5003 benedict
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There is some evidence that Benedict was influenced by the pragmatists (e.g. Dewey and G.H. Mead): can you identify any such evidence in "Configurations..."?
This is a comment--Varenne 17:20, 17 February 2009 (EST)
Benedict stipulates to the fact that "cultural traits" (2), or what might be called cultural facts or a piece of the pattern of a culture, function in the "total cutural complex" (2). She takes as granted that "each trait has a pragmatic function that it performs... the discovery that nothing exists in human life that mankind has not espoused and rationalized" (2). What is interesting about Benedict's argument is what it builds on this foundation. She takes as a given the "functioning" and induces/deduces why the culture adopted these traits, what the trait achieves in this culture, how the trait was acquired, its relation to similar traits in other cultures, and why the uniqueness of a specific culture has formed this trait or rather how the uniqueness of the trait has contributed to form the culture.
Benedict recognizes two dominant formations of cultural patters, Apolonian cultures and Dionysian cultures which she aligns with phychological sobreity and excess, respectively. These cultures, she claims, represent identifiable patterns that can be aligned with personality states. While her argument is based on the fact that similar patterns have been diffused between neighboring cultures, she does not directly investigate the method of diffusion. However, the structure of her argument parallels how G.H. Mead constructs how the process of communication happens. One could imagine that a specific cultural pattern, death mourning rituals, for example, occur first in a dionyson culture, are diffused into an apolonian culture, modified by that culture, and then re-transmitted back to the first culture, or to a third culture. Somewhere within this conversation of patterns a culture identifies the meaning of the actions and prescribes the pattern social act. G.H. Mead writes about the conversation (stimulus-response interchange) of gesture within the context of the social act as the mechanism by which meaning develops. One person says, or does, a gesture and the second responds which thereby forms the response of the initiator in terms of what he/she was or wasn't expecting. Meaning, what G.H. Mead terms conversation, develops as the two contributors play ping-pong with their communicational expectations and reactions. I believe this Mead's formula can be adapted to describe the diffusion and creation of cultural patterns.
The piece of Benedict’s “Configurations” that follows Dewey’s transmission of social life theory is implied, though not explicitly stated. For example, her main argument is that neighbor cultures acquire and practice different patterns of behavior. One of her stronger comparisons is the difference between rituals of morning among the Plains and the Pueblo groups. These neighbor cultures have oppositional ideas actions regarding how a deceased group member is mourned, prepared for their journey into the afterlife, and the consequences of that death in the lives of the living. While Benedict does not broach the topic of how patterns are transmitted between the mature members and the young, she clearly implies that, as Dewey explains “any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it” (Dewey 6). While the cultures that Benedict describes do not deliberately educate the young members “they depend upon children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing” (Dewey 7). It seems probable that Benedict was influenced by Dewey’s ideas of un-instituted participatory education of social behavior. Benedict extended the fact of transmission of un-instituted education into a portrait of patterns that develop through inter-group and intra-group communication.
Is Benedict's theory of cultural configurations a theory of "popular culture" as Fiske presented it?
It seems very doubtful that Fiske could reconcile his theory of “popular culture” with that of Benedicts’. Benedict’s theory of cultural configurations is most clearly a theory of dominant cultural configurations, patters of actions that are the norm, those institutionalized behaviors that are taken as typical as the collective actions of the people and regulated and administered by those who hold influence, authority, decision making status in their groups. However, if one looks at the whole cultural geography of the area, it would be possible to argue that the Pueblo or Plains represent popular culture survivors among the prevalence of the dominant culture patterns that surround. For example, the Pueblo and Plains have “prevented”, “refused”, and “hated” such dominant patterns as those represented by outside groups and by means of “cultural islanding” (Benedict, 4) the Pueblo and Plains have resisted the patterns of their neighbors. Stated simply, one could argue that these groups developed, or maintained their popular cultures that they in turn institutionalized as their own dominant cultural patterns.
Given Fiske's understanding of hegemony, would he place a cultural "pattern" within the world of "popular culture"? Why (not)?
