Step Ten

Ward H. Goodenough, that man with the most wonderful name in the world, wrote an article on Culture for the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology. Caveat emptor: I did not read all of it before composing this bog post, which will really be yet another semi-coherent criticism of what I consider to be the failings of people significantly more educated than I.

Within the first few pages, Goodenough handily dismisses 19th century attitudes towards culture and moves on to 20th century conceptions. He starts with Franz Boas, who was a proponent of the idea of "distinctive" cultures whose differences could be explained by (a) environmental conditions and (b) "the accidents of history" - so, essentially, an early Jared Diamond. He explains that, according to this theory, "People at the crossroads of communication have benefited from new developments being transmitted from many different places". I stopped there, stuck a little star in the margin, and wrote "STEP TEN: TRY TO AVOID INFLUENCE IN THE INTEREST OF FUTURE ANTHROPOLOGISTS", because something I've been getting through all these readings is that, because of cross-cultural exchange, it can be really, really hard to tell who-developed-what and what-things-looked-like-before-these-other-guys-came-into-the-picture.

So I keep reading, and Goodenough remarks that "The diffusion of customary practices is now known to be a highly selective process", which to me negates the whole point of cross-cultural exchange. If a culture could pick how another culture influenced it, I think a lot of them would choose realities a little different from how things turned out.

The question that I think Goodenough negates in this section is of what, if anything, do we know about cultures that were completely subsumed? Christian's steppe peoples, for instance, are a bunch of cultures/a cultural structure that he can only barely reconstruct, and, if you take him at his word, he's one of the first people to acknowledge their existence. If they could "selectively" decide which Chinese or Indo-Aryan or whatever other culture would "diffuse customary practices" within their society, would they have chosen the route that left them a teensy, pale footnote in what we actually, concretely know about the Silk Road(s)? We know next to nothing about them, which to me suggests that, since Christian posits that they were "at the crossroads" of trade, they "benefited from now developments being transmitted from many different places" and thus lost their singular identities.

I shouldn't really attach a value statement to the process by using words like "lost" or "subsumed". My problem is just that I feel Goodenough dismisses very real evidence about smaller communities in favour of looking at bigger cultures who COULD be selective about what they took from others.

In my interpretation, Step Ten should still be Try to avoid influence in the interest of future anthropologists, although arguably it's mapping cross-cultural contact that makes the discipline of history so alive and wonderful. But I rest on the idea that my steps are MINE: for this day, this year, this age when cultural preservation is very present on people's radar screens, and they are for me: for the Western world that has exerted, at many times, an undue negative influence on cultures it deems less "advanced" than itself.