwardness this sort of view tends to produce, given the ingrained Cartesianism of our psychological language, ìto learn how songs, or slights, or killings, can stir human hearts we must inform interpretation with a grasp of the relationship between expressive forms and feelings, which themselves are culture-bound and which derive their significance from their place within the life experiences of particular people in particular societies.î However resemblant their general aspect, and however useful it may be to compare them, the m’eniswrath of Achilles and the liget-rage of Rosaldo's Philippine headhunters draw their specific substance, she says, from ìdistinctive contexts and Ö distinctive form[s] of life.î They are local ìmode[s] of apprehension mediated by [local] cultural forms and social logics.î⁶

From this general sort of platform, inquiry can move in a number of directions, most of which have been at least tentatively explored. There are ìvocabulary of emotionî studies, designed to ferret out the sense of culturally specific terms for feelings, attitudes, and casts of mind, as Rosaldo does for the Ilongot liget. (In fact, this word is inadequately translated as ìrage.î It is closer to ìenergyî or ìlife-force,î but even they won't do. One needs, as one does for m‰enis in The Iliad, extended glosses, sample uses, contextual discriminations, behavioral implications, alternate terms.) A whole host of anthropologists, myself included, have performed similar services for words ethnocentrically, tendentiously, or merely lazily, translated from one language or another into English as those affective cliches ìguiltî and ìshame.î The culturological linguist, Anna Wierzbicka, noting that Japanese words ìsuch as enryo (roughly, ëinterpersonal restraintí), on (roughly, ëdebt of gratitudeí), and omoiyari (roughly, ëbenefactive empathyí) Ö can lead us to the center of a whole complex of cultural values and attitudes Ö revealing a whole network of culture-specific Ö scripts,î not only demonstrates the fact for Japanese, but for Russian (toska, ìmelancholy-cum-yearningî), for German (Heimatliebe, ìlove of native placeî), and for what she calls ìthe great Australian adjective,î bloody. Others have carried out comparable unpackings of Samoan alofa (ìlove or empathy Ö directed upward from status inferiors to status superiorsî), Arabic niya (ìintentî Ö ìdesireî Ö guilelessî Ö ìundilutedî Ö ìsincereî), and Javanese rasa (ìperception-feeling-taste-import-meaningî).⁷

Beyond such vocabulary-system studies, there has been a wide range of other sorts of research designed to examine emotion meanings and, so far as such a thing is possible, map the conceptual space over which they extend. There are ethnomedical studies of indigenous concepts of disease, suffering, pain, cure, and well-being. There are ethnometaphorical studies of figural regimesóspirit possession, witchcraft, rites of passageóengraving feelings of Ö well, to reverse the usual Tarskian procedure, ìpossession,î ìwitchery,î and ìpassage.î There are ethnopsychological studies of the importance of different emotions in different societies, and the way in which children learn how to feel them. And there are ethnoaesthetical studies of myth, music, art, and the tone and temper of everyday life. Each such study, or type of study, remains tentative and suggestiveódifficult to pin down, hard to replicate. And some of them confuse more things than they clarify. But in their bulk, their variety, the range of materials upon which they touch, and especially their steadily increasing observational subtlety, the case for the cultural constitution of emotion seems, to me at least, fairly well made.

However that may be, the strongest, most developed challenges to culturalist, symbolic-action theories of emotion, feeling, and passion do not, in fact, come in the form of doubts about their empirical adequacy as such, which is, after all, but an interpretive issue only further, and more exact, observation can resolve. They come, rather, in the form of accusations of a more fundamental, more deeply crippling, even fatal deficiency: their supposed neglect of ìintra-psychicî dynamics and thus their, also supposed, inattention to, and inability to deal with, agency, individuality, and personal subjectivity. Such accounts, the psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow, who is particularly exercised in this regard, writes,

are unable to conceive theoretically, even as they describe ethnographically, individual psychological processes of personal meaning creationÖ. [They] bypass the idiosyncratic, divergent ways in which emotions develop and are experiencedÖ. Where, we might inquire, does the child gain the capacity, ability, or habit of ìreadingî cultural bodies in the first place if not in some internal or psychobiological parts of its being?⁸

As an analyst, and a fairly orthodox, Melanie Klein, Hans Loewald, D. S. Winnicott one, Chodorow has a strongly, down deep in the unconscious, ìinner lifeî conception of how hallucinatory infants become fantasy driven adults. Besides the cultural and the biological, she says, there is ìa third realmî which cannot be effectively understood (quoting Rosaldo, who, along with myself, is her main target here) ìwith reference to cultural scenarios and the associations they evokeî or ìcultural scenes associated with particular emotions.î

