Drawing on delineations of culture in the anthropological canon and their intersection with Appadurai's use of the term in his recent book "The Future As Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition", Hylton White thinks through the entanglement of culture, history and economy.
There is so much one could say about these essays, which advance but
also reorient, or at least mark a quite significant shift of emphasis in
Appadurai’s work, extending but retooling his effort to put together a theoretical
vision that he thinks would be more adequate to the world that has been created
since the collapse of the socialist project. As extensions of his earlier work,
they of course take the global condition as a starting point, both conceptually
and in the kinds of empirical objects to which almost all of the essays attend.
Whether he is writing about financial speculation, or urban social movements,
or the meaningful conditions of possibility for popular violence, especially
against minorities, Appadurai is never very far from concerns that all of us,
in every part of the world, would recognize as being some of the most
immediately compelling ones that face us in our own respective surroundings. So
although he quite emphatically takes the stance of “the view from Mumbai”
(113ff) here, that view will not disorient or seem overly unfamiliar to people
who engage the world from Johannesburg, or even from New York. Anything else
would be surprising, of course, since Appadurai reminds us several times here of
an idea that he has made key to his own understanding of the peculiar shape
that “the structure of the conjuncture” (Sahlins 1981) takes in a world like
ours: the idea that the local is not just a work in messy progress, just as
much as the global is, but also, even more to the point, that the local is
itself a space created only by, even as, the confluence of many lines of global
composition. If Marx (1857) described the concrete as being concrete because of
its many determinations, Appadurai says that the local is the local because of
its concentration of many globalizations. To discern and give names to those
lines of composition is his project here as much as it was in Modernity at Large, even if, as he notes
in his introduction to this collection, the world of the new millennium is one
that makes us attend as much to the “bumps” as to the “flows” of global order.
As the title tells
us, the making of the future is the arena where Appadurai wants to pursue this
broader theoretical agenda now, and in that we already see a shift not just in
object but also in orientation. On re-reading now, as Chapter 1 in this volume,
the well-known introduction to The Social
Life of Things, we are reminded that Appadurai has long conceived of the
social world as a kind of informational space:
a domain where diverse imaginations cluster on a topography of pathways,
conveyances, enclaves, diversions, overflows. The reference to “bumps” will
signal that this spatial conception of social facts continues in the new work
as well. But by Chapter 15, on “The Future as Cultural Fact,” we have moved
towards a much more pressing concern with time. By giving that last essay’s
title to the collection as a whole, Appadurai positions the book in some ways
as a response to Jane Guyer’s call (2007) for an anthropology of the futures
people posit, fear, await, defer, or dissolve in their activities. Also much
like Guyer, Appadurai wants to investigate these productions of the future by
examining the interplay of economy and culture. That intersection is where I
want to focus my remarks as well, but let me come to this gradually, by
starting with just one of these terms: Appadurai’s notion of culture.
I start there
because, as followers of anthropology’s recent intellectual history will know,
the irony of the matter is that “culture” is a much less likely term than is
“economy” to be found within the title of a major work in the field now. In
polite speech among anthropologists in the early 21st century, culture is
almost as abject a term as any of the discipline’s repudiated inheritances. Yet
Appadurai uses “culture” in the noun form more than a hundred times in these
three hundred pages, not counting bibliography, footnotes or headers, and
repeatedly in that most avoided plural: “cultures”. Coming from a figure of
Appadurai’s generation and stature, this insistence suggests not just
analytical method, but manifesto: a statement about the nature and the promise
of anthropology, at a time when all the social sciences face great
institutional and intellectual difficulties.
