Culture as practice, part II

1. A story about Captain Cook and Hawaiian natives
1.1. Who is Captain Cook?
1.2. He visited Haiwaii in 1778 and 1779.
1.3. Natives’ conceptual categories
Gods/ Human
Sea/ Island
Outside/ Inside
Chief/ people

1.4. From the native’s point of view
1.4.1. “Foreigners from the sea” = gods.
1.4.2. According to their religious belief, giving birth of a baby by a god brought benefits and sacred power to them.
1.4.3. The native women had sex with the sailors.

1.5. From the European’s points of view
1.5.1. Civilized/ uncivilized
1.5.2. Their conceptual scheme:
High/ low
Man/ women
Sex ≠ baby or benefit
Sex = services
Patron/ client

1.6. Exchange and consequence

1.6.1. Service<===>gift (silver and iron tools)

1.6.2. Exchange of symbols and objects

1.6.3. Gift exchange: a functional institution or symbolic-material exchange?

1.6.4.The death of Captain Cook (a controversial issue):
-In the first encounter, he, coming from the sea, was integrated into Haiwaiian people's symbolic structure.
-His return to Haiwaii was viewed as the return of the natives' Year-God Lono
-According to their Lono ritual, Lono was to be killed by their warrior god.

1.6.5. Further political changes
-Violating the tabu system
-Iron and siliver tools-->Challenging the authority of the chief.
-Polluting the god-like nature of foreigner

1.8. Some implications

1.8.1. Culture-as-constituted and culture-as-lived

1.8.2. The internal conflicts within the native society
-The natives used their own cultural codes to interpret the foreign culture and generated new practices and lived relations with others.

1.8.3. Their cultural codes were reconfigured in practices:
-The decline of chief authority
-The power of chiefdom was decentralized.
-De-sacrilization of western powers

1.8.4. Cultural domination or encounter?
-A popular theory of globalization (global capitalism): Native culture is invaded by global culture characteristic of the western culture and the material forces of capitalism.
-Culture is far less dominant and rigid than one usually expects.
-The colonial encounter might not be characterized by cultural domination; instead, it is a process of mutual reconfiguration of cultural codes.

1.9. Capitalism and culture
-The expansion of capitalism is not purely a material process.
-The commodities, particularly at the early stage of capitalism were highly embodied with cultural values.

2. Symbolic-material processes of Capitalism (the early 19th century)

2.1. The failure of free trade but the prosperity of private trade in the southeast

2.1.1. The imperial authority was not interested in trading with equal partner (The Chinese concept of imperial order)

2.1.2. Example: Yuan Ming Yuan: an imperial garden as a collection of baroque architecture, sculpture and western rare artifacts (photo 1/ photo 2)
Yuan Ming Yuan in wikipedia (Chinese/ English)

2.1.3. Example: Zheng He's journey to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Arabia and Africa (1405)

2.1.3. The local interest in trading with American merchants: Sandalwood (for Buddhist ritual, noble architecture and fine object of art)

2.2. Ameican merchants: Chinese goods<---->sandalwood

2.2.1. A great demand of Chinese or oriental goods
-The development of modern western civilization has depended on the consumption of an enormous amount of soft-drug culture.
-The spread of the ritual and habit of drinking tea
-Tea became popular beverage for the general public rather than the elite class before the 19th century

2.2.2. Shortage in silver

2.2.3. Sandalwood is a substitute

2.3. Hawaiian natives: Goods from the West (from the gods)

2.3.1. "Cultural and sacred goods" in the eyes of natives

2.3.2. The chiefs competed with each other for more goods from the westerners

2.3.3. They mobilized natives to provide as much sandalwood as possible for American merchants.

2.4. What is trade?
-It is not possible without socio-cultural formation of demand
-The socio-cultural formation is related to people's changing cosmologies.

3. Sahlins' contribution to our understanding of culture

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3.1. Culture is not confined to a social entity (a community, a group, a country, …)
3.2. Symbolic and material are not separated from each other.
3.3. Anthropology is a "critique" of cultural power (revelation of its historical formation or the possible conditions of existence).
3.4. Anthropology may be a way of opening up possibilities for practices.

Next week… …
Rabinow, Paul. 1977. “Respectable information.” Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 101-124.
Passaro, J. 1997. "You can’t take the subway to the field!”:‘Village’epistemologies in the global village"