ABSTRACT
Frustrated by the loose, metaphorical and ultimately not very productive talk about ‘systems’ in cultural studies, sceptics have recently raised their voices against too easily presuming the existence of systems where there might be none. For example, Pascal Boyer (1994: 229) has written about the false “theologism” that takes the existence of connections among religious assumptions for granted. Benson Saler (2001, 2005; and personal communication) has argued that beliefs do not constitute a system, because there are apparently numerous beliefs that we can remove from the set of an individual’s or culture’s beliefs without aecting any other belief. Cognitive anthropologist Roy D’Andrade suggested that culture is a collection of units, rather than an “entity”. Cultural items in the minds of people do not constitute “a thing” because they are lacking “entitativity”. D’Andrade compares this with the collection of items on his desk:
the collection of things on my desk doesn’t really make much of a thing because the items on my desk aren’t in immediate contact with each other, aren’t made of the similar stu, don’t have much of a common fate, don’t strongly resist dispersion, and don’t interact strongly. Basically, the collection as a whole has no causal
properties. … In my opinion, the situation with respect to the entitativity of the collection of cultural items found in the minds of people living on Bali is not much better than that for the things on my desk [Cliord] Geertz’s … opinion of the matter notwithstanding. (D’Andrade 2001: 252)
D’Andrade’s arguments raise interesting questions as to the extent to which one can compare a collection of items on one’s desk with beliefs in an individual’s mind, as well as about the systemic properties of both examples. But even scholars who did think about culture as a system, such as Cliord Geertz, whose ideas D’Andrade is criticizing in the passage quoted above, did not necessarily want to make quantitative, scientic predictions about culture or religion. Geertz, in spite of his own claims to the contrary, has been accused of rejecting anthropology as a scientic endeavour (Pals 2006: 285-7), and he famously claimed (C. Geertz 1973: 5) that cultural analysis is “not an experimental science in search of a law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning”.
