In five or so remarkable years at the end of the 1960s the Modern Era’s balloon popped. Nineteen sixty-eight’s global revolutionary year sparked the chaotic beginning. Five years later, 1973’s Arab-dominated OPEC’s fist-pumping oil embargo announced the first clear sign that the West’s imperial run was over. Postmodernity, born in the period’s global turmoil.  

In between about 1968 and 1973 or so, the West wobbled toward breakdown. Its confidence deflated by one embarrassment, by one unresolved crisis after the next. Social revolution roiled democracies at home; assassinations, riots, bombings; US defeat in Vietnam; breakdown of the international currency mechanism, dollar devaluation, recession, failing industries, “stagflation”; Watergate . . . and on, setting off a decade of economic weakness and political malaise. Many among the “Rest” (the non-West) watched the muddle, made a reasonable assessment of it, and lost confidence in the West’s leadership and in its modern project as a model for development.

Long wearied by the West’s globe-straddling imperial power (at the onset of World War II, more than 80 percent of the Rest was directly colonized or controlled by Western powers), and now newly freed from colonial occupation, the Rest spoke up with stronger voice and vigor to criticize the West’s universalist modernizing project. They saw through the modern project’s narrative façade—the story that for centuries had bulldozed the world’s cultures flat—and pronounced it, as Jean-Francois Lyotard duly noted, dubious (see Essay 3). The West lost its triumphant swagger; its dominating cultural authority collapsed.[1]

Western modernity, its individualism, dualism, universalism, foundationalism, and faith in progress, fell under radical scrutiny. Its institutional keystones—the modern liberal states that commanded the power centers organizing Western life, not to mention much of the world—lost the public’s confidence. Governance slid into a half-century (and continuing) legitimacy crisis. What else can we call the January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol but an exclamation point on a slow-rolling fifty-year Age of Fracture?

What changed all of a sudden at the 1960s’ end? Loss of faith in Western virtue.

Could it be, skeptics asked, that all along the West’s ‘enlightened’ narrative of reason, world progress, science, liberal democracy, and capitalism, had been wishful thinking? Even worse, a ruse? A fig leaf to conceal actually-existing imperial modernity: The West’s militarized claim on global power, its economic domination, resource and labor exploitation, and racial chauvinism? Where’s the virtue in that?

Fair questions? It depends upon one’s perspective. For those on the bottom of the world’s social heap looking up, their experience of racism, paternalism, poverty, and foreign control (either outright colonialization or control by foreign capital, Western-assisted coups d’état, and military interventions), certainly made Western virtue look like fig-leafed Western vanity. For those on the top looking down from the commanding heights, imagining that the modern world could look a lot worse—We in the West haven’t done such a bad job, have we? —vanity looked like virtue.

Before the late 1960s blowup, the Western metanarrative held “bottom” and “top” in balance by promising a Grand Deal: Hope to the world’s downtrodden—a promise that, if you wait long enough, the modern world will lift you up too! And to the rich: Security from socialist revolution if corporate and social elites would only cooperate with government, practice social responsibility, redistribute wealth, and happily pay taxes![ii]

The bargain took clearest shape in Western liberal welfare states (European social democracies; the American New Deal and Great Society), foreign aid to emerging nations, and Western-assisted development. But in the long run, the shaky, ‘virtuous’ balance between the patience of the poor and noblesse oblige satisfied no one.

By the Sixties’ end, radical critics, both Left and Right, blew up the Grand Deal. Neither side found virtue in the ‘enlightened’ modern, liberal center. Left and Right together dissolved the glue that held together the modern global imperial project.

The Left found the deal too weak, its promises too slow when unfolding and ineffectual when they did. It turned away from gradual liberal democratic “reformism” to forcing change through radical social movements and revolutions. Long struggles, for example, like movements for decolonialization, Third-Worldism, Black power, women’s liberation, Liberation Theology, anti-globalization, and so on.

The ascendent Right, found the deal too strong, its taxes and regulations onerous. They pronounced social equality an unachievable myth, turned away from liberal reformism (and the poor) altogether, and revolutionized global, free-market capitalism as the postmodern new world order—a market revolution set on a foundation of neoliberalism and libertarianism. Movements identified with Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, the “Chicago Boys,” Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, and others as we will see (sorry for the delay) later in Essay 6.

That liberal modernity had been discredited as a model of world order was unquestioned on all sides. The race was on for its replacement with an alternative world order. And not just a race between Westernized socialism and global capitalism, but also “third-world” (so-called at the time; today we call it the “Global South”) proposals to delink from liberal global development models altogether—to “think globally, act locally”; “small is beautiful”—and to return to traditional ways of life rooted in indigenous communities organically connected to the earth. Each alternative in its own way, whether by emphasizing community, ecology, social justice, or property rights and free trade, promised a return to virtue, and a solution to the imperial excesses of the Modern Age.

In fifty-years’ retrospect, we can look back to see that our search for a virtuous new world order has taken two distinctly different paths, taking two different forms with two distinctive world-stories (narratives) to tell about creating a more virtuous world. One we’ll call “globalist,” which in its most idealistic guise promises a materialist property-centered economic and technological utopia of sorts, one of shared wealth, prosperity, and ease (and as noted above, we’ll examine this narrative later on).

The other, we’ll call “culturalist,” a redefinition of reality itself based upon the diversity of human perspectives, identities, and beliefs. A redefinition which creates the possibility of peace among peoples, equality, open multicultural societies, the reconciliation of injustices, and a people-centered world-story that places culture, social justice, and care for the environment above material wealth and the pursuit of it at the peak of our hierarchy of values.   

For fifty years, the globalist and culturalist stories have run in parallel and our failure to weave them together has left our politics in knots and our societies enflamed and divided. Divided between multiple and fundamentally different realities, ideologies, and values.

In order to see why and how we are divided, it’s going to take this (Essay 4) and the next two essays (5 and 6) to explain it—so, patience please, it will take some time. But our purpose in weighing through the details is simple: to help us to understand our current world condition, a condition that defines our point of beginning to move forward, forward toward the creation of a new metamodern vision for together surviving the Valley of the Shadow of Death that we’ve already entered—and by chance to return virtue to the world. 

So, here in this essay, let’s turn to the postmodern culturalist story, the attempt to re-think our global existence in terms of culture rather than in terms of Western modernist universalism. A re-think that helps explain why it is that the world looks the way it does, how it got that way, and what it means to us. The pivot toward a culturalist understanding of reality—often called the Cultural Turn—happened very quickly around 1968 or so.

The new postmodern culturalist re-envisioning of the world after the Cultural Turn is by turns a chaotic story of trying, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, to restore virtue to the world. And following the “turn,” words and concepts that barely (or never) appeared in public discussions before 1968—such as contextualization, multiculturalism, identity, perspectivism, intersectionality, patriarchy, and decoloniality—will help us tell the culturalist postmodern tale and the ways in which we’ve tried to sort out conflicts and injustices previously overlooked.

But to tell a culturalist story assumes that we already understand what culture actually is. And herein lies a profound conceptual problem. For what culture is, and what it means to us, is a slippery business. The very word culture itself has become so widely used to discuss most everything relating to life and society—or even relating to the “culture” of businesses or sports teams or kindergarten classrooms—that for good reason we might wonder if the word any longer means much at all.[iii]

Culture, like many concepts, over time has lost its explanatory power through overuse (to use a technical term, it’s been reified, a once-helpful idea hardened into a “thing” too wooden to any longer explain its object of reference). We like to think its conceptual power guides us into deeper awareness, unawares that it just as easily beguiles us with a false sense of understanding.

To gain some conceptual clarity, then, let’s start here in this essay to construct (actually, to reconstruct) a definition—a working theory—of culture one step at a time, building it up in a series of layers. We’ll call these layers “tiles,” “ropes,” and “structures.” Each of them represents a dimension of culture-as-a-whole.

I noted in the introduction to this essay series that one purpose of it is to provide a background for understanding our existing living world; I called it (borrowing a term of art from journalists) a “backgrounder.” And the discussion that follows below is very definitely a backgrounder exploring important concepts that we’ll need to understand and to put to use in our discussions later on.

My hope is that when we’re finished, we’ll have an enriched and much more useful understanding of culture and apply it to our thinking about how our living worlds work. More importantly, that we’ll have a sharp-edged theoretical tool placed in our hands to craft a better appreciation of the problems we face today, and to reshape the future world that is pressing in upon us. Clear thinking requires concise concepts, and we’ll apply our new tool in all the essays that will follow.

We’ll use the term culture throughout our discussion here and discuss its complexity. At the end, however, we will begin to wonder if we’ve stretched the common meaning of culture so far out of shape that we no longer recognize it. That’s my plan, so let me tip my hand ahead of time. The concept “culture” as we use it colloquially to discuss the world we live in, and even use it as a technical term to examine our societies, has become non-functional in our emerging metamodern world. In the end, I will suggest that we quit using it—at least for a while until we get its meaning straight—in order to preserve a deeper understanding of our world. We will of course find a new word—a new concept—but we have a lot of explaining (“backgrounding”) to do before we get there.  

And this will make our discussion quite long. My apologies. For our reading comfort we might take each section—Tiles, Ropes, Structures—one at a time. Take a breather at the end of each and let it sink in. Then get started again. 

I. Tiles of Difference

When Clifford Geertz published The Interpretation of Cultures in 1973 (see Essay 3), he could assume his audience generally knew what he meant by “culture,” even as he redefined culture as “webs of significance that we ourselves have spun.” By then the reading public was well nourished on otherworldly stories of “native” peoples—cultures—written from the field by intrepid cultural anthropologists. “[W]e hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange. Merchants of astonishment,”[iv] Geertz said of his fellow anthropologists.

Beyond the anthropologists’ scholarly works, this was the stuff of newspapers and magazines. Margaret Mead titillated 1930s readers with her reports on adolescent sexuality in Samoa (an early prompt for the 1960s sexual revolution). In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl amazed the world with his Pacific Ocean raft voyage on Kon-Tiki to search out the origins of the Polynesians.

Bronislaw Malinowski famously documented “Kula ring” gift exchange economies in New Guinea; others East Africa’s Neur cow herders, remote Amazonian Yanomami tribes, Australian Aboriginals, and so on around the world. Claude Lévi-Strauss conclusively debunked the myth of the “savage mind,” demonstrating that the primitive mind, so-called, is structured the same way as any other conventionally civilized mind—culture alone makes its thinking different.[v]

Fascinating as these reports were they exoticized the world outside the West by contrasting the West with the mysterious strangeness of the Rest. The Rest, thus differentiated from the West, were set apart as West’s cultural contrast, set apart as the Other to the West.

In the process the prevailing meaning of the word culture itself shifted in its popular Western usage. It lost its earlier reference to the West’s “high” artistic and literary “culture” of the Louvre and Lincoln Center—or as city planners throw the term around, the “cultural sector” where the city’s artists can be collected. Formerly, “culture” was understood as universal intellectual cultivation, a civilization’s highest achievement, the expression of its art and philosophy.

Instead, under the anthropologists’ influence, culture’s primary public meaning shaded into what late eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher J. G. Herder had called a Volk (Folk). In this light, culture defines a people—a folk—united by blood, language, land, and history; what in the ancient world Greeks had called an ethnos, an ethnic nation, a people; what we today commonly call a culture.

In the anthropologists’ hands culture took on this narrower reference. Culture was re-thought to mean the complete life-ways of a folk and its folklore. And given the folks they studied, it came to emphasize isolated, pre-modern or “backwards” (not yet “civilized”) peoples; or to describe the mysterious “semi-civilized” “Oriental despotism” of Islamic, Chinese, or Indian (South Asian) peoples. The natural inference was that the West possessed civilization; the Rest, only culture—though this must have been news to many non-Westerners.  

Let’s begin with the anthropologists’ pictures of these exotic cultural Others and the stories they told about them to sketch a first-level understanding of the meaning of culture. Culture, from this point of view, is the complete way of life of a definable group, a “people” (a “folk,” “clan,” “kindred,” “nation,” “ethnos”). For example, a forest tribe (the Amazon’s Guarani), or a geographical zone of language-related societies and customs (Bedouin nomads, Papuan New Guinean highlanders), or a region with shared history and religion (Tibet).

Culture describes a people’s total way of life: how its members navigate their environment, adapt to it as it changes, and evolve a life in common. A life-way that fits their context, gives meaning to their actions, and that creates, ultimately, their world. Each culture produces its own reality and, as pioneering mid-century anthropologist Ruth Benedict once proposed (and exaggerated a bit), its own “personality.”[vi]     

The only universal truth common to all cultures is that, universally, all human groups, no matter who or where they are, manufacture culture. Through culture, each people creates and passes on to new generations the knowledge their community needs to survive and thrive, to define its reality, and to construct a world to live in. As much as shelter and food this activity is essential to maintaining a people’s collective life. And all this creative activity adds up to a system of knowledge that sustains its common life and gives its members meaning.

