Culture as practice, part I

1. The assumption of structuralist anthropology and symbolic(interpretative) anthropology

1.1. Culture as a cognitive structure or a textual structure

1.2. But... ... anthropologists come across various events in the field and reduce them to a relatively stable structure.

1.3. But how do anthropologists take account of event?

1.4. Example: Dressing code in Hong Kong Legco

1.4.1. Dressing code in the Legco as a (post-)colonial form of symbolic power

Causal wear: citizen
Legislator: elite

1.4.2. –How to make sense of “long hair”’s resistance?

1.5. Human agency?
-Culture makes human
-But could human makes cultures?

2. Huamn agency: Rational choice or cultural determination?

2.1. Cultural determination: anthropologists develop various concepts of "culture" to explain individual behaviour

Example: Cultural pattern and collective personality

2.2. Rational choice model
-Human are goal-oriented
-Humans have sets of hierarchically ordered preferences, or utilities.
-In choosing lines of behavior, humans make rational calculations with respect to:

• the utility of alternative lines of conduct with reference to the preference hierarchy

• the costs of each alternative in terms of utilities foregone

• the best way to maximize utility.

-Emergent social phenomena -- social structures, collective decisions, and collective behavior -- are ultimately the result of rational choices made by utility-maximizing individuals.

-Emergent social phenomena that arise from rational choices constitute a set of parameters for subsequent rational choices of individuals in the sense that they determine:

• the distribution of resources among individuals

• the distribution of opportunities for various lines of behavior

• the distribution and nature of norms and obligations in a situation.

2.3. Marvin Harris (Cultural Materialism): Cannibalism and Diet of Aztecs
-Why did Aztecs practice cannibalism?
-Their diet was meat-poor
-Cannibalism was a rational choice: distribution of animal protein to a dense population
-Cannibalism was one of the parameters encouraging people to continue cannibalism

3. Marshall Sahlins: Responses to rational choice or utilitarian model
3.1. Instrumental rationality as a modern westernized invention

3.2. Interest: material interest and cultural disposition are closely related
Example: Dogs are not edible not because their protein is insignificant to us. They are seen as "friends" of human beings and eating dog meat had been banned by the colonial government long time ago (e.g. "Royal Society for the Prevention of Curelty to Animals").

3.3. Sense: symbolic schema in the everyday life
-Pig and cow belong to the category of "Meat": pork, beef, ... ...
-Dog or cat is classified as "pet"
-Sense is not a rigid framework imposed on the world outside.
-Sense is both perceptive and structural

3.4. Agency: interest-sense
-Human beings re-arrange their conceptual categories to adapt to new environment.
-Rationality: Practical reason

4. Example: A story about an ethnographer

4.1. An ethnographer studied a group of migrant workers from inland provinces

4.2. What did an ethnographer do? Why did he take photos of their children? To make friend? To make money?

4.3. A rumour: He engaged in trafficking children

Familiar people	non-commercial
Stranger	commercial
Photo	Commercial
Stranger-photo	Non-commercial?

5. Example: Lord Macartney and Qianlong (1793)

5.1. Lord Macartney was a diplomatic envoy of George III requesting free trade with China.
5.2. He was asked by Qianlong to kowtow (present tributes to the Celestial Emperor).
5.3. Free trade is incomprehensible in the cosmology of the Qing Dynasty.
5.4. Macartney vs. Qianlong
Macartney:
Sovereignty-->Sovereignty (trade)
Qianlong:
Celestial Empire-->Feudatory (tribute)

6. Culture, practice and event:
6.1. Culture-as-constituted: symbolic structure (prescriptive structure)
6.2. Culture-as-lived: how people live in the material-symbolic world (performative structure)
6.3. Practice is situated in the dynamic relationship between culture-as-constituted and culture-as-lived.
6.4. Power relationship resides in practices, i.e. the dynamic relationship between “culture-as-constituted” and “culture-as-lived”.
6.5. Event or experience is not accidental but a structuring process at a particular moment.

Sahlins, Marhsall. 2000(1982). "Individual Experience and Cultural Order." Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. New York: Zone Books.