In defence of culture
The anthropological concept ‘culture’ has always been somewhat contentious. Historically preferred by American anthropologists and disdained by British anthropologists, infamously difficult to define, and fulfilling a startling array of functions for a wide range of scientists (social or otherwise) it has been described alternatively as the ‘proper object’ and the Achilles heel of anthropology. Recently, the culture concept has also become prominent in popular discourse – invoked by consultants, advertisers, governments, tourist agencies, resistance groups and ethnic renaissance movements. Suggestively, it has also recently come to be vilified within academic discourse, particularly within anthropology itself. It is now being characterised as everything from dangerous, hegemonic, and racist to irrelevant, obsolete and dead. The plight of the culture concept is symptomatic of, if not conducive to, a general crisis in anthropology. Whether questioning of the fundamental premises of the discipline is anything new in anthropology is debatable; however in the tradition of the capitalist market the perception of crisis, well founded or not, has produced just such a crisis.
This crisis has contributed to the proliferation of evaluative, retrospective mythologies of the anthropological tradition and its core concepts, methodologies and orientations (see for example Sahlins, 1976; Ortner, 1984; Horrigan, 1988; Jackson, 1996). Once again this is not a new practice in anthropology, but there seems to have been a kind of quickening, by which it has become impossible to say anything without first retelling the creation myth in a pointed (and selective) acknowledgement or criticism of ancestral lines of theory. Adam Kuper has produced several entire volumes in this vein - retelling the history of anthropology including, more recently, an exploration of the culture concept. Kuper, originally from South Africa, has serious anthropological reservations relating to his experience of the purposeful conflation of culture with race in South African politics of Apartheid, and thus his attitude towards the culture concept is not generous. He claims that “the more one considers the best modern work on culture by anthropologists the more advisable it must appear to avoid the hyper-referential word all together” (in Luhrmann, 2001:7), and he goes on to critique the work of influential American anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz and David Sneider in pursuit of this point.
This essay takes the first part of Kuper’s hypothesis as its inspiration, and the second part as its point of departure. When constructively evaluating the value of the culture concept for anthropology it is only sensible to review its use amongst its most prominent exponents but, contrary to the findings of Kuper, there is much in modern anthropological work that justifies, and indeed encourages, the preservation of the culture concept as both an anthropological tool and project. Marshall Sahlins (1993; 1999a; 1999b) Bruce Kapferer (2000) and Robert Brightman (1995) have all argued convincingly that much of the modern criticism (especially from the post-modern, post-structuralist and post-feminist quarters) of the culture concept is based on an essentialised, homogenized, misrepresentation of the concept as it appears in anthropology. These three all ultimately show that the concept held up as the epitome of all that is wrong with anthropology today is actually a caricature of the anthropological concept as used by most real (as opposed to hypothetical) anthropologists - many of the qualities problematised by opponents of the concept are simply not qualities displayed by the concept as used by the mainstreams of anthropological tradition. Further, the real culture concept is as diverse and contested as that which it conceptualizes, and just as we now speak of cultures we must also speak of culture concepts.
In the work of Marshall Sahlins we find a culture concept that bears at least a passing resemblance to the subject of modern critique. Sahlins has been specifically targeted for criticism relating to his use of the term culture (for example Horrigan, 1998; Thomas, 1990) and made somewhat of an example of by post-modern anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere in a public and vitriolic debate regarding Sahlins’ interpretation of the death of Captain Cook (useful discussions of this debate can be found in Kuper, 1999; Kapferer, 2000). Kuper’s own critique of Sahlins is limited in scope and depth, concerning itself more with a discussion of his theoretical allegiances than of his use of the term ‘culture’, and culminating in an evaluation more of the Sahlins/Obeyesekere debate than of the study of Captain Cook itself. Kuper is also guilty of either misunderstanding or misrepresenting Sahlins’ work; exaggerating his cultural determinism and representing his thesis in more absolute terms than it was originally couched. These factors make Sahlins’ work an appropriate starting point for a counterpoint both to Kuper’s conclusions and to the accusations of anti-culturalists in general.