A people’s cultural knowledge system contains all that it has learned and accomplished. This accumulated knowledge is substantial in any culture and recorded in its narrative—in the stories told round the campfire, or recorded in its libraries, taught in its schools, and discussed in its newspapers (or their social media analogues).

A knowledge system includes everything from unique approaches to foraging and farming; to intimate connections with the land, plants, and animals; to healing practices and medical remedies; tool-making technologies; adaptation to severe climates; forms of family, kinship, and clan; governance and economic exchange; dress, arts, and rituals; and spiritual insights that may transcend the material world, or even fuse the transcendental and the material together as one.

Now, for reasons that we’ll see in a moment, let’s focus closely on this idea of a people’s cultural knowledge system. And to abstract this idea just a bit (sorry!), let’s take a people’s complete system of knowledge-as-a-whole, and call it—in the singular—a “knowledge.”

Each people’s knowledge (its knowledge system taken as a whole) represents one-of-a-kind insight into the cosmos and human life. As such, a knowledge is of irreplaceable value in its own right. Who knows what we lose if we lose one? Maybe something crucial to our survival. Like a banner I once saw in Brazil at a conference of indigenous Amazonians proclaiming, “The wisdom of the fathers is the salvation of the world!”

There is no such thing in the world as human knowledge per se. Only a constellation of human knowledges produced by the world’s constellation of peoples, of cultures. Each is of fundamental value to the world. Each provides a quantum of understanding to a complete picture of human be-ing.

We must pay close attention, then, to a people’s cultural inner workings to appreciate the human genius revealed in the construction of its knowledge. And a substantial part of this genius is revealed by paying attention to the sophisticated rules a people creates for determining what is proper—true—knowledge as opposed to superstition or boloney.

Every people (culture) creates its own rules, its own form of logic for constructing its knowledge. This logical approach to testing, justifying, and building-up systematic knowledge from everyday life experience is called a people’s epistemology, its rules for knowing.

A people’s epistemology guides and structures the way in which its members turn random everyday experiences into true understanding. In the process of evolving its culture, every people great or small, develops its own epistemology. This is precisely what René Descartes did (a Western example as we saw in Essay 3) when he proposed justifying truth through mathematical proofs, creating his own distinctive, rationalist epistemology.   

When we denigrate the “primitive” mind, as chauvinistic Westerners are wont to do, we ignore the innate human sophistication required to create a system of knowledge in any culture including our own. French theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault described such complexity this way: 

Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.[vii]

This “regime of truth,” to use Foucault’s phrase (in other words, the fundamental structure of a knowledge), is a culture’s most valuable possession. It establishes the criteria to define the real and the unreal. It divides the logical from the irrational, true from false, right from wrong, pure from unclean, native from foreign, wisdom from superstition.

Let’s call such a regime of truth and the knowledge it organizes an “episteme” (pronounced epis-ta-mee). Sorry again for the social theory jargon but it’s important for our discussion.

The word episteme comes from the Greek for knowledge. The concept episteme refers to the interlocking system of knowledge produced and organized by the structural logic of the system’s epistemology. In other words, an episteme defines a culture’s total, logically-integrated point of view, its world. Every culture is organized by its episteme, and each one different.

The point of our rather technical discussion is this: To imagine the world in its entire geographical range as a splendid landscape of gloriously rich and colorful epistemes scattered throughout. In this vision, the world loses its colorless uniformity as we learn to see humanity as a garden mosaic: a rich assortment of myriad discrete human peoples, each with its own self-created knowledge.

Geertz referred to this garden of global epistemes as the “tile” concept of culture. By it we’ve learned to “see” cultures according to their epistemological differences and by the knowledges they produce.

We can see the world’s peoples individually as entities bound up by their epistemes. Each culture defined by its own unique knowledge and its own story to tell about it. Each one separated from the others. Each one possessing boundaries with a clear inside and outside. And on a culture’s insides, its community is colored from one side to the other with a distinctive common ethos and identity.

We see the world of cultures like a wall of colorful kitchen tiles, a pattern of bright, distinctive tiles grouted in place next to each other. We can examine the differences from tile to tile; easily tell one tile apart from another. Tell Indian Kannadigas apart from Mizo, Indonesian Balinese from Achenese, Canadian Quebecois from Ojibwe. In fact, we’d be blind not to notice the colors of cultural variation.

Herein lies the Cultural Turn’s cash value. After taking the “turn” the richness of human diversity popped into 3D. We learned to see a world of difference. We see difference everywhere we turn. And warmly appreciate the splendid colors of our many cultural realities—the tiles—that make up the world.

Very quickly after the Cultural Turn, postmodern pluralism—the recognition that we live among plural realities—eclipsed the Modern Era’s one-size-fits-all universalism and stole its intellectual thunder and conceptual authority. In a world of tiles, in a world of difference, plural epistemes create plural perspectives on what is real and what is not. Depending upon where we stand in the world (our cultural context), reality—and our grasp of it—simply looks different from place to place. We’re forced to recognize the world as a world of tiles, as a world-of-worlds. And to value diversity over uniformity, perspectives over universalisms. 

Postmodern pluralism opened a window to restore virtue to the world. And it did so on the most basic of terms: It taught us to recognize cultural difference, to treat each culture with equal dignity, and to give to each its due respect. In doing so, pluralism offered us a new way of doing politics—the politics of recognition, as philosopher Charles Taylor helpfully called it.[viii]

Rather than pump everyone into the West’s universal bottle, we learned to recognize our differences, to see and to appreciate each other—our different tiles—for what we are, and to call it good. And by the politics of recognition, we mean not just the formal processes of governance, but also the politics of living together—of truly recognizing each other, of granting freedom to every people to shape its own way of life, to determine its own reality, and to thrive accordingly.

In this new postmodern cultural story, the endeavor to apply culture to restoring virtue to the world—especially by applying it to the politics of difference and recognition—was fleshed out around two distinctively postmodern ideas, two new postmodern ways of looking at the human world. We’ll call these decolonialization and multiculturalism.

Decolonialization

We in the West conveniently forget (deny) what those in the Rest never can: the brutality of Western imperial colonialism. To wit: In less than 20 years from the late 1880s, the white reign of terror in King Leopold’s Belgian Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) reduced its population by half—estimates of death range from 8 to 15 million—through forced labor (slavery in all but name—and food), physical mutilation, forced migration, starvation, and disease. German genocide of Herero and Nama peoples in what is now called Namibia (recently, after more than a century, admitted as such by the German government) included ethnic cleansing, mass murder of innocents, concentration camps, and slavery—a trial run for the Holocaust.[ix]

In the Americas, upwards of 90 percent of the estimated 60 to 80 million original native peoples were destroyed by white European conquest and settlement. In the US only 250,000 (out of an original 5 to 10 million; no one knows for sure) survived into the early 1900s. Not to forget the West’s four hundred years of African enslavement—adding up to 12 million human beings hunted, transported, and worked like animals, and one or two million more who died enroute. Or to forget countless other stories from New Mexico to New Delhi to New Guinea—or the production of massive British fortunes by forcing the opium trade upon the Chinese.

The list of atrocities is too long to enumerate here—it fills entire books—though an essential-to-read, slim volume, Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, clearly explains the militarized nature and racist causes of the brutality (even the title is hard to read).[x]

The world weeps for those who suffered such atrocities, their names unrecorded and forgotten. Yet vivid memories persist and simmer still in unexpected ways among the peoples who survived, or who at least who physically survived, as we will see.

But many who physically survived genocide and domination did not survive culturally. Imperial conquest and land-hungry colonization destroyed worlds—peoples’ realities—and stamped out centuries of productive cultural evolution. To take a lesson from Essay 2, the West’s imperial enterprise collapsed indigenous cathedrals of value wherever it went, plowing entire peoples into nihilism’s abyss.

Too often this cultural erasure was deliberate—for example, by taking (stealing) Indigenous children from their parents by force (as many as 80 percent in the US) and interning them in boarding schools as late as the 1990s in the US, Australia, and Canada. The purpose? To assimilate them into Western ways and language under the motto, “Kill the Indian, save the Man!” Or accomplished by driving herders and subsistence farmers off their traditional lands to free up the lands for white settlement and to create plantation agriculture—including the oil palm plantations and giant cattle ranches that proliferate even now in former colonies, similarly with strip mining, timber harvesting, and oil fields.     

Put another way, the West’s imperialist colonial project destroyed epistemes by cutting off peoples from their roots and from each other; driving them from their lands, dispersing them into the wider world, into exploitative labor conditions, into urban shantytowns, and into a completely incomprehensible foreign world.

Worse in a way than genocide itself is surviving genocide without a world left to inhabit. Portuguese sociologist and legal theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called this form of cultural death epistemicide: the murder of knowledge, the forced collapsing of worlds, the extinction of knowledges, and the profound disorientation that follows.[xi]

Westerners certainly are not blind to the effects of epistemicide, but too often interpret them through wickedly racist stereotypes of “drunken Indians,” “lazy aborigines,” and “filthy natives”—the “unwashed masses”—exiled to land reserves (reservations) or urban slums. Seldom do we comprehend them as victims whose worlds have been obliterated.

What epistemicide’s victims manifest is decidedly not some racial moral defect or lack of intelligence. Rather, they suffer anomie—a condition of malaise, of meaninglessness, of nihilism in its truest sense, attributed to the extinction of their confident sense of reality, their social organization, and their way of life. Think of it as collective, intergenerational PTSD, as culture shock in the extreme, of collective depression, of epistemic death.

Anomic conditions are observed all over the world in the shadow of colonialism where global forces destroyed local realities. Also, that it takes generations (even centuries) for a people, or what’s left of a people, to begin to recover its equilibrium, confidence, and dignity. But how? By a people’s long struggle to retrieve their cultural memory, to relearn their indigenous language, and to evolve both to fit into a new world not of their own making (we’ll see examples later on).

Decades ago, anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace called this process a “revitalization movement.” By it he meant a subordinated people’s recovery—resurrection—of its past from the ash heap, and the forceful reassertion of its peoplehood, of its identity in the face of social pressures against it, a demand for recognition and respect.[xii] 

Revitalization movements—witness the renaissance of Native American culture, identity, and influence since the 1970s; and among Canada’s First Nations, and New Zealand’s Maoris, for instance; similarly with indigenous Andean Quechuas and Aymara—continue to simmer as a force for change in exploited lands long after official colonialism has ended.

Subordinated peoples confront not only memories of past exploitation from which they must recover. But also continued exploitation (economic, political, and racial) in forms of domination originally set in motion by colonialism and now continued in neo-colonial forms of development and economic globalization. Forms of exploitation all too often even carried on by their own now independent postcolonial governments. 

The fight for dignity is a fight for justice: A people’s fight for freedom to return to themselves and to recover their lands and their world. And then to relate to the larger world on their own terms rather than on terms imposed on them from the outside. It is a fight for self-determination and autonomy, a struggle for recovery of the resources—material and cultural—once taken from them and now denied them. A struggle for the freedom to recover their knowledge; to use it to revitalize their existence; to resist assimilation into a foreign, Western world; and to remove or de-colonize Western influence to the extent possible. A struggle that became easier to see and to sympathize with, when, after the Cultural Turn, we learned to see a world of “tiles” and to appreciate its importance.

More recently, this struggle has been called a “resistant knowledge project.” It is a people’s rejection of the Western-inspired global geoculture in order to recover local knowledge. And then to use local knowledge not just to restore a people’s way of life, but also to create alternative realities to the prevailing global order. Resistant knowledge has most often been raised in opposition to continuing Western, Eurocentric ways of thinking once imposed by colonialism, even as Westernized geoculture continues to be superimposed through mass media, Western educational models, and global business practices.[xiii]

After 1945, scores of former colonies gained independence and formed separate postcolonial nations. Others like China, Algeria, India, or Vietnam reemerged from colonialism. But that was just the start. Decolonialization has only grown in the postmodern era as a vital movement. It is the Rest’s reaction to an imposed imperial past. Decolonialization is, in effect, a resistant knowledge movement writ large to recover suppressed cultures, identities, religions, traditional politics, and indigenous forms of economic exchange from Eurocentric prejudice.

Often unreported and unseen in the West unless it results in violence—usually police or military violence to contain it (for example, Apartheid-era South Africa; the Kurdish independence struggle; Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement; the international La Via Campesina movement for food sovereignty, land reform, and indigenous rights; Indigenous protests of pipelines and mines constructed without prior informed consent)—decolonial activism is part and parcel of the postmodern spirit. It is a world-historical project not only to rewind colonialism’s pervasive effects and wash the slate clean to build societies on other terms. But also, to “un-think” the entire Western story and then, on new terms, to imagine a new world story beyond it.

We’ll say more later in the next essay about decolonial resistant knowledge projects. But this is a complicated issue, and we can address its complexity only after we’ve first said much more about what culture is and how it works. We’re not ready yet at this point in our discussion to fully explain decoloniality as a complex, global project which spreads as a network of movements, as a movement of movements throughout the world’s Rest.

