Page 66 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THINKING ABOUT CULTURE IN A GLOBAL ECUMENE

In a Washington neighborhood
But then I had made those notes as I had just left a field situation where that
view of culture seemed quite problematic. It had been two exciting years in an
African-American neighborhood, as I immersed myself in another way of life,
at the same time as that way of life was going through important changes, and
was also at the center of much public debate. But what was it I had actually
been studying? In a way, for ‘a culture’ it could seem it was not shared enough,
as I was inclined rather to distinguish between several co-existing lifestyles,
among which individuals might also move as time passed. And people in
these lifestyles co-existed, but not always quietly. If some said they preferred to
‘walk their walk and talk their talk’, there was also intermittent confrontation
and continuous debate.
In another way there was too much sharing, extending too far, to allow me
to delineate the distinctive culture of the community I had been involved with,
for somehow I must do justice to the complicated interweaving between what
was in some way more peculiar to a black, largely low-income community, and
what was more or less mainstream American – whatever now that could be
taken to mean. There was a ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ quality to the
cultural boundary, even as the social boundary between races was clearcut
enough.
Besides, that notion of culture as ‘transmitted from generation to generation’
was really far from innocent. In the political climate of the period, such ‘trans-
mission’ could too easily be understood along the lines of an epidemiology
of collective maladaptation; a debate raged over whether there was, among
low-income black Americans, a ‘culture of poverty’ which itself maintained
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poverty. One critical response to such a diagnosis was that, if there were
observable modes of action which did not seem properly mainstream
American, they were still not ‘cultural’, just situational responses to extreme
circumstances. That seemed like an enlightened line of argument – but did it
not take rather lightly the cultural history of a people who had moved, over the
generations, from West African village life, through the Atlantic slave trade and
plantation slavery, to the rural American South and then to the urban North,
mostly without having been really a part of that American mainstream?
So those notes from aboard the Kungsholm had to do with the blurred
boundaries of my field of study, its striking internal variation, and its ongoing
cultural process, in relationship to the changing circumstances of history. In
retrospect, one might see that I had come into anthropology in a period
when a growing number of its practitioners, like me, were placing themselves,
deliberately or rather willy-nilly, in field situations where that culture concept
which had perhaps itself been transmitted from generation to generation,
within the discipline, did not seem to work very well any more. Probably it had
had its weaknesses all the time, but now they could no longer be disregarded.

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