The culture of Marshall Sahlins
Sahlins’ conceptual scheme, like any conceptual scheme, is not ahistorical. His culture concept and the theory in which it is embedded have a contextual dimension and display change over time. Sahlins originally studied under Leslie White and inherited from him the cultural relativism (and determinism) associated with Franz Boas. He also adopted White’s symbolicism, and his opposition to Boas’ anti-evolutionism. His early work is thus concerned with evolutionary themes – Stone Age economics, social stratification in the Pacific Islands. Later he was profoundly affected by his exposure to European theory; while retaining Boas’ cultural relativism and White's symbolicism, he shunned evolutionism, embraced the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and faced off against Marxism. The Vietnam War had an impact also, and Sahlins eventually became more concerned with nature of the relationship between structure and agency, and began his more recent project to “explode the concept of history by the anthropological experience of culture” (Sahlins, 1985: xvii). In this way the work of Sahlins, like the culture concept itself, reflects shifting perspectives and context specific concerns. This is a strength, not a weakness, but is to be kept in mind when generalizing about Sahlins’ understanding of culture.
For Sahlins, as for Boas, White, and Levi-Strauss, culture is primarily a conceptual scheme, a way of understanding and negotiating the world. As Sahlins explains, while reflecting on the theoretical position of Boas, “For any given human group, the tradition at issue is a set of accumulated meanings: collective and historical theory which makes of their perception a conception” (ibid, 1976: 65-6). Further, Sahlins follows Boas, White and Levi-Strauss in taking culture to be the mediator between object and subject. This forms the backbone of Sahlins’ culture concept – a conceptual scheme through which the world is comprehended, negotiated and manipulated. It is this conceptual scheme that Sahlins considers to be the ‘proper object’ of anthropological investigation (cf. Malinowski; ibid: 83), an object created “by symbolic valuation and synthesis of the objective reality” (ibid, 64) which cannot be understood by applying the same methods used in biology and physics.
Superficially it appears that Sahlins has set culture against nature (nature encompassing both ‘objective reality’ and the ‘material world’), encapsulating humans in a bubble of cognitive projection, but this is not the way Sahlins envisages the situation. His rendering of the relationship between culture and nature is complex, elaborated in discussions of everything from the subject/object dualism to adaptation. While everything is a part of nature, nature is made external to all organism by the act of perception – “Perception in the human subject is apperception; it depends, one might say, on the mental tradition. But that itself is…not unique to man” (ibid: 65). On the other hand, Sahlins argues that the culture concept actually dissolves the classic antinomies of subject/object, mind/matter and idealism/materialism, saying that:
To engage culture in the same problematic is merely to ask whether it represents the subject’s “real” experience or his ideal conceptions; whereas, in truth, it is the social condition of the possibility of either and both” (ibid: x; see also ibid: 56).
He extends this point in a discussion of adaptation by teasing out the implications of selective advantage for the culture/nature relationship. He suggests that selective advantage requires a minimum positive impact, so it essentially treats as advantageous any development that does not immediately compromise the organism or system. In this way the question of optimal versus minimal advantage is irrelevant in evolutionary dynamics. According to Sahlins:
…selection as a “limit of viability” is a negative determination, stipulating only what cannot be done, but licensing indiscriminately (selecting for) anything that is possible. (ibid: 209)
While this appears to further separate the worlds of culture and nature Sahlins believes it brings them closer because nature consists of all the possibilities for human populations, whereas culture is a single realization of potential. But the relationship doesn’t stop there – the only way that nature can impact on a human population is through culture:
Although it may be the property of fire to burn a house, it is not the property of fire to burn your house … between the property of fire to burn wood and a man’s loss of his property, there is no commensurate relation. (ibid: 114; his emphasis)
Hence culture does not just mediate human interaction with nature; it also mediates nature’s interaction with humans:
The natural fact assumes a new mode of existence as a symbolized fact…From the moment of cultural synthesis, the action of nature is mediated by a conceptual scheme... (ibid, 209-210).
Humans do not live in a bubble of cultural construction, they live in a complex world constantly negotiated and renegotiated in and through the relationship between nature and culture; they live somewhere between culture and nature. Thus Sahlins claims that the culture concept breaks down the traditional antinomies of subject/object, culture/nature, mind/matter by being the condition of their merging (in which case for Sahlins, as for Bourdieu, culture/habitus encompasses both the conceptual scheme and its product); he even suggests that this was the original project for which the concept was created (see for example ibid: x).
