Page 44 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

RETHINKING THE FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURE

During the nineteenth century, the encounters of cultural theorists with
actual and singular cultures were indirect. As I am about to explain, cultures
different from one’s own were not known from lived experience. This is not to
say that early cultural theory held a sloppy or careless approach to particular
cultures. Encountering a culture was a means of collecting data, never an end in
itself. Collecting data served a higher purpose.
Anthropology started under the sign of a clear-cut division of labor.
Government officials, missionaries, travelers, explorers, and other tentacles of
colonialism would experience intercultural contact, leaving the processing and
the reflection of data to armchair theorists with deficient second-hand know-
ledge of actual cultures. Tylor, for instance, thought that his role was to deal
with the conjectural aspect of anthropological imagination, fitting singularities
into an overall design. Meanwhile, the actual contact with specific groups was
left to missionaries already in the field, like Lorimer Fison and Robert Henry
Codington, or to explorers such as Everard Im Thrun (Stocking 1983: 78). It is
therefore no surprise that culture, the key notion of such an odd undertaking,
could be regarded as suspicious, however careful the British Association on
Anthropology may have been, requesting rigorous information, and demanding
data to follow a meticulous prescription. Informers were ordered not to
ask uncalled-for questions and, above all, to be precise (Stocking 1983: 72–3).
Informers should follow step by step the script of Notes and Queries on
Anthropology, blessed by the British Association on Anthropology.
The great transformation in cultural anthropology came when this division
of labor was unraveled, at the onset of the First World War, after Malinowski’s
involuntary but deep immersion in the native life of the Trobriand Islands.
Malinowski’s experience would reveal the importance of living in the social
group to be interpreted. The interpreter of a culture should learn to be a native;
the anthropologist must be able to comprehend the native culture from the
inside.
With the lived experience of dwelling among the members of a society, a
whole new insight on culture emerged. To separate a fragment of a culture
from the conditions of its use was deemed a hopeless distortion. Nothing could
repair it, not even the high purpose of inserting the segment in the evolutionary
metamorphosis of humankind.

Cultural function and singularity

In Malinowski’s terms, the basic rule to understand society was to dispense
with establishing the sequence of historical and comparative links between
social groups. The main objective now was to provide ‘a functional analysis of
culture’ (Malinowski 1931: 624). Looking towards the past was replaced by
consummate immersion in the present. The functionalist conception of culture
maintained that social experience was an integral whole offering collective
cohesion to social interaction. The task of anthropological analysis was to

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