By Miles Richardson, used by permission

Paper read at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., November, 1976. This is a preliminary draft of some thoughts about culture, ambiguity, and what it is to be human. I beg the reader's patience and his comments.

Although some may say there are as many definitions of culture as there are anthropologists, I would suggest that there are only two: the one that defines culture as coercive and customary, and the one that sees it as liberating and creative.

The first definition, the one that has culture coercing humans down customary paths, rests upon the assumption that anthropologists look for uniformities. Our task is to generalize, to factor out the unique and to search for the universal. We are to emphasize what people have in common: what behavioral patterns they share; what ideas they agree on. The sharing and agreeing are culture.

This is the blueprint notion of culture. Culture is the Big Blueprint in the sky. People read the blueprint for instructions on what to do and when to do it. Where does this blueprint come from? Certainly it does not come from the day-to-day efforts of humans trying to relate to each other. No, the blueprint is derived from history, wherever that may be. Blueprints for living in the present come from the past. The tradition of our culture guides our behavior; the weight of the past pushes us into the future.

Some of us are more guided by our past than others. People do act differently from what the traditional blueprint says they should. If human behavior is different from animal behavior because of culture and if culture is the Big Blueprint, then what do we call people whose behavior deviates from the blueprint? We call them deviants. The conventional explanation for these people's behavior is skewed socialization, improper enculturation. Something went wrong with the process of making us worthy members of our society. Our mothers, God bless them, dropped us on our heads. Departure from the blueprint means the individual is pitted against his culture, often times at the expense of the individual. Departure from the norm equals marginality and even delinquency.

In anthropology there is another definition of culture and that is culture as creativity. In this view, culture was what we were doing when we first carved an idea on stone, when we first painted mammals on a cave wall in Spain, when we first domesticated wheat in the Old World and maize in the New, when we first built a ziggurat or a truncated pyramid, when we first built a steam engine, then a gasoline engine, then a rocket engine, and became the first terrestrial life form to walk on the moon. Is this a blueprint for living? Is this the weight of the past, the dead hand of tradition? No. It is what drives us on. It is what propels us out of the Pleistocene savannah. It is what pushed us out into the Pacific in frail outrigger canoes. It is what possessed Martin Luther King when he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and told us, "I have a dream."

This is culture.

The definition of culture that sees culture as creative rather than customary, liberating rather than coercive, is the "thick" one, the interpretative one, the semiotic one (Geertz 1973:3-32), the humanistic one. The humanistic view seeks to generalize, but not at the expense of the unique. In the words of Miguel de Unamuno, "there is nothing more universal than the individual for what becomes of one becomes of all. Every man is worth more than all Humanity." (Unamuno 1972:51). We are humans not because of what we share, but because of how we differ, and "...what most unites us as human beings are our discords" (Unamuno 1974:7). Departure from the norm produces not deviants but innovators. Culture is not a blueprint for the living which most of us follow most of the time, but it is the living in itself, an integral part of each of us that each continually uses in our efforts to solve the riddle of our peculiar, paradoxical existence.

The creative, adaptive role of culture and the struggle to be human are told in the stark prose of Pleistocene. The story of our fossil record is the interplay of biology and culture. At its beginning we were small-brained, big-jawed creatures grubbing out an existence under the hot African sun with crude pebble tools. By the end of the Pleistocene we were big-brained, small-jawed humans driving the Pleistocene mega-fauna ahead of us as we restlessly moved across the surface of the earth (Swedlund 1976 and Geertz 1962).

The Pleistocene narrative is straight forward. We humans have a biological component and a cultural one. We are not naked apes with a thin veneer of civilization, nor are we the lords of creation who bend the environment to our will. Culture is us and we are culture. Can we be so arrogant as to suggest that we have finished evolving? Can we now conclude that in this post-Pleistocene era we have become fully and completely human? Surely the story that began over 2 million years ago has not yet ended. Surely the tremendous growth of culture since the Pleistocene has been accompanied by biological changes, however subtle. As for the future, the direction of human evolution is difficult to forecast, to say the least. A close reading of science fiction and repeated viewings of Star Trek suggest two possible directions: (1) we will become a blob; we will be pure brain matter with the ability to levitate objects and to communicate without speech; or (2) we will become a flabby appendage to a gigantic computer, which eventually will grow tired of our unnecessary presence and cut us off.

Regardless of the direction, the human story continues to unfold. It began in the Pleistocene, and it continues today, full of struggle and paradox.

One paradox is what does culture, or symbol using, do for us? Symbol using has been a successful adaptation by a bipedal primate, at least up to 1976. But in return have we not become isolated from each other? When two human friends meet and clasp hands, aren't they acting in terms of the concept of friend rather than as two primates grooming each other? "Non-human primates share experiences; we share meanings" (Willhelm 1974). Even better, we pretend to share meanings. The coercive, normative definition of culture says, "We act as the rules of our culture dictate." The humanistic, or the symbolic interactive, definition says, "These so-called rules are the reasons we give each other for doing what we have already done. The blueprint does not dictate us; we create it. Norms are not rules; they are explanations." Instead of culture being a set of rules that guide our behavior, culture is that which we, both as anthropologists and as ordinary humans, create to give meaning to our behavior. Rather than thinking and then proceeding to act; we act and then proceed to explain. (Culture, "as a conception, whether defined as customs, traditions, norms, values, rules, or such like, is clearly derived from what people do." Herbert Blumer 1969:6; see also Wagner 1975).