The questions that we will save for later will be these: Can the Rest and the West—realistically, today—be untangled from their imperial past? Should they be? Or why not untangle them? More importantly, can the West restore its own virtue only by decolonizing itself?  

Multiculturalism

Our intrepid field anthropologists’ tile concept taught us to appreciate human diversity. It was a breakthrough. We learned to recognize difference rather than uniformity and to see it clearly. But their scholarly field work mostly reported the ways of life of exotic, small-scale, localized, rural communities. That’s not the world most of us live in.

How, then, does culture work in today’s globalized world in which half of humanity lives and mixes in cities, the other half deeply affected by a city’s goings on? What, exactly, can we make of the overlapping urban tiles of cultural difference?

And even if most of us live in and around cities, all of us, whether we like it or not (and radicals on Left and Right certainly do not like it), live within nation-states. Diverse countries like interracial South Africa, multireligious Indonesia, tribally divided Kenya, or four-language Switzerland. Think of nation-states as giant tiles marked out in different colors on our maps.

Nations, despite their internal differences, bind us into singular political communities. Each nation spreads a single canopy of power over all its citizens. Then within these national boundaries, innumerable cultural “tiles” intermingle and jockey to promote their political interests, each from its own uniquely different epistemic perspective.

Within nations, culture provides a buffer between the individual and the national structures of governance. Our cultures—our tiles—bind us into singular communities of the like-minded or historically-related, defend our identities, protect our values, institutionalize our collective strengths, and mobilize these to influence the nation’s wider political community. Always and unavoidably in every nation, the cultural is political.

The Modern Age’s liberal cultural politics, where it could—and when it didn’t cynically use cultural identity to marginalize unwanted minorities—suppressed cultural differences in the name of harmony and of a greater political unity. E Pluribus Unum: “Out of many, one.” Everyone a citizen, differences be damned, or differences outgrown until the world becomes a single cosmopolitan whole.

Postmodernity challenged this modernist assumption that the world of difference ought to be cooked down into a single universal pot of soup. To the contrary: Every group has the right—a legal cultural right—to be different. Why? Because uniformity condemns authentic difference to invisibility, and then to suppression, deliberate or benign. Scarce a minority community that hasn’t experienced an imposed uniformity in this suffocating and demeaning way.

Asserting difference, protecting differences, not only means protecting one’s identity from erasure, but also protecting from extinction the cultural knowledges that groups need to flourish on their own terms. Thus, a postmodern claim on the right to difference: The right to cultural self-defense from forced assimilation, or subordination by the dominant cultural groups at a loss of traditional worlds, identities, and well-being.

The 1960s Cultural Turn was itself prompted by powerful social movements from “below”; “revitalization movements,” as we called them before; movements of those historically made invisible and subordinated. In the United States, of course, civil rights movements, first for Blacks, then for Chicano/as, and Native Americans. These set the pattern for cultural identity movements taking civil and cultural rights as their objects. Whether French rights in Quebec; Algerian and Black African immigrants in France; in Britain, South Asians, Africans, and Caribbean Islanders; Turks in Germany—and these are just a few Western examples. (We’ll look at women’s and gender minority identities later.)   

The common thread running through these revitalization projects is individual and collective identity: the need to be seen—to be identified, not overlooked—by the dominant majority; to be taken seriously; to be recognized—and affirmed—in one’s difference. These are not trivial differences. Often, they are grounds for exclusion, marginalization, and violence by the majority. Conversely, they are grounds for demanding a politics of difference; grounds for creating societies with many cultures—multicultural societies—in which cultures, their epistemes, values, and identities can co-exist unmolested and free.  

That’s the spirit of Charles Taylor’s multicultural politics of recognition:

The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Non-recognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.

“[M]isrecognition,” Taylor continues, “shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we own people. It is a vital human need.”[xiv]

Postmodern cultural pluralists convinced us that our cities and nations are not neat boundaries drawn on maps, but honeycombs of difference. We exist in and among tile mosaics of peoples trying to find themselves, secure their existence, and survive the political competition for respect as well as for social and material resources to flourish on their own terms.

Multiculturalism promises the freedom to be diverse. To celebrate our differences and not to denigrate them. To live differently among others undisturbed. To revitalize our cultural souls. And to accept diversity rather than homogeneity as the proper basis for building our societies.

Thinking in “tiles” allows us to appreciate the cultural “spaces”—for example, urban neighborhoods (“Little Havana,” “Little Haiti”) where a culture can be nurtured and expressed; tribal and cultural associations providing political representation and preserving traditional life-ways (the National Congress of American Indians); or regional and international cultural networks supporting widespread diaspora communities (The World Hindu Federation)—spaces that sustain cultural identities, maintain cultural energies, and support individuals and groups in deciding on their own terms how to interact with their wider societies. Or, to build solidarity to protect themselves from misrecognition and prejudice, and to demand an equal seat at the table in public life.

Thinking in “tiles” allows us to appreciate and value difference. It also alerts us to the nature of differences that often boil down to the treatment of minorities by the socially dominant majority. Whites, in the West; or, say, Burmans in Myanmar, or Han in China.

In the contest between minorities and majorities, cultural boundaries often get drawn between tiles not out of choice to protect one’s heritage but are imposed from the outside to segregate and control a disrespected population. The discrimination of difference, then, heightens boundary conflicts and leaves minority groups with little choice other than to double down on identity and reconfigure themselves as communities of resistance.

In the West generally, the prevailing cultural boundary questions have concerned the relationship of traditional minorities (Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian in the US; similarly, elsewhere), as well as recent immigrant communities from everywhere, over against the dominant white majority. At the center of the struggle lies the experience of minority exclusion which sharpens the demand for recognition, equal dignity, and inclusion.

But recognition and inclusion along what lines? The Modern Era’s expectation was full individual legal, political, economic, and social integration. In the US, the movement for racial integration: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a society where his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by content of their character.”[xv]

Progress toward colorblind, culturally neutral societies continues. Barack Obama was elected the first mixed-race US president, and self-identified as Black; the City of London’s popular mayor is a British-born son of Pakistani immigrants and a practicing Muslim. But integration proceeds slowly by fits and starts at a pace that satisfies no one and presents problems of its own.

Integration in King’s time assumed one’s assimilation into the dominant white culture. And this at the cost of one’s own cultural or religious authenticity; of one’s desire to be or to believe differently; of the suppression of one’s own experience of feeling different and misunderstood; even erasure of one’s cultural history. In truth, real integration—the full recognition of the “other”; the affirmation of one’s dignity; the granting of respect; the will to friendship—is anyway often blocked by the dominant society’s fear of losing its own status and identity.

Multiculturalism resists the expectation that individuals must assimilate into a greater, more homogeneous—in effect, cultureless—whole. This in favor of emphasizing one’s ties to cultural communities wherein one can nurture one’s own identity, language, and history. And to build solidarity to collectively represent group interests in public life.

In postmodernity, integration as the Modern Age conceived it has given way to diversity, to the recognition of groups and to the incorporation of diverse group interests, experiences, and perspectives into the wider society. From a group perspective, I, for instance, become integrated into public life and institutions individually. But also, as a representative of my group; as one who can speak with authority for my group; who can defend my group from misrecognition and bias; and who can add my group’s perspective to the common whole. By my presence, diversity shines through. And slowly, again far too slowly, our societies and institutions begin to reflect and to include the different distinct realities making up our national communities.

However, diversity itself presents problems of its own. Here are two: First, a personal tension. If one identifies as, say, Latino/a, for example, such a person is aware of decades of Latino/a/Latinx activism on their behalf that provides them with public recognition, dignity, and legal protection. They’d feel lost without it.

But in public such a one might also feel stigmatized— “essentialized,” that is, reduced by others to their Latin essence alone—and placed in the diversity “box” as something they may not quite feel that they are. What if one wishes to marry an Asian partner or choose to assimilate into a “white” (dominant society) lifestyle? Does one become a traitor to one’s group, ungrateful for one’s group’s historical struggles for justice? Or merely exercise a personal desire to live free from traditional encumbrances and to embrace modern, liberal individualism? Can this be an authentic decision, made in ethical freedom, and with dignity and love for one’s cultural community, history, and tradition?

The second is a difficult problem for any local or national political community. Certainly, we grasp that our multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural societies are realities. Our multicultural societies exist in fact, not just in postmodern theory, or in a distant hope for a diverse future. And most of us happily affirm plural realities, epistemes, and identities because these free us to be ourselves among our fellow citizens. Diversity is a powerful tool to restore virtue to our societies and has gone a long way toward doing it.

But what, exactly, constitutes a virtuous society? Well, it depends on your perspective. Among multiple multicultural realities exist multiple visions of the common good, even multiple visions of social justice—and power struggles that play out between competing realities.

Our power struggles undermine consensus about what a nation should be, who it is to benefit by it, and how. The problem only grows as culture wars ensue. A society reduced to power struggles between identity communities portends violence. The most visible in recent years: immigration bans, insurrections, terrorists, tiki torches and assault rifles.

Multiculturalism unfolds within the forcefield of what we called in Essay 2—and let’s use this term here in its strictest technical sense—nihilism. By this we mean the unmooring of cultural realities one from another without a hierarchy of political and epistemic values to organize them.

As we noted, in a nihilistic society we experience the problem of free-floating values (realities and epistemes, in the cultural sense), each valued and secured only relatively against the others. What we lack amidst our diversity is a universally accepted measuring rod (a “great universal value”), a clear consensual criterion for collectively making and enforcing political decisions. Instead, our differences become politicized; different racial, ethnic, and religious identities compete in contests of power for relative political gain.

No singular story, no single episteme, no shared center of gravity exists anymore that is strong enough to hold us all together in our diversity—other than the waning energies of liberal democracy and recourse to universal human rights. But democracy and universal rights are both the metanarrative legacies of our Western past. And both now survive (as long as they can hold out) in the shadows of postmodern skepticism, the naked will to power, and the survival of the fittest.

With one hand we hold tightly to the wonderful diversity of our multiple multicultural epistemic realities; all-the-while with our other hand we grasp at the air in vain to catch even a precious few, concrete, commonly-agreed-upon stories to fuse our realities together. And all-the-while, doubt itself is skillfully manipulated for political gain by authoritarian-nationalist political players like Hungary’s Victor Orban, India’s Narendra Modi—the list goes on.

Or in the US, the phenomenon of Donald Trump’s and his fellow travelers’ Big Lie about his 2020 election loss. This unreal assertion of reality—and the fact that so many believe it (or might accuse me of a similar “invented” reality for not believing it)—underscores our epistemic breakdown. In this new light, reality is simply what we say it is, that truth is whatever the loudest voices claim it to be. We’re stuck trying to fit our diverse world of tiles together into a harmonious whole.

Let’s stop here and ask ourselves if, perhaps, somehow, we’re missing the point. Missing something in our cultural analysis, something important, but something that we fail to see. Maybe we need to consider something else that we haven’t anticipated before. Maybe, at the end of the day, our tile concept really was not so very helpful in the first place.

Do “tiles” really provide us with an accurate picture of human community? Maybe not. Maybe thinking in this “tile” way is its own problem, a self-limiting view of the world. Would it surprise you to hear that some (many?) anthropologists—of all people! —don’t much like the word culture anymore for the very reason that its usage has become restricted to this “tile” image? That they seldom use the term? Perhaps we need to rethink our “cultural” questions in a very different light to restore virtue to our cities, nations, and the world.

II. Ropes of Complexity

One might think ragged, remote Indochinese mountain ranges a fine place to discover the isolated, exotic, primal societies anthropologists so like to study. Yale University political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott has decades of experience there, with traditional slash-and-burn agriculturalists living in kin groups, hiding themselves away from outsiders in mountain jungles. Might these be some of the world’s last remaining ancient peoples?

Well, no, Scott reports in his fascinating book The Art of Not Being Governed. Centuries ago, most of these peoples lived as subordinated minorities in and around lowland Burmese, Chinese, and Vietnamese empires. Escapees, really, they found liberation the higher they climbed into inaccessible jungle forest highlands, exchanging civilized governance for the freedom of primitive life and isolation, and putting their “civilized” past behind them. Freedom, for them, is a function of altitude and rejection of civilization, no matter how “ancient” they come to appear.[xvi]

The point is that ancient, pristine, untouched societies and crystalline epistemes are vanishingly rare. Human history is the story of cultural contacts, entwinements, contamination, and cross-pollinating. Cultural boundaries are porous, epistemes fuzzy, and few of us are unaware of cultural others. Indeed, to one extent or another, all cultures co-evolve in relationship with (or in conflict with) other outside groups.  

Our first-level “tile” concept taught us the importance of difference and explained why plural realities exist, and why they are crucial to organizing our postcolonial, multicultural world. But it only gets us so far in understanding how the cultural forces around us shape and reshape our identities. So, let’s take a second-level step and elaborate our conceptualization of culture.

