it gives to users, the gaps and inconsistencies speakers must fill in and resolve for themselves, and which stimulate the mind to develop its powers.7 To quote Annette Karmiloff-Smith again: “What is special about humans is the fact that they spontaneously go beyond successful behavior.”
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew the implications of such an understanding at greater length:
The human dialectic … manifests itself first of all by the social and cultural structures that it brings into existence and within which it confines itself. But the objects it employs for practical purposes and as bearers of cultural meaning [ses objets d’usage et ses objects culturels] would not be what they are if the activity that brings them forth did not also point in the direction of being able to negate or go beyond them.
Every generation of human beings comes into a material and cultural world partly shaped by the imagination and inventiveness of those who preceded it, finding in this inheritance both resources and restrictions for their activities. But the same powers of reflection that allow any group to make use of this heritage impel its members to transcend it, to seek new tools and new uses for old ones, new forms of speech and thought, new painting styles or new ways to interpret the past.8
That humans possess this creative impetus is often celebrated, but it is sometimes overlooked or forgotten that the reflective capacities that can put us at a distance from shared values and practices play a role in the process whereby we first become cultural beings. These same abilities are surely at work when we take on other, related forms of culturally patterned expressive action: bodily movement, facial display, and setting the acceptable boundaries and gestures that define personal space. I know of no studies that tell whether these modes of behavior and action present a similar pattern of early openness to learning multiple forms that is lost as children grow up, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the process through which individuals adopt and absorb them has much in common with that of language. Here, too, reflection and objectification need to be brought to bear on the task of navigating the anomalies and potential confusions that such signals, like linguistic ones, present. As the social theorist Martin Hollis has emphasized, social and cultural experience has a character much like the one Kant observed in regard to nature: cultures do not make sense of themselves, but only come to have sense in the minds that engage with them. To gain social knowledge a person must act—to use Kant’s language—not just as a pupil but also as a judge, applying forms of conceptual understanding that make sense out of what must sometimes appear as a fluid and unstable ground of interaction and experience. The difficulty of understanding just what objects and practices signify, the need to determine just how and to whom certain prescriptions or prohibitions apply (gender roles, age and class distinctions), require that individuals be able to employ “intelligent agency,” acting in ways that presume and develop the capacity to clarify the often murky meanings of their social surroundings, in order to make their way within them.9
Because the flexibility exhibited by infants, their ability to imbibe and absorb cultural elements and patterns, recedes along this whole front as they grow up, we may be tempted to regard any attempt by adults to insert themselves into a second culture as somehow artificial and unnatural. Tongues learned later on are seldom mastered at the level of those we acquire as children, and the same seems largely true of the other forms of expressive behavior just noted. Taking on features from a second culture requires a self-conscious and purposeful form of imitation that contrasts with the more spontaneous and seemingly “natural” entry into a primary one. These are some of the reasons why attempts to establish an intercultural existence may never fully succeed. But the presuppositions of cultural membership just considered suggest that these two ways of entry into culture are not wholly distinct, but exist on a spectrum or continuum where boundaries are permeable. However much attempts to blend or fuse cultures may seem foreign to our ordinary manner of belonging to a single one, they also constitute a further development of abilities that are essential in order for us to live as cultural beings in the first place; thus they put certain essential prerequisites of cultural membership into higher relief. The cases below all exemplify these general features, illustrating how our individual ways of belonging to our cultures draw on the capacity to set ourselves at a distance from them.
Another way to say this is that cultures are always particular and concrete, but that making our way within them requires that we call on abstract capacities of reflection and interpretation. Each culture, like each language, is what it is through the characteristic forms and elements that distinguish it from others; but in order to become part of any culture or acquire any language, we need to draw on intellectual powers that are independent of any specific cultural situation. We live at once within culture and outside it.
And yet this conclusion, although apt and enlightening on one level, may mislead us on another, because we can only exist as concrete beings, as individuals bearing the impress of the conditions where our lives take shape. The promises and tensions that arise from this two-sidedness have been examined in a somewhat different connection by a notable philosopher of our time, Thomas Nagel. Human beings, he argues, have the potential to develop a “view from nowhere,” a perspective that would arise by virtue of looking on every concrete determinant of our being from some external point, and subjecting it to an appropriate mode of analysis. Taking each such condition in turn—among them age, sexuality or gender, class, ethnicity, and historical situation—we can contemplate it from outside, focusing on the physical, social, or temporal conditions to which it is subject and the limitations it and the others impose. To do this in regard to each and every situation that imprints itself on our being would be to achieve a generalized perspective independent of every feature of our concrete life, a “view from nowhere.” But while we may learn a great deal about ourselves in this way, and even achieve some degree of autonomy from certain of the forces that impinge on us, we can never cease to be the concrete individuals we are, and whose existence is largely shaped by all these conditions. The promise that seems to reside in such reflective independence is therefore never fulfilled; what such a condition brings instead is a split, sometimes perplexing and painful, between our actual being, with its persisting limitations, and our expanded consciousness.10 Such a conclusion helps to understand both the already-mentioned difficulties often entailed by attempts to pursue an intercultural existence, and why such projects can be significant and exemplary all the same.
In the course of illustrating these general issues in particular cases, the personal histories recounted below will make evident that the faculty of reflection is not the only component of human nature that can move people to put themselves at a distance from what cultures would have them be. A different kind of gap, but one that has more in common with the first than we may immediately suppose, is opened up by sexuality. Few prohibitions are harder to enforce than sexual ones; wherever cultures impose them, people find myriad ways to escape. This widespread evasion should remind us that cultures are not wholly contained in or represented by the standards and expectations explicitly announced within them; if large numbers of people in any given situation ignore or transgress certain prohibitions, should we not regard their doing so as part of the pattern of behavior that these ways of life comprise? What we encounter here may reasonably be seen less as breaking out of cultural limits than as evidence that many cultures contain deep divisions between conflicting attempts to decide where limits should be set, conflicts that pit formal, often religiously colored constraints against some alternative set of norms (in European history one example would be the contrast between Christian self-denial and aristocratic libertinism). But even if it is not always possible to say just what boundaries a given culture imposes on sexuality, tensions often arise between such limits and the desires they seek to contain. Whether given individuals or groups transgress sexual rules or not, the tensions they feel in regard to them can generate a sense of distance from the values and attitudes that impose them. As tandem generators of distance between people and the cultures they inhabit, reflection and sexuality can reinforce or even become intertwined with each other.
All of our figures recognized this connection implicitly or explicitly, beginning with Burton, whose reflection on cultural difference was partly set in motion by the contrast
