Structure, History, and Culture—Introduction (a)

[a] Structure (history, culture) RF

Introduction to Structure, History, and Culture—A         Introduction to Structure, History, and Culture—B

Delivered as the 2010 Presidential Lecture at Beloit College's Phi Beta Kappa Induction Ceremony

Sameness, Difference, and Renewal
 As a person who has been around the block—the academic calendar—a few times, I cannot help but feel nostalgic as the calendar turns to March, April, and May. The renewal of springtime and the greening of even northern areas makes me think of the ways our lives are structured, timed, reconfigured, renewed…and remembered. Nowhere is this as true as in academia, where I spend most of my working life. Let's think about school, then. I'll use examples from college springtime, but only because my memory is a little rusty (aside from those dreams where I show up to the high school and have to finish "Senior Math" to graduate...usually in my pajamas). The examples work from kindergarten through medical school, so let's get started. 

[b] Structured history RF

Some things stay the same. The warming of spring, the rush to the end of the term, papers, finals, a brief (and often raucous) punctuation of exuberance from Wednesday until Friday…and then the gear-up, with families in tow, for graduation weekend—departmental receptions, presidential gatherings, Phi Beta Kappa inductions, and the commencement ceremonies on Sunday. All of these are remarkably persistent from year-to-year. Every year people take "final" exams in the spring. Every year people graduate. Every year family members from all over the countryside show up to celebrate with the graduates. 

Yet some things are always different. The students themselves, the paths each has taken to garner enough credits for graduation, their papers and exams (these had better be different), and their individual reactions to the enormity of the occasions—all of these things change from year-to-year, and give a joyous particularity to the events of graduation.

This interplay of sameness and difference—the rhythmic blending of things that seem to endure and others that drift away as scattered moments in time—takes me back to my first day of graduate school in October 1987. That was the day I began to think about structure, history (or "event"), and culture. Part of the reason had to do with the anthropology professor I met for the first time that fall. Marshall Sahlins was focusing a great deal of his thinking (and writing and teaching) on the subject he called "structure and history." I would eventually take his seminar by that title, but this was a different course—a graduate introduction, as it were, to anthropological theory. 

[c] Structured event RF

As much as I would eventually learn about "structure and history" from Professor Sahlins, I was shocked into considering those matters the moment I looked at the syllabus for the course. A ten-week term lay ahead of me, with a little bit of "finals time" that gave me a total of seventy-five days. Seventy-five days for an ambitious course with many papers, lots of pressure, and...I double-checked the syllabus, just to be sure...ninety books.

Ninety. In real terms, I knew that I would have to work out a pace of about a book and a half a day to keep on-track. I thought about the structure of the term, and then about the way that I could approach it. I was already learning about structure, history, and culture, and Professor Sahlins hadn't even mentioned the words yet.

What I want to do with this series of posts is to engage these ideas and to push them in new directions that were not “covered in class.” Even in the seminar I eventually took called "Structure and History," Marshall Sahlins never discussed the bedrock (elementary?) issues and examples I am about to present, but I never could have developed them without his influence. What I am doing, in a way, is going back to the very beginnings of Sahlins's rich intellectual thread and trying to explain these ideas from the ground up. Sahlins has published a number of superb works that change the way we think about culture and change. What I am trying to do here is to walk through the very basic (and largely unexamined) "undergrowth" of his profound ideas. 

[d] Like flight RF

 
The Basic Ideas 
Structure, history, and culture. It all begins with the give-and-take between sameness and difference that I mentioned above. Let us begin with an example that I have used repeatedly when I have explained these concepts to classes of mine (imagine that we are in class). Consider the table in front of me, and let us assume that I want to get from my side to the other side—closer to y’all, as we say (sometimes) back home. The table is a structure, and the movement I make to reach my goal (getting to the other side, like the chicken on the side of the road) is an event. Once it has happened, it is history, and by this definition, history is the array of things that happened to have happened—particular negotiations of structure that have everything to do with the individual predilections and peculiarities of individuals. And structures.