As an alternative to sharp-edged, tightly bounded tiles, let’s begin by re-imagining a culture as a center without a boundary. Like the sun, our own culture radiates out from its center, and its rays of light (at least some of them) radiate into other cultural centers—and vice versa, their rays (some of them) penetrate our own. The powerful solar gravity of our cultural center anchors our reality and identity—that is, we are deeply rooted in our epistemes—but never are we free of outside influence. To one degree or another we all live interculturally, and more-so as urbanization and globalization draws us ever closer in contact with one another.

How do we sort out this cultural contamination? Protect ourselves from unwanted entanglements? Or more to the point, with all this cross-pollinating going on, how do we identify a culture at all? How can we measure its insides and outsides, locate it in time and space—put our finger on it and say, this, right here, is a “culture”? Few of us doubt that we have a culture—we draw our identities from it—but what our culture is, isn’t always clear. Culture, the very idea of it, comes with a lot of strings attached.

Clifford Geertz gave us the “tile” concept to describe the anthropologists’ earlier concept of culture. But as helpful as it is to think in “tiles,” he labelled tiles as such to contrast them with another conception of culture he thought better of: Culture might best be thought of as a “rope”—as fibers braided, entwined, and wound up in a single cable. A single rope, but a rope of many colors, textures, and materials.

Let’s stretch out this rope concept to see what it includes. Each of the rope’s strands (strings, threads, fibers, wires, filaments) represents an aspect of meaning, a memory of historical experience, a spirituality, a sense of place in the world, networks of relationships, ways of doing things. How, then, as Geertz would have it, do we visualize culture when we find it in a complex multicultural country or society?

The culture of any place and at any time, per Geertz, must be described as: 

the overlappings of differing threads, intersecting, entwined, one taking up where another breaks off, all of them posed in effective tensions with one another to form a composite body, a body locally disparate, globally integral. Teasing out those threads, locating those intersections, entwinements, connectings, and tensions, probing the very compositeness of the composite body, its deep diversity, is what the analysis of these sorts of countries and societies demands.[xvii]   

So then, where can we begin to make sense of this rope idea? Well, how about with this question: How long, exactly, is the rope that runs through a culture? Geertz gives us a clue: Certain strands of our cultural experience are “globally integral.” Our rope circles the planet. Buenos Aires, Bangkok, and Bujumbura are manifestly different cities, yet each tango to globalization’s economic, technological, geocultural tune. 

Then we can ask, how old is the rope that runs through any culture? That’s a longer story. It begins with the rise of Homo sapiens, continues until now. Certain primordial strands of our rope tie together prehistoric linguistic roots and branches; prehistorical interpretive root mythologies (formative stories) to explain the cosmos and the origination of life; the evolution of symbolic reasoning and religious and artistic instincts. All these link us back to the “explosion” of human culture some 50 or 60 thousand years ago. Or even further back as French-American theorist René Girard traces some culture traits to pre-human, hominid species. A general humanness interconnects us despite the twists and turns of cultural evolutions in one place or another.[xviii] 

Of course, most of our attention goes to more immediate and local concerns, and there, to other tangles. With how many strings of meaning and practice does our nation tie us up regardless our other cultural differences? Policies on property rights, say, and land tenure (the right to occupy a piece of land) determine who gets to own what, and why we live in one place and not in another. All of us are subject to laws and their enforcement (fair or not), and to everyone’s dismay, taxes. Social policies affect how one group treats another. Other strings tie us to countries next door by cross-border treaties, trade policies, shared water rights, or threats of invasion.

When we think about culture at all, though, it’s most often the near-at-hand, the lighter, shorter threads of meaning that we have in mind: Our families, communities, folks we live and work with, local histories, folkways, and eye-raising suspicion of “those folks over there” who aren’t like us—or “those other folks” who treat us so poorly.

All the while, as we examine our rope, our mental gears grind in our narrative minds (as we saw in Essay 3) while we ask, who are we, exactly? Why are we the way we are and not some other way? What story can we tell ourselves about how we got here and why? What rights do we possesses by virtue of being here? Why do others treat us the way they do? The answers to which we call “cultural.”

So, if we’re interested to know what our culture is—what it is where we live right here and right now in a multicultural neighborhood, a city, a country—how can we interpret the cultural rope that runs around the world, tangles us up in history, nationality, ethnic genealogy, race, class, gender, and winds us up into a particular cultural identity? Well, pull a cleaver from the kitchen drawer and chop the rope as it runs through our location, and then examine the strings, threads, fibers, and wires the cut exposes.

In the cross-section we’ll find the dominant episteme that generally shapes our local reality (our cultural “gravity”), but we’ll also find other overlapping minority or immigrant epistemes. And remember that these realities open to each other and cross-pollinate such that our local culture is far from homogeneous.

Global wires connect us to massive economic and technological influences (these “structures,” as we’ll see below, have their own independent epistemic logics). Strings of national politics, threads of religion and tradition, fibers of kinship—even the influence of geology, geography, climate, and disease—shape our sense of the world, our reality, how we experience it, and how we share it with others.     

All these influences intertwine with such complexity that it makes the question, what exactly is a culture? difficult to answer. Difficult, that is, if we seek authenticity and aren’t willing to settle for superficial stereotypes and the prejudices that go with them.

What does it take to pick apart the tangle and to lay our finger on culture as we experience it? Patience and careful on-the-ground observation. Or, as Geertz calls it (and we turn to him one last time for yet another concept), “thick description.” Thick description is the slow identification of strings and threads; the careful interpretation of the intersections of influence; a close examination of the layering of cultural elements, one on top of another, until a clearer picture of experience comes into view.[xix]

Assemblages

Once we cut a slice from our many-stranded rope and look at its threads in detail—to describe it “thickly”—we might begin to wonder if “culture” is really the right word for what we see. Or might we need new words to describe what, upon closer examination, is more convoluted, interconnected, fluid, and brilliantly alive than we’ve ever imagined. Let me suggest a couple of terms that are emerging from contemporary anthropology: “assemblages” and (below, in a moment) the “analytics of existence.”

Let’s begin with a story from an Oregon National Forest. A story of global complexity that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, an anthropologist, tells us about a decades-old, seasonal community of mushroom pickers. These are harvesters of not just any mushroom, but the exquisitely rare matsutake; unappreciated in America, in Japan given away as expensive gifts, or otherwise served in exclusive restaurants at premium prices.[xx]

Matsutake mushrooms enjoy a privileged place in Japan’s national story, but they are in steep decline there. They can’t be cultivated, only found in special conditions—like Oregon’s scrubby replanted second-growth red pine forests where the trees’ roots intertwine with the mushroom’s underground fungal networks, and each feeds the other to keep each other alive. Likewise, the harvester community wouldn’t exist at all without its own entwinement in an international supply chain of a market in luxury goods.

Many of the harvesters immigrated from Southeast Asia: from Hmong, Lao, and Mien families, traditional adversaries who fought alongside the United States in the mountains of Vietnam and Laos; US allies, interned for years after the war in refugee camps; later permitted immigration to the US. Many of the rest of the harvesters are American military veterans of the same war.

In the forest’s remoteness the Asians find respite from California’s cities where they struggle to integrate, and a place to refresh their mountain life traditions. In it, the Vets escape a nation that sent them to war and find refuge to mourn their guilt and memories of horror. The entire harvester community nurses psychic wounds from America’s war in Vietnam.

But for the war and for their varied experiences of it none of them would be there in Oregon to forage for matsutake. Likewise, but for the overseas mushroom market. Their multicultural, multiracial mushroom-harvesting community is as much as anything a creation of America’s fear of Communism, Japan’s fascination with fungus, and the fact that matsutake are found only on devastated clear-cut, reforested lands nobody else has any use for.

What cements such a diverse community? Shared moments of freedom to start over again. Temporary escape from the world to consider life and its meaning. Freedom to recapture even a trace of pre-war existence. But also, freedom to weave a new way of living; of winding a new rope out of countless threads, traditional and new: from geopolitics, international supply chains, dislocation, exclusion, and trauma, all the way through to new knowledges, psychological adjustments, healing of memories, and the fun of haggling over prices in the matsutake market. Freedom to create new identities, to start telling new stories to put the world back together again.  

Though seasonal, the harvester community remains robust year to year; the gathering is for many the highpoint of the year itself. Can we speak of an established culture there? Barely, in any traditional definition of “culture.” Mostly we see only the disconnected threads of a frayed rope.

But to ask this question is to miss the point. If we look from another angle, we see something else: the necessary human work of assembling a world in a place, at a time, from the materials at hand. Of creating an assemblage of new meanings and stories to be told that sort out entirely new ways of living and surviving change in a local-global world.   

Assemblage, to use this word as a concept to sort out what we otherwise call culture, points us to the human dynamics of world-building, to the eternal winding and rewinding of ropes from the scattered fragments of existence. Assemblages accentuate the ad hoc, the provisional, the temporary even fleeting nature of weaving ways of life from countless threads of complexity.

Our contemporary, interconnected world moves too fast, changes too quickly, ties us up in too many threads to give us a predictable, stationary, well-integrated sense of life. We have only what we assemble as we move forward together, piling up assemblages of assemblages—just like the globalized matsutake pickers assemble life in the forest.

And it is the mushroom pickers, whom, Tsing shows us, stand in as a model for the rest of us. A model for living that shows us that, wherever we are, and whatever lives we assemble from whatever strings and threads entwine us—that we are always weaving, assembling, the ever-changing rope we call “culture.”  

The Analytics of Existence

If we decamp to Australia’s Northern Territory, we find another story to tell. This one told by Columbia University anthropologist and philosopher Elizabeth Povinelli who has engaged the Karrabing Aboriginal community for nearly 40 years—sometimes living with them, sometimes acting on their behalf (gratis) as an anthropological consultant which heavy-handed Australian law requires Karrabing to provide in negotiations with the government.[xxi]

It is in Australian law that we encounter the problem of cultural politics and the confusion that the word culture has left us. Law, of course, always defined Aboriginal contact with white settlers, justifying settler land claims at Aboriginal expense, forcing children into boarding schools (“for their own good”), even—and was the Karrabing experience—confining them to settlements little better than concentration camps.

As a result of the Cultural Turn, in the 1970s new laws repatriated Karrabing to certain lands and gave them limited sovereignty. But they did not repatriate them necessarily to lands they had recently lived on. And now, even these lands are targeted for aggressive strip mining with billions of dollars hanging in the balance.

Legal questions, then, turn on who and which ones—individuals, families, kin groups, tribes? —has the right to negotiate land concessions and to say what lands must be protected. To answer these questions, the government turned to a “tilized” theory of culture.

In its application, the government requires Karrabing to document their “culture.” That is, to connect themselves genealogically through many generations; and to prove how their lineages (kin groups, clans) are connected to certain sacred spaces (places, monuments, lands). These requirements in effect freeze the Karrabing and their culture in time as the cultural custodians of defined land reserves and as protectors of a certain Aboriginal way of life. Put another way, to locate them in an Aboriginal “zoo” among the other “species.” Only then can the government sort out who may sell what lands and resources to whom.

The problem is that Karrabing only became Karrabing in recent generations, gradually taking on a new identity and set of social relationships in order to revitalize their collective existence after losing much of their past and kin to white settlement. In revitalizing themselves and creating a coherent life-world, the Karrabing’s interest is in assembling “ropes” not “tiles.” Their real interest lies in the process of living, regardless the form of “culture” that gets produced along the way.

How multilingual and multicultural, for instance, must Karrabing be to negotiate national politics and the cash economy imposed upon them? Certainly, they must be both to function in a world of laws, public policies, and land claims, not to mention their own desire to move forward into Australian life on their own terms. How many threads—geopolitical, capitalist, environmental, geographical, historical, ethnic, and philosophical—must they wind up, entwine, tie together, to create a mode of existence suitable to their flourishing?     

Karrabing, of course, don’t want to lose the lands that sustain them to strip mines. But neither to they think of culture as a “thing” frozen in time to be preserved and protected and, thus, freezing them in a prehistoric past for the entertainment of tourists. Or, for a self-congratulating government priding itself for its protection of diversity and multiculturalism without troubling to look closely enough at what either of them means.

Culture is not a thing for Karrabing, but a constant process of observing change, discerning its meaning, and adjusting to it. This is key to their episteme—to their logical process by which they grasp a changing world and turn it into true and useful knowledge. This forward-looking logical process is the “cultural” prize they wish to preserve. It is their unique way of being in the world. Povinelli calls it their analytics of existence.

Karrabing’s analytical process is also a collective one. Each is giving voice within the entire community of stakeholders. Each speaks, hears, and deliberates as an equal. In fairness, all community stakeholders must be cared for, listened to, and respected. These stakeholders include mothers and fathers, grandparents, kin, and clan—even outsiders like Povinelli who may be welcomed in. But to the mystification of Western outsiders, these stakeholders also include rock formations, estuary streams, beaches, ancient bones, fog, and cloud formations who speak and act as independent agents and on their own terms.

