Page 61 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDUARDO NEIVA

the free-for-all individualistic reaction of a herd running from a predator that
appears suddenly in its midst. Individuals will compose transcultural quilts
with shreds of what were parts of singular and traditional cultures. As the
marginal space between groups is radically reduced, and without frontiers to
separate them, we need a theory of culture capable of dealing with the kind of
individualism that will spread, like a stain, over contemporary experience.

Notes
1 Malinowski’s claim that the fieldworker should take a respectful peek inside the
studied culture did not prevent the founding father of anthropology from expressing
extreme irritation and contempt for the natives. In his posthumously published
diary, Malinowski (1967: 282) would refer to them as niggers: ‘In the morning
worked for two hours at Teyvava; felt very poorly and very nervous, but I didn’t stop
for a moment and worked calmly, ignoring the niggers.’ To be completely fair, we
must mention Stocking’s (1983) argument about the difficulty in translating mech-
anically the original word in Malinoswki’s diary, nigrami, into the infamous nigger.
Nigrami as a word composed of the English racial epithet, nigr., plus ami from the
Polish, could be ambiguous and puzzling. Yet Stocking (1983: 102) believes that this
is ‘no reason to argue that word did not have derogatory racial meaning’. On the
other hand, Leach (1980) defends Malinowski, saying that the Diary, as it was pub-
lished, is an unreliable source of Malinowski’s ideas. The Diary goes from March
1915 to March 1916, and at this time Malinowski had not started his Trobriand
research. That is a reasonable point. But to dismiss, as Leach (1980: 2) does, the
translation of nigrami for nigger, arguing that nigrami ‘could not have carried in 1918,
the special loaded meaning which the term nigger conveys to American readers of
1970’ is an exaggeration. Since the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of
the eighteenth century, the term had a contemptuous connotation. The Oxford
English Dictionary quotes a line from Lord Byron (1788–1824) with this meaning.
The same condescending attitude as Malinowski’s can be seen in Radcliffe-Brown’s
(1958) definition of anthropology as ‘of practical value in connection with the
administration of backward people’.
2 Leopold (1980) provides an excellent detailed description of Tylor’s intellectual
development and background.
3 Franz Boas was another major force urging the anthropologist to avoid generaliza-
tions in favor of detailed studies of particular cultures. For an analysis of the impact
of the Boasian approach, see Brown (1991: 54–8).
4 Sahlins (1976) depicts Malinowski’s conception of language as the bastardizing
effect of a narrow pragmatic idea of meaning. Malinowski’s insistence on immediate
lived experience created a pernicious division in anthropological thought. We
would find conventions and rules that made up cultural dimensions existing in a
different realm from the actual behavior of social actors (Sahlins 1976: 80). That
division was an obstacle hampering both cultural theory and anthropology as a
whole.
5 About half of the world’s population is immersed in an Indo-European linguistic
universe. Latin, Germanic, Celtic, and Slav languages are part of the Indo-European
linguistic tree, as well as Greek, Albanese, Armenian, Iranian, Gypsy, Baltic, and some
of the languages spoken in India (Malherbe 1983: 134). Among other traits of the
Indo-European languages, such as the fact that words with fixed form (adverbs,
prepositions) are less numerous than the ones that su ffer some kind of flexion

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