Page 157 - Cultural Theory

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••• Derek Robbins •••

There was nothing in Bourdieu’s philosophical training which would have made
him conceptualize situations in terms of ‘culture’. He showed no interest in the ele-
ments of Kulturgeschichte transmitted to France by Raymond Aron in his La philoso-
phie allemande (1938). Bourdieu always remained hostile to the attempts of Dilthey,
Rickert and others to find a hermeneutic mode of analysis of culture and society that
might be different in kind from the scientific mode which was the legacy of posi-
tivism. He confronted raw phenomena in Algeria and his disposition was to under-
stand inter-subjective relations in the context of social change extraneously imposed
by colonial intervention. To acquire this understanding, he needed a conceptual
apparatus and the bibliography of Sociologie de l’Algérie provides evidence of Bourdieu’s
intellectual apprenticeship. The Bibliography lists two main kinds of texts. First,
Bourdieu read accounts of the social history of North Africa and of North African
Islam. Second, he read books which gave him methodological guidance. He cited
Weber’s Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssociologie, but, mainly, it appears that he was
largely self-taught by reference to American books on acculturation. In particular,
for instance, the Bibliography lists the following: Herskovits, Acculturation, 1938;
Keesing, Culture Change (Stanford University Press, 1953); Mead, Cultural Patterns and
Technical Change (Mentor Book, 1955); Siegel, Acculturation (Stanford University
Press, 1955); and Spicer, Human Problems in Technological Change (1955).
The books which Bourdieu cites fall into two categories. There are those which are
specifically about acculturation understood in terms of culture contact and racial
contact while there are others which are concerned with the relationship between
cultural and technological change. The first is essentially the product of the work of
the 1920s and 1930s whereas the second is the product of the post-World War II
American interest in global modernization through technical advance. I want to
focus on the influence of Herskovits.
In 1935, the American Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Personality
and Culture established a sub-committee on acculturation composed of Redfield,
Linton and Herskovits. The committee observed that acculturation was an indistinct
concept. They believed that ‘a series of studies prepared in accordance with a single
plan or outline would be extremely useful for the testing of certain hypotheses.’
(Linton, 1940). They produced a report which endeavoured to define terms so as to
stimulate future enquiries to be conducted within a common conceptual framework.
There was, in other words, an attempt to scientize the analysis of acculturation.
Herskovits’s book of 1938 appends the 1936 report of the sub-committee, but
Herskovits wrote a long introduction in which he continued to clarify definitions
and in which he expressed some of his personal reservations about the report which
had been jointly authored. Herskovits insisted that the analysis of acculturation
involves the study of culture carriers. He wrote: ‘For the moment, it can however be
assumed that culture does not exist apart from human beings, and that where con-
tact between cultures is mentioned a certain human contact must be taken for
granted as the only means by which culture can spread from people to people or
from generation to generation’ (Herskovits, 1938: 11). This view had methodological
implications which connected with Herskovits’ original training as an historian. He
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