Things and places, in Karrabing reality cannot be reduced to psychology or cultural myth. They are not symbolic projections of human wishes onto nature (anthropomorphisms), much less imagined “spirit” voices, or mythical birthplaces frozen in time by traditional symbols. All such are the stereotypes of outside “tile” culturalists. Rather, Karrabing reality is constructed and reconstructed by each community stakeholder—humans, living nature, and dead geology which is not as “dead” as it seems.

Each stakeholder, human or otherwise, is an independent agent in its own right. Povinelli calls the non-human agents existents, actors with their own unique characteristics. Each communicates knowledge on its own terms about shared matters of concern, human and non-human. Non-human community members (what outsiders improperly call the “environment”) speak to the Karrabing.

The fog, for instance, speaks of toxins that are poisoning them, speaking by changing colors as the fog fills with pollutants. Other existents warn that fertile lands will choose to withdraw themselves into desert if Karrabing lose communication with them and ignore them like the white settlers do.

As a philosopher, not only an anthropologist, Povinelli can place Karrabing rationality—their episteme—in conversation with Australia’s wider Western episteme. And in the conversation, we can see plural realities (mutually unintelligible realities) arising from fundamentally different definitions of existence, from differences in how our minds constitute the human and non-human world. Different realities draw different distinctions between the living and the non-living, and from the unity, or otherwise the separation, of life and non-life.

What to Karrabing is an inclusive community of existents (human and non-human), is to Australian settlers and land developers only living people surviving in and around dead geology and mere “nature.” Geology and nature are treated as non-entities, leaving settlers free to harvest nature and strip mine dead geology as commodities.

Amidst the politicized conversation about realities, Karrabing must revitalize a historically damaged way of life. To do it, they lean forward into the process of living. They grasp the strings and threads offered them by the various existents around them (human and non-human; even technological existents—they maintain a fascinating community website) to wind up a reality able to sustain them in the flow of climate change. Changes both from the warming physical climate as well as the changing political climate.

What concerns them is not freezing “culture” in time but moving forward as the world changes and adjusting to it as they need to. Their analytics of existence—their epistemological strategy for knowing and acting in the world—drives them forward in the on-going, ever-changing process of winding and rewinding reality’s rope. Karrabing do this in microcosm yet keep their keen eyes open to the global macrocosm—and to our own Western analytics of existence if we but listen to them while they speak.

Shifting our cultural imagination from tile-thinking to rope-thinking frees us from imagining “culture” as a fixed thing or an essence that defines a particular group; an essence that defines who is in or out of a culture, who is culturally “authentic,” or who can be identified in only one way and not in another—or may be categorically misrecognized or abused in our multicultural societies. Tiles create a vision of a finished past to be preserved and protected from change, protected even from the other tiles. Ropes, a process for living together in a complex, intermingled changing world.

Our attention must always lean forward to the living work of meaning-making, reality-defining, and identity-forming. To the pragmatics of imagining and testing ways of being against the constraints of planetary life. To look back is to lose ground. Concepts like “assemblage” and the “analytics of existence” put the emphasis upon action, upon human agency, the human freedom and capacity to act effectively in shaping our life worlds—no matter how strange and unfamiliar our “cultures” will come to look.

Ropes, assemblages, analytics of existence, as concepts, will help guide the rest of our discussion about culture. But these alone are not quite enough sketch a fuller, more embracing picture. We must consider yet a third-level of cultural understanding. 

III. Structure and Agency

We live our lives always moving forward in time. And what choice do we have since our flight through time never ends? Stop the world, I want to get off! isn’t an option. One moment leads to the next. We wake up every day to see what the morning brings, and we rise to greet it.

What else can we do each day but to lean into each emerging moment; pursue our interests, desires, and needs; dodge the traffic that makes us zig this way and zag that way around life’s events; assemble life on the go from the filaments, threads, and strings we find along the way? That’s what we humans do: We live by acting, by engaging life as it comes at us. And to the extent that we seize the day and act to orchestrate our lives in meaningful ways we become the agents of our own existence. What kind of life do we wish to build? It depends on us—though as we will see in a minute, there are limits to our agency.

Whether self-aware or not, each day we assemble a world for ourselves to live in. How we assemble it, why we assemble it in this way or that, what we want from our lives, the meaning we search for, figuring out what is at stake in life—all of it is up to us. And how we fit it all together depends on our personal analytics of existence, our reflexive methodology for assembling life out of confusion.

Then, as with our individual lives and agency, it is even more-so for the groups we are a part of since we never operate alone. This is because the opportunities for action opened to us—or closed to us, sometimes oppressively closed to us—to successfully move forward in life begin with collective opportunities that we share with the people around us.

And shared since birth: As British sociologist Margaret Archer notes (and much of our discussion below about structure and agency draws from her work), without any choice at all we’re born into our parents’ existing social grouping—“pre-grouped” as it were—born into certain habits of thought, automatically embedded in existing relationships, our imaginations predisposed to pre-existing epistemes and established analytics of existence.[xxii]

From these pre-existing assemblages we will never entirely be free no matter how critical of them we become, insightful about their problems, or radical in our attempts to change them. Our interests will always reflect, to one degree or another, our group’s interests; in one way or another, our agency throughout life remains connected to our beginnings. We intuitively move forward with our group and remain aware of our difference from other groups.

Further, as we grow up, we also discover that we live within not just one primary group, but that we also live within other secondary groups, groups-within-groups, however we experience our overlapping groups as families, clans, tribes, races, genders, ethnicities, religions, political parties, unions, trades, professions, or our nation’s political life. And within our multiple groupings we lean together into each emerging moment to survive, to find life, and to make sense of it.

The experience of multiplex life is rather like standing together daily on a vast scaffold at the frayed open end of our giant cultural rope—standing together as a multitude, editing and weaving the strands, strings, and threads into a shared form of life. And the process never ends. Our hands stay busy grasping threads and wires, pulling them apart, tying them together, constantly winding the rope, always assembling a life for ourselves and for our groups-within-groups.  

We might observe that by force of habit in each emerging moment we collectively seem to rewind the same old rope the same old way. Habits die hard. But sometimes one of us drops a stitch and we wind in a mutation. Or when we’re alert to what we’re doing we knowingly wind in a new idea or innovation and change happens.

Our rope continually evolves. It’s never the same today as it was yesterday or will be tomorrow. Sometimes we notice these evolving changes, sometimes we don’t, but we together are the agents that wind, rewind, and alter our rope through time and make it ever new. Then, each evening when we’re finished winding for the day and go sleep, what we wound up today passes behind us into the past and is set solid into history.

Culture, then, as we experience it is both living and dead. In the moment—today—we are culture’s creators, assemblers, authors of our existence, a generation very much alive taking our turn in the sun. But our culture is also the sum of many generations’ creative work; long dead generations whose assemblages stretch back centuries into the mirk of time, the work of multitudes frozen in a past that can’t be changed.

This long-term, multigenerational legacy becomes each new living generation’s starting point. This is not to be taken lightly. The dead hand of history holds the living in its grip. Our path’s direction today was already predetermined—path dependent—by the assemblages of the past even before we were old enough to be aware that we’re on a path at all, much less old enough to worry about our path and to try to point ourselves in a new direction.

In other words, the dead past shapes the circumstances from which our living experiences emerge, and the past washes over us like a force of nature. Think of it this way: We’re born involuntarily on surfboards, as it were. Already, even before we learn to think (or walk), we awaken to find ourselves skimming a massive Hawai’ian breaker, speeding headlong in the direction the wave sends us.

Yes, we possess agency to shape and to reshape culture while we live, but the cultural formations assembled in the past tower over us, a relentless wall of water forcing us along in its channel. Our freedom to create, to produce the new, to wind our rope as we like into something beautiful—our human agency—has definite, profound, though certainly not immutable limits.    

The force of these limits on our freedom and agency is what we mean by structure. The past hands down socially patterned—structured—ways of doing things and patterns of ideas to think with and about; pre-patterned modes of behavior evolving over a long duration, imposed upon us to socialize us into a particular historical way of life.

Because these structures are of such longstanding and are so widely embraced as standard, “normal” ways of operating, incorporated into our laws and institutions, and encoded into our educations, even into our vocabularies and daily conversations, we scarcely notice them at all. It’s just the way things are, right? But invisibly they shape our thoughts and behaviors just so, operating behind our backs so to speak, to produce a certain, patterned response from us when we think and act.

Structures are the legacy of past actions. Our current actions begin within the structures we receive from the past—and sadly they too often end there—although our actions certainly can change them. The push and pull between the patterned past that predetermines our point of beginning in life and our actions to adjust to it and to change it is called the structure-agency problem. Or put differently, the determinist-free will problem.

We’re stuck, or at least we feel stuck, between determinism and free will. Determinism: the idea that outside structural forces beyond our control are inescapable and that they inevitably dictate our behavior beyond our capability to resist—structure as prison house; or as the criminal said to the Judge: “I’m not guilty, Your Honor, society made me do it!” And free will: the faith in our ability to direct our lives as we desire and to change our culture as we wish, to remake the world as we want to without limitation though certainly not without struggle.

The structure/determinism vs. agency/free will problem is also a chicken-and-egg type of paradox. Were there no human agents to produce them in the first place there would be no structures at all. People collectively produced them over generations; they are a human legacy. But, once in place, structures take on a life of their own. There is no way for living human agents to avoid them, indeed we all are embedded in them, and our very actions generally reinforce and reproduce them.

So then, do we create structures, or do structures create us? Well, both. Let’s be clear: structures exist. They indeed have a life of their own independent from ours. They are in this sense agentic, that is they act upon us freely as actors in and of themselves, as independent agents. Structures may be invisible to us, yet they are formidable autonomous actors in public life. Or, to use Elizabeth Povinelli’s term above, think of them as existents, as non-human actors (even if of human origin) affecting us from outside of ourselves. (Why this is so, and why it’s important will be discussed in later essays.)

But then again, for this reason, such structures—non-human existents—are not us. As collectives of living individuals, we exist in relation to them, we are enmeshed within them, we respond to them—mostly unconsciously, perhaps unwillingly. But we are not ourselves completely subsumed by them nor are our lives overdetermined by them. Hence our agency is not eliminated by structures. We retain the freedom to act within and against them. In fact, our relation to structures is one of agent vs. agent, of reciprocal powers wherein each agent mutually shapes the other.

The interaction between our present-day agency and historically-evolved structure creates moral dilemmas for us in the present. Structures are not neutral. They embed in the present day the past’s historical human actions. They embed the imaginations, ideologies, the interests of the powerful, the actions of generations past that slowly shaped them. Past structures were assembled to fit their times—and may, of course, not fit our own time at all. They may have been structured to create progress, but then again often they were constructed to dominate and exploit the weak. Brought forward to our present moment, they threaten to bury us with the misjudgments and injustices of the past.

On the other hand, since we are indeed agents and since we can resist and transform structures, we must come to grips with what our agency means—because one way or another our actions constantly shape and reshape our structures. We live in a moral landscape that requires us both to evaluate and to judge the structures we inherit, and then to act in such ways that improve, overturn, or create structural change that better suits our living generation. We can do this work well or we can do it poorly, but we can’t not do it. The tension between structure and agency is a moral fact of life we can’t avoid.

We must also ask if the living shall be held responsible for the structures (and their injustices) inherited from the past? If so, how and in what ways are individuals guilty for being caught up in such structures? Who owes what to whom in recompense—restitution, reparations—when we are all born into and caught up in the same structures?

We’ll take up these loaded questions in later essays as we go along. Suffice to say here that determinism has some scientific justification among natural and social scientists—sociobiologists and neuroscientists particularly—as we will see later on in another essay. But these theories are a long way from explaining everyday life which is (and I imagine most social scholars believe) far too complex to reduce to singular deterministic forces. Free-will is, of course, an everyday human experience, too deeply engrained in us to explain it away (again, we’ll explore this in detail later).

Our questions are questions of balance. Is it naïve to deny structures exist? Yes. Is it also naïve to deny that we possess the human capacity to change structures, to change the world, to end injustice, to create new human solidarity? Certainly. But it’s complicated: we will never have the one—structure or agency, determinism or free will—without the other.    

The structural legacies reaching out from the past into the present—their webs of significance, networks of influence, frameworks of social organization—make up the core of what Geertz called the “compositeness of the composite body.” And the structural power of political, economic, and social institutions and systems to dominate us—to structure both the ways we relate to each other and the ways we think—reinforce the thickest wires wound up in our cultural rope.

Once we recognize how formidable this structural power is we might despair of ever changing it. What good is our flimsy agency against the structures towering over us? We can’t save the world, so why not just give up, go with the flow, and make the best of it? But this, of course, is to give into fatalism and to surrender our agency. And more to the point, to renege on the human and humane promise of our analytics of existence to exist in a better way.

Or to exist at all. We forget that structural powers are as likely to grind human beings down in misery and early death as they are to make us prosperous and happy. This, certainly, is a sobering thought as we face our inevitable journey through the future-present’s Valley of the Shadow of Death and the dangers to be found there.

