Reflections on Culture

Abstract

The culture concept has been a continuing source of conceptual difficulties. This chapter begins with some of the failed attempts to address those difficulties, which also cropped up in my own research. Thus, for example, D’Andrade found that a value can be either institutional or personal, leading to the anomalous result that Japanese in my sample, questioned about institutional values, were only slightly higher than Americans on collectivism. Thus, the big differences in cultures are in the interpretation of what-counts-as-what. To appreciate culture, we must first accept the prior assumption that it constitutes a discrete ontological level of collective mental states, above individual mental states. This level, moreover, is a clear case of non-eliminative reductionism; that is, collective mental states can do things that individual mental states cannot. To capture this mix of values, practices, norms, sanctions, institutions, and representations intersubjectively shared by a recognized collectivity, I introduce the notion of lifeworlds. Lifeworlds may or may not conflict, and one can colonize another. In addition are the innate, but culturally shaped, social instincts with which humans are endowed. Culture thus has important causal force, and cannot be omitted from the equation.

Roy D’Andrade: Deceased.

The University of Chicago Press has generously permitted the reproduction here of a discussion originally published in Cassaniti and Menon’s 2017 edited volume, Universalism without Uniformity. That discussion occurs in the sections of his chapter (D’Andrade 2017) about lifeworlds: the final paragraph of “The Formation of Cultural Values ” and the three sections to follow, “How Many Lifeworlds in a Society?,” “Civil Society , the Covering Lifeworld ,” and “Lifeworld Colonization .” This editor did not realize this duplication until she happened to read the earlier essay of D’Andrade’s in the other volume, when that book saw publication during preparation of this one. D’Andrade has never before, to this editor’s knowledge, published the same words in two different places. This departure from his usual practice must have been due to the exigencies of his illness, which, as we tell in the Preface, included pain, memory loss, and inability to work.