Culture and the Legacy of Anthropology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Gatto, Maristella, editor. | Squeo, Alessandra, editor. | Trulli,
Maristella, editor.

Title: Culture and the legacy of anthropology : transatlantic approaches,
1870-1930 : a reader / [edited by] Maristella Gatto, Alessandra Squeo,
and Maristella Trulli.

Description: Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Peter Lang, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019023070 | ISBN 9781788740456 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Culture--Philosophy. | Anthropology--Philosophy. |
Anthropology--English speaking countries--History. | Culture in
literature. | Anthropology in literature.

Classification: LCC GN357 .C8474 2019 | DDC 306.01--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023070

This publication has been made possible thanks to the support of the
Dipartimento di Lettere Lingue Arti. Italianistica e Culture Comparate.
Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro.

Cover design: Peter Lang.

Cover image created using wordle.net © Jonathan Feinberg 2014.

ISBN 978-1-78874-045-6 (print) • eISBN 978-1-78874-046-3 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78874-047-0 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-048-7 (mobi)

© Peter Lang AG 2020

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,
52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom
oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

Maristella Gatto, Alessandra Squeo and Maristella Trulli have asserted their right
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of
this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of
the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and
processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author

Maristella Gatto is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Bari (Italy).

Alessandra Squeo is Researcher and Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bari, where she teaches English Literature and Culture.

Maristella Trulli is Associate Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Bari.

About the book

This reader investigates the changing face of the notion of culture, tracing how it emerged in some of the most important and controversial phases of the lively Anglo-American debate on the subject from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, including the crucial years of Modernism. Shedding light on the cross-disciplinary approaches that characterized the debate and focusing especially on the legacy of anthropology, the volume presents a selection of some of the most distinguished voices from such assorted fields as literature, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and ethnology, whose interests and areas of enquiry apparently converged and partly overlapped. A selection of primary sources from leading figures such as Matthew Arnold, Bronisław Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Aldous Huxley provide an overview of the crucial issues raised on a wide array of topics: civilization, race, nation, progress, evolution, education, art, science, literature and politics. The primary sources are accompanied by critical essays that offer new insights into these classic texts. This reader will be of use to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as to scholars exploring the cross-disciplinary or transatlantic nature of the study of culture.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Acknowledgements

maristella gatto, alessandra squeo and maristella trulli

Introduction

part i The Forerunners

alessandra squeo

The humanist and the anthropologist: Victorian notions of culture in Matthew Arnold and Edward Burnett Tylor

laura chiara spinelli

Thomas Henry Huxley on culture: Science and humanities in Victorian England

Readings from

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869)

Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871)

Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Science and Culture’ (1880)

part ii The Emergence of a Discipline

maristella gatto

From ‘armchair’ to ‘open-air’ anthropology: Views of culture in James George Frazer and Bronisław Malinowski

Readings from

James George Frazer, ‘The scope of social anthropology. A lecture delivered before the University of Liverpool’ (1908)

Bronisław Malinowski, ‘Culture’, in Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (1931)

part iiiThe American School205

angela di gennaro

Franz Boas: A brand new perspective for the study of culture

angela di gennaro

The multifaceted nature of culture(s): Edward Sapir’s in-depth analysis

angela di gennaro

Benjamin L. Whorf: Language as the key to understanding culture

lorena carbonara

In search of a plural language: Rethinking Ruth Benedict’s new and old patterns of culture

Readings from

Franz Boas, ‘Early Cultural Traits’ (1911)

Edward Sapir, ‘Culture, Genuine and Spurious’ (1924)

Benjamin Lee Whorf, ‘A linguistic consideration of thinking in primitive communities’ (1936)

Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934)

part iv Intersections

cristina consiglio

No tradition, no culture-history: Introduction to Lawrence’s ‘America, Listen to Your Own’

A theory in progress: Before and after Eliot’s Strange Gods

rosanna damato

T. S. Eliot’s homogeneous culture in After Strange Gods

lorenza cervellera

Forster’s ‘Does Culture Matter?’ and other essays

elisa fortunato

‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’: Notes on ‘T. H. Huxley as a Literary Man’

giovanna epifania

Interdisciplinarity and transculturalism in Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

Readings from

D. H. Lawrence, ‘America, Listen to Your Own’ (1920)

T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (1934)

E. M. Forster, ‘Does Culture Matter?’ (1935)

Aldous Huxley, ‘T. H. Huxley as a Literary Man’ (1936)

Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938)

Notes on contributors

Index

Acknowledgements

The editors gratefully acknowledge permission from the following to reprint copyrighted material:

The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Society of Authors and the E. M. Forster Estate, for permission to reprint E. M. Forster, ‘Does Culture Matter?’ from Two Cheers for Democracy (1935).