To be clear, these
are not the “cultures” of Mead and Benedict, let alone of Tylor and the like,
and Appadurai is an ambivalent anthropologist. He begins the book by renouncing
much of the field as a scrabbling about in a “cabinet of curiosities” (5), aka
the ethnological record, and close to the end he complains that
anthropologists’ concerns with what is passing from the face of the earth have
“confined” (285) the imagination of the discipline. Statements like these have
become obligatory gestures of self-distancing embarrassment, of course, and one
has to ask what the ritual of their repetition in text after text is covering
up in the broader self-conception of the discipline. But despite succumbing at
moments to this impulse, Appadurai much more consistently and decisively
follows another. Douglas, Dumont and other anthropological theorists animate
most of these essays because the concern Appadurai shares with them is an
interest in identifying, not so much how culture shapes the behavior of human
others, but rather, almost the opposite, how culture allows human actors to
make worlds otherwise through their practical activities. This interest in the
otherwise of human life is anthropology’s signal contribution to the lexicon of
modern critical thinking. Of course it can be made into a charter for fixating
on the essentialisms of otherness, but most of anthropology’s major theorists
have in one way or another treated culture as a doorway onto the open-ness of
the human condition, rather than to its closure. As Andrew Sartori puts it in
his account (2005) of the global history of the culture concept, wherever
culture appears as a term in modern intellectual life, in South Asia, Europe or
elsewhere, it does so because it articulates the emergence of a new interest in
the underdetermination of human affairs by externalities or givens. Although he
does not put it in so many words, and in fact refuses to offer us a definition
of culture as such, Appadurai is firmly in that tradition here when he
describes the making of futures as a cultural activity.
Specifically, in
Appadurai’s scheme, culture is linked to the open-ness of human life by the
fact that our assemblages of representation, disposition, practice and thought
are the media for the development of two distinctive capacities for being
otherwise. The first of these is the ability to imagine forms of human life as
forms of life worth living: what Appadurai calls the capacity to aspire (126).
The second is the capacity to devise the social ecologies, the material,
institutional and intellectual arrangements, within which lives worth living
are plausibly livable: a dimension of what Appadurai calls “the social life of
design” (257ff). In both respects, Appadurai is pursuing a set of interests in
the construction of worth as an aspect of human activity, in a way that marks
the book, among many other things, as contributing to the renewal of a broader
anthropological interest in questions to do with value (Graeber 2001, Lambek
2008, Robbins 2013). The capacity to aspire is a cultural one, Appadurai says,
because it involves positioning oneself with evermore confidence and competence
in a field that comprises, not just individual means and ends, but collective
understandings of the good that make those means and ends the elements of value
that they are. At stake here are the many visions of well-being and of
worthiness in human life that people have developed and continue to develop in
the context of particular forms of collective social existence. And likewise
for the latter: Appadurai says that forms of life can be re-conceived in the
active voice, not as so many given patterns of culture, but rather as the
pragmatic, contested, aspirational making of valued social environments in the
face of all the forces that oppose such human designs.
To put Appadurai’s
argument in other words, the capacity to be otherwise that we call culture is a
vector of ethical reaching: a capacity that always stands at least partially,
potentially, in a negative, even in a critical relationship to given states of
affairs--rather than simply reflecting or affirming them. But then what is the
worldly life of this capacity? Where do we find it, and how can it be nurtured?
Again, two things stand out within Appadurai’s account of this. One is that,
being cultural, the capacity to aspire is not an individual property but a
relational one. One cannot hope to be otherwise except through others. But the
second is that it is not the default condition of a social existence either.
For one thing, it is unequally distributed: more readily at hand for the rich
and powerful than for the poor (188). For another thing, and this is the major
theme of the essay that gives the book its title, the capacity to aspire
involves “an ethics of possibility” or of open-ness, and this is an ethos
Appadurai puts in stark contrast with another one, an “ethics of probability”
that animates much of our social life as well. The latter is the ethic of the
contemporary financialized economy as he portrays it, and so we come to the
question of the relationship between culture and economy in his argument. In
the present age, as Appadurai describes it, the relationship between culture
and economy is an antagonistic relationship between two kinds of spirit or
ethos: one in which the diversity of collective goods is imagined, another in
which the impulse is instead to manage risks. What global futures emerge for us
in coming years will depend on which of these spirits is victorious.
