Geertz, Common Sense. Common Sense as a Cultural System Geertz seeks to understand “roughcast shapes of colloquial culture vs. worked-up shapes of studied

Geertz, Common Sense

Common Sense as a Cultural System

• Geertz seeks to understand “roughcast shapes of colloquial culture vs. worked-up shapes of studied culture”

• ‘common sense’ = dimension of culture not usually conceived as forming an ordered realm

Common Sense as a Cultural System• the elementary forms of [religious life among the

Australian aborigines, native botanical systems in Africa, spontaneous sense of design on the Northwest Coast, ‘concrete’ science in the Amazon]

• traditional occupation of anthropologists to find out about systematized knowledge in different cultures

Common Sense as a Cultural Systemcommon sense

• immediate deliverance of experience

• realm of the given and undeniable, matter-of-fact, self-evident realities

• ‘just life’ with ‘world as its authority’

• if it rains it is common sense to step into the house

• ‘what everyone with common sense knows’

Common Sense as a Cultural Systemcommon sense

• not a tightly integrated system but based on conviction by those who have it on its validity

• common sense (problem of ‘everyday experience’, how we construe the world we biographically inhabit)

• interpretation of experience; constructed; cultural system; what leads to what

• system of thought based on pre-suppositions


common sense

• Discuss Zande vs. Evans-Pritchard’s ‘common sense’ (what is the underlying system?).

• Why is it useful to look at categories that cross cultures (e.g. hermaphroditism)?

• Give own examples of common sense systems:• that have shifted historically

• that demonstrate cultural relativity


common sense

• How is common sense knowledge system built?

• What are transmission systems for common sense knowledge systems?

• Give examples of how common sense can regulate activities of the society (e.g. economic, agricultural, etc.). What are the limitations?


common sense

• Give examples of how anomalies in the system of commonsense thought can be explained away? (Zande: witchcraft)

• Discuss each of the stylistic features (quasi-qualities) of common sense: naturalness (p. 18+), practicalness (p. 20+), thinness (p. 22), accessibleness (p. 24).


• common sense / everyday experience

• categories organized into systems

• transmitted body of knowledge

• natural symbols

• formalized knowledge: information infrastructures

• Why? moral order creates meaning

knowledge information data

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Introduction to Knowledge Systems


critical analysis of knowledge processes

• repositioning of discourses (self-awareness, situated knowledges)

• include diversity• civic responsibility, driving democratic change,

balancing power • … or what? loss of capacity for social criticism


how structured knowledge systems operate

• relationship of knowledge systems to moral order • deviance• culture / nature• naturalizing discourse

• memory (social, personal)

Origins of Knowledge Systems

knowledge systems• related to post-Enlightenment epistemology

• critical analysis of knowledge practices in particular time periods (discursive formations supported by institutions)

• concepts: ideology, hegemony

• assumption: knowledge systems are not neutral, they promote the interests of the ruling class

• situated knowledge • personal experience

• ‘communities of practice’ and information infrastructures supporting information flow


history of knowledge • by subject? by period? as succession of epistemes?

• history or ‘archaeology’ of human sciences (Michel Foucault) avoids producing the traditional unity of subject, spirit,or period


history of knowledge

• history of knowledge represented as a dynamic, constantly changing totality

• shift from a traditional historical inquiry into ‘what’ was known at a given moment to discursive practices that rendered something knowable

• discursive practices are first hand evidence to understand what was knowable


• analysis of an episteme = theorization of the grounds of knowledge by analyzing the representational paradigms which organize the theorization

• what could be knowable? boundary objects? anomalies? displaced categories?