The statement that norms are not rules but are explanations does not imply that human behavior is hopelessly random. It is probably more random than we, as social scientists, think it is. Human behavior is patterned and more of that patterning is due to our biology than we have been willing to admit. It may be that the chimps are becoming more like us, or that we are becoming more like them, but recent research in sociobiology (Wilson 1975) reminds us that though we strive to be gods we are only a special breed of primates, a unique, paradoxical, perhaps even a tragic breed, but a breed nonetheless.

Human behavior is patterned also because we make our explanations into causes. Through the magic of reification we objectify our explanations until they begin to breathe with a life of their own. They turn upon us, causing us, their creator, to act as if we were their creatures (Berger and Pullberg 1965). We then explain again to each other why we are acting the way we are. "Actions beget fictions, and fictions in turn create actions." (Dietrich and Sundell 1974:5). Behavior becomes myths, and myths convert to rituals.

From the humanistic perspective we create culture as an explanation of what we are doing. Does this mean we share the explanation? How can we share it if we are symbol users? Your explanation of what we are doing will differ from mine and mine from yours. We don't share; we only pretend we do. We attribute our standards to others (Goodenough 1974); we take the roles of each other (Mead 1974). I play like you are me; and you play like I am you, and together we act out the human story.

Why do we do this? Why do we act out this farce that is both high tragedy and low comedy? We do it because, as Leslie White told us long ago, we must (1945:235-247). Our creativity is deterministic. Our only freedom is to be our own tyrant (Burke 1966:52). We pretend to communicate because the only alternative is insanity. Destroy the pretense of contact with others, and there awaits us the terror of chaos, where all become nothing, and we cease to exist (Becker 1973).

The capability of pretending that we share explanations is located in the ambiguity of culture. What does this mean? Ambiguity?

Surely it means that a culture trait or complex has several meanings both to various individuals and to the same individual. Probably it also means that some traits or complexes are more ambiguous than others. In fact I would suggest that the more ambiguous a trait or a symbol, the more compelling its call, the more people will respond to its message.

Could we divide science and religion along these lines? Science strives to be non-ambiguous. Its experiments are useless unless everyone agrees on the outcome. A large measure of religion is also devoted to achieving a unity, a unity not of thought however, but a unity of experience, of feeling. When the world dissolves around us, when the pretense reveals itself for what it is, a thin fabric of half-truth and outright lies, isn't that when religion comes in and connects us to God, or at least to each other? In addition to causing corn to grow, fish to bite, and warts to disappear, religion must have something to do with loneliness.

In religion we fight loneliness and sense unity by constructing ambiguous figures. In Christianity, Christ is such a figure. He is god turned into man through the birth pains of a virgin. He becomes more ambiguous as different people seek in him ways to confront the ultimate loneliness, death. The Anglo-American Protestant constructs out of him a message of eternal life; the Spanish American Catholic finds in Christ the lesson of how to suffer. (Richardson, Bode, and Pardo 1971).

Ambiguous religious figures call to us not vaguely but sharply. They do not soothe us with boring symmetry but stimulate us with jarring contractions, which they simultaneously present and hide. A god becomes man; a virgin becomes a mother. The mother in turn becomes a sister, and the sister may even flirt with us like a lover.

If culture is fiction (Geertz 1973:15), something we use to construct an explanation for our existence, then religion is the most perfect part of that fiction, the attribute of humans most unlike that of other animals, the part of us most divorced from reality, for we use religion to tell us that we humans have a purpose, that we need not fear death, that we are not lonely.

By defining culture as creative fiction, full of ambiguities, the humanistic perspective promises neither the enticing abstractions of science nor the beguiling sirens of religion. Instead, it addresses itself directly to the question, the basic anthropological question, what is it to be human, what does being human mean.

Being human means continually wrestling with questions of why are we here. Blind, senseless, uncaring nature produced us. She cast us out of the primate troop, by cursing us with the ability to imagine God and thereby making us one of the most successful species, and certainly the most lonely. Being human is not to be a passive reader of blueprints, it is not to be a puppet on a string of norms, but it is to be man the hero, fighting to make sense of what nature has accomplished with us, the creation of a paradox: a species who can dream of eternal life but who must die, a species who preaches peace but who is more effective at waging war, a species who can imagine perfect beauty but whose shit stinks like all the rest.

This is culture and the struggle to be human.

References

Note: I appreciate the most helpful comments of Barbara Bode, Andy Deseran, Toni Flores Fratto, Edward Henderson and Edward Lyon.

Becker, Ernest

1973 The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.

Berger, Peter and Stanley Pullberg

1965 Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness.

Blumer, Herbert

1969 Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Burke, Kenneth

1966 Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dietrich, R. F. and Roger H. Sundell

1974 The Art of Fiction. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Geertz, Clifford

1962 The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind. In Theories of the Mind. J. Scher, ed. pp. 713-740. New York: The Free Press.

1973 The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books.

Goodenough, Ward

1974 Review of the Interpretation of Culture, by Clifford Geertz.

Science 186: 435-436.

Mead, George Herbert

1974 George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology. Anselm Strauss, ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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