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, for permission to reprint ‘The Integration of Culture’, from Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict © 1934 by Ruth Benedict, renewed 1961 by Ruth Valentine. All rights reserved.

Faber & Faber for permission to reprint pp. 15–20 from After Strange Gods. A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934) by T. S. Eliot.

New Directions Publishing Corp, for permission to reprint from Guide to Culture by Ezra Pound © 1970 by Ezra Pound. Excerpts from pp. 6–7; 15–20: 23–24; 51–62; 79–84; 107–114; 134–136; 207–208; 217.

George Borchardt, Inc., for the Estate of Aldous Huxley, for permission to reprint The Olive Tree and Other Essays by Aldous Huxley © 1936 by Aldous Huxley, renewed 1964 by Laura Huxley.

Introduction¹

In their prominent Culture: A Critical Review and Definitions (1952), Kroeber and Kluckhohn collected more than 150 definitions for the term provided by anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, and other scholars in their attempt to offer a comprehensive selection of perspectives, whose primary aim was ‘to illustrate developments of the concept and to bring out the convergences and divergences in various definitions’ (1952: 41). Further explaining the results of their merely descriptive approach to what they defined ‘the general history’ of the word ‘culture’, the two authors clarified: ‘As the concept of culture was expanded, more and more things came to be described as their possible significance was grasped’ (1952: 180). On the other hand, Raymond Williams’s renowned assertion that ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (1976: 76) is often mentioned as proof of the difficulty of defining such an elusive and unquestionably thorny concept, whose polysemic status and far-reaching implications have acquired increasing prominence in the academic debate of the last few decades. As Williams pointed out in his 1982 introduction to the Morningside Edition of Culture and Society, ‘[O];ne of the central ways of understanding the two extraordinary centuries which have so greatly changed the world and which underlie its now major crisis is through the detailed and complex thinking about culture which has been active and vibrant at every stage’ (1982: ix).

The threat of increasing global homogenization of cultures in most recent years largely accounts for the growing prominence of cultural issues in the American and European debate ranging from the role of cultural difference in politics and governance to the evolution of the cultural economy (Anheir-Isar 2007). In opposition to the nationalists’ call for the preservation of the integrity of national cultural identity, a form of ‘cosmopolitan humanism’ is increasingly developing, according to Reno Lukis and Michael Brint, that is founded in the belief that ‘there is an essential core of understanding values, and rights that all human beings share’; despite the fears of national nationalists, ‘cosmopolitans advocate the creation of an “information society”, linked by a sophisticated and relatively open communications infrastructure. They represent the demands of a growing international middle class with ecological, social, economic, ethical, and political concerns that, they believe, are inexorably bound to an increasingly independent world’ (Lukis-Brint 2018: 2).

In the wider perspective of the growing field of enquiry of cultural studies, investigating how cultural practices relate to systems of power and to a huge variety of social phenomena, class structures, forms of art, ethnicity, or gender, Paul Willis has persuasively argued that ‘culture is a strange and capacious category. It’s one of those concepts, perhaps the best example, that we simply cannot do without – it is used everywhere – but which is also very unsatisfactory and cries out for betterment. No one can define it exactly, say what it really means’ (Willis 2008: xxi). The manifold meaning of the term has undergone a remarkable enlargement of its semantic area, as the scholar further explains:

At the same time and in a connected way, ‘culture’ has become an important and much used theoretical and substantive category of connection and relation. Both in academic and popular writing and commentary we see countless references to ‘cultures of … schools, organizations, pubs, regions, sexual orientations, ethnicities, etc’. You name it and you can add, ‘culture of’. All those evoked domains of ‘culture’ are seen as containing a multiplicity of human forms and relations. (Willis 2008: xxi)

On such premises, the object of the present volume is an investigation of the changing face of the concept of culture through the selection of contributions by some of the most eminent figures who animated the ←2 | 3→debate between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the following century, with a specific focus on the crucial role played by anthropological studies and on their far-reaching legacy. This largely accounts for the inclusion in the volume of contributions by the scholars who most overtly epitomized the early impact of anthropological theory in the long process through which the notion of ‘culture’ was gradually outlined, against the wider horizon of an exceptionally manifold background where the term progressively became a central object of investigation in/for many other disciplines and fields of enquiry.