What is missing [she writes] from the approach of doing things with emotion words is an understanding of what exists between universal human instinctuality or panhuman culture and universal cultural particularity, and how this in-between develops and is experienced in particular interpersonal and intrapsychic settings to which projection and introjection, transference and counter-transference, give personal meaningÖ. [The] psychological [is] a separate register, [it is] sui generis.⁹

But it is not just in this notoriously self-contained and selfengrossed discipline, about whose claims for imperium and ultimacy, and whose peremptory way of putting things, even a sympathetic onlooker may reasonably have some reservations, that this sort of criticism arises. Anyone interested in individual development, from Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky to Jerome Bruner and Rom HarrÈ, is likely to have similar concerns about any conception of the passions that does not inquire into their ontogenetic history. The issue is not that cultural analyses of emotions fail to account, as Chodorow seems to imply (ìa separate registerî Ö ìthis in-betweenî Ö ìsui generisî), for how it really, really feels for someone actually, inside, in their heart of hearts, to have this one or that one. Put that way, the question is unanswerable; like pain (or ìpainî), it feels as it feels. The issue is how, m‰enis, liget, wrath, or rage, toska or heimatliebe, on, enryo, or omoiyari (or, for that matter, bloody), they come to have the force, the immediacy, and the consequence they have.

Again, recent research, mostly by developmental and comparative psychologists (Bruner, Janet Astington, David Premack), but on occasion by psychologically oriented linguists and anthropologists (George Lakoff, Carol Feldman, William Frawley, Roy D'Andrade) as well, has pushed forward with this matter with some rapidity.¹⁰ Most notably, a seriously revised conception of the infant mind has emergedónot blooming, buzzing, confusion, not ravenous fantasy whirling helplessly about in blind desire, not ingenerate algorithms churning out syntactic categories and ready-to-wear concepts, but meaning making, meaning seeking, meaning preserving, meaning using; in a word, Nelson Goodman's word, world-constructing.¹¹ Studies of the ability and inclination of children to build models of society, of others, of nature, of self, of thought as such (and, of course, of feeling), and to use them to come to terms with what is going on round and about have proliferated and taken on a practical edge. Studies of autism as a failure (for whatever reasons) on the part of a child to develop a workable theory of ìother minds,î of 

reality-imagining and reality-instructing through narrative and storytelling, of self-construction and agency-attribution as a social enterprise, and of subjectivity as intersubjectively, thus contextually, thus culturally, achieved are giving us a picture of how our minds come to be in which ìdoing things with emotion wordsî and ìpersonal meaning creationî do not much look like ìseparate registers.î ìThe development of the child's thinking,î Vygotsky, the godfather of this sort of work, wrote seventy years ago, ìdepends on his mastery of the social means of thinkingÖ. The use of signs leads humans to a specific structure of behavior that breaks away from biological development and creates new forms of a culturally based psychological process.î¹²

Thus it is that feelings happen: ìbetween a literal lesion and a literary trope,î as Richard Shweder has remarked, ìthere is a lot of room for a broken heart.î But, as he also remarks, ìfrayed nerves, tired blood, splitting heads, and broken hearts [are] metonymies of suffering; they give Ö expression by means of body-part metaphors to forms of embodied suffering experience through the body parts used to express themÖ. [But] splitting heads do not split, broken hearts do not break, tired blood continues to circulate at the same rate, and frayed nerves show no structural pathology.î¹³

Other emotional states, though, sometimes do; or at least involve observable (and perceptible) deformations in somatic processes. The recourse to body-part imagery to characterize not just suffering, but emotion generally (if hearts break with despair, they burst with joy) reminds us that, however they may be characterized, and however one comes to have them, feelings are felt. Faces flush hot and redden or they drain cold and pale, stomachs churn or sink, palms sweat, hands tremble, breath shortens, jaws drop, to say nothing of the complicated swellings and perturbations that eros brings on. Even literal lesions, if they are somebody's lesions, in somebody's brain, coloring somebody's life, and not extra-cultural gods from a cerebral machine, are worth looking at.

Neurologists have, of course, long investigated the implications for mental functioning of lesions located in one or another region of the brain. But, until recently, the bulk of this work has had to do with cognitive processing in the narrower, intellective senseóperceptional, linguistic, memory, or motor defects and deficits; Wernicke failures to recognize, Broca failures to produce. Emotional alterations, perhaps because they are less definite in form and more difficult to measure (as well, perhaps, because they are not readily characterized in deficiency terms) have, from William James to Oliver Sacks, been more phenomenologically reported, albeit brilliantly, than somatically unpacked.