Right now, I am the peculiar individual, and I could choose from five basic options. I could go over it (leaping or crawling). I could scrunch down and crawl under it. I could move the table to the side, and walk forward, or I could simply walk to my left or my right and go around it. With any of those choices, I negotiate the structure and achieve my goal. Or not—it is not particularly difficult to imagine Professor Icarus catching a sole on the table and hurtling to earth. The table is the structure, and the event is what I happen to happen to do. Culture, in this schema, is the patterning of behavior and expectations. You might not think of going around a table as “culture,” but you already have a surprising number of shared assumptions about the matter right now. It is the reason you might very well chuckle if I crawled under the table, and the reason why the only “good” option for a middle-aged professor is to go around one side or the other. But you already knew that, and no one had to teach it to you. That's culture.

[e] Structure, culture RF

Structural Scenes

I like to think of structures as having three very basic “levels.”  There is nothing binding about these characterizations, but they represent ways of framing the issues so that the permeability of structures make more sense. Let's start with a series of images.

The first image—my dad, as a young boy, at the lake. When I was young—and at the lake—my father would tell me about his childhood dream of riding a bike as fast as he could from the road, across the lawn, and down the dock, then sailing through the air until he would gently descend to the water in a long, slow arc. I, too, imagined it until it was real for me. I could see it happening. It was then that he told me what really happened in his childhood negotiation of structure. He rode, flew down the dock, and went face first into the water the moment the front wheel left solid wood. He had not integrated gravity and several laws of physics into his imaginary equation.

[f] Level Three RF

The second image. Driving home from Madison yesterday, I took the Interstate, that vast river system that has crisscrossed the nation ever since the Eisenhower administration, complete with its network of oases and small river towns known as truck stops. Here’s the deal: the Interstate highway system is a structure, and life all around it is structured in ways you may or may not think about. Traffic (in structures called cars and trucks of various makes, models, and sizes) flows in two or three lanes, exiting and entering in methodical fashion not found on rural roads. It goes further, though. Traffic laws and speed limits are structures, too. If you drove to work or class today going nine miles over the speed limit (or four), you know exactly what I’m talking about. Even if you drove exactly the posted speed, you negotiated the structure. Some structures are just more malleable than others.

The third image. Students finishing their studies negotiate an entire series of structures in the last few weeks of the semester—all of which most people would call more flexible than the laws of physics or the structures of our biggest highway system. Try telling those same students, though, that their structures are so flexible they need not worry ("grading is subjective," we hear). Is that what you were thinking as you prepared your fourth grade report on the United Nations, your high school biology lab write-ups, or your upper-level seminar paper for your major? You did all of these things according to page limits, time constraints, and assignment guidelines. And you probably spent more than a little time wondering what constitutes the difference between an “A” and an “A-“ (or a B- and a C+) for various teachers.

[g] Structured conditions RF

In every case, we are “negotiating” structure. Let’s be sure, though, that we’re on the same page with the word negotiate. I don’t mean back room (or even front room) deal making. No cigars are required. I mean action. You are acting—right now, even. My father learned that he could dream and imagine and act all he wanted. The structures he negotiated were unforgiving (I call gravity a Level 1 structure). You might have found Interstate highways (Level 2a) or traffic laws (Level 2b) unforgiving, too, and I know that many students think that a professor with a red pen (Level 3 in my parlance) is the most unforgiving of all. Even Professor Redpaper, though, would agree that s/he is not gravity and those macroeconomic theory paper expectations are more flexible than the laws of nature.

This introduction to a complex topic and series on Round and Square is structured, too. Check in tomorrow for the rest of the (introductory) story.

Introduction-A          Introduction-B

---

Notes

[1] Kwame Appiah, Thinking it Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), ix-x.

[2] I have used the outdated Descriptive Notation style for my chess examples, for old-time’s sake.

Bibliography

Appiah, Kwame. Thinking it Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

[h] Structure (and history and culture) RF

Seinfeld Ethnography (37)—Pool Man

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.

[a] Spacious RF

Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 

George Eats Trash     No Soup for You     Elaine Exclaims    The Puffy Shirt    Poppie's Pizza     Mr. Bookman

Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party
George's Friend        Jerry's Haircut          Face Paint             Mustachioed       Smoking              East River
Pool Man                   Dunkin' Joe              Life Lessons          Reckoning          Dog Medicine      Shower Heads
Looking Busy            George Tips             Kramer's Job          Empty Tank
Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.

Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific

Structure, history, culture, and event. That is what we will explore today on Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific. Have you ever tried to play pool in an awkward room? Have you ever tried to meet oncoming traffic on city streets...with cars on both sides of the streets? In a new series, I will soon be covering larger implications of the ideas behind structures we negotiate day-after-day throughout our lives. For now, we are just getting our feet wet. Take a look at how Kramer and Costanza the Elder negotiate the structures of time and space in this clip.

Pool Man 1:26

Pool Man 3:27

[b] Framed RF

What do we mean by structure, history, and culture? Well, I devoted an entire advanced seminar to the topic two years ago, and suffice it to say that it's complicated. I don't mean that in an ordinary sense. Everything is complicated. The way we "negotiate" space, though, has so many connections to the way we think and act that it is worthy of special consideration. As I often tell my students, we are "structure-negotiating animals," and we manage our physical and temporal barriers from the time we get up in the morning (negotiating the spaces of "bed," "floor," bathroom," "fasting," blood sugar, and so forth). Every moment of our lives, we "negotiate" multiple structures. The keyboard on which I am typing is a structure that I am negotiating according to a culturally and technologically scripted framework (English langugage, QWERTY keyboard, and so forth). I am drinking green tea in a mug structured in a manner to keep the teabags from spilling out. It goes on and on, as you will see in the new Round and Square series (coming soon) called Structure, History, and Culture.

For now, however, let's think about Kramer and Frank struggling with the upstairs pool table (and the structures and cultural overhead, as it were, of betting strategems). Think even of our woeful conductor with his twisted baton. Why should a damaged piece of metal affect the performance of music? Because it's fiction, I hear you say. Well, yes, but think about it. Have you ever watched a conductor carefully? Have you ever played for a conductor? If the conductor is any good, s/he will manage the cultures and structures of the orchestra in ways that bring the very best from the talent s/he encourages. These, too, are matters of structure, history, and culture.

[d] Tight RF

Let's think about just one more term-defining example, and I'll leave the rest to our theorists and the new "Structure, History, and Culture" topic on Round and Square. Structure: Frank and Kramer have to "negotiate" a full-sized pool table with full-size pool cues. The room is not adequate to the task. These matters are structured. Culture: the various rules ("I'll break," "what's your game?," and calling your pocket). History: the particular choices that an individual (or group) happens to make at any particular point. Faced with structural challenges, Kramer innovates, picking up the conductor's baton. He is within the shared cultural "rules" of the game (you know this if you have ever seen the mini-cues in houses or bars with inadequate room), but his particular historical (this time he sees it; before he didn't) choice is due to luck, chance, fate, or happenstance. The structure (full-sized table; small room) never changes, but the negotiation of it (using the baton as a cue) does.

Don't worry if this sounds confusing. It is (this is my argument) only the most important thing to understand in all studies of...everything. We'll tackle it more deeply in the coming weeks.

Our readings deal with some of the most important writings on structure and history ever written. This will be one of the few times that we deal with three writings from the same theorist in Seinfeld Ethnography. His name is Marshall Sahlins, and we'll have much more to say about him in the future.

Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities
Marshall Sahlins (1981)

[d] Metaphor ADV

Structural anthropology was founded in a binary opposition, of the kind that would later become its trademark: a radical opposition to history. Working from Saussure's model of language as a scientific object, structuralism similarly privileged system over event and synchrony over diachrony. In a way parallel to the Saussurean distinction between langague (la langue) and speech (la parole), structural analysis seemed also to exclude individual action and worldly practice, except as they represented the projection or "execution" of the system in place. I will argue here, mainly by concrete demonstration, that all these scruples are not really necessary, that one can determine structures in history—and vice versa.

For Saussure the engagement of structure from history had seemed requisite, inasmuch as language could be systematically analyzed only as it was autonomous, referentially arbitrary and a collective phenomenon...Perhaps it is too much to claim that Maitland's famous dictum should be reversed: that history will be anthropology, or it will be nothing. My object in this essay is more modest, simply to show some ways that history is organized by structures of significance.[1] 

To a degree, the task is not difficult, since the ready structuralist notion of plus ça change...is a very historical idea. The past, it says, is always with us. From a structuralist perspective nothing is simpler than the discovery of continuities of cultural categories as modes of interpretation and action: the celebrated "structures of the longue durée." I shall begin my discussion of the Hawaiian kingdom with considerations of this kind. But only to lay the groundwork for a more ambitious project. The great challenge to an historical anthropology is not merely to know how events are ordered by culture, but how, in that process, the culture is reordered. How does the reproduction of structures become its transformation?[2]