The first section of the volume, focusing on ‘the forerunners’, highlights the influential definitions of culture provided by Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), Edward Tylor (1832–1917) and Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) between the 1860s and the 1880s, within the exceptionally multifaceted ←3 | 4→context of Victorian England. While certainly aiming at identifying the specific contribution of each individual figure to the lively debate on culture that characterized the second half of the nineteenth century from a variety of viewpoints, disciplinary fields and methodological approaches, the selected passages and the introductions that precede them mainly respond to the volume’s focal attempt to juxtapose their various voices, shedding light on their points of convergence and divergence, and above all exploring their relationship with the context in which they were shaped.

On the other hand, Arnold’s view is also explored in the perspective of an ideal cross-disciplinary dialogue with Edward Tylor’s anthropological conception of culture − a ‘complex whole’ including customs, practices, beliefs, ‘and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ − as it emerged in his three most influential works: Researches into ←4 | 5→the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865), Primitive Culture (1871), and Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (1881). Tylor’s basic assumptions, as testified by the selected passage, bear traces of the scientific environment that strongly affected them, and of the long process that eventually led to the recognition of anthropology as a distinct branch of science in 1884, introducing a new conception of man, ‘the so-called “stratigraphic conception” of the relations between biological, social and cultural factors in human life’ (Geertz 1973: 4). Not only epitomized by the highest artistic and spiritual achievements of mankind, culture is thus likewise discernible, according to Tylor, in man’s material and technological progress at all the different stages of his long development, from a primitive condition of savagery to a civilized state. Such a descriptive approach is illustrated in the opening essay within a wide context that witnessed the far-reaching impact of Charles Darwin’s The Origins of Species (1859) and of the evolutionary theory as well as a lively debate on the thorny issue of ‘race’, that Tylor strongly refused to accept on a scientific ground, arguing that all societies develop in the same way in a progression that follows universal patterns.

A further contribution to the multiple voices that engaged, from a variety of perspectives, in the late nineteenth-century debate on culture is provided by Thomas Huxley. If the long process of reforms that increasingly improved the level of education in Victorian England had far-reaching social and political implications, as testified by Arnold’s views in Anarchy and Culture, it also marked the background of one of the most passionate seasons of the nineteenth-century dispute between scientific and literary culture, that re-enacted in new terms the old querelle on the supremacy of ancient or modern writers. As Laura Spinelli’s introduction to Huxley points out, the prominent position that science was acquiring in modern curricula both in grammar schools and in Universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, was highly controversial and harshly contrasted by most humanists, firmly anchored to the defence of literary culture. Not only did biology and geology struggle to reach a place in education, but the ‘respectability’ of scientific disciplines and the idea, in a wider perspective, that they could actually embody a form of culture, were largely eroded by their assumed closeness to profit. It is against this background that Spinelli’s ←5 | 6→essay traces Huxley’s position in Science and Culture (1880). Arguing that to ignore science is to ignore the foundation of progress, he basically reversed Arnold’s thesis that literature is the unique way to achieve culture. Tracing the further evolution of the lively debate between Arnold and Huxley on this topic, and the subsequent development of Huxley’s thought in On Science and Art in Relation to Education (1882) as well as in his 1883 speech at the Royal Academy of Arts, Spinelli sheds light on his progressively more conciliatory tone. His proposal of a synthesis between scientific disciplines and humanities challenges the very notion of hierarchy in culture’s complementary constituents, in ‘the three branches of art and science and literature’ that are ‘essential to the making of a man’.

The development of these seminal investigations on the concept of culture is further explored in the second section of the volume, which traces ‘the emergence a discipline’ by focusing on the contribution by the founding fathers of British anthropology, James Frazer and Bronisław Malinowski. A leading figure in the research field devoted to the study of man and culture, in The Golden Bough (1890) Frazer called the attention of late nineteenth-century readers on accounts of religious and magical practices, from ancient and modern times, tied together by theories of sacrifical and regeneration myths and rituals which had an everlasting impact on the writers and artists of the Modernist period, especially Eliot, Pound, and Joyce. As noted in Gatto’s essay, Frazer’s approach was based upon an evolutionary paradigm which made him a recognized follower of Tylor. Given the evolutionary nature of culture, by which later stages bear traces of earlier ‘primitive’ stages via superstition, the anthropologist’s task was to him an attempt to reconstruct the past via attentive investigation of the present in a way that very much recalls the work of other scientists. This approach was based on the collection of documents and artefacts, rather than on fieldwork research, and was soon called into question when a new thriving generation of younger anthropologists made direct first-hand experience with the natives the sine qua non of anthropology, focusing on different kinds of questions concerning the life and culture of particular peoples. Among them, Bronisław Malinowski more than anyone else has been credited with having sounded the death knell for Frazer’s removed ‘armchair’ approach to anthropology (Manganaro 2015: 262– 263).