I think the best answer to this question is that it depends on what cultural “pattern” we are talking about. Benedict’s cultural pattern theory is just that, a theory of cultural patterns, not of hegemonic or sub-group cultural patterns. One can imagine a sub-group of the Pueblo or Plains whose “inner neccessities” (Benedict 2) have motivated them to excorporate the dominant pattern of their group so that thier behavior better resembles that sub-group’s “highly individualized attitude toward life” (Benedict 3). Perhaps this sub-group ascribes to typical Dionysia n themes of “abandon and emotional excess” (Benedict 5). Under these circumstances Fiske’s theory of cultural conflict would caracterize the inner tension of the popular patterns, or sub-patterns within the larger cultural pattern as the one is “working toward the obliteration of others” (Benedict 6) and vice-versa. Likewise, as I try to explain above, the Pueblo and Plains configurations could be read as popular culture that has successfully resisted hegemoic pressures from outside. On the other hand Fiske would find the cultural patterns that Benedict describes functionalist readings of hegemonic and patriarchal culture patterns. Fiske claims that expressions of popular culture contradict itself becuase it “always bears within it signs of power relations, traces of the forces of domination and subordination that are central to our social system and therefore to our social experience” (Fiske 5) and that functionality has little to do with culture which is, instead, built upon the transmission of semiotic meaning and values by means of texts, resources, and artifacts. Fiske would argue that anyone who participates in dominant cultural patterns, such as those that Benedict traces, is validating and invigorating that ideology and are therefore deliberate, or undeliberate, producers and distributors of hegemony. In this reading the patterns that Benedict describes do not resemble Fiske’s coneption of popular culture.
How does Benedict's discussion of the individual relate to Mead's discussion of the self?
How does Benedict's discussion of the individual relate to Mead's discussion of the 'I'?
I find few intersections between Benedict theory of patters and Mead’s theory of the conversation of gesture. While Benedict touches on human personality types I find her treatment overly general which suffers from a shaky construction when it comes to personality types and their resulting cultural patterns. She sketches two cultural personality types, Apollonian and Dionysian, and proceeds to suggest that a “trait is reworked to express the different emotional patterning characteristic of the culture that has adopted it”(Benedict 7). After stating this, she cedes theoretical ground by saying that more anthropological work is necessary to firm up the connection between personality and pattern. However, Benedict returns several times to the Apollonian and Dionysian vocabulary which is evidently an important piece of her thinking, for example on page 23 she states “cultural configurations stand to the understanding of group behavior in the relation that personality types stand to the understanding of individual behavior”. Benedict’s argument is not without persuasive power, nevertheless, it concerns a question significantly different than Mead’s topic. Taken as a building, a model showing the configuration (or construction) of culture, Mead’s analysis of the conversation of gestures fits several floors below that or Benedicts’.
There exist more parallels between Mead’s essay on the social self and Benedict’s theory of patterns. While I cannot claim to grasp the whole thread of Mead’s logic, i.e., the profundity of his distinction between conscious and the object and subject, I am able to pick out relatable pieces of Mead’s work that fit into the Benedict’s patterns of culture. The logic of Mead’s argument that can be applied to Benedict is the following: communication creates meaning through the conversation of gesture within the social field. The conversation of gesture happens when one person initiates communication and another person responds to that initiation, and the initiator re-responds to that response. Within this sequence meaning is created, understood, and communicated dependent upon the variable (context) of the environment. (Mead’s more subtle insinuation is that the initiator “cannot hear himself speak without assuming in a measure the attitude which he would have assumed if he had addressed in the same words by other… in this way we play the roles of all our group; indeed, it is only as we do this that they become part of our social environment” [The Social Self]. This is where Mead gets complicated. He argues that action by the object, the I in the present, is mediated by the conversation of gestures that have taken place throughout the past, and which, in the present, consist of the I’s memory of the Me, and the consequence is that action in the present equals the sum of the Me. This memory, what Mead terms, the old self can be related to Benedict’s patterns of culture in that they are the summation of past experience and gesture. Mead explains how an old self can be changed into “a new social situation” (Mead), a theory of change which also bears parallels with Benedict.
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