Subscribe to RSSBuilding Sustainable Imagined Communities
by Bruce White
As social animals human beings could be said to occupy two kinds of worlds simultaneously. The first of these could be seen as the concrete world made up of physical infrastructure, buildings and public and private spaces. The second might be thought of as a symbolic world built from stories and images and identities. These two worlds are of course deeply entwined with one another in that seeing a flag in the concrete world may have a variety of meanings that link into and affect change in the symbolic. Or the reverse: that a connection made or destroyed in the symbolic world will lead to action and change in the concrete.
In this short article, I would like to speak to what I see as an essential and yet constantly underrepresented application of anthropological theory and practice: its ability to contribute to improving the “infrastructure” of the symbolic world in which we live, and its potential thus to create new forms of social cohesion. Applying the term “Intra-Cultural Development”, I would like to make a case for the importance of monitoring and managing the symbolic discourse that individuals use to represent and legitimize themselves in the world, again attempting to highlight the need for anthropology to apply itself more systematically to this task.
Anthropologists’ ability to understand, and, on occasion, to speak, the language of cultural symbolism, of symbolic discourse, has already contributed a great deal to the way in which countless millions of people represent themselves in the world as members of cultures. Mead, for instance, attributes Benedict’s Patterns of Culture to the fact that “today the modern world is on such easy terms with the concept of culture, that the words ‘in our culture’ slip from the lips of educated men and women almost as effortlessly as do the phrases that refer to period and to place…”.
Cultural Relativism
When cultural relativism was being defined at the beginning of the 20th century by anthropologists such as Boas, Sapir, Benedict & Mead, the ability that ordinary people had to represent themselves in the symbolic world was limited to underdeveloped notions of racial or cultural superiority/inferiority, forms of monocultural nationhood and culturally deterministic ideas about one’s sense of place in a variety of hierarchal social systems. If we continue to use the concrete community development analogy, we might recall images of housing estates where the houses and gardens are all on the same layout, where there is little variety of access to alternative modes of living and where people have access to the same limited stock of materials and designs.
In many ways the Boas/Sapir/Benedict/Mead promotion of cultural relativism through their ‘personality writ large’ frame were attempts to build an understanding of cultural relatively into a globally-shared symbolic discourse of the human being. In so doing, their ideas helped to prop individuals up in new ways, to give them interesting representations for their own personalities by linking them to diverse traits and characteristics that were seen “as possible” within the context of universal human experience. Suddenly, through the idea that cultures could be seen as “equal” and representative of a common human diversity, people were able to begin to see parallels between themselves and others from outside and inside their own nations. These ideas allowed an increased freedom of movement within the symbolic world—people were no longer restrained to see themselves as “destined” to be somewhere along a social Darwinian evolutionary scale, and were now freer to create new relationships within themselves and with each other.
Of course, I do oversimplify the development and spread of these ideas greatly, but I do so in order to make a central point: The Boas/Sapir/Benedict/Mead cultural relativism was not merely destined to become an example of classical anthropological theory. In providing an imaginative environment that sustained individuals in their desires to seek out and find positive self representation in their everyday lives, these anthropologist’s efforts were also a splendid example of Intra-Cultural Development; or community development in the symbolic rather than concrete habitat.
Intra-Cultural Development
Again, then, I wish to see the “development” of the symbolic landscape of self representation as akin to the development of physical infrastructure and community development in the traditional sense of the term. In both endeavors, the importance of good management, planning and construction are vital. As with its concrete counterparts, intra-cultural development must identify problem areas where little or no infrastructure exists and work to design and build sustainable architectures and environments. These environments will work to diversify and enrich the symbolism available for self-representation, seeing that such symbolism is broadly and equally accessible and representative across the diverse sectors of societies and personalities.
Intra-Cultural Development is in motion across vast areas of interdisciplinary activity. The range of projects which have the potential to improve and develop the quality of our imaginative landscapes is limitless. Hosts of media projects, role-play and dramatic workshops, and educational and experiential programs attempt to directly redress unbalances within the individual-cultural identity representation system. However, anthropologists well versed in symbolic language of individuals and cultures—the bricks and mortar of this intra-cultural development—share a special responsibility to return to a once influential, even leading, role.
Task List for Intra-Cultural Development Practice
Innovative anthropological research into the workings of identity needs to continue to be consolidated and further innovated in order to continue to provide for people rich representations of human diversity. This research must be marketed, popularized and distributed in accessible forms so that individuals can digest and utilize these enriched representations of diverse symbolism and meaning. A long-term project here is to distribute the contemporary ideas of the universality of contextual, improvised, selves—to make it “acceptable”, even “natural”, to be culturally multi-sited, (Koven, 1998), or contradictory, in ones affiliations and choices of symbolic representation.
Areas where intra-cultural development has been deliberately halted, restricted, or seized through media campaigns, misinformation and/or propaganda need immediate pluralization. As a means to achieve this, anti-propaganda campaigns and other applied approaches to restoring diversity in symbolic representation need consolidation, innovation and deployment. Formal training programs and curricula aiming to equip students, a variety of actors and diplomats with the interpretative skills necessary to make their own professional contributions need to continue to be designed and put into action.
These aims cannot be achieved by anthropologists alone, (Moore and Sanders, 1996), but their trade and its tradition dictates action. Interdisciplinary networks and terminologies, resources and forums need to be built in order for intra-cultural development to be fully realized as an organized cooperative endeavor. The anthropological tradition of building sustainability into the concepts of humanity and community is unquestioned. What needs now to be considered are “concrete”, systematic, approaches to the development of symbolic infrastructures and architectures—the development of environments that simply must succeed our current unequally resourced and under-developed landscapes of identity.
Bruce White is the director of the Organization for Intra-Cultural Development (OICD)
References
Benedict, 1989 Patterns of Culture. Mariner books
Koven, Michele E.J 1998 Two Languages in the Self/ The Self in Two Languages: French-Portuguese Bilinguals’ Verbal Enactments and Experiences of Self in Narrative Discourse. Ethos 26/4: 410-455.
Moore, R., and Sanders, A.1996 The Limits of an Anthropology of Conflict: Loyalist and Republican Paramilitary Organizations in Northern Ireland. In Wolfe, Alvin and Yang, Honggang (eds,) Anthropological Contributions to Conflict Resolution (Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings). University of Georgia Press
Wolfe, Alvin and Yang, Honggang (eds,) 1996 Anthropological Contributions to Conflict Resolution (Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings). University of Georgia Press
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