Page 42 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

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RETHINKING THE
FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURE

Eduardo Neiva

Despite being currently considered the solid ground of communication studies,
or better because of it, culture needs radical reformulation. The antiquated
perspective on culture defined it as an idealized abstraction, as a means of
distinguishing human beings and the variety of their social groups, as well as an
edge severing humanity from the natural world. In that sense, culture is con-
ceived as a set of immanent rules of social integration, whose purpose is to
separate what is ours in opposition to what is other. The distinctions are neat:
social groups are different because they have different cultures, and culture
draws a line disengaging human beings from both animal and natural life.
These assumptions are untenable. The separation of cultures in the world of
global communication simply cannot hold any more. Nowadays, no culture can
aspire to isolation. Cultural identification is more than ever under the global
pressure of information exchange. And why should we accept uncritically the
opposition between what is natural and what is cultural, between what is given
by genetic inheritance and what is acquired through human interaction? The
separation of nature and culture stems from an inaccurate assumption that the
natural world and the human mind belong to universes without bridges. It
implies that the natural world is a realm ruled by blind necessity, resulting from
the mechanical properties of matter and determined by unchanging links of
cause and effect, inasmuch as human life and social interaction are basically free.
This assumption is based on the premise that matter and mind are isolated
dualities. But the dualism of nature and culture, or of matter and mind, merely
reflects an archaic metaphysical polarity: the one between body and soul.

A critique of the anthropological illusion
How can we continue to believe that human cultures are radically autonomous
from each other, when even anthropologists embracing this conception of
culture inevitably return from their field research saying that the studied
group is a meaningful whole, and that it can be understood? Anthropological

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