This backbone is given its form by symbols, the vertebrate of the concept. This is another fundamental for Sahlins:
The symbol is the ‘origin and basis of human behaviour’, as White put it in the title of a well known essay…In all its dimensions, including the social and the material, human existence is symbolically constituted, which is to say, culturally ordered. That is a position I was not then, nor have ever been since, prepared to give away. (ibid, 1999a:400)
Symbols are the building blocks of culture, and it is specifically symbols that make culture the unique project of human beings. Sahlins is absolutely unequivocal in his belief that culture is distinctly human and humans are distinctly cultural:
…the distinctive quality of man [is] not that he must live in a material world, circumstances he shares with all organisms, but that he does so according to a meaningful scheme of his own devising, in which capacity mankind is unique. (ibid, 1976: viii)
That culture is an exclusively human enterprise is definitive for both the concept and the species; it is a difference of kind, not degree. Sahlins invokes White’s maxim that “no ape could appreciate the difference between holy water and distilled water – because there isn’t any, chemically” (ibid, 1999a: 400). Although the concession that perception is subjective for all organisms seems to undermine the assertion that there is no precedent in nature for the development of culture Sahlins preserves the uniqueness of humans by locating the foundations of culture not in subjective perception, but in symbolism.
Not only is cultural experience unique to humans but each culture is unique, subject to and constituted by an internal logic. This relativism draws Sahlins a great deal of criticism, and it is this element of his culture concept that most exposes him to the wrath of what he terms ‘afterology’ – postmodernists, poststructuralists, post-feminists and the like. The main implication of cultural relativism for Sahlins is that one culture is not automatically subject to the logic of another, particularly, the utilitarian logic of our own Western paradigms cannot be assumed to motivate practice in other cultures; there is no primary, pre-cultural pragmatism or materialism as invoked by utilitarian accounts of culture that determines cultural forms. Sahlins counters biological, ecological and economical determinism with cultural relativism. Predictably then biological, ecological and economical determinists, along with most other functionalists (like Kuper), are among the chief opponents of the culture concept, and particularly cultural relativism.
The most vehement critiques, however, come from those afterologists for whom cultural relativism exemplifies the sins of the fathers: with relativism comes reified, essentialised culture and fetishised culture traits; “holism, localism, totalization, coherence, homogeneity, primordialism, idealism, ahistoricism, objectivism, foundationalism, discreteness, devisiveness” (Brightman, 1995: 512). Brightman provides a comprehensive account of these accusations and their failings, accusing the perpetrators of reifying and essentialising the culture concept in the same way that they claim anthropologists have reified and essentialised culture itself. I will not recount the details of his critique here, but it is a sophisticated piece of counter-deconstruction, demonstrating the flawed and circular nature of much post-modern argument.
Sahlins also defends the culture concept from these charges, but rather than fighting fire with fire he has responded to the afterologist critiques in terms of anthropological theory; he uses the culture concept against them. He emphasises Brightman’s point that the ‘old codgers’ of anthropology are not guilty of many of the crimes they are accused of – that they admitted and addressed internal diversity and contested meaning, that they noted the difficulty of studying a culture when it could not realistically be taken in isolation and took each other to task over signs of the reification or essentialising of culture (see especially 1999a: 404-5). But Sahlins also locates the afterologist critique and the associated turn in anthropological theory within the anthropological tradition. Like Stocking (in Brightman, 1995: 539-40) he declines to consider the post-modern movement as some kind of anthropological watershed, insisting that not only are the specific criticisms not new, but that the basic theoretical position from which the critiques are made has developed out of practice theory, a veritable reincarnation of functionalism.
At the most basic level Sahlins argues that the opponents of the culture concept exaggerate the extent to which the concept infers homogeneity, boundedness, discreteness, coherence, stasis etc and underestimate the extent to which cultures can actually be considered to be homogeneous, bounded, discrete, coherent, static etc. Versus the claims that the culture concept implies a static view of tradition Sahlins protests that:
If culture must be conceived as always and only changing, lest one commit the mortal sin of essentialism, then there can be no such thing as identity, or even sanity, let alone continuity. (Sahlins, 1993: 4)
Responding to the accusation that the culture concept perpetrates the generalisation of human populations as homogenous Sahlins points out that:
In order for categories to be contested at all, there must be a common system of intelligibility, extending to the grounds, means, modes and issues of disagreement. It would be difficult to understand how a society could function, let alone how any knowledge of it could be constituted, if there were not some meaningful order in the differences. (ibid: 15; his emphasis)
With respect to cries that the culture concept portrays human populations as discrete, Sahlins embarks on a sophisticated discussion of the role of self-designated boundaries and symbolic classification, finishing with the statement that:
There is here some suggestion of a better reason for living and dying with, and for, certain people than the fact that all are reading the same newspapers at the same time. But that would be another lecture. (ibid, 1999a: 415)
In this way Sahlins refuses to engage with the critiques on the same post-modern and copiously philosophical level from which they are pitched, instead referring back to the “accumulated anthropological knowledge” (ibid, 1993: 20) embedded in the culture concept.
