Page 45 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDUARDO NEIVA

identify the cultural values and regulations in actual and occasional behavior
(Stocking 1989: 98). Every incident in a group loomed from culture.
After Malinowski, cultural interpretation ought to be anchored in contexts. 3
The major condition for cultural analysis was the observation and the actual
interaction of the ethnographer with the interpreted society. Any other
contention outside of the present context matured into a fuzzy supposition.
Linguistic exchange, and by extension all exchange in a culture, was ‘only
intelligible when placed within its context of situation’ (Malinowski 1923: 306).
The trace perfusing all cultural events and whatever communicative act
occurred in a social group was singularity.
The impact of Malinowski’s recommendation was deeply felt throughout
anthropology. More than anyone else, he ‘emphasized that the e ffect of a
spoken word is entirely dependent upon the context in which it is uttered’
(Leach 1957: 131). Linguistic meaning could not be grasped by philological
and historical concepts. Malinowski’s idea of a situational context as a criterion
of meaning led the interpreter to link one lived stimulus to another, expanding
the conditions for his understanding to encompass more than actual utterances.
Language in context implied culture, and correct interpretation of meaning
needed ‘a detailed account of the culture of its users’ (Malinowski 1923: 309).
Literal translation of an utterance, word by word, from one language to
another, would never be su fficient to cope with the intricate question of mean-
ing. If speech is ‘one of the principal modes of human action’ (Malinowski
1923: 333), how could we do away with the cultural frame in which the action
occurred, and which itself allowed this action to be performed? In Argonauts of
the Western Pacific, Malinowski (1922: 459) declared that ‘no linguistic analysis
can disclose the full meaning of a text without knowledge of the sociology, of
the customs, of the beliefs current in a given society’.
Malinowski’s pragmatic conception of language may have been innovative,
but it was marred by his unwarranted conclusion that in utterances everything
amounted to a mere reiteration of the very culture into which they occur.
Linguistic exchange was then reduced to phatic communion. Language grew into
the fulfillment of a social function. 4
For Malinowski, cultural acts were the transformation of biological impulses.
Culture had a tendentious practical nature. Kinship was the cultural answer to
reproduction; health was obtained by cultural notions of hygiene (Piddington
1957: 35). To the functionalist interpretation, culture was a form of practical
reason whose restricted goal was survival.
If that was the case, did biological needs generate culture; or did culture
create organic needs? The circularity of answers to easily interchangeable
questions indicated that this was a false problem, a tautological merry-go-
round, haunting Malinowski’s understanding of culture. But it is valuable to
recognize in Malinowski’s definition of culture the traces of a resilient idea of
culture as a rupture with an original natural state severing humans from the
natural world.

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