So how, we ask, do we summon the energies to resist the power of structures over us? Where does agency gain a toehold to change them, to cut them down to size, to humanize them, to make them the servants of life—of human and non-human life on a fragile planet—rather than our masters?

Can we discover even the hint of a point of beginning to imagine a new metamodern analytics of existence that we will need in order to flourish in the future-present? One way or another we must, because future generations will find themselves wound up into the rope that we who are alive and active today have wound up for them. We owe it to them to pay attention to what we are doing, and to wind up our rope in ways that don’t foreclose opportunities for future generations to flourish in their own lifetimes. So, where do we start to address the problem of structure?

Critical Theory

Imagine a beautiful sunny day at the beach. And that on that beach you and the rest of your world of groups-within-groups live inside—stay with me—a giant, invisible beach ball. The water is beautiful! you think, and you run to it, only to crash into the beach ball’s inner wall and bounce back inside it before you make it to the waves. You don’t see it, yet all the while the beach ball structures your life and sets its boundaries. 

It might feel like a stretch to imagine powerful social structural systems this way. Yet in essence, global capitalism can and has been described much the same. This is what Immanuel Wallerstein meant (see Essay 2) when he said that we live in a global world-system, that the world-system is a capitalist world-system, and that our geoculture is the cultural system that both grows from the capitalist world-system’s workings and in return structures and reinforces them.

Even as we find ourselves today living in a fragmenting postmodern era; even as we confront our world-system as it cracks, bifurcates, reveals its contradictions; and even as it transitions into what we don’t know yet—the world-system still defines the common structure of our lives. Put another way, our capitalist world-system beach ball represents (now, to mix word pictures) the core of the modern cathedral of value that, as Nietzsche pointed out, replaced Christendom’s value hierarchy with the new modern keystones of individual freedom: the marketplace, and the liberal state that supports it—as now, even these slowly lose their coherence (again, Essay 2).

Since the industrial revolution and right up into postmodernity, many of us have celebrated and defended the capitalist world-system’s globalization as the best of all possible worlds, even if indeed its roots originated in global colonization and empire (more on this in the next essay). Others of us of course have hated it and proposed its overthrow. But no one on either side, capitalist or communist, ever really doubted its existence and global influence. All along, the only questions have been, how will we live with it even if we like it? Or if we desire not to live with it, how will we understand it from the inside out and escape it for the freedom of a new, restructured, decolonized form of existence?

With such questions in mind, a new theoretical approach to our structured world—critical theory—emerged nearly a century ago in interwar Germany among scholars connected to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (the “Frankfurt School,” as it’s called). Critical theorists turned their attention to the capitalist beach ball and sought to break free from it. The “beach ball” is my term, of course, not theirs; they called it the totality or total structure.[xxiii]

Critical theorists accepted the Marxist (and not particularly controversial) analysis that historical processes had since the end of feudalism produced a totalizing economic system that includes all of us, and that this system is reinforced by the modern state. Together, economy and state form a social complex they called “structure.” And they claimed that structure becomes total as, over time, structure expands and absorbs all of us into it.

That is, as structure encloses around us, its totality comes to define our social consciousness, drains other forms of meaning from our traditions, reduces artistic culture to a set of manufactured reproducible commodities (the “culture industry”), and reduces individuals to hollowed out, politicly disengaged consumers caught up in the endless cycle of economic production and mass-produced entertainment. This was indeed a widespread worry in the 1950s and 1960s. Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse put his finger on the mood of the time with his eerie phrase, “one-dimensional man,” also the title of his popular 1964 book describing the effects of life within the totality.[xxiv]

All the same, critical theorists rejected Marxist class-based revolution as misguided; and along with it rejected its German fascist doppelgänger; both of which produced even worse totalitarianisms. No, the totality won’t be overthrown by revolution, it must be hammered away at bit by bit until it yields to our freedom from it.

Their primary target? Exposing the mass consumer society that has collapsed into Nietzsche’s nihilism of relativist and trivial values; a society about which Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing;” a society susceptible to visible or invisible authoritarian control through the structural workings of the technologically-enhanced capitalist world-system.  

Max Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School’s driving force, made the argument that challenging the totality called for an entirely new way of thinking about it. It required a new kind of theory—a “critical theory.” “Traditional theory,” as he called it (as in the established “objective” scientific search for natural laws), when applied to life and society, frustrated him. Decades of social research merely painted a static picture of reality without really explaining how it worked. And traditional theory said nothing at all about how to change structure; nor could it provide workable prescriptions for actually living in reality. Or, as Marx once remarked, “Philosophers [the social theorists of his day] until now have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”[xxv]

Instead, Horkheimer proposed a “critical” theory of society. In doing so he sought to unify thinking about society (“theory”) with the practices of living in it and changing it. Later generations called his critical theory, a bit superficially, “learning by doing” or “action-reflection.” What Horkheimer meant was that deep social and philosophical critique should be employed to support human actions to challenge the totality. Then, that acting and learning from experience must be fed back into theory to further refine its critique. And finally, that new theorizing would lead to better informed practices of social change. This back and forth, repetitive cycle is what makes critical theory useful as well as fully critical.

Critique, by definition, requires a standard against which something—in this case, the social totality—can be criticized. That fundamental standard or norm, argued Horkheimer, is freedom, a universal human desire. He was quite concerned about individual freedom from authoritarian control whether political or economic or, as is the case in modern society, both. He was just as concerned about freedom of the mind—liberating thought to make it free to imagine alternatives to the totality and then to create liberating social practices able to break down the structures that control our lives. Not least, he sought a process to unthread the epistemes, the knowledge systems, that bind structures together and freeze them in place.[xxvi]  

The critical theorist’s job, then, is to examine whatever it is which limits liberation; to expose or to “unmask” its assemblages; to reveal how its power works; and then to create liberating practices of freedom, social justice, and intellectual and artistic vigor. This combination of action-informed theory and theory-informed action is called praxis, a rigorous methodology of social change. Without the conviction to create liberating change there is no real critical theory. And, in fact, without liberating praxis, there can be no useful social theory at all. When applied to structural constraint, critique exposes its reality. Critical theorists want us to see the structures otherwise invisible to us—and then to do something about them.

To return to the image of the great invisible structural beach ball: The effect of critical theory is much like film directors projecting vivid images of a structure’s otherwise hidden presence onto the beach ball’s wall—as if onto a movie screen so it can be seen by all. Their purpose is to make structure visible, to reveal it for what it is, to explain how it works, how it is to be resisted, and to show us the doorway of escape.

Unmasking, truth-telling, unstinting research, and analysis in the name of liberation makes clear the stakes involved. Critique reinforces the actions of those seeking liberation—and awakens the public to the realities of structural power. Against this public backdrop, then, social movements and theory can mutually and critically reinforce each other in an evolving praxis of public political confrontation over the recognition, dignity, rights, and restitution of those trapped in structure’s power.

A critical-theoretical, praxis approach to making structure visible, then to make it publicly contestable, influenced the 1960s radical New Left and especially Latin American Liberation Theology which directed its energies at the emancipation of the poor. It has enriched feminist and gender studies, as well as critical legal theory, and alter-globalist and decoloniality movements. Each in its own way finds capacity to project images of confining structures, to force all of us to see them, and then to resist them and to break them down in the name of freedom.

Throughout the postmodern era the unmasking of repressive structures and the revelation of their powers and inner workings continued. The term structure itself has become by now quite familiar to us, repeated endlessly in political and media discourse, and in everyday conversation.

In the postmodern era, as the analysis and meaning of structure became clearer in public discourse, its analysis also slowly coalesced around three centers of structural constraint and liberation—three centers where we hear the word structure used most often. Each center is itself a vast assemblage of history, power, and constraint, and each represents its own structural beach ball from which to break free.

Earlier we called these three the problematic triumvirate of race, gender, and class. Critical theorists have illustrated and defined each of them as the high-voltage hot-wires wound into and reinforcing the center of our cultural rope—powerful, monumental assemblages built into the central structures of life.

Intersectionality

In the public struggle to wind up the rope of a liberated and virtuous society, theory alone without connection to practice remains sterile: ivied tower speculations, scholars speaking to other scholars in abstractions—and there is all too much of this going on. I speak (embarrassed) from experience.

Then again, activism without theory is unstrategic: public actions too often reduced to chasing the cause du jour, copping the right attitude, showing up at a march or media event. Again, I speak, embarrassed by this too. This is not to minimize their usefulness in shifting public opinion. However, it takes much more to change structures. Liberation won’t be bought on the cheap.

Neither is it easy to know where to start to unravel the tangle of overlapping, invisible yet powerful structural threads—the historical assemblages that bind up and limit our freedom of thought and action. No single theory can penetrate such complexity from “above.” And no single perspective from “below,” no matter how sincere or authentic, gives us an adequate angle of vision upon the whole.

We’re left with thick description as our starting point: beginning with our experiences in our local communities, engaging with concrete everyday realities, and then building up our insights into emerging and expanding patterns; building them into ever enlarging assemblages of theories that explain what is going on. But also, by applying existing theory as best we can to aid our critical interpretation of our local experience.

We might start our thick description with the image of speeding cars approaching an intersection—a thought experiment we can use to begin the process of picking apart the tangles of social structures. In the late 1980s, Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw used this image to analyze several complex workplace discrimination cases. All concerned low-wage, Black women workers whose employers denied them routine raises and promotions and otherwise ignored their complaints—this in companies that appeared to treat Black men and white women fairly.[xxvii]

These legal cases presented a paradox: The women involved couldn’t directly prove discrimination for simply being Black (Black men appeared well-treated) or for just being women (white women did not complain). And the courts ruled (at times in contradictory ways) that race and gender must be considered independently within existing law. Thus, the groups Crenshaw describes didn’t qualify for legal standing as a special class of Black women despite their vulnerability in the workplace.

Yet they were clearly being held back as groups by misrecognition, by an animus deliberate or unconscious, but unrecognized in law. They remained legally invisible even after decades of civil rights and feminist activism had improved employment rights for Black men and white women.

Crenshaw picked apart this assemblage of misrepresentations by proposing a thought experiment to untangle it, to explain it, and to make its structures visible:

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.[xxviii]

Intersectionality, the name she gave her thought experiment, illustrated how multiplex group identities form from unforeseen structural intersections in local circumstances; and how various groups suffer injustices unique to their situation in the overlap of various structural systems of power—like the racism, patriarchy, and class that shaped Crenshaw’s low-wage, Black women’ experience.

These points of convergence—intersections—of structural power are like knots in our cultural rope—complicated knots since we might find ourselves at the intersection of several “streets” (axes) at the same time: intersectional crossings of gender, class, and race, but also others like ethnicity, disability, immigration status, or age. Unpicking them within the context of real-life situations gives us a concrete place to start to describe how structures constrain our freedom.

Put another way, by standing at a particular intersection, we gain a unique, personal perspective upon the workings of overlapping structures; a perspective that remains unseen from other perspectives. Call this “perspectivism”: that is, that multiple realities are revealed by multiple perspectives depending on how we individually experience the structures around us. Often this is referred to as “standpoint theory”: that what we “see” depends upon where we “stand” in the multitude of intersections of structure and power.

Or better, “standpoint epistemology”: Meaning that experiencing life in a particular structural context—standing at the intersection—provides us with greater capacity to know from experience how structures truly shape our lives in the different communities where we live. Because these are our experiences, we know them because they happen to us.

Knowing about structures by experiencing them, knowing them from the inside, gives us authority to talk about them, to explain them in public, because we know them from our own experience in ways that outsiders simply cannot. And we insist on being listened to since not many others will be able to grasp our situation.

In the last 30 years, intersectional theory has amassed a sophisticated body of work describing and analyzing specific forms of injustice formerly unnoticed or ignored in public life. And as sociologist Patricia Hill Collins demonstrates in her Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, intersectionality now incorporates such a wide world of critical theory in its work that it is becoming a master theory on its own.[xxix]

Intersectionality brings a concrete focus to other well-developed bodies of critical theoretical work. Think of analyses of inequality and poverty (among persons of color as well as whites), feminist theory, gender theory, queer theory, race theory, decolonial theory, class theory, and so forth. Just as easily, intersectionality is applied as a tool to gain personal and group insight even among those in the dominant society or by any individual to understand one’s social status, unique social challenges, and problems, even one’s relative prestige or privilege in society.

Each dimension of identity represents a “street” (axis) in Crenshaw’s model. The “intersections” provide broad vistas for interpreting otherwise separate theoretical perspectives; for connecting—bundling—them; and for sketching them collectively into a clearer, wider picture of how many overlapping structures—the windings in the rope—add up to a greater whole.

Add up, we might say, to what the Frankfurt School critical theorists called the totality. Intersectionality became “critical,” as Collins says, when it began doing what critical theory has always done: That is, to examine the concrete experiences of individuals and groups; to reflect upon them in the light of existing theoretical and philosophical perspectives; to reinterpret experience in a new light; and then to correct the theory—and on and on until a liberating praxis develops to address and resolve injustices.

