The Communitarian Impulse

Colorado College's 125th Anniversary Symposium
Cultures in the 21st Century: Conflicts and Convergences

Delivered at Colorado College on February 5, 1999 at 3:00 PM
in a discussion forum with the same title.

by

Richard Shweder

… I confess to being an anthropologist and feeling a bit brainless in the presence of my distinguished co-panelists. Of course, given all the turmoil in the profession of anthropology these days, my confession is not very informative. It carries no implications as it would have fifty years ago, or even twenty years ago, for how I might feel about the concept of culture—whether I’m for it or against it; whether it makes me laugh or makes me cry. There are plenty of anthropologists these days who want to disown the concept of culture or who think they own it but do not want anyone, including themselves, to do anything with it. But I’m not one of them. Regardless of whether the idea of culture makes me laugh or makes me cry, I like it a lot, I can’t get rid of it. I find we can’t live by ecumenism alone; thick ethnicity has its place.

Sometimes, the culture thing does, however, make me laugh. Consider this incident. A South Asian Indian woman married to an American applies for U.S. citizenship so that her father, who has lived his entire life in the third world, can join the American Peace Corps. At the final stage of being naturalized in New York, the immigration officer says to her, "Do you swear you will bear arms in defense of the Constitution of the United States?" Compounding the irony of her situation, after all her aim was to get her father into something called the Peace Corps, she replies, "No, I won’t do that!" The immigration officer asks, "What do you mean?" She says, "I’m a pacifist, I don’t believe in killing." He says, "Who taught you that?" She says, "Mahatma Gandhi." He says, "Who’s that?" She says, "A great Indian religious leader." He says, "Well, you’ll have to get a note from him." She says, "I can’t; he’s dead." He says, "Well, get a note from whoever took his place!"

Yet sometimes the concept of culture and all the talk about culture does make me cry. One reads about the unfortunate organizers of a cultural festival in Los Angeles who lost funding from the Korean government when they decided to represent Korea with a performance of indigenous shamans rather than with the ballet company proposed by the Korean government. But that was only the beginning of their woes. The Thai community of Los Angeles was also offended because the festival featured a classical dance troupe from Cambodia but only popular street theater from Thailand. So much for popular culture when it comes to your rank in the hierarchy of sophistication and taste. And sometimes I find myself laughing and crying at the same time. An American scholar I know, trained as a symbolic anthropologist at the University of Chicago, applies for official research permission to do work among the Maori people of New Zealand. As part of the official procedure for approval, he finds himself interrogated by a native, a Maori with University of Oxford training in anthropology, who was the gatekeeper for the tribe and who has some doubts about the Chicago school’s approach as a way of representing the beliefs and practices of others.

There are undoubtedly many reasons, some good, some bad, some genuine, and some spurious, that the idea of culture is very much in the air these days. And [there are] other reasons, mostly bad, I think, for the recent re-emergence of various anti-cultural or post-cultural critiques. Let us not conflate the good reasons with the bad, and certainly let’s not reject the idea of culture just because some people use the word in bad faith to defend authoritarian social arrangements or, equally in bad faith, to promote egalitarian political agendas that have little to do with the study and understanding of a genuine culture. A genuine culture, by the way, I will argue, does have inherent worth, but that turns on what we mean by genuine.

So now you can locate me as an anthropologist. For the sake of this panel discussion today, I’m going to assume the voice of someone who is not anti- or post-cultural. My voice will be that of a cultural pluralist who believes at least these two things. One, that cultural diversity or multiculturalism is a fact of life in many contemporary nations, including the United States, by which I mean that American society, here borrowing some words from Joseph Reyes, "consists of groups and communities with diverse practices and beliefs, including groups whose beliefs are inconsistent with each other." And two, that a proper concept of culture—I shall try to offer you one in a moment—is useful in helping us avoid certain kinds of mistaken and damaging judgements about the beliefs and practices of others, including the judgements that others are abusive, fiendish, mutilators of their children, or otherwise immoral, disgusting, or bad. There are other far more provocative implications of cultural pluralism which I won’t have time to discuss. For example, the claim that members of the executive board of the American Anthropological Association did the right and courageous thing, although perhaps for the wrong reasons, when, in 1947, in the name of cultural pluralism, they decided not to endorse the United Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of Man on the grounds that it was an ethnocentric document—a decision that, as far as I know, has never been reversed. Perhaps that and other related issues will come up later in open discussion.