Islands of History
Marshall Sahlins (1985)

[e] Islands ADV

Still, the Hawaiian case, for all its historicization of the world, has already shown that there is not ground either for the exclusive opposition of stability and change. Every actual use of cultural ideas is some reproduction of them, but every such reference is also a difference. We know this anyhow, that things must preserve some identity through their changes, or else the world is a madhouse. Saussure articulated the principle: "What predominates in all change is the persistence of the old substance; disregard for the past is only relative. That is why the principle of change is based on the principle of continuity." Yet in certain anthropology, also notoriously in the study of history, we isolate some changes as strikingly distinctive and call them "events," in opposition to "structure."

This is really a pernicious distinction, structure and event. If only for the relatively trivial reason that all structure or system is, phenomenally, evenemential. As a set of meaningful relations between categories, the cultural order is only virtual. It exists in potentia merely. So the meaning of any specific cultural form is all its possible uses in the community as a whole. But the meaning is realized, in presentia, only as events of speech and action. Event is the empirical form of system. The converse proposition, that all events are culturally systematic, is more significant. An event is indeed a happening of significance, and as significance it is dependent on the structure for its existence and effect. "Events are not just there and happen," as Max Weber said, "but they have a meaning and happen because of that meaning." Or in other words, an event is not just a happening in the world; it is a relation between a certain happening and a given symbolic system. And although as a happening an event has its own "objective" properties and reasons stemming from other worlds (systems), it is not these properties as such that give it effect but their significance as projected from some cultural scheme. The event is a happening interpreted—and interpretations vary.[3] 

Baseball is Society, Played as a Game

Marshall Sahlins (2004)

[f] Baseball structures ADV

The Giants' implausible season became "The Miracle of Coogan's Bluff" (the site of their ballpark, the Polo Grounds). Bobby Thompson's home run was "the shot heard round the world." Every red-blooded American baseball fan of a certain age remembers where he or she was when listening to the broadcast of Thompson's great feat—just as they remember the news of Pearl Harbor, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the assassination of President Kennedy. After first writing that sentence, I came across the following passage on Bobby Thompson's home run in Jules Tygiel's Past Time: Baseball as History:

It was likely the most dramatic and shocking event in American sports and has since taken on the transcendent historical character of Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination," observed journalist George W. Hunt in 1990. "Anyone alive then and vaguely interested can answer with tedious exactitude the the question "Where were you when you heard it?"

Perhaps we have underestimated sport the way we underestimate talk about the weather, as the integuement of an otherwise divided and only imagined community. Tygiel notes DeLillo's musing on this score: "Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment [i.e., Bobby Thompson's homer] enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses—the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?"

So is it truly chutzpah to put "the shot Heard round the world" on the same plane as the Peloponnesian War or the 2000 U.S. presidential election? Hexter said Thompson's homer was "the equivalent (in its sphere) of the defeat of the Armada, the battle of Stalingrad, the Normandy landings."

Or else, in the same hyperbolic vein, it was the equivalent of the Copernican Revolution. The difference between the types of historical change we have been discussing seems much like Thomas Kuhn's famous distinction between revolutionary "paradigm shifts" and "normal science"—the first described in such terms as "breakthrough" and "transformation," the second as "progressive" and "cumulative"—as much in their respective temporalities and agencies as in their dynamic forms.[4]

Notes
[1] Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 3.
[2] Sahlins, Historical Metaphors, 8.
[3] Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 152-153.
[4] Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xxx.
 

Bibliography

Sahlins, Marshall. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the 
       Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981.
Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Sahlins, Marshall. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. 

       Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

[g] Structure, event (history) RF

NEXT
Wednesday, February 1st

Dunkin' Joe

Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio...? Kramer thinks he has found you in a coffee shop, and insists that you dunk. There is ample grist for the mill of social theorizing next week on Seinfeld Ethnography.

Seinfeld Ethnography (10)—Newman's Mail

Click here for an introduction to the Round and Square series Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific.
Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 

George Eats Trash     No Soup for You     Elaine Exclaims    The Puffy Shirt    Poppie's Pizza     Mr. Bookman

Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party

Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.

