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Saturday, July 10, 2021

Whoops! Here we go again. “Western” and “African-American” ARE NOT terms usable in serious cultural analysis.

Neither are terms such as “Western culture,” “African culture,” “French culture,” and so on. I know, I know, those terms are used all the time in discussions about culture, and that is unfortunate. As long as the discussion is informal and nothing much is at state, such usage is fine. But if the discussion is about serious matters of social policy, as it is in the following video, than such terminology is best avoided. 

What is required is that we separate the idea of culture as consisting of ideas, attitudes, behaviors, mores, and so forth from the idea of group identity. One can get started on the with nothing more that good intention and will. But to keep going you need something else, you need ideas about culture. Despite all the time and energy that’s been expended on culture, such ideas remain hard to come by.

Early on Lawrence Mead says (c. 2:39):

...our country is really divided between two cultures. We have a dominant culture which descends from Europe [...] where people more or less pursue their own goals but at the same time they have a moralistic idea about right and wrong. [...] We also have minorities in America who come from the non-Western world, and that leads to quite a different culture, although there’s quite a lot of diversity. These groups all in various ways are less individualist. They tend to orient more on the demands of the outside world and adjusting to those rather than pursuing their own goals.

OK, so that’s what interests Mead, individualism vs. non-individualism. That’s fine. What I object to is the way a makes a blanket identification between those characteristics and something he calls Western culture, on the one hand, and non-Western culture on the other–though, you notice, he admits there’s quite a bit of diversity there. African-American culture is one of those non-Western cultures, though later on he’ll admit that as many as a third of African-Americans are individualistic in the way he specifies. So they don’t exhibit African-American culture? Western culture, maybe?

It’s a mess. I suppose Mead, if he recognizes my argument at all, would think I’m hung up on technicalities. Well, yes, but I’m not “hung up” on anything. I’m simply insisting on a coherent and consistent concept of culture.

What’s the problem? I’m not going to go into it in any detail here, but I’ve listed four papers (below) where I hash these things out. But I will say that I became aware of the problem in the wake of two things: 1) learning that those ancient Greek temples were painted in brilliant colors when they were in used, and 2) deciding that jazz is neither Western nor African music.

On the first, it was a moderately shocking fact for a minute or three, but it led me to conclude that those ancient Greeks really were quite different from us. We may have inherited this and that from them, but culturally we really are quite different. I concluded that, to the extent that it was a meaningful term of cultural characterization, “Western culture” didn’t apply anywhere in the world before the 15th or 16th centuries.

On the second, yes, jazz arose in America, a so-called Western nation, but it is quite unlike the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, etc., the Western classical tradition. But it is also quite unlike the musics of the West African nations that were the source of the people enslaved in America. The time is quite different, as are instrumentation, melody and harmony. Sure, jazz drew elements from both sources, Europe and Africa, but it is a hybrid and a new creation, neither European/Western or African.

I spell these things out in more detail in the four papers I’ve listed below. The first talks generally about culture and identity. The second two are specifically about music. The last is somewhat theoretical and speculative. It is about cultural evolution and is part of my ongoing effort to theorize culture. I suggest that only in preliterate societies is life simple enough that one can identify a specific culture with a specific group. Otherwise, groups have cultures that come from various sources.

* * * * *

Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century, Working Paper, https://www.academia.edu/8613602/Culture_Plurality_and_Identity_in_the_21st_Century

Abstract: These five essays deal are about separating the concept of culture from that of geo-political identity. They make two points: 1) Such terms as "French culture", "Egyptian culture", "Oriental culture", and so forth are geo-political concepts that no more identify KINDS of culture than such terms as "African wildlife", "Pennsylvanian wildlife", and "Japanese wildlife" identify KINDS of animals. 2) Social groups have systems of identification that are parts of the group culture, but that the identification systems of nation-states and religions tend to appropriate all of culture to themselves and thus obsure our thinking on these issues.

African Music in the World. In D. C. Major and J. S. Major, eds. The Future of Africa. The New York Society for International Affairs, 2003, pp. 199-208, https://www.academia.edu/34610738/African_Music_in_the_World

Abstract: Sometime in the last million years or so a band of exceedingly clever apes began chanting and dancing, probably somewhere in East Africa, and thereby transformed themselves into the first humans. We are all cultural descendants of this first African musicking and all music is, in a genealogical sense, African music. More specifically, as a consequence of the slave trade African music has moved from Africa to the Americas, where it combined with other forms of music, from Europe but indigenous as well. These hybrids moved to the rest of the world, including back to Africa, which re-exported them.

Cultural Negotiations: Jazz and the West in the New Millennium, Working Paper, https://www.academia.edu/13947988/Cultural_Negotiations_Jazz_and_the_West_in_the_New_Millennium

Abstract: It is common to talk of such things as Western culture, African culture, Oriental culture, etc. as though they described culturally coherent entities. If we look closely at the evolution of jazz in 20th century America, however, we see that this division between “the West and the Rest” is incoherent. For example, the idea that jazz is specifically American in character arose in propaganda during WWII and was not a result of cultural analysis. The idea of Western culture seems to be ideologically driven and is only loosely related to the details of cultural origin and practice.

Culture as an Evolutionary Arena, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 19(4): 321-362, 1996, https://www.academia.edu/235113/Culture_as_an_Evolutionary_Arena

Abstract: Culture is an evolutionary domain in which paradigms evolve through the replication and variation of memes and psychological traits. In biology genes flow in such a restricted way that there is a relatively transparent relationship between genealogy and taxonomy. In culture memes are borrowed freely between lineages so that a given paradigm may have contributions from many cultures. Further, under certain conditions cultures come into such intimate contact that the process of creolization produces new paradigms within a relatively few generations. Consequently cultural taxonomy is inherently more complex than biological taxonomy. Dynamically, over the long term culture exhibits an S-shaped growth curve which reflects the proliferation of memes within cultures. Perhaps the deepest issue in cultural evolution is the Gestalt switch which happens between the highest level of one cultural rank and the beginning of the next rank.

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