There is much to
find appealing and inspiring in this argument. I am especially drawn to
Appadurai’s conception of culture as value-creating praxis, which I think will
help us return to a range of questions that were once at the critical edge of
anthropology, but which we have left unanswered since we turned away from
realist approaches to the analysis of culture (Turner 1984; Munn 1986; Comaroff
and Comaroff 1991). But I also want to ask questions of Appadurai’s scheme, and
especially about how far the economy of our time is really susceptible to being
understood in terms of the language of spirit.
In that regard,
Appadurai’s model is Weber, of course, and especially the question that Weber
leaves to his readers at the very end of The
Protestant Ethic, when he asks what will take the place of a Calvinist
ethos that gave up its life as spirit when the technical and the institutional
forms of modern capitalism objectified and materialized it. Appadurai says that
the calculation of risk is more and more becoming the logic of this economy.
(In the final part of the book, he also describes the emergence of a “spirit of
uncertainty” (238) that gambles on the inadequacy of the instruments or devices
that pursue such calculations, but the ethics of probability is nonetheless the
driving force at work.) When Appadurai uses this argument to take on Callon
(1998) and others who see the economy as an actor-network, I find myself in
sympathy—but asking nonetheless what would have given rise to probabilistic
thinking, as well as to gambles against it, if the calculating devices
themselves are indeed not enough to explain the kind of spirit that puts them
to work. Here I claim no historical expertise at all, but surely one could
speculate that spirit and device alike are responses to the experience of an
objective condition of practical uncertainty, created by the irrational and
impersonal logic of capital as an overarching socio-historical reality. Ever
since The Social Life of Things,
Appadurai has resisted any attempt to conceive of capitalism as, in his words
there, repeated here, “a vast impersonal machine, governed by large-scale
movements” (52). But might it not be the case that the sheer abstraction,
inscrutability, and crisis-ridden gyrations of a “vast impersonal machine” of
growth are themselves the very conditions of necessity for the kinds of
calculations, risks and gambles that Appadurai identifies. It is certainly an
option Weber himself considered and left in play, when he talked about the way
that spirit in general had fled from the metal forms of modernity.
If this were the case, it would mean that
several parts of Appadurai’s story could be narrated somewhat differently. It
might help us think about modernization theory in another light, for example.
Appadurai says that modernization theory is misunderstood when it is regarded
as essentially, or formally, Eurocentric (228), a point with which I agree. But
he also says that modernization theory is an example of a species of thought
that he labels as trajectorist, or focused on progressive developmentalism. And
trajectorism is a habit of thought that he does describe as peculiarly Western
both in origin and in impulse (224). No doubt there are resources in the
Western tradition on which such thinking could base itself, but within that
same tradition one could just as easily find resources for cyclical and other
nonlinear ways of considering time. Surely the question is not whether Western
thought is itself trajectorist, but under what historical conditions its
trajectorist possibilities become the most compelling ones by comparison with
others. Could we not see historical experiences of capitalist growth as one
major spur towards towards this selection of linear images? This would
certainly help explain why we see a similar faith in development emerge in the
non-Western world at times in the modern age as well, which we cannot do so
readily when we root that faith in uniquely Western legacies.
More broadly,
though, to take seriously the impersonal logic of capital would mean that the
vectors of culture and economy relate to one another not as two competing
spirits in the modern age, but rather as spirit and system. We would have to
take Marx as seriously as Weber in constructing such an account of the economy,
and then we would have to ask in what ways capital relates to the conditions of
possibility for culture. If culture is the condition for the capacity to be
otherwise, then what we would have to consider here is the relationship between
capitalism and freedom. In such an account, the limit to the capacity to aspire
would be more than its unequal distribution between the rich and the poor, as
much as that is important. Understanding the limit to the capacity to aspire
would require that we also trace how human action everywhere is mediated,
deferred and disconnected through its dependence on the forms of economic life
dictated by the peculiar nature of capital. And although he would not put it
this way, I think this is where Appadurai’s conception of culture as freedom
takes us almost necessarily.
Hylton White is senior lecturer and head of department at the Anthropology Department, University of the Witwatersrand
