ABSTRACT
Culture and development: do social struggles make a difference? One of the biggest difficulties faced by the social sciences lies in trying to talk intelligently about ‘culture’. For one thing, we have all become, to a greater or lesser degree, Weberians, and we are all now convinced that human beings are like spiders spinning the webs of their own meanings. Even Marxists with communist leanings, or indeed communists, have finally come to admit as much, thanks to the influence of Gramsci, and the Copernican revolution (for lack of any other revolution) that they were led to bring about under the aegis of E.P. Thompson (1963) and his demonstration that the English working class had created itself as a moral and cultural community, as well as being a community that sprang from the interplay between relations of production. From this point of view, we have all more or less taken the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s (Clifford 1988; Hunt 1989; Jameson 1998; Ortner 1999). But, on the other hand, the tidal wave of ‘cultural studies’, a field generally more literary than anthropological or sociological, and the ravages of what I have called, uncharitably (but I don’t take back a single word), the ‘stupidity of identity politics’ – something which arose from the political retraction that accompanied the imperial and capitalist globalization of the nineteenth century – have made our repeated lip-service to ‘culture’ more or less incomprehensible, on the level both of theory and of political or economic action (Bayart 1996, 2005). Paradoxically, culturalism, i.e. the explanation of social phenomena as the products of a relatively stable and homogeneous ‘culture’, prevents us from grasping the irreducibly ‘cultural’ dimension of social, economic, political and . . . cultural practices. This is not the place to go into the philosophical and religious debate on the ontological specificity of the human race (or its ontological relativity, either). But, whether we are like our cats and dogs or not, we still act socially and individually only through the intermediary of our symbolic and affective production. Over and above the confessional schisms of psychoanalysis, Freud’s great contribution was to make us realize as much – and on this point he in no way contradicts Marx, so long as we read Marx himself rather than his epigones. So our
imagination is ‘constitutive’ (Veyne 1988), and the real question is that of the ‘imaginary institution of society’ (Castoriadis 1975) which cannot be dissociated from its relationship with materiality, from what is rather oddly called ‘material culture’ – can we conceive of a culture that is not material, or a materiality that is not cultural? – and the ‘techniques of the body’ induced by it (Mauss 1950: 365-86; Bayart 1996, 2004, 2005; Warnier 1999; Bayart and Warnier 2004).