[a] Overwhelm   RF

Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific 
Life. It just keeps coming and coming. And then you die. That might be Newman's approach to these matters, but the great thinker was not alone.  Confucius said something very similar, and countless philosophers across the world have hinted that this might be the case.

What does this all mean? There's too much stuff, too little time, and too much pressure? Well, yes. Thinkers from Charlie Chaplin to Pierre Bourdieu have considered these matters, and puzzled over the ways that "progress" and "overwhelm" are linked. There is a disturbing connection between the two. For those of you old enough to remember a time when you waited for the post(man) to come every day, does life with e-mail seem unambiguously better?

I will not pursue this particular line much further, and not only because it is far from being an original question. If you need a prompt in considering this, though, just think what it was like to return to work today and open your e-mail (especially for those of you in the United States, who returned from the Memorial Day holiday). Some of you surely "kept up" with cyber demands during your time away from work. Others of you found...a whole bunch of stuff waiting for you yesterday morning.

And I haven't even mentioned Facebook, yet. Ah, progress.

It just keeps on coming—information and control; knowledge, and power. Before we get too far down the road, though, let's take a look at some "oversize(d) mail/male" (so to speak). We shall call him (channeling Nietzsche) NewMan.

When you control the mail...  0:30

Because the mail never stops 1:05 

[b] Too much   RF

It just keeps on coming (and then there are the phone books and the catalogs—at least in an earlier, non-digital era). What are we to make of never-ending pressure (or at least the very basic idea that I mention in every class I teach—that there will always be too much stuff and far too little time)?

Newman embodies the frustration in truly memorable ways, but let's take a look at what several thinkers have said about pressure, frustration, and monotony over the years. You will notice that I am not peering very deeply into the peculiar pathos that is Newman, at least not yet. For now, he will guide us in our thinking about larger ideas. His particular idiosyncrasies will be topics of analysis (so to speak) in future posts.

***  ***

Remember, as always, that the "theory" readings in Seinfeld Ethnography are meant to juxtapose ideas, and not merely to echo the Seinfeld clip.  Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Marshall Sahlins will lead us in directions unforeseen by the great über-carrier, Newman.  Karl Marx starts us off with an interesting little discussion from chapter ten of Capital on the limits of the working day. We will follow with a few lines from Michel Foucault on knowledge, information, and power, and finish with Marshall Sahlins's critique of traditional economic models for understanding certain kinds of societies.

And then we will pause. We will sit back and imagine the entire Seinfeld crew as...hunter-gatherers. We will imagine them picking berries and pursuing antelope. Above all, though, we will imagine them, at the campfire (yes, the secrets of fire are with them), pondering the day that has just passed...and talking, talking, talking.

[c] Capital ideas

Karl Marx
The Limits of the Working Day
We begin with the assumption that labour-power is bought and sold at its value. It value, like that of all other commodities, is determined by the labour-time necessary to produce it. If it takes 6 hours to produce the average daily means of subsistence of the worker, he must work an average of 6 hours a day to produce his daily labour power, or to reduce the value received as a result of its sale. The necessary part of his working day amounts to 6 hours, and is therefore, other things being equal, a given quantity. But with this the extent of the working day itself is not given.

Let us assume that Line A------B represents the length of the necessary labour time, say 6 hours. If the labour is prolonged beyond AB by 1,3, or 6 hours, we get three other lines:
          Working day I:  A - - - - - - B - C
          Working day II:  A - - - - - - B - - - C
          Working day III:  A - - - - - - B - - - - - - C
which represent three different working days of 7, 9 and 12 hours...

The working day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity. One of its parts, certainly, is determined by the labour-time required for the reproduction of the labour-power of the worker himself. But its total amount varies with the duration of the surplus labour. The working day is therefore capable of being determined, but in and for itself indeterminate.

