cultural replication. Hence, Fox calls approaches such as Ortner’s “culturology” (1985, 106), while Ortner accuses Fox (and me) of holding that cultural structures exist “external to actors” (1990, 84). The approaches seem opposed, but they are so only to the extent that they allow generalizations to cover phenomena that are themselves heterogeneous and contingent. Individual and group contestation is clearly important, but participants rarely come to it without previous entanglements. They always bring “scripts” that shape their understandings of their situation; yet these scripts are never free of contradiction. Moreover, cultural hegemony is not a seamless web of domination but a panoply of processes of varying intensity and scope. Whether the structures of communication are negotiable or completely closed is not predictable in advance but becomes apparent only after the skirmishing has begun.
Going well beyond the Geertzian emphasis on “characteristic symbolic forms” or Ortner’s “cultural schemas,” Marshall Sahlins has applied Lévi-Straussian structuralism, premised on the supposed operations of the mind, to define the cultural structures at work in particular societies. In contrast to Lévi-Strauss, however, Sahlins used structuralism to engage history. To visualize the continuity of structures, he borrowed from Fernand Braudel the notion of structures lasting through the longue durée (which Braudel had applied mainly to the enduring dimensions of geography and ecology) but extended it to cover the mental structures of whole cultures. He thus defined, for Hawaii, an overall structure that opposed two contrastive sets of elements: on one side, heaven and sea, gods and chiefs, and masculinity and male generativity, which are associated with foreign invaders who come by sea, take wives from the natives of the land, and implant culture by introducing the customs of sacrifice and taboo; and, as its opposite, underworld, land, commoners, femininity and female powers, wife-givers, natives of the land, and nature (1977, 24–25). At the same time, he argued that these elements were historically combined or opposed in different ways and were adjudged differently when viewed from different positions within the system, thus opening up the total structure to possibly “unstable and meaningfully negotiable” permutations (1977, 25). On top of this, the entire Hawaiian structure was challenged by the advent of European seamen, traders, and missionaries, who imported alternative Western structures into the novel “structure of conjunction” (also a Braudelian term). In seeming paradox, therefore, Sahlins holds that such systems maintain themselves precisely through reconstruction and accommodation; the structure is said to maintain itself by changing. Even though critics have interpreted Sahlins as essentially concerned with the persistence of an unchanging cultural structure over time, his central concern has been to ask “how does the reproduction of a structure become its transformation?” (1995, 8).
Yet laying out the cultural structure can only be a first step in comprehending how “native” categories partition the world into oppositions and levels of oppositions. To grasp what these categories and oppositions imply, one must go beyond the structuralist method to ask questions about the structure itself, especially how it came to be and what role it played in founding and sustaining the differential powers and inequalities that flowed from it. That would involve stepping outside the structure, to view it comparatively in the perspective of another structure or in a longue durée of successive structures in history. Furthermore, it would be important to consider how the structure worked to contain its own contradictions, especially since Hawaiian sociopolitical organization itself habitually set successors in the direct line of chiefs against collaterals (Valeri 1990, 173). How the structure “works,” in other words, requires knowing what the structural categories and their organizational logic are “about.” It may be the case that power is always exercised through culturally particular categories and meanings, but how power comes to control social labor must be formulated in other terms.
Sahlins holds that neither Hawaiians nor any other people can step outside their cultural categories to deal with reality, for “material effects depend on their cultural encompassment. The very form of the social existence of material forces is determined by its integration in the cultural system” (1976, 206). In contrast, Roy Rappaport insists that anthropology can adopt both an “etic” approach whose frame of reference is the community of science and an approach that engages the subjective understandings, the “emics” of the people themselves. As an ecological anthropologist, Rappaport began by attempting to trace “the effects of culturally informed behavior on biological systems: organisms, populations and ecosystems” (1971, 243); at the same time, and contrary to Harris, he argued that native understandings have a part to play in activating ecosystemic variables, which can, in turn, be stated in the etic terms of the scientific observer. For Rappaport, therefore, how the “cognized environment” (as understood by the people studied) intersects with the “operational environment” (the model of reality constructed by the scientist) remains an open problem, where Sahlins denies the validity of this kind of distinction.
Rappaport has also contributed a scheme for studying the natives’ “cognized models.” For him, such models have a structure, an architecture grounded in “ultimate sacred postulates” which, in turn, support understandings about the nature of entities in the world, rules for dealing with them, ways of registering fluctuations in the conditions of existence, and schemata for classifying the beings encountered in everyday life. In contrast to symbolic approaches that confine themselves to the study of culturally specific metaphors, Rappaport’s scheme suggests that it may become possible to compare cognitive models cross-culturally. However, in its present form, it probably works best for systems that ensure stability through ritual but is less applicable to arrangements in change that rely on power.
Discussion
In following the contestations between the proponents and opponents of Enlightenment through Reason, and their aftereffects, it becomes clear that these were not abstract theoretical debates. The affirmations of utterly opposed claims to the truth became arguments and counterarguments over power and status advanced by contending interests. While increasingly assertive commercial classes allied to expanding rationalizing states presented themselves as the party of the future, besieged social classes and locally based political elites countered this claim by exalting tradition, parochialism, true inner spirit, the social bonds of intimacy, and local knowledge. Many of the foundational concepts of the social sciences were hammered out in such contests over the control and distribution of power and bear the imprint of their political affinities. Revolutionary and Imperial France asserted dominance over Europe in the name of rationalism, secularism, and equality; the Germanies responded with traditionalizing and “spiritual” countermovements in the name of “culture.”
At the same time, both cohorts of interlocutors were locked into a common field of social and political interaction and were speaking to the same issues, although one did so from a position of strength through victory and the other from a position of defeat and victimization. Thus, one side accentuated the promises held out by the rationalist vision, while the other focused on the ways in which rationalist techniques would suppress parochial interests and loyalties by installing regimes of more perfect domination. As a result, the concepts put forward—reason and ideology, culture and society, practice and metaphysics—were not only placed in opposition but were reified as emblems of contrasting orientations, each concept objectified and animated as a bounded and holistic entity endowed with a capacity to generate and propagate itself.
When the sets of opposing arguments are placed in their social context, however, they can be seen to intertwine. When Reason is no longer abstractly set off against Culture, one can visualize how it is activated or resisted, in culturally specified ways, within institutional settings such as scientific laboratories, administrative offices, and schools. In this way, phenomena once set apart by absolute distinctions can yield to more integrative understandings.
The same point may be made about the counterposition of “class” and “culture.” When first introduced in their present-day senses, these concepts appeared to be wholly incompatible, especially when deployed in political discourse. Yet they do not exclude each other; they occur together and overlap in various ways. Both terms, in fact, claim too much and also too little. They suggest that “classes” or “cultures” represent totalities