Before going much further, however, let me make another confession. I’m not only an anthropologist, I am also a confusionist and a neoantiquarian as well. A confusionist, not be confused with a Confucianist, is someone who believes that the knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from the famous nowhere in particular. Given the choice between incompleteness, incoherence, and emptiness, I opt for incompleteness while trying to get beyond such limitations by staying on the move between different ways of seeing and valuing things in the world. In addition to being a confusionist, I am also a neoantiquarian. A neoantiquarian is someone who rejects the idea that the world woke up, emerged from darkness, and became good for the first time yesterday, or three hundred years ago, in the West and Northern Europe. A neoantiquarian does not think that newness is necessarily a measure of progress. That means that, when I stay on the move, I do so by revaluing things from out of the past, including pre-modern notions of community, and searching for the corrosive irony latent within every fixed and totalistic point of view, whether articulated from the left or from the right.

Indeed, I would suggest that, in the contemporary world, the distinction and opposition between left wing versus right wing political convictions has lost much of its meaning and most of its appeal. We live in a world in which libertarians and anarchists are bedfellows. We live in a world in which the people who want the government to be more involved in our lives include moral majoritarians and old New Dealers. I remember the political scene a few years ago when the so-called left wing government of Angola employed Cuban troops to defend oil fields owned by American corporations against a Maoist revolutionary supported by the Reagan administration. It’s hard to have much confidence in the left-right distinction when the world starts to look like a Monty Python show. Moreover, the demand to be either left wing or right wing has begun to feel both morally and intellectually incapacitating. Perhaps that’s why Bill Clinton has been so popular because of his ability to adapt to the times and combine social liberalism with fiscal conservatism. I recognize, of course, the existence of essentializing and stereotype left wing virtues, such as equality, individual rights, and ecumenism—everybody bleeds, everybody feels pain, everybody loves Saturday night. And yes, there are those essentializing and stereotype right wing virtues, such as sacrifice, loyalty to members of one’s group, ancestral worship, the sacredness of an oath, and respect for elders. Nevertheless, as far as I can tell, it takes two wings to create something that can fly.

Now I want to say one or two things in defense of the concept of culture. The word "culture," in my view, refers to community-specific ideas about what is true, good, beautiful, and efficient that are socially inherited and customary and mark some kind of distinction between different ways of life, such as the Amish way of life or the way of life of Hindu Brahmans in rural India—or the way of life of secularized, upper middle class, urban, Euro-Americans who believe that individual happiness is the measure of all things. That is to say, culture refers to what Isaiah Berlin calls "goals, values, and pictures of the world that are made manifest in the speech laws and routine practices of some self-monitoring group." Now there is a lot packed into that definition, and I don’t have time to do the full unpacking. There is the notion that actions speak louder than words and that practices are the central unit for cultural analysis. I will focus on one rather astonishing cultural practice in a moment. And there is the problematic of defining a self-monitoring group. It’s problematic, as one cannot know in advance what the relevant self-monitoring groups are going to be within any society. A nationality, for example, is not necessarily a culturally relevant, self-monitoring group. The relevant communities for cultural analysis are probably not going to correspond to political or bureaucratic or census categories, such as Asian or Hispanic or Jewish or Black or Native American or what have you. One of the things that ought to make you weep is to witness the misuse and appropriation of the rhetoric of culture to serve the economic interests of political action groups. Nevertheless, of this I feel relatively sure: Forty years ago, many social scientists predicted that, in the modern world, religion would go away and be replaced by science, and the tribes would go away and be replaced by individuals. They were wrong. This has not and will not happen. We may have become cosmopolitan, but it goes hand in hand with local cultural revival and efflorescence—thick ethnicity.

What we have to do is figure out a way in which the cosmopolitan strata of people appreciating diversity is going to be integrated with local revival movements of people who want authentic ethnicity and don’t really care about other cultures—and what the ground rules are going to be in doing that. Multiculturalism is a fact of life. Many of us live in nation states composed, as Reyes put it, of groups and communities with diverse practices and beliefs including groups whose beliefs are inconsistent with each other. Life in such a society can be hazardous—especially for members of immigrant or minority groups—and the concept of culture can be very useful in minimizing some of the risks.