Although the working day is not a fixed but fluid quantity, it can, on the other hand, vary only within certain limits. The minimum limit, however, cannot be determined...On the other hand, the working day does have a maximum limit. It cannot be prolonged beyond a certain point. The maximum limit is conditioned by two things. First by the physical limits of labour-power. Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man can only expend a certain quantity of his vital force. Similarly, a horse can work regularly for only 8 hours a day. During part of the day the vital force must rest, sleep; during another part the man has to satisfy other physical needs, to feed, wash, and clothe himself. Besides these purely physical limitations, the extension of the working day encounters moral obstacles. The worker needs time in which to satisfy his intellectual and social requirements, and the extent and the number of these requirements is conditioned by the general level of civilization. The length of the working day therefore fluctuates within boundaries both physical and social. But these limiting conditions are of a very elastic nature, and allow a tremendous latitude. So we find working days of many different lengths, of 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, and 18 hours.[1]

Michel Foucault
Labour, Life, Language

[d] Thingèd orders

[And now, approaching 1800] The space of Western knowledge is about to topple: the taxinomia, whose great universal expanse extended in correlation with the possibility of a mathesis, and which constituted the down-beat of knowledge—at once its primary possibility and the end of its perfection—is not about to order itself in accordance with an obscure verticality; a verticality that is to define the law of resemblances, prescribe all adjacencies and discontinuities, provide the foundation for perceptible arrangements, and displace all the great horizontal deployments of the taxinomia towards the somewhat accessory region of consequences. Thus, European culture is inventing for itself a depth in which what matters is no longer identities, distinctive characters, permanent tables with all their possible paths and routes, but great hidden forces developed on the basis of their primitive and inaccessible nucleus, origin, causality, and history. From now on things will be represented only from the depths of this density withdrawn into itself, perhaps blurred and darkened by its obscurity, but bound tightly to themselves, assembled or divided, inescapably grouped by the vigour that is hidden down below, in those depths...

Then—and this is the second phase of the event—knowledge in its positivity changes in its nature and its form...What changed at the turn of the [nineteenth] century, and underwent irremediable modification, was knowledge itself as an anterior and indivisible mode of being between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge; if there were those who began to study the cost of production, and if the ideal and primitive barter situation was no longer employed as a means of analysing the creation of value, it is because, at the archaeological level, exchange had been replaced as a fundamental figure in the space of knowledge by production, bringing into view on the one hand new knowable objects (such as capital) and prescribing, on the other, new concepts and new methods (such as the analysis of forms of production.


Production, life, language—we must not seek to construe these as objects that imposed themselves from the outside, as though by their own weight and as a result of some autonomous pressure, upon a body of learning that had ignored them for too long; nor must we see them as concepts gradually built up, owing to new methods, through the progress of sciences advancing towards their own rationality. They are fundamental modes of knowledge which sustain in their flawless unity the secondary and derived correlation of new sciences and techniques with unprecedented objects.[2]

Marshall Sahlins
The Original Affluent Society

[e] [Af]fluency

If economics is the dismal science, the study of hunting and gathering economies must be its most advanced branch. Almost universally committed to the proposition that life was hard in the paleolithic, our textbooks compete to convey a sense of impending doom, leaving one to wonder not only how hunters managed to live, but whether, after all, this was living? The specter of starvation stalks the stalker through these pages. His technical incompetence is said to enjoin continuous work just to survive, affording him neither respite nor surplus, hence not even the "leisure" to "build culture." Even so, for all his efforts, the hunter pulls the lowest grades in thermodynamics—less energy/capita/year than any other mode of production. And in treatises on economic development he is condemned to play the role of bad example: the so-called "subsistence economy."

The traditional wisdom is always refractory. One is forced to oppose it polemically, to phrase the necessary revisions dialectically: in fact, this was, when you come to examine it, the original affluent society. Paradoxical, that phrasing leads to another useful and unexpected conclusion. By the common understanding, an affluent society is one in which all the people's material wants are easily satisfied. To assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny then that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner of hard labor of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means.

For there are two possible courses of affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little. The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way, makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies: that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable: thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own: that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting a Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living.[3]

...Still this much history can always be rescued [even from] existing hunters: the "economic problem" is easily solvable by paleolithic techniques. But then, it was not until culture neared the height of its material achievements that it erected a shrine to the Unattainable: Infinite Needs.[4]

[1] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I [Trans. Ben Fowkes] (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 340-341. Italics mine.
[2] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [Trans.information missing] (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 251-253. Italics mine.
[3] Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1972), 1-2. Italics mine.
[4] Sahlins, Stone Age, 39. Italics by original author.


Bibliography
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things [Trans. information missing]. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1 [Trans. Ben Fowkes]. New York: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1972.