Intersectionality provides us a useful tool to examine the complexity of our identities, and to explain a culture’s structural goings-on. It shows us how these affect our daily lives and adds substance to what it means and to how it feels to us to live inside a culture.

IV. From Culture to Assemblage

Perhaps now we can better grasp the importance of tiles, ropes, and structures—of multiculturalism, assemblages, analytics of existence, critical theory, intersectionality—for our understanding of culture and for clarifying how we tell its postmodern, culturalist story. Even if by this point in our discussion it might seem we have bent the word culture so far out of shape that we’re no longer quite certain what it is.

Our human life-worlds are interconnected wholes, assemblages that wind together our thoughts, perceptions, language, meaning, and habit; our patterned and institutionalized behaviors; the frozen past that shapes the living present; the cultivation of our personalities; our spirituality; the meaning of love; our consciousness of reality itself. And our geographical life-worlds—East, West, South, North—are as well interconnected by history and intercultural contacts, by trade and empire, and conditioned by global economic and political structures. Our countless cultural strings, threads, wires, and filaments wound up in our cultural ropes are the very ties that bind us. 

Culture grants us our sense of identity—how we are recognized (or misrecognized) and defined by others, and how we present ourselves in public; how we experience fitting into the world; expectations for our behavior; our sensibility about what is “normal,” true, secure; what is real and how we can know it. We normally take our vast assemblages for granted. Scarcely do we think about them . . . until, of course, they are threatened. Then we feel them. We grow alarmed when confronted with difference. We fear the other “worlds” we don’t recognize and that threaten to shake our secure experience of ourselves and our reality.

Think of how it feels to leave one’s own culture altogether and to integrate into another. Long-term expatriate workers, diplomats, Peace Corps volunteers, for example—let alone refugees and immigrants—who have experienced a sojourn in another society, know from experience the inevitable culture shock that awaits any newcomer: a (hopefully) transient sensation of anger that the world no longer works in “normal,” accustomed ways; of loathing the “natives” for not “getting it,” for their food styles, manners, and inscrutability; a period of hating the new location because it feels uncomfortable; a passage through emotional depression from the stress of feeling out of control until a new reality comes into focus; even a period of moral cluelessness and dangerous antinomian behavior. The point is, we feel the encounter with difference emotionally and deeply.

Culture obviously exists and is central to human consciousness. But simply feeling cultural difference—feeling threatened by it or feeling instinctively protective of one’s own culture—doesn’t really explain culture; doesn’t really tell us what culture is or how it works. Nor does it help us much to sort out how it affects us, other than to fuel our fears and our squabbles over it. What we need is an integrated working definition of culture and how it grows and changes—one that explains why we think and feel as we do and that explains the behavioral habits we fall into as we live our lives with others.

Pioneering British anthropologist E.B. Tylor, in his 1871 Primitive Culture, gave us our first comprehensive definition of culture. It is still a standard reference: “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society.” It is the humanly-created linguistically-shared world inside our collective minds and acted out in public. Our sense and sensibility.

Tylor’s definition quite helpfully tells what we’re looking at when we behold culture. But it says nothing about how it works. What about its dynamics? Its evolution through time? Its structure?

If we fast-forward a century-and-a-half, Ronald Inglehart, a University of Michigan political scientist and distinguished world values analyst, helps us to add dynamism to our understanding of culture. In his 2018 Cultural Evolution, Inglehart defines culture in terms of human survival, as “a set of norms and skills that are conducive to survival in a given environment, constituting a survival strategy for a society.” “[A] set of learned behavior that constitutes a society’s survival strategy.” We might recall that this is what we meant earlier when we used Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept, the analytics of existence.[xxxi]

In fact, Inglehart (whose World Values Survey’s statistical dataset draws on about 90 percent of the world’s human population) distinguishes the ever-shifting conditions of material and political security—and the question of how we are to survive them—as the central influence upon our changing cultural experiences. Security, or its absence, lies at the bottom of culture.

For most of history, he reminds us, most people lived insecure lives. Their insecurity reflected culturally in fear of the outside and in the felt need for control and order. Reflected in xenophobia, rigid ideologies (nationalist and religious), strict family patriarchy, and demand for powerful, autocratic leaders to represent and protect them. These are the values of fear, of scarcity, of insecurity and a people’s natural self-protective reflex to overcome their insecure existence.

In contrast, our modern post-World War II period, Inglehart writes, is both safer (the 80-year “long peace” between world powers) and materially richer especially in developed countries—unprecedentedly so. And unworried about survival, fundamentally secure societies generate other values: tolerance; openness to change, cross-cultural encounter and experimentation; individual self-expression and identity; concern for human rights and democracy; declining nationalism; global cosmopolitanism. 

Important to our discussion here, Inglehart’s research identified a major shift in cultural values among affluent Western and Westernizing societies that occurred around 1970. It was a shift away from “materialist” values (i.e., concerned with material survival) toward “postmaterialist” values (individualism, freedom, and identity). This cultural transformation occurred as older generations shaped by fear and insecurity (world wars and the Great Depression) began to give way to a new generation, the first generation (the baby-boomers) shaped by mass affluence and nearly preternatural feelings of security, at least among the dominant society.

The tipping point of this late 1960s and early 1970s transformation of values occurred when the relative measure of the value placed upon economic class issues (employment, wealth distribution, labor mobilization, the welfare state—“materialist” values) and the value placed upon cultural issues (identity, recognition, equal rights, freedom of expression—“postmaterialist” values) reversed their polarity. Class-oriented materialist values gave way to culturalist-oriented postmaterialist values at the top of our hierarchy of concerns.

Issues related to class, and issues related to culture, of course, run in parallel in any society. In the West, for example, labor movements and civil rights movements have run alongside each other; at times they have even converged. But in the 1970s, the relative value we placed upon them—their salience—reversed. Postmaterialist (what other postmoderns called “post-scarcity”) values took pride of place, and identity (cultural) values rather than class (economic) values and concerns became central to social and political life. Labor, as a category of public concern, began to vanish; ethnicity, race and gender, and the assertion of rights, freedoms, and recognition came front and center as expressions of the central passions available only in a post-scarcity world.

The 1970s shift to postmaterialist values provides a valuable historical marker for the onset our fifty-year postmodern age—the post-scarcity age of security. But our acceptance of post-scarcity postmodernism has also produced an entirely counterintuitive, surprising reversal of our sensibilities. Many conservatives of course are frightened by “radical” postmodernism, even though all of us—conservatives and progressives alike—equally have been shaped by it for decades. So, despite the fifty-year so-called “culture war” over identity which preoccupies us, in point of fact, our postmodern era has been a quite conservative period—reflected in our conservative politics—compared to the liberal progressivism that proceeded it from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Our post-scarcity existence rests upon capitalist foundations that generate the wealth to support it. This reality is more-or-less assumed to be our new, permanent mode of life by postmodern analysts, politicians, and the media. All along it’s been tempting to take the conservative position that we indeed really have reached “the end of history” when our struggle for survival has been satisfied by a solid foundation of wealth. But then again, throughout the postmodern period we generally have overlooked the perennial problems of class and poverty—as the Marxist Left faded into obscurity.  

Be warned, however. Security also wanes—at least within segments of society. Overlooked in our conservative postmodernity was the traditional working class trapped in the new, so-called “post-scarcity” economy as wages were ratcheted down, employment made “flexible,” and financial security made precarious, all-the-while demographic changes have reduced the dominant (white) majority.

This is the experience of a new insecurity for millions of us. And in the West, it has produced emotional reactions to it, expressed especially by, but not limited to, white men. And per Inglehart, it shouldn’t surprise us that the cultural reflex of growing insecurity has been a return to xenophobia, racism, fundamentalist religion, anti-democratic authoritarian leadership, and patriarchal “family values” among those of us who once felt secure and now, in a changing economy and society, feel threatened and insecure.

Curiously, though, and in accordance with the economically conservative postmodern spirit, little complaint has been registered even among those slipping into insecurity about the underlying economy itself and about how the economy actually works. Seldom has our form of economy and its fundamental structures been challenged—until recently, perhaps, and even then, economic problems were blamed on foreigners and colluding global “elites,” and not on the capitalist economy itself. Tensions remain focused on culture—on identity—even among those who in previous generations were concerned most with labor, class, wealth distribution, and social welfare, Bernie Sanders’s movement in the US the notable exception.   

The point here is to illustrate the fact that underlying structural changes always get reflected in cultural change. And yet, “culture” as we commonly understand it today in our postmodern age, the way we value it, think about it, talk about it, and fight over it—our cultural discourse or “conversation”— has in fact become disengaged from our understanding of its structural roots, especially from the problems of class and our forgotten concern for labor. And disengaged to the point that our concern for identity (on the cultural right as well as on the left) is blinding us to the deeper intersectional, structural “armored cables” in our cultural rope that disfigure contemporary society and that drive our cultural conflicts from behind our backs. 

So, when E.B. Tylor calls culture “that complex whole,” how are we to understand the “wholeness” of it? Well, we must grasp that our “life-space,” our entire “world,” can’t be divided up into “cultural” and “structural” pieces without hiding and obscuring the effects of one upon the other. Our world exists simply as one whole thing, as a single interconnected whole of tiles, ropes, and structures.

Yet, divide the world up into pieces is what we typically do when we think about or study the human world. And we divide it up simply because we don’t have a singular term to name the whole of the collective life-world we live in. We’re bedeviled by a terminological problem. For example, conceptually and habitually, we reserve culture for the anthropologists and art, literary, and “cultural” critics who study what people are conscious of, of what goes on in their heads, of how they express themselves. But economics is left for something else, the domain of economists; social relationships and structures are for the sociologists; politics for the political scientists, giving us a picture of the world in pieces. 

We’ve created an intellectual division of labor between the analysis of the abstract (cultural consciousness—the subject of the humanities) and of the concrete (social relationships, including economic and political relationships, even nature—the subjects of the sciences), as if the inner world of thought and sensibility is somehow separate from the outer world of concrete institutionalized stuff and structures. But in fact, we can’t have the one—the abstract or the concrete—without the other. They—the inner and the outer—are all of a piece.

Since our descriptive words—culture, economy, society, politics—don’t work well to capture the wholeness of the world, perhaps we’re stuck, per Tylor, with having to call the assembled whole culture (and to then imagine society, economy, politics, etc. as parts of a culture). Or to the contrary, to call whole thing society (of which culture and the other pieces are parts of a society), as we commonly do. Or we can call the whole thing, awkwardly, socio-culture. But we don’t have a clear concept to use to talk about our worlds as wholes, though we need to learn to think this way.   

Into this definitional confusion comes sociologist Margaret Archer, a pioneer in the growing field of “realist social theory.” We’ll come back to her and to her important theory of how societies change—she calls it morphogenesis—in a later essay. For now, though, let’s consider her claim that what we typically think of as culture (collective consciousness; the abstract) and society (social relationships, institutions, and structures; the concrete) are mutually interconnected systems of the same thing—each interactively mirroring the other in a common whole.   

We must think of our “world” as one whole thing, the pieces and parts of which can’t be separated from each other and treated as if each is not affected by the others. However, simply calling our world a “whole” can mislead us too. Even though all the parts flow into and around each other, our human whole is not a singular black box. To speak of its wholeness doesn’t mean that we can’t also at the same time tell the pieces and parts apart enough so to talk about them. So, then, how do we imagine talking about the parts without losing our perspective of the whole?

Well, imagine a choir director’s musical score (my analogy, not Archer’s). On the written page, the music’s pieces and parts are organized into separate staffs, the horizontal lines that separate the musical registers into clefs: treble, bass, and for our illustration, something in the middle; or think of the musical registers as soprano, tenor, and baritone. On the page, the music flows through time from left to right, the notes run up and down the page. But the music we hear and that moves our hearts is a single orchestrated thing, each register blending with and supporting the others. Musicologists might indeed examine each register separately; they might even need different conceptual tools to measure and interpret it. But for the rest of us who are listening to a composition being performed, hearing only a piece of it in isolation would mean little to us. We’d miss the combined force of the whole.  

Similarly, we can examine our richly orchestrated life-world by conceptually dividing it into three registers. We’ll call the upper, treble register (per Archer) the cultural system; call the bottom, bass register, the social-structural system. In-between lies another register we call socio-cultural interaction. Each register is an essential element of our human chorus.

The top register—the cultural system—represents, to reprise a term from above, our episteme, our inherent rationality that evolves slowly over centuries, but which gives us our deep sense of reality and the ability and common language to distinguish the true from the false, the real from the unreal. And think of it, too, as including, to reprise another term, our value hierarchy—the cathedral of value—that historically orders our lives.

The bottom register—the social-structural system—consists of our social infrastructure: the complex historically evolved patterned webs of political and economic relations, laws, group formations, and expected social behaviors—be they legal structures, racial or gender norms, consumer practices, governmental policies and procedures, financial logics, or bureaucratic organization.