Sahlins on ‘Afterology’
Sahlins, true to form, also takes the offensive. He picks up on the near-obsessive concern with power in afterologist exposition and insists that trading in the culture concept for “a mess of Foucauldian discourse, or for the mess that has been made of Foucauldian discourse” is a return to the determinism of Kroeber and White except that this time “we know everything functionally, as devices of power; which is also to say, not substantially or structurally” (ibid, 1999a: 404). He complains that:
It is enough for interpretation to show that one or another cultural practice, ranging from Vietnamese second person pronouns to Brazilian workers’ house construction, is either hegemonic imposition or counter-hegemonic resistance in order to suppose it has been satisfactorily interpreted, even though these abstract functions as such cannot account for the specific attributes. (ibid: 406)
Thus for Sahlins the new anthropology theory associated with afterology differs from functionalism only in its privileging of the issue of power – an issue that Sahlins considers to be permeated by moral overtones which he dismisses as derivative of the Enlightenment principle famously paraphrased by Marx as ‘religion is the opiate of the masses.’ The comparison Sahlins makes is between the structural-functional position that “whatever maintained the social system as constituted was a good thing” and the post-modern realization that “what maintains them are prejudicial means of differentiation and discrimination”. He finds that “The difference is not in the nature of the functional understanding so much as in the moral-political judgments framing it” and concludes cynically that perhaps “The great theoretical advance of recent decades has been the improvement in the moral character of the Academy” (ibid: 404).
The implication is that the new ‘discourse’ theory advocated by opponents of the culture concept (for example Abu-Lughod, 1991) is just as dangerous as it considers the culture concept to be; it replaces a culture-centred approach with a determinism based around power, revives the functionalist assumption of a universal cultural logic (the post-modern logic of power relations), encourages the transfer of an a priori understanding of power relations to the field, and consciously approaches the anthropological project from within a specific moral-political paradigm intending to pass judgment. With this in mind Sahlins cautions that:
...there are…good reasons to suppose that knowing other peoples is not fully accomplished by taking the proper attitudes on colonialism, racism or sexism. These people have not organized their existence in answer to what has been troubling us lately. (Sahlins, 1999a: 406)
Historical Ethnography
In ‘Culture and Practical Reason’ (1976) Sahlins accuses Malinowski of introducing “a type of ontological schizophrenia” into ethnography through his resolution that:
The true problem is not to study how human life submits to rules – it simply does not: the real problem is how the rules become adapted to life. (ibid: 84)
Nine years later in ‘Islands of History (1985) Sahlins appears to be confronting just this problem. Through his ethnography of the Hawaiian Islands, and particularly his investigation of the death of Captain Cook, he develops a sophisticated theory of history and social change that enables us to consider both practice theory and World Systems theory in a new light. Very simply, Sahlins suggests that every time action is taken (praxis) according to a conceptual scheme (culture) that scheme is thereby changed by its interaction with reality (nature). This occurs because the vertebrae of the conceptual scheme (symbols) are essentially ideal types – they are the embodiment of the past (experience) in the present. Every event is understood in terms of the conceptual scheme and so every event necessarily involves the reproduction of the conceptual scheme; but since each event, each moment in praxis, is unique the conceptual scheme is challenged, stretched and renegotiated in the resulting practice (hence the sometimes significant gulf between belief and action that has troubled many social scientists – particularly anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists). Past experience can never entirely predict/account for the present experience so it must be constantly reordered in response to the world.
