culture as praxis

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CULTURE AS PRAXIS

Michael Higgins

The history of the development of the an- thropological concept of culture has been attempted by many, with little success in defining the process beyond the hope that it does exist in some fashion. The one work that I have found that can rise above all this confusion is Zygmunt Bauman's book, Culture As Praxis [ 1 ]. The following will be an attempt to sum- marize Bauman's argument and to explore its use in understanding the process of caring (both in the specific sense of health care and the more general problem of human concern, which is, in turn, a reflection of socio-cultural relationships). Bauman provides an extensive review of what the concept of culture has sup- posed to have meant in particular schools of thought (such as the difference between British and American anthropology in terms of the importance of culture) and how it has been misused. He is concerned to show that much of the confusion over the term culture arises from the attempt to place the process of cultural action within a closed scientific discourse which requires some verification of a process that in fact transcends such limited techniques of verifications that are embedded in positive science. Baumaa contends that the process of culture deals with the formation of behavioral and symbolic ordering which allows human beings to confront and transform the

Michael Higgins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley.

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conditions in which they find themselves. That is, humans order the world of their existence not to make it permanent but to allow for both an understanding of it and a means for the transformation of that existence. This is a collective effort which provides meaning to people's existence, and then links them to- gether in the process of continually producing and reproducing meaning in terms of how they order their use of labor, time and space. Thus to Bauman, the process of culture is analogous to the process of human praxis. Praxis then becomes the ability to impose order upon chaos; this, in turn, allows for collective human action for survival. More importantly, through these actions of ordering, humans are able to create meaningful actions that lead towards social change. Therefore, culture becomes a dialectic process in which humans order their universe of action to allow for an existence that is meaningful to themselves and to the conditions which they confront [2]. To illustrate what I am saying, let's go back to the differences between content and action. What is consistent about human behavior is not any particular form of behavior or content; rather, we consistently act to make our lives meaningful and significant. We can do this through having control over what we create in the context in which we find ourselves. It is only through having this power of ordering that we can alter our conditions. However,

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when we are asked to demonstrate or verify this field of action, we fall victim to the limited positivistic epistemology .of counting. In accepting that meaning of behavior we are forced to turn the dynamic processes of action into static elements of content. This produces a mundane and vulgar description of human behavior as a process of a constant adaptation to the real (survival) and we always wonder how it is that people change. Furthermore, those who have laid down the dictates of posi- tivism can clearly see the mundani ty of our at tempt and thus continue to monitor the level of the scientific import of our work. In accepting the dictates of an alienated form of inquiry, we lock ourselves into dead-end conceptual frameworks, and thus lose any instru- mental power we have for altering the nature of our own conditions and those of the people we seek to help. The content of any particular cultural system is not very important to either the cultural system or to anyone attempting to understand the behavior and aid in the caring of other human beings. Content is the end product of human action directed towards ordering a domain of meaning in terms of the people's historical conditions. We as health anthropologists observe the content of people's history - such as the role of social networks and caring and the appointment of particular persons who mediate or perform a series of rituals - then we extract that process from social context and label it as culture. Then we go back ten years under different conditions and start labeling what we witness as cultural change. In fact, what has changed is a multi- level process involving the rearrangement of the nature of people's labor use, thus placing people in different space and time relationships. This rearrangement necessitates a change in ordering people's lives so they can search for and create new meanings for their existence. When dealing with the onslaught of capitalism, many such creations will not work because the context no longer exists for there to be any meaningful behavior associated with

the order (such as the ghost dance of Native Americans). Some confrontations we identify are in fact short-term adaptations to difficult conditions such as urban poverty or class domination, while others, such as the revolutionary acitivity of the Amazon Indians of Ecua- dor, are concrete attempts to construct meaningful behavior in the context of the underdeveloped capitalism of Latin America. However, we tend to miss these processes because we are in the ethnographic laboratory labeling content as human behavior.

Bauman provides us with a possible solution to this conceptual double bind. He stresses that culture should be defined as a process of action which is a constant critique of any given reality [3]. That is, culture is not the end product of some assumed historical processes; it is, in fact, the process of history. The wide array of ethnographic information we have collected under the label of cultural behavior is a strong endorsement for human creativity and all the empirical proof that we need to demonstrate that we can understand both our own and other people's immediate conditions, perceive means to alter such conditions and, in fact, to change social conditions. Culture is thus the continual critique of all determinist episte- mologies, ranging from social biology to vulgar materialism. In terms of this argument, we need to see that culture illustrates the domain of people's real and symbolic actions and provides us with a means to demystify the domain of the imaginary. This concept of culture provides us with a tool to fight against the processes that threaten both ourselves and the people we wish to care for; that is, we can talk seriously and concretely about how to transform the context of our own social alienation.

It seems to me that health practitioners and anthropologists have accepted Illich's general critique of the modern medical industry, and thus we wish to draw upon different social systems to build some kind of holistic health care system. We pull out particular contents of

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social systems that we think will aid in this endeavor. I think we are wrong. The existence of folk health care systems is not an endorsement for the practice of holistic health, but a strong and powerful condemnation of the modern medical industry that cannot by its very structure provide health care for all the people who need it. The pragmatic and curing powers of folk health care need to be studied and confirmed as to their overall usefulness. But we must recognize that many of these behaviors are short-term adaptations of people in situations where their worlds have become meaningless.