Both systems—the cultural and social-structural systems—are of long historical duration and pass from generation to generation with only modest changes. And both registers reinforce each other. The top register provides the logics and reinforces the rational integration and operation of the bottom. The evolving operations of the bottom register slowly transform the logical possibilities of the upper. Both are interconnected and deeply entwined, and we wish (hope) that they stay in balance. Though as Inglehart demonstrated above, an entire transformation of public consciousness can be driven by overlooked structural economic changes and relative changes to our sense of security and to our quest for survival. 

But, of course, each register also evolves separately on its own terms. Our top register—our cathedral of value—may well collapse (as we have seen), leaving us in confusion until a new one is built. However, its collapse may little affect the bottom register which can endure as if with a mind of its own. In fact, the bottom register might even strengthen its systematic control over us without a cultural system to push back with the values we need to keep it in line—a prospect of autonomous structures (especially economic and technological ones) running amok. Just think of the secular structural trends we’ve warned about before: the human causes and reactions to climate change; artificial intelligence. And certainly, war, environmental calamity, disease, and economic collapse can destroy structures without much affecting the cultural system: indeed, we depend upon it and upon the logics of its episteme to rebuild.

The top and bottom registers evolve historically over a duration that far exceeds a human life: the dead hand of history created by many generations still hangs onto us. So, then, where do we fit in, we the living, that is, taking our own generational turn in the sun? We fit into the register in-between the historical systems above and below us, in-between and taking our place in the register of socio-cultural interaction. This middle space is where the human agency of the living interacts with historical structures. It is the space of human activity where we wind-up our cultural rope together in the search for security and survival. In other words, this is the middle space wherein we the living interact with each other and interact with the systems above and below, as if we exist together in a force field, suspended between cultural and structural systems.

Following Archer, by naming this register the space of socio-cultural interaction we call attention to both the boundless power of human agency, and to the inevitable historical structural powers that put boundaries around our agency and that shape the contours of our lives. These systemic powers, of course, shape our thoughts and behaviors as they press in upon us from top and bottom; their systematic goings-on often invisible to us or else felt to be normal patterns of life.

Yet it is our interactions with the systems above and below us, and in addition, our interactions with each other in the present moment, that set in motion the particular things that we choose to think about, discuss with others, turn into public issues, let organize our identities, and which we examine to see if we can create a better way to exist together on our planet—all the stuff we think we should call “cultural,” seldom grasping their structural foundations. And slowly, together, as we push back from within the middle register—the register of socio-cultural interaction—we can restructure the cultural and social-structural registers above and below us in order to create change.

What then do we call this singular, indivisible, three-register reality? Perhaps it’s clear by now that the words culture and society as we commonly use them can’t be stretched wide enough to adequately describe the whole. Both terms on their own don’t provide the analytical heft to examine the whole.

But another word we encountered above certainly does have the conceptual power to be stretched that wide: Assemblage. Think, then, of our ethnic tiles as “assemblages”; of our interconnected ropes as “assemblages of assemblages” (or an “ecology of assemblages”); or call our whole world, all of our structures tied up into the totality, “the Assemblage.” This is a little different way of imagining our life world than we’re used to. It may take some re-imagining on our part, even a little practice to use the term, but in the rest of the essays that follow in this series we will attempt to use the word assemblage as a way of talking about what we usually call culture or society—and talk about them with a little more clarity and precision.

As we go along in this series, it will be helpful to identify human groupings—their distinctions and goings on, be they local or global—as assemblages. To identify an assemblage as a unit of analysis prompts us to ask what, exactly, is this group an assemblage of? What forces—local, global, historical, structural, epistemic—run through it? How are they mixed up and tied off together? How is one group mixed-up in and interwoven with another group, or with many other groups amidst our contemporary world’s global flows of influence? Only then can we grasp the proper (yet boundless) context to apply our critical-theoretical tools to examine the vast intersections of powers, logics, and structures. And to interpret in a fuller light our mutual struggles for survival, our strategies to flourish—our analytics of existence—our drive to thrive.

We won’t abandon the word “culture” entirely, but mostly use it in its earlier Western understanding as artistic and intellectual “cultivation” (both words derive from agriculture, the cultivating of crops and herds) including pop culture. We will also use words such as identity, identities, worlds, ethnos, ethnic, ethos, groups, peoples, folkways, and so on to distinguish various human assemblages in more familiar terms.  

By thinking in “assemblages” we are alerted to the fact that behind and around our many differences, we find so many common epistemic and structural forces that we might begin to wonder how different from each other we really are. We might be surprised to find ourselves as similar to each other as we are different. And that our historical fumbling around about our differences, either overstating them or trying to obliterate them, has led to many historical tragedies. Understanding the tensions between difference and similarity, interpreting them fairly, and bringing them into some sort of workable balance will be important to us later as we envision a metamodern future and strive to survive the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  

In the beginning, above, we noted the Cultural Turn as a marker of postmodernity’s emergence fifty-some years ago. And indeed, the turn to culture enhanced our understanding of it, renewed our appreciation of difference, the politics of recognition, the meaning of epistemicide as cultural murder, the problems of identity and diversity, the power of culture over us, its complexity. All of it has provided us a much richer understanding of our world and opened new possibilities to restore virtue to the world. The postmodern cultural turn leaves us a vast inheritance, a crucial legacy; one that must not be ignored nor forgotten. We are all the richer for it. 

But fifty-some years later, we depart the postmodern period and move into a new human form of life that, as some point out, lies “beyond the cultural turn.” We need to be sensitive to our changing sensibilities. We might have noticed that in our discussion of the postmodern culturalist story about tiles, ropes, and structures it appeared that our thinking about culture seemed to evolve over time within the postmodern period. And this is correct: Early in postmodernity we thought mostly of culture as tiles, and our concerns were about cross-cultural contacts, intercultural differences, and cultural protection. At the end of postmodernity, we’ve become much more concerned with structures, their power over us, their forms of oppression, and the struggle to liberate ourselves from them.[xxxii]

In the process we’ve pretty well worn out the concept “culture,” stretched it beyond its explanatory capacity, found it stuck running in circles to explain our world to us. However, even as we begin to abandon “culture” at the center of our discussions about the world, and replace it with “assemblage,” let’s not forget that fifty years of culturalism brought us to our new, productive point of view.

So then, let’s take our new analytical tool—assemblage—and put it to work to examine perhaps the most crucial of assemblages, a great assemblage of assemblages, the Assemblage that has lurked in the background and bedeviled our postmodern period. Earlier we promised to get to this when we discussed decoloniality. And in the next essay we will get to it directly and address head-on the problem of imperialism.

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Notes

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[i] For a map of the world at the peak of Western imperialism and brief explanation, see the online news and analysis website Vox: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/24/5835320/map-in-the-whole-world-only-these-five-countries-escaped-european.

[ii] My development of the Grand Deal draws from Immanuel Wallerstein’s description of modern liberalism’s democratic-capitalist “middle way” between conservatism and socialism and its breakdown after 1968. See his “The Agonies of Liberalism: What Hope Progress?” In Wallerstein, I. “The Essential Wallerstein (The New Press/WW Norton: 2000), pp. 416-434.  

[iii] Raymond Williams begins his discussion of the historical evolution of the word “culture” saying, “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. . . . [M]ainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.” See “Culture,” in his Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 2015 ed. (Oxford University: 2015), pp. 49-54.

[iv] Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton University:2000), p. 64. Our discussion of tiles and ropes below is from Chapter 6, “The World in Pieces: Culture and Politics at the End of the Century,” pp. 218-260. Geertz’s profoundly influential The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books: 1973) and Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (Basic Books: 1983) turned thinking about culture toward the interpretation of meaning (symbolic anthropology) and to a concentration on the local context in a wide variety of academic fields.  

[v] For a survey of the work of twentieth-century anthropologists, R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms, Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History (Mayfield Publishing: 1996). 

[vi] McGee and Warms, Anthropological Theory, pp. 202-214.

[vii] Quotation from Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, eds. The Essential Foucault: Selections from The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 (The New Press: 2003), p. 316.

[viii] See Charles Taylor’s landmark “The Politics of Recognition” in Charles Taylor, et. al., Amy Gutman, ed. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton University: 1994), pp. 25-73.

[ix] “A Forgotten Genocide: What Germany Did in Namibia, and What It’s Saying Now,” New York Times, 28 May 2021. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/europe/germany-namibia-genocide.html. For European colonization in Africa generally, including the Congo Free State, see Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: The White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (Random House: 1991).

[x] Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, Joan Tate, trans. (The New Press: 1996 [1992]). Other well-known and accessible works in addition to Pakenham’s Scramble for Africa and Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes include Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (Simon and Schuster:1997); Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Cedric Belfrage, trans. (Monthly Review Press: 1997 [1973]); Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press: 2014). For a fascinating historical discussion of the difficulty in establishing accurate figures for pre-Columbian indigenous populations in the Americas, Charles C. Mann, 1491: Now Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2^nd ed. (2011 [2005]), pp. 105-151. On British imperialism and its self-justifying ideology, Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Harvard University: 2020).

[xi] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Routledge: 2014), p. 92 and passim.

[xii] Anthony F.C. Wallace, Culture and Personality (Random House: 1961), pp. 143-156.

[xiii] On “resistant knowledge projects,” see Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University: 2019), pp. 87-120; especially 108-116.

[xiv] Quotation from Charles Taylor et. al., Multiculturalism, p. 25. Original emphasis.

[xv] Quotation from King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” Speech. James M. Washington, ed. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper One: 1986), p. 219.

[xvi] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University: 2009).

[xvii] Clifford Geertz, Available Light, p. 227.

[xviii] René Girard’s reconstruction of prehistoric fundamental human mythology and its contemporary effects, see his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, trans. (Stanford University: 1987 [1978]).

[xix] Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 3-30.

[xx] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University: 2015).

[xxi] Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Capitalism (Duke University: 2016); “A Fire on the Ancestors’ Road to Bamayak,” Noema Magazine, 30 March 2021. URL: https://www.noemamag.com/author/elizabethpovinelli/>. 

[xxii] Our discussion of structure and agency draws its outlines from Margaret Archer’s Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, Rev. ed. (Cambridge University: 1996). Together with her Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenic Approach (Cambridge University: 1995) and Being Human: The Problem of Agency (Cambridge University: 2000), her three volumes—collectively called “the Archers”—constitute a major recasting of social analysis and social change and will inform our discussions throughout.

[xxiii] For a thorough survey of critical theory, the Frankfort School, and its continuing contribution to social understanding, see Craig Calhoun’s “Social Theory and the Public Sphere,” in The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, 2^nd Ed., Bryan S. Turner, ed. (Blackwell: 2000), pp. 205-244; and Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University: 2011).

[xxiv] Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies, 2^nd Ed. (Beacon Press: 1991 [1964]).

[xxv] Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Matthew J. O’Connell and others, trans. (Continuum: 1972), pp. 188-243.  

[xxvi] Critical theory, of course, began its history deeply engaged in Western issues and values, liberation being a central Western value. Liberation and freedom are important universally, however, among the Rest other values may be more central such as “land, water, territory, self-determination, dignity, respect, good living, and mother earth” as Boaventura de Souza Santos points out in Epistemologies of the South, p. 41. We’ll pick up this discussion in the next essay.

[xxvii] Crenshaw’s two seminal articles established the intersectional approach to legal and social analysis. See: Kimberle Crenshaw (1989), “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8, pp. 139-167; Kimberle Crenshaw (1991), “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991), pp. 1241-1299.

[xxviii] Quotation from Crenshaw’s, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” p. 149.

[xxix] Ibid. Collins, Intersectionality and Social Theory.

[xxx] Quotation taken from James Lett, The Human Enterprise: A Critical Introduction to Anthropological Theory (Westview Press: 1987), p. 54.

[xxxi] Ronald F. Inglehart, Cultural Evolution: People’s Motivations are Changing, and Reshaping the World (Cambridge University: 2018), pp. 17 and 21.

[xxxii] In their introduction to their edited volume Beyond the Cultural Turn, sociologist Victoria Bonnell and historian Lynn Hunt survey the context from which the cultural turn emerged, how reflection on culture and society were transformed in the postmodern period, and what lies beyond. This is a complicated story of structure and agency, and of the abstract (symbolic, semiotic) and the concrete (structural). They conclude, saying “Historians and sociologists no longer assume (not that everyone always did!) that causal explanation automatically traces everything cultural or mental back or down to its more fundamental components in the material world of economics and social relations. At the same time, it is clear that many are just as unhappy with a definition of culture as entirely systemic, symbolic, or linguistic. The focus on practice, narrative, and embodiment—whether of whole cultures, social groups, or individual selves—is meant to bypass that dilemma and restore a sense of social embeddedness without reducing everything to its social determinants.” “And change, when it comes, will no doubt follow from something other than theoretical prescription. It will come out of new practices embedded in the social world in ways that we cannot yet see.” See their “Introduction” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (University of California: 1999), pp. 1-27. Quotations, pp. 26, 27.