In this way Sahlins accounts for both incremental social change which results from the constant renegotiation of culture in everyday life, and more significant socio-cultural ruptures which develop out of dramatic environmental changes – for example, the impact of the advent of British colonialism. Sahlins may not only have succeeded in initiating an explosion of the concept of history with “the anthropological experience of culture”, but he may also have managed to “explode the anthropological concept of culture” with history (ibid: xvii). In Sahlins’ vision, history is not merely an account of the impact of external factors on human populations (as in the impact of the arrival of Captain Cook on the Hawaiian Islands) but is instead an account of the way that human populations have understood and responded to both internal and external factors - the way that their interpretations and responses have shaped and been shaped by events. In this way external events become internal events, because their impact is felt in the terms of culture, and through the renegotiation of culture the event becomes part of that culture – embedded in the past-in-present nature of the conceptual scheme.
It now becomes possible to talk not about the consequences of the Cook’s arrival for the Hawaiians, but how Hawaiian culture both defined and was defined by the arrival of Cook. Cook’s arrival in the Hawaiian Islands is therefore not simply an event in the respective historical timelines of Europe and the Hawaiian Islands – it is an integral part of the history (and therefore the culture) of both Europe and the Hawaiian Islands. The event is thus not fetishised and objectified, it is instead a moment in cultural time, part of an ongoing process driven by the interaction of people with their environment (which includes the forces of nature, biology, economics and, of course, other people). This is not necessarily a revelation for historians or for anthropologists, but the difficulty has always been successfully understanding and conveying the complex relationship between history and culture; a difficulty that Sahlins has perhaps taken steps to overcome.
Sahlins goes on to draw a distinction between ‘performative’ and ‘prescriptive’ cultures, similar to Levi-Strauss’ hot and cold societies. In this typology ‘performative’ cultures constantly alter their conceptual scheme to accomodate events, whereas ‘prescriptive’ cultures strive to reproduce their conceptual scheme exactly, interpreting events quite strictly in terms of past events and minimizing any renegotiation of the scheme itself. Sahlins quotes the New Zealand Maori as an example of such a prescriptive society, claiming that they respond to world as if everything was simply a re-enactment of the (mythical) past. This is not a fair representation of New Zealand Maori, and the typology itself seems to be a kind of throwback (if you’ll excuse the pun) to Sahlins’ evolutionist past.
Ignoring the prescriptive/performative distinction the historical approach that Sahlins advocates is a natural and useful extension of his culture concept. Culture is primary – it both the conceptual scheme and the result of the interaction between the scheme and the environment. Praxis is the actual process of this interaction, and history is the story of that process through time. In the context of colonialism and, more recently, globalisation native populations are not passive victims of Western ‘hegemonic imposition’ but neither are they eternal saboteurs embarking on ‘counter-hegemonic resistance’. They are instead active participants in their own history, as well as in the history of others. They do not merely respond pathetically or heroically to the historical processes of the West; they engage with circumstances, shaping them as much as they are shaped by them.
Recently Sahlins has taken this powerful concept and used it effectively to challenge anthropological talk of invented traditions. He addresses developments in anthropological discourse that dismiss the assimilation of ‘foreign’ elements and the reification of cultural tradition in the face of cultural hegemony as inauthentic cultural processes. In this version of the post-colonial, post-Global Village world, devastated ‘native’ (formerly ‘primitive’ or non-Western) peoples construct Frankensteinian cultures using reified fragments of tradition, exaggerated claims to homogeneity, false designations of boundary and ‘appropriated’ Western elements. Sahlins is scathing He observes that:
Ethnography in the wake of colonialism can only contemplate the sadness of the tropics…Like the rusting shanty towns in which the people live, here are bits and pieces of cultural structures, old and new, reassembled into corrupt forms of the Western imagination. How convenient for the theorists of the postmodern deconstruction of the other. (ibid, 1993: 6-7)
He argues that all tradition is reified and invented in some way, that Fijian Christianity is part of Fijian culture, and that the idea of ‘authentic’ culture is nonsense. Sahlins refers to ‘the indigenization of modernity’ in which non-Western cultures encountering colonialism and globalization respond by incorporating the experience into their own culture rather than simply being absorbed or destroyed by a ‘global’ (American) culture. Through his culture concept and the historical ethnography he has developed from it, Sahlins is able to talk about the native experience of the West (in all its forms – for as Sahlins points out it is probably the only culture yet to be un-bounded, un-homogenised and un-essentialised by afterologists) and the way that both native populations and Western elements are altered by their respective interactions.