Let me give two examples of how we can look at culture as a process of a critique of existing reality. For this I will draw upon the works of some artists: the work of John Nichols on the Spanish-speakers of northern New Mexico, andthe art of reggae in Jamaica. Nichols' book, The Milagro Bean Field War [4], is a long historical novel which deals with the living conditions of Chicanos in northern New Mexico. Though the author is an Anglo, his feeling for both the region and the people is powerful and accurate. The story line involves a small mountain town that over the years has lost most of its productive land to corporate interests, the remaining land threat- ened by a large tourist park. The novel deals with how all the characters - though predo- minantly the Chicanos - confront what they have wanted from their lives, what they have been able to attain in terms of the constraints upon their lives and how they can change. The Chicanos come to grips with what their past and present have been and redefine who they are and who they have been. This comes about not through protecting their life styles in terms of some cultural system, but through struggling against those who were dominating them. To succeed they had to redefine several decades of history and abandon many forms of behavior that outsiders had labeled as their culture. The book is fiction; its subject matter is real.

Reggae, is created in the urban slums of Ja-

maica, music which addresses political, social, economic and religious issues. It comes from the experience of extreme urban and rural poverty and the religious movement of the Rasta, a back-to-Africa movement based upon the images of Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey, and involving the smoking of a great deal of ganja. The major artists of reggae have all come from the slums and their music expresses their background. They have created a new language, a religion and a series of political concepts that are defined in their music and, in turn, are used to force changes in the conditions in which they live, conditions which involve the future of their children. The songs are not harsh or bitter, but openly political and revolutionary in their vision. They have organized their general views around the concept of "dread". They define dread as a concrete awareness of the conditions in which they live and what brought them about. It also contains a meaning or an awareness that change will come, that they will be the ones to create the changes, and that such changes will involve both new lives for themselves and also for the people who have oppressed them. In fact, I consider the reggae concept of dread the best metaphor we can create for the idea of culture as praxis.

How does this epistemological argument refer back to the problem of caring? Health care and anthropology share two important aspects. Both disciplines, because of the nature of their working conditions deal with people in terms of the reality in which people live. U~fortunately, both disciplines have attempted to explain that context in terms of some cultural model. When we deal with people in their social context, we move beyond the limited discourse of a science which attempts to find ways to justify alienation with the use of such split realities as culture and society. However, when we explain what we do, we tend to have our work and our hopes neutralized. How do we get beyond the double bind of our own social system?

The answers have to come from a collective

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confrontation within the disciplines of health care and anthropology. First, we need to re- think the language we use in attempting to ac- count for other people's behaviour. If the argument about culture is correct, then all terms such as society, community , family and perso- nality that are related to culture also have to be rethought. We need to face the reality that many of the problems we confront in our pro- fessions have little to do with other people's social systems. In a search for means to provide care for people who live outside our system, we need to recognize that perhaps we are the ones who need care. Often the assumptions of cultural relativism hide the real problems of health and illness. As health practitioners and anthropologists, we are concerned with the plight of the powerless in the world. We attempt to aid powerless people who are themselves attempting to lessen their domination. However, our main means of aid is to simply offer ethnic and cultural respect. Left un- answered is the question: Who are the powerless people? The other cultures of the world or our own powerlessness in relationship to the dominant others in our own social system? That is, if we can attain respect for the lives of other people, then do not we also attain some kind of respect from the dominant powers in our own social system? The point of this paper has been an at tempt to point out that such assumptions end up negative for both the people we wish to aid and ourselves.

The acceptance of a split reality is thus an acceptance of an alienated epistemology which assumes that meaning and significance are separate from people's daily lives. We continually allow concepts to be used that state that the subjective and objective domains of human behavior are in fact separate realities. They are not, and as I have stated above, we know that from the nature of what we do as health practitioners and anthropologists.

To conclude, let me suggest that we can use the concept of care as one that is part of the range of meaning meant by the idea of culture and praxis. Praxis is the constant and

spontaneous creation of meaningful behavior in the lives of human beings. Culture is the historical context in which praxis takes place. Thus, culture is people making, defining, altering and transforming the means which they have to attain meaning. Thus to me, caring should be a health science that looks for the relations of human actions that can illustrate these processes and attempts, not to turn a particular context into an imaginary tool we think can be used to fight our own powerlessness. Caring has to be felt at the level of the real and the symbolic and should fight against the neutralizing powers of the imaginary. We must create strategies of care that accept the existence of others but refuse to allow them to dominate the status of dominant other.

Let me end on a concrete level. We need to create caring strategies that lessen or transcend the process of alienation within our own social system. It is quite clear that the social process of capitalism is the source of this alienation and is not about to disappear tomorrow or the day after. Instead of looking for ways that the dominant system can be opened, we should ask what strategies the dominated have created to survive as long as they have, and what in the area of knowledge and skills can we share with them that will give back information to aid in their survival and hopefully their transformation. If you accept my definition of culture as praxis, then the cultures of other peoples in the world are in fact their historically real critique of alienation and their attempts at negation of the domination they and we face. Thus, the most concrete form of caring would be to create ways to aid both in the critique and the negation. Such a course of action will return meaning to the domain of human action.

NOTES

1 Zygmunt Bauman, Culture as Praxis (London: Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).

2 1bid., pp. 107-179. 3 1bid., pp. 170-179. 4 John Nichols, TheMilagro Beanfield War (New York:

Random House, 1978).

Dialectical Anthropology 5 (1980) 167-170 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands

culture as praxis

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