This, too, has now begun to change, in example of which fact, we may look, in hurried summary, at Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, only one of a number of recent inquiries into what has come to be called ìthe embodied brain.î¹⁴ Damasio reports there on his work on personsónamed, described, particularized, and culturally located personsówith frontal lobe injuries (a spike through the forehead, an excavated meningioma, a stroke, a leucotomy), and the inferences that can be drawn from their strugglings, their subjectivities, their personalities, and their fates concerning the role of feeling in the construction of a human existence: ìFeelings let us catch a glimpse of the organism in full biological swing, a reflection of the mechanisms of life itself as they go about their business. Were it not for the possibility of sensing body states Ö there would be no suffering or bliss, no longing or mercy, no tragedy or glory in the human condition.î¹⁵

And no meaning. The presenting condition of his frontal casesóa nineteenth-century New England railroad worker, a professional accountant, a stockbroker, a man damaged at birth and never recovered, a dozen or so in allóis a certain affectlessness, shallowness, detachment, and indecision, an irregularity of aim, an inability to choose a course, foresee consequences, or learn from mistakes, to follow convention, plan the future, respond appropriately to others; all this in the company of otherwise normal, even superior, motor, linguistic, perceptual, and intellectual abilities.

This ìGage matrix,î as Damasio calls it after his type case, the unfortunate railroad worker with a hole in his forebrainóa certain Phineas P. Gageóis fundamentally an affective disorder, an attenuation of emotional capacity that cripples at once judgment, will, and social sensitivity:

[Gage matrix] social behavior and decision-making defect [are] compatible with a normal social-knowledge base, and with preserved higher order neuro-psychological functions such as conventional memory, language, basic attention, basic working memory and basic reasoning Ö [but they are] accompanied by a reduction in emotional reactivity and feelingÖ. [And this reduction] in emotion and feeling [is] not an innocent bystander next to the defect in social behaviorÖ. [The] coldbloodedness of [Gage patients'] reasoning prevents [them] from assigning different values to different options, and [makes their] decision-making landscape hopelessly flatÖ. It Ö also [makes it] too shifty and unsustained for the time required to make response selections Ö a subtle rather than basic defect in working memory [that alters] the remainder of the reasoning process required for a decision to emerge.¹⁶

From this foundation, a parabolical syndrome teaching a conceptual lesson, Damasio goes on to develop an articulated theory of the way emotion functions in our mental lifeósomatic markers, recalled perceptions, dispositional body states, neural selves, and so onówhich we cannot, and need not, follow out here (it is, in any case, appropriately tentative); save, perhaps, to note that Francis Bacon's laconical doctrine, ìthe intellect of man is no dry light,î receives new and powerful empirical support. ìEmotions and feelings [are] not intruders in the bastion of reason,î Damasio sums up his studies and his point of view, ìthey [are] enmeshed in its networks for worse and for better.î¹⁷ The passionsólove, pain, and the whole damn thingócan wreck our lives. But so, and as completely, can their loss or absence.

So much, then, for my minature case in instructive point: emotion in culture, mind, and brain Ö brain, mind, and culture. It is, I trust, at least dimly apparent from these compacted, offhand accounts of differently imagined and differently pursued approaches to the study of feeling (though, I could, as well, have taken learning or memory, or perhaps even madness), how a restless, catch-as-catchcan movement of attention across counterpoised disciplinary matrices, an opportunistic shift of focus from one competing research program and community to another, can yield a sense of the general direction of things in a dispersed and distributed field of scientific inquiry.¹⁸ Frontal assaults, massive drives toward conceptual unity and methodological agreement, have their placeónow and then, and when the situation permits. So does ever-deepening technical specialization, insulated, purified, and border-patrolled fact-making, without which no science, even a social one, can advance. But they in themselves do not, and will not, produce the synoptical view of what it is we are severally afteróthe end, as we say, in mind.

In the present instance, what we are looking for and how we must look for it (as well as what we may achieve for ourselves and our lives in our looking) seems to me exactly, if tropologically, set out in Richard Wilbur's compendious little poem called Ö well, called Ö

Mind in its purest play is like some bat 
That beats about in caverns all alone. 
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit 
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

It has no need to falter or explore; 
Darkly it knows what obstacles are there, 
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar 
In perfect courses through the blackest air.

And has this simile a like perfection? 
The mind is like a bat. 
Precisely. Save That in the very happiest intellection 
A graceful error may correct the cave.¹⁹

Culture, mind, brain / Brain, mind, culture, in: Available light: anthropological reflections on philosophical topics. Princeton/N.J./USA: Princeton University Press, pp. 203-217

online source: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=99830258

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