• episteme = historically specific, dynamic field of representations of knowledge


episteme

• defined in Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge: as the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems

• Foucault’s Order of Things (17th / 18th century shift): the problem of order as organizing episteme


episteme

• episteme is multiplied by communication among different disciplines

• language + technology of transmission + totality of people’s interactions + ...


constraints

• a range of fields in a given historical moment demonstrates a set of discursive practices common to all the fields

• constraints and limitations imposed on a range of discourses in the human sciences and other knowledge practices


post-Enlightenment epistemology

• ‘modernity’: ideas of progress, science, nature (as logical and ordered), reason

• reflected in the discourse of science and technology (technocriticism: Haraway)


studies of science and technology

• focus on nature / culture / discourse / + infrastructure (bureaucracy, institutional contexts for the circulation of knowledge)

• dichotomy of nature / culture (cf. Haraway’s natureTM or ‘nature as not nature’ and cultureTM )

Instead of a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the 'soul' of the knowledge to be remembered, the emphasis was on the discovery of the right logical category. The memory of this system of logical categories and scientific causes would exempt the individual from the necessity of remembering everything in detail ... The problem of memorizing the world, characteristic of the sixteenth century, evolved into the problem of classifying it scientifically.

(James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory, 1992, 13)

In the late 18th century, science becomes established as cultural apparatus, in the form of materialized semiotic fields.

(Haraway, Modest Witness@Second_Millennium)

The Laboratory, or, The Passion of OncoMouse

(Lynn Randolph 1994)

From: Donna Haraway’s, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouseTM), 46.

Knowledge Structures: the link between of knowledge production and social control

• production of knowledge and handling of knowledge in organized systems (information infrastructures)

• how institutions such as bureaucracies moderate this process

• how process affects individuals

• analysis of sites of struggle over representations

Knowledge and Society

knowledge and power, ideology, hegemony


• constraints and limitations inherent in knowledge systems (Foucault)

• hegemony (Gramsci)

• critiques of ideology and culture (Marx-Engels; Marxist critics: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, etc.)


• hegemony (Gramsci; 1930s)

ability in certain historical periods of the

dominant classes to exercise social and

cultural leadership and by these means, rather

than direct coercion of subordinate classes, to

maintain their power over the economic,

political, and cultural direction of the nation


• hegemony binds a society together without the use of force, under the leadership of the dominant classes

• how achieved? manipulations of images and meanings; institutions as producers of sense, knowledge, and meaning

• hegemony operates by winning of consent for unequal class relations


consent is achieved in the realm of consciousness and representations

• a totality of social, cultural and individual experience is capable of being made sense of in terms that are defined, established and put into circulation by the power bloc


consent is achieved in the realm of cultural agency of institutions

• the state, the law, the educational system, the media, the family are prolific producers of sense, knowledge, and meanings

• organizers and producers of individual consciousness, institutions are taken as impartial or neutral, representative of everybody (no apparent reference to class, race or gender)



• institutions shape the knowable, and hide the fact that they are shapers of knowledge (they are ideological)

• institutions are sites in which hegemony can be established and exercised if captured or colonized by a power bloc



• power bloc finds allies in professionals and managers and intellectuals of various kinds (‘subaltern classes’ for Gramsci) who perceive their interest as congruent to or identical with those of the dominant group


• Results? Hegemony naturalizes what is historically a class ideology, and renders it into the form of common sense

• Power is exercised not as force but as authority; cultural aspects of life are depoliticized; ideology is naturalized

• Culture may be seen as mode of domination and liberation (cultural studies)


critiques of ideology and culture

• analysis of culture in terms of its relationships to a mode of production and its specific social formation (Marx-Engels; Marxist critics: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci)


critiques of ideology and culture• capitalist mode of production structure political,

legal and cultural institutions of their time

• culture is a form of superstructure which articulates the interests and ideologies of those who control the economic base of society (reductionism, economic determinism)


critiques of ideology and culture

• contribution of cultural analysis: analysis of art, literary form and ideology

• reading of cultural texts as expressions of social experience and ideology

• recognition that institutions are involved in distribution of power in society

Documents

Geertz, Common Sense. Common Sense as a Cultural System Geertz seeks to understand “roughcast shapes of colloquial culture vs. worked-up shapes of studied