Page 43 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDUARDO NEIVA

interpretations may be right or wrong, but anthropologists consistently o ffer an
interpretation of social gatherings.
Yet, paradoxically, anthropology disseminated the idea of culture as con-
ventional and that singular patterns of thought form an invisible but potent
barrier that grants collective and excluding identity to social actors. Culture
then becomes a set of rules antedating social actors – the cause of relative social
determination, a stable grid resisting change. But why did it seem reasonable to
understand culture as a fixed frame acting over social life making it resistant to
change?
At the foundation of anthropology in British universities, anthropologists
were incapable of dealing with a pressing social problem that was very near to
them: the destruction of the urban working class by the Industrial Revolution.
And, without inclination or desire to idealize the English peasantry, they trans-
ferred their expectations of domesticity and social equilibrium – so inbred in
the upper crust from where anthropologists were recruited – to primitive social
groups subjugated to British colonial rule. It is an anthropologist (Leach 1984:
4) who recognizes that his discipline suffered, since its beginnings, from this
kind of arcadian illusion. In any case, anthropological thought is mixed with a
superior attitude that, in a condescending manner, identifies what is its other.
Even for authors (Gass 1989: 189) writing from the fringes of contemporary
social thought, culture is seen as a term that cannot be easily stripped from
prejudice and bad consciousness. How can we forget that the apparently
neutral anthropological approach to societies branches out into two trends
superficially contradictory that are – deep inside – complementary? 1
On one hand, in classrooms, anthropology claimed to be the defender of the
legitimate humanity of the people it studied. But, on the other hand, it fur-
nished the necessary knowledge for the transformation of natives of colonized
societies into servants that would be bought with beads. Anthropology, whose
birth is a consequence of the colonialist legacy, presented a bad deal for the
natives. In exchange for their symbolic validation as humans, the colonized
would receive a religion that was foreign to their traditions; at the same time
the integrity of their society was almost always destroyed. Colonized societies
would never be the same; they became part of the general plan of humankind,
to which they contributed unconsciously and at their own expense.
The idea of cultural singularity was marginal in early cultural theory. The set
of values prevalent in a particular social group was seen as part of a unique
whole organizing the apparent diversity of humanity. The lines separating
human groups were less important than the recognition of a legacy underlining
the multiplicity of cultures. Edward B. Tylor’s (1871) in fluential project of a
cultural and anthropological theory was a typical nineteenth-century pseudo-
2
evolutionary scheme that had its foundations in the Enlightenment concep-
tion of a progressive development of humankind. This would change. But, at
the beginning of anthropological research, universals mattered much more than
particulars.

32