Here’s an example that has recently come to my attention. My example comes from a legal case in the state of Maine. One of the problems of life in a multicultural law and order society, especially for immigrant and minority groups, is that the law of the land often presupposes and codifies the substantive beliefs, values, emotional reactions, aesthetic standards, and pictures of the world peculiar to the group with the most power. And this was the case when, in 1985, the state legislature of Maine wrote a law making criminal any sexual act with a minor, non-spouse, under the age of fourteen, and went on in its wisdom to define a sexual act as, among other things, "direct, physical contact between the genitals of one and the mouth of another." Thus, in 1993, when Mr. MK, an Afghani refugee, who had been residing in the United States for three years, was seen kissing the penis of his eighteen-month-old son, he found the police descending on his house, and he was arrested and convicted of gross sexual assault in Superior Court. A few years later, his conviction was overturned by the State Supreme Court, relying heavily on cultural analysis. As it turns out, kissing the penis of a young child is commonplace in MK’s cultural community and is viewed as a sign of love and affection. It is precisely the father’s willingness to kiss what is viewed as an unclean or unholy part of the body, a place where urination takes place, that makes the act such a powerful display of love. Photographs of this type of act are displayed proudly in family photo albums in the community. After taking testimonies from members of the relevant local community and expert witnesses, it was possible for the Supreme Court to construct an alternative understanding of the meaning of MK’s act, although at great cost to the defendant and with no assurance that the law will be amended so as to make room for alternative cultural understandings of sexuality and touching—and with no assurance that other Afghani residents of Maine will not have the police knocking on their doors.

By the way, this practice may be more common than we suppose. Years ago, I was told a story by a psychiatrist friend about a colleague of his, an Iranian man, also a psychiatrist, who had married a Jewish-American woman. When his son was born, the man’s mother visited from Iran, walked into the infant’s room, and started to stroke and kiss his penis. The Jewish-American mother of the child was shocked. "What are you doing? Stop that!" she said. Her mother-in-law, equally astonished, said, "What do you mean! I’m stimulating his growth so one day he will be a man!" "Never do that again in my house!" said the angry and near-hysterical daughter-in-law. "Look," said the Iranian mother-in-law, "I did that to your husband when he was a child, and he turned out all right!"

Perhaps this case seems exotic to you, perhaps it makes you nervous, given your local, cultural sensibilities. Unfortunately, I think, it is more common than one might suppose. I invoke it only to illustrate why I think the concept of culture is and ought to play a big part or ought to be in play in our public policy debates.

Let me conclude by addressing one of the issues raised by Professor Rorty, particularly whether there is an interesting issue separating liberalism from communitarianism, although he didn’t get to talk about this in great detail. I think there is an interesting issue, and in a moment I shall try to state it. But first, I want to emphasize that what I’ve just said about the importance of the concept of culture and understanding the meaning of another person’s act—for example, whether a harm was intended or has been done—is quite separate from the issue of the standing of cultural communities as legal entities, entitled to protection or favor or special treatment within a nation-state. Here is my understanding of liberalism. Liberals believe that individuals are the units of analysis, and the main purpose of the state is to uphold and promote the values of liberty and justice, that is equal regard for individual actors. The ideal liberal state does not privilege the goals, values, or religious conceptions of any particular community or group. Within the ground rules of liberty and justice for all, individuals are free to act without prejudice or interference to form communities and create and adopt traditions of belief and practice as they see fit. From this perspective, groups and communities are voluntary organizations like private clubs, not foundational units in the formation of civil society. From the liberal perspective, the state has absolutely no interest in diversity or cultural or religious variety, per se. Its only interest is in freedom and justice for individuals in pursuit of happiness, from which diversity may or may not flow. Communitarians, on the other hand, believe that a genuine cultural tradition is something of value, like the French language or a great religious tradition such as Judaism or Islam. A kind of tragedy occurs when you’re faced with the last speaker of French or the last Jewish person in the world. And that society is made up not only of individuals with rights, but also of communities with claims to cultural rights that are worthy of public recognition. It seems to me that almost all the issues separating liberals and communitarians are at least interesting, not the least of which is the empirical question whether communitarians are right that the principles of the liberal state erode the capacities of communities—for example, the Amish in America, the French-speaking population of Canada, Muslims in India—to reproduce and perpetuate the goals, values, and pictures of the world that they have inherited and carried forward from the past. Will the answer to that question be the same in India or Canada as it is in the United States? I don’t think it necessarily has to be. But that is just one of several issues that we might want to take up in the time that remains in discussion.

Thank you.

© 1999 by Richard Shweder