Conclusions
Sahlins’ culture concept has drawbacks. He has been accused of cultural determinism, and at times he is guilty of it. He sometimes takes an extreme position in order to refute economic, biological and ecological determinism, as well as utilitarianism, functionalism and evolutionism. Generally though Sahlins is not a determinist; his vision of culture is not of a prescriptive symbolic scheme subject to nothing other than itself. Sahlins claims to have “learned to distrust vulgar cultural determinism from masters” (ibid, 1999a: 409). He emphasizes that:
Just because what is done is culturally logical does not mean the logic determined that it be done – let alone by whom, when or why – any more than just because what I say is grammatical, grammar caused me to say it. (ibid)
It is not that economical, biological, ecological and utilitarian factors do not and cannot impact on social and cultural forms and behaviour, but that they are always negotiated by (i.e. experienced through) the cultural paradigm. In this sense biological, ecological and economic factors as experienced by human populations are not the same as those as represented by science: ‘Science’ is a very specific cultural experience of such factors.
Sahlins is human and thus idiosyncratic, and I agree with Kuper that sometimes it is difficult to extract his thesis from his anthro-political position. He has a tendency to become a ‘raving’ anthropologist and can become distracted from valuable theoretical discussion by his various crusades (vs. Marxism, utilitarianism, functionalism, postmodernism, etc). His culture concept, while clearer than most, can be less than lucid. Like many others he uses the term to refer to both the process (conceptual scheme) and the product (a culture), and like many other cultural anthropologists he fails to adequately qualify the relations between culture and social structure. Some would argue that his solution to the subject/object dilemma is simply to dissolve one into the other, and many would argue that the empiricism embedded in his efforts to reveal the native perspective contradicts his assertion that one culture cannot be understood in terms of the logic of another. Sahlins unintentionally opens a can of worms around the issue of the authority of the anthropologist but does not stop to address it.
Imperfections aside, Sahlins demonstrates conclusively that the culture concept is not dead, dangerous or unfounded. Through his involvement in anthropological discourse and his ethnographic work we see that the culture concept is actually dynamic, and relevant. He both argues and demonstrates convincingly that there is (still) such a thing that can be called ‘culture’ and studied in particular ways by anthropologists, that this ‘culture’ cannot be reduced to mere biological, ecological or economical factors and disregarded, and that it also cannot be replaced with terms such as ‘discourse’ which would substitute an insubstantial concept of fragmentation and hegemonic determinism for a substantial concept of structure and meaning. By considering Sahlins’ ethnographic and theoretical enterprises we can see that the culture concept is not as bounded, homogeneous and essentialised as critics would have us believe. It also becomes clear that culture is not actually conceived by anthropologists to be rigidly bounded, homogeneous and essentialised. Further, and most significantly, Sahlins demonstrates that culture itself is not as transcendent, contested and irrelevant as critics would argue.
Most significantly, through a critical evaluation of Sahlins’ culture concept it becomes apparent that the culture concept is a powerful tool for anthropology. Like an old family recipe it is refined by every generation, tempered in the fires of new discourses, modified to reflect the concerns and insights of the time. The history embedded within the concept is part of its potency, we cannot forget or deny the influence of the Enlightenment, imperialism, colonialism; and neither should we. But the culture concept is not a straightjacket, it is not sui generis – it is adaptive and creative and reflects the needs of a modern anthropology as much as it tells its history. It is multivocal, discursive, adaptive, contested, historical, structured and structuring. It is everything that it seeks to represent; it is cultural. In many ways this is what its critics seek to purge from anthropology – ethnocentrism, subjectivity, culturalism. If critics of the culture concept find it is impossible to move beyond the ‘cultural baggage’ that accompanies the concept it is because they are searching in vain for that undefiled tabula rasa of anthropological, sociological and psychological myth. After airing the dirty laundry they would replace all the linen, start afresh as if banishing dirt from the house. It is as if by abandoning the culture concept anthropologists can absolve the discipline of its complicity in the sins of the Empires (British, French and American) and be without sin. Then, armed with terms like ‘hegemonic’ and ‘counter-hegemonic’, they could begin casting stones:
Given the current theoretical and moral discourse of domination and subjection…It might be better just to ignore the accumulated anthropological knowledge. This popular tactic is called “poststructuralism” (ibid, 1993: 20).
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