lucian pye = on my bad list.

[intertribal]

I am rapidly turning against relativism. I'm still a constructivist, of course, but I'm starting to see a suspicious trend in relativists: basically, blaming the problems (which they insist, condescendingly, are not real "problems" but just "quirks") of developing countries on those countries' cultures, and not, say, on anything anyone else (like their own countries) might have done. Hey, you know who's a relativist? Katzenstein. You know who else is? Samuel Huntington. I tell you, there's Old School Relativism, defined by Huntington, that says, "other countries are poor and decrepit because their cultures are broken, because I say so". Then there's New School Relativism, defined by Katzenstein and now Pye, that says, "other countries are poor and decrepit because their cultures are just 'different', and we should love them despite these differences, the way we love special ed children".  Either way it's a brand of racism.

I mean, you gotta love this guy. First he has the obligatory politically correct statement that he clearly doesn't believe in:

Instinctively we pause before accepting such a conclusion because several generations of Americans, taught by the texts of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, know that it is wrong to be ethnocentric. 28

Right, boys and girls, remember, it's wrong *wink wink* to be ethnocentric *wink wink*.  Then he tells us that Suharto had "bold and imaginative" policies (332) - such thinking will get you disowned in my family.  Here's the clincher, though, his cleansing of his Western guilt and declaration that Asian nationalism (or just all Asians?) are racist:

In the immediate postwar years it was assumed that Asian nationalism was largely a reaction to colonialism and the Western impact, which to a degree it was. Since then it has become clear that the intensity of xenophobia is more closely correlated with the strength of paternalistic styles of authority. The more the culture conceives of authority as being a nurturing force for a ‘family’ collectivity, the sharper the sense of boundary between its members and foreigners. Distrust of the foreigner has resulted not so much from bad experiences with outsiders as from a deeply felt need to repay paternalistic authority and maintain the cohesion of the collectivity. 329

LOVE IT. 

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I think if you're racist or ethnocentric, it'll come through in whatever theoretical position you take up. Universalism is just as capable of it (e.g. there is a universal truth, moral right, way of perceiving, human condition, whatever, and it's ours. they're just wrong, stupid, incompetent, silly, etc.). Then again, I don't think relativism and constructivism are separable in anthro. If it's socially constructed, it's relative, not universal. Unless it's socially constructed by the fact of society, in which case I'd say it's human, but that's me.

I have no idea why anyone would still be talking about Margaret Mead or Ruth Benedict outside of intro anthro...but that's the problem, I s'pose--all anyone ever knows is what anthro was at least half a century before.

it's funny, my problem with relativism is that it can turn into multiculturalism, basically: there is no one right way, so all of these cultures are equally good. It doesn't matter what their practices are or how hierarchical they are or if people have equal rights, because it's all relative, see, and in their culture, it all fits into their system such that people are happy with it that way, they value it, which makes it good. I agree that "good" is relative, but if you start from that same premise, it undermines any social hierarchy--no one is naturally better than anyone else, only socially, or at an advantage practically--and so you're actually claiming a universal truth here, and to step back and try to include that in your relativism too (i.e. my notion of cultural relativism is a product of my culture and so is no better than anyone else's culturally-bound understanding) doesn't quite jive with me. I still take offense to naturalized inequality, to the prevention of opportunities, to 'injustice,' I guess you could say. And most cultures are guilty of that in some respects--different ones, though, and some cultures are far, far more egalitarian than others. "Cultures" is kind of shorthand, though, really, because they aren't little discontinuous units with no interaction with any other "groups."

I dunno about generalizing to all of Asia (yeah, that's just bad), but...wait, what he's saying is just plain weird--I mean, imagine he's talking about the "West" instead of "Asia." The West's xenophobia is closely correlated with the strength of paternalistic styles of authority. The more it conceives of authority as being the nurturing force for a 'family' collectivity, the sharper the sense of boundary between its members and foreigners.

I know a lot of anthro is based in looking at kinship systems and how they affect social relations and perceptions, etc., but what he's saying doesn't really hold any anthropological weight. "Paternalistic" is just a vague and sloppy category, and pretty much every society conceives of 'themselves' and 'others' regardless, with a clear boundary. It becomes important to emphasize that boundary or decide that the "other" is also unwelcome for other reasons.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Okay, my Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict comment might be a bit harsh. I just don't like Ruth Benedict, I think. For their time, they were groundbreaking and insightful and all that. But still, they come out of a certain historical context, and a certain period of anthropology.