NEXT
Wednesday, June 8th
The Bootleg
Jerry and Kramer consider art, legality, pathology, and morality...occasionally at gunpoint.

Beginnings (16)—Captain Cook in Hawaii (and Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr)

Click here for the introduction to Round and Square's Beginnings theme.

[a] From Here to Eternity (Beach)    RF

I am heading for the islands today (Monday morning), and will give a paper on Chinese management ideas—remonstrance, actually—at the East-West Center on Saturday. My travel schedule will mean that I will probably not be able to post again until Thursday 5/19 (my "Seinfeld Ethnography" post, possibly a day late). In the meantime, I am showing the rolling waves just outside of my favorite beach on Oahu—the very same location where a famous love scene in the 1953 movie From Here to Eternity was filmed.

[b] Whale Chart    RF

233 years ago—and a few islands over—Captain James Cook arrived in what he thought of as the Sandwich Islands. It didn't turn out so well for the old guy, but in a fascinating and peculiarly "cultural" sort of way. One of my University of Chicago professors, Marshall Sahlins, has had a great deal to say about Cook, Hawaii, and structural theory. He is perhaps the most important American anthropological theorist in the last half century. I would say "ever."

Very few anthropologists have rigorously examined the dimensions of historical change in social and cultural life. Sahlins has, and it is truly contemptible that historians have not read him thoroughly. As more than one critic has noted, it is because of the narrowness of many historical readers, who will not deign to read outside of their geographical areas of specialty (why would an early modern European historian read about Hawaii?...or so the academically xenophobic reasoning goes).

Sahlins's [1] approach to time and change is deeply innovative, and historians need to read him. He is the most important philosopher of history ever to walk the earth (yup, really). Here is a key quotation from the introduction to Islands of History.

Anthropology has something to contribute to the discipline of history. The converse also goes without saying. Yet I am not arguing simply for more collaboration between the disciplines. As I put it at one point, “the problem now is to explode the concept of history by the anthropological experience of culture.” Nor again will the consequences be one-sided: an historical experience will as surely explode the anthropological concept of culture—structure included. [2]

For us, though, it will be enough to read a little bit further in Marshall Sahlins's masterwork Islands of History. For our purposes, let's think of it as a kind of "beginning," with Cook and his crew starting to get to know the eighteenth century Hawaiians. We'll discuss his death in an "endings" post later on this week. For now, let's take a look at Sahlins's take on Cook's visit to Hawaii, and how being received as a god (not so bad, really) turned dark.

Many weeks from now, I will examine the greatest debate in the history of anthropology (Sahlins-Obeyesekere). If you have not spent much time in the discipline (and that is certainly understandable), let me just say that it comes out of the sentiments in the statement below. This is volatile stuff. 

[c] Islands

Marshall Sahlins
Islands of History
The ritual makes another curious juncture with European history: in the death of Captain Cook, whom Hawaiians had identified as their lost god/king, Lono. The next chapter will document the event in detail; here we may be content with a brief synopsis. Cook's first visit, to Kaua'i Island in January 1778, fell within the traditional months of the New Year rite (Makahiki). He returned to the Islands late in the same year, very near the recommencement of the Makahiki ceremonies. Arriving now off northern Maui, Cook proceeded to make a grand circumnavigation of Hawai'i Island in the prescribed clockwise direction of Lono's yearly procession, to land at the temple in Kealakekua Bay where Lono begins and ends his own circuit. The British captain took his leave in early February 1779, almost precisely on the day the Makahiki ceremonies definitively close. But on his way out of Kahiki, the Resolution sprung a mast, and Cook committed the ritual fault of returning unexpectedly and unintelligibly. The Great Navigator was now hors catégorie, a dangerous condition as Leach and Douglas have taught us, and within a few days he was really dead—though certain priests of Lono did afterward ask when he would come back. It was a ritual demise: hundreds of Hawaiians, many of them chiefs, pressed in upon the fallen god to have a part in his death. [3]

Notes

[1] If the "s's" seems strange, just look at the first entry in Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Disagree if you like, but just think of Charles's throne and Jesus's compassion. S's. Deal with it (they're "right," actually).  LaFleur's point. Bierman's speech. Sturtz's archival research. Deal.
[2] Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 17.
[3] Sahlins, Islands, 93-94.

Bibliography
Sahlins, Marshall. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.