Page 130 - Cultural Theory

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••• Zygmunt Bauman, Culture and Sociology •••

essential step away from the ethnographic obsession with the idea that the anthropolo-
gist can become immersed in the culture of the other. From here it is but a short
step to the idea articulated by Joel Kahn, that the project before us is an anthropology
of modernity: in the dual sense, that our others are also modern, and that we stand
to learn a great deal from seeking to take an anthropological distance from our own
modernities, to treat them as though they were, are, also exotic (Bauman, 2002a; Kahn,
2001). The foreign becomes familiar at the same time as the familiar is made foreign; or
that, at least, is the orienting purpose of our activity. All cultures are mythological;
myths are good to think with, or at least some myths are enabling while others are
disabling.
In a tellingly cultural confession, Lévi-Strauss informs us that he had ‘Three
Mistresses’ – Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology. These are not each irredeemably
structuralist, but they are all structural, indicating the difficult yet apparently
unavoidable spatial images of critique: ‘surface’ and ‘depth’ (Bauman, 2002a: 201).
Bauman’s point of insistence is to maintain the duality of focus, to succumb neither
to surface image or representation, nor only to summon up the hidden depths
behind them. The practice of sociology, in this way of thinking, is to mediate
between the two levels of reality, analysis and activity. The strength of a cultural soci-
ology, unlike some work in cultural studies, is to insist on the reality beyond the text
as well as the reality in the text.

A Little Glass of Rum

The point of cultural sociology, to put it differently, is to seek to hold together cul-
ture and power, image or symbol and relationship. Bauman’s attraction to Marx,
Weber, Freud and Foucault can best be seen in this light. Bauman takes his distance
from the redemptive, or Faustian stream in Marx; he is more highly animated by the
problems of the time than by the obsession of Freud’s followers with the unconscious
or with language. With Weber, and later Foucault, both under the sign of Nietzsche,
Bauman worries the dark side of modernity. With Lévi-Strauss, he negotiates the
ambivalence of our worlds. This is nowhere more apparent than in the way in which
Bauman connects the figure of the stranger, from Simmel, to the hints offered by
Lévi-Strauss on assimilation and expulsion in Tristes Tropiques, veritably a desert-
island book, arguably for us, certainly for Bauman. Here Lévi-Strauss speculates, in
closing his book over a little glass of rum, that if we studied societies from the out-
side, it would be tempting to distinguish two contrasting types: those which practise
cannibalism – that is, which regard the absorption of certain individuals possessing
dangerous powers as the only means of neutralizing those powers and even of turn-
ing them to advantage – and those which, like our own society, adopt what might be
called the practice of anthropemy (from the Greek, emein, to vomit); faced with the
same problem, the latter type of society has chosen the opposite solution, which con-
sists in ejecting dangerous individuals from the social body and keeping them tem-
porarily or permanently in isolation away from all contact with their fellows, in
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