This is kind of unrelated to Pye, though, since when he credits them, it sounds more like he dislikes them for not being ethnocentric enough and having influenced others in that opinion.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about either. I have said "Fuck Margaret Mead" but it was when I was being a third world nationalist and my mother didn't like that comment.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

yeah, I know relativism is close to constructivism, but... I guess I feel like relativism doesn't take any construction into account, it just says that "it is because it is", because "that's just the way God made me", and I guess it's that sort of... essentialist outlook that I object to. At least relativism in political science, anyway.

And yes, your position against relativism is why most people (incl. my mother) object to relativism.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

in anthro, i think universalism is pretty essentialist...it was originally the taking things for granted of before anthro realized it was ethnocentric and racist, that the so-called universal categories were actually Western, and that didn't make it better--it was people like Boas(their teacher), Mead, and Benedict who posed anti-racist relativism. Now you don't really hear about universalism much in anthropology, at least not to any very large extent. Hell, even psych and linguistics are being slowly forced to admit that absolute universalism is just blatantly false.

I guess maybe a very old school, structuralist relativism could be essentialist in anthropology, simply because structuralism has a tendency to look at structures synchronically--how the structure holds itself up, relates to itself, functions and is constructed in that sense--leaving out history. But even that is about explaining why any culture fits together the way it does, how it creates itself, reconstructs itself...it can get essentialist to the extent, I think, that it only says this system reproduces itself and not that it changes or came to this point through various other changes. Which is sometimes not so much denied as left outside the discussion. Otherwise I feel like the whole point of relativism in anthro is like...these are relative because they were/are constructed differently, really, that the whole point of anthropology is to explain why/how any culture/society "is the way it is" instead of just saying that it is.

"To call the endproduct of a sociopolitical struggle 'grammar' is to reify that struggle." So says the most relativist, anti-structuralist prof I know, and for all the comparisons anthropology makes between linguistic structure and cultural structure...

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

last quote is a bit out of context, though....context was discussing Bourdieu.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

"In his 1907 essay, "Anthropology," Boas identified two basic questions for anthropologists: "Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?" Amplifying these questions, he explained the object of anthropological study thus:

We do not discuss the anatomical, physiological, and mental characteristics of man considered as an individual; but we are interested in the diversity of these traits in groups of men found in different geographical areas and in different social classes. It is our task to inquire into the causes that have brought about the observed differentiation, and to investigate the sequence of events that have led to the establishment of the multifarious forms of human life. In other words, we are interested in the anatomical and mental characteristics of men living under the same biological, geographical, and social environment, and as determined by their past.

These questions signal a marked break from then-current ideas about human diversity, which assumed that some people have a history, evident in a historical (or written) record, while other people, lacking writing, also lack history. For some, this distinction between two different kinds of societies explained the difference between history, sociology, economics and other disciplines that focus on people with writing, and anthropology, which was supposed to focus on people without writing. Boas rejected this distinction between kinds of societies, and this division of labor in the academy."

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

"Although Boas was making a very specific contribution to the methods of descriptive linguistics, his ultimate point is far reaching: observer bias need not be personal, it can be cultural. In other words, the perceptual categories of Western researchers may systematically cause a Westerner to misperceive or to fail to perceive entirely a meaningful element in another culture. As in his critique of Otis Mason's museum displays, Boas demonstrated that what appeared to be evidence of cultural evolution was really the consequence of unscientific methods, and a reflection of Westerners' beliefs about their own cultural superiority. This point provides the methodological foundation for Boas's cultural relativism: elements of a culture are meaningful in that culture's terms, even if they may be meaningless (or take on a radically different meaning) in another culture."

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

hmm, well, as you know, this isn't what I study. Political science basically takes the wikipedia version of anthropology from forty years back and uses it to add "psycho-cultural" to their explanations. That's good that relativism has construction in anthro, because it doesn't in poli sci, not at all. In poli sci it's like saying, black people are misogynistic because it's in their culture and they can't help it and it just stops like that. It's pathetic, I know, but it's just not what poli sci people are good at.

A lot of what I say about this is not even founded on academics, but on my own personal gut reaction. I know what you're saying about relativism's merits. It's just that... it's the kind of thinking that is really easily manipulated by despots of these countries. SE Asia's club of dictators protected themselves for a very long time because they said Asian values were different and the West had to respect that (which they did because they (a) did not care and (b) were fighting Communism), and while of course there are differences, do Asians have values that justify shipping political dissidents off to islands for the rest of their lives? Nobody in Indonesia was like, "well, yes, those people shouldn't have been criticizing the president, they got what they deserved". Like you said, I object to injustice too much.