Investigations of a Dog

Yesterday I went to the Institute of Historical Research to hear Peter Burke talking about “Strengths and Weaknesses of Cultural History 1980-2006″. Judging by how full the Pollard room was this was a major event. I thought I might be out of my depth there, but as it turned out I didn’t hear anything that surprised me or that I couldn’t understand. The paper was a very general overview of cultural history which did pretty much what the title suggests. I can’t remember all the points because I wasn’t taking notes, but most of the suggested strengths and weaknesses were fairly obvious. I didn’t take part in the discussion at the time because it was already going on long enough and I wanted to get away (and also didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking stupid questions of course!), but other people asked some interesting questions. This post was going to be an attempt to summarise the paper, but it went off on various tangents.

Perhaps the best point that Peter Burke made was about cultural construction: the idea that many things which have been assumed to be natural (eg gender, sexuality) are really cultural phenomena. He asked: who is doing the constructing and what material are they using for the construction? This is an important question that too often goes unasked. The constructing in “cultural construction” is very rarely an active verb. We might know that the object is constructed, but who or what is the subject doing the constructing? There might not be an easy answer to that question, but that’s no reason to avoid it. The Marxist answer would be either that the construction of culture is determined by the economic base, or that culture is manipulated by the ruling elite through “repressive structures” in order maintain their power. Recent work by social historians on power and authority tends to show that it’s much more complicated than that (for early modern England see various works by Michael Braddick, John Walter, Steve Hindle, and Andy Wood). In Marxist terms, a conservative cultural ideology which maintains the status quo would be seen as serving the interests of the ruling classes and working against the interests of the lower classes. However, that ideology would also limit the freedom of the elite. If they try to change things too much they might face opposition from the lower orders who want things to stay as they are. If the elite go too far they can compromise their own legitimacy and ultimately bring about their own downfall. Enclosure riots are a good example of non-elite action to enforce conservative ideology, and even the English Civil War can be seen in these terms: conservative parliamentarians reacting against the innovations of Charles I.

This is not to say that ideology necessarily serves the interests of the lower classes either. It would be more accurate to say that cultural ideologies place some limits on all members of a society (but those limits are not usually equal), and that they do not entirely or constantly serve the interests of any easily identifiable group or individual. Even something as overt, artificial, and seemingly simplistic as fascism might not always do what its inventors want it to. I remember hearing a paper (several years ago) by Dave Gould about his research on football hooligans in fascist Italy. It’s easy for liberal intellectuals to assume that fascist thugs and football hooligans are the same thing, but their aims and motivations were not always the same. While Mussolini’s fascist vision encouraged nationalism and violence, it also emphasised order and discipline. The disorder and parochialism of football crowds did not fit in with this vision, and the embarrassment of major trouble at international matches undermined rather than reinforced national pride.

If historical evidence doesn’t suggest any obvious candidates for the mysterious constructors of culture, then where is it coming from, and can we really talk about it being constructed? It might be more appropriate to talk about cultural phenomena “emerging”, but we still have to ask what or where are these things emerging from and how? Evolutionary psychologists want to reduce it all to selective pressures but I think that’s an oversimplification. Even Richard Dawkins recognises that some aspects of culture (such as religious restrictions on sex, particularly celibate clergy) don’t serve any purpose for “the selfish gene”. It’s interesting to note that there’s some tension between militant atheism and evolutionary reductionism here: if religion is evil and needs to be destroyed then it can’t also be natural and useful.

Some followers of Dawkins believe that while culture is not biologically determined, it does develop in a way which is closely analogous to biological evolution: the meme is the basic cultural unit in the same way that the gene is the basic biological unit. As I’ve said before (and will probably say again) I’m not convinced by that. At best the meme is an arbitrary unit of information with no inherent meaning. It might help us to map what happens to some bits of culture, but I can’t see it helping to explain anything. Bill Benzon’s work on the evolution of culture is much more subtle and interesting, but we still need to know more about language, meaning, and above all the human brain. The physical characteristics of the brain must have some influence on culture, if only by placing some limits on thoughts and memories, but culture creates an artificial environment with its own selective pressures.

While Peter Burke acknowledged the danger of reducing all history to cultural explanations at the expense of other causes, and pointed out the difficulty of defining such a large and fluid field as cultural history, he didn’t say much about the more fundamental problems of defining and explaining culture itself. What is culture? How does it work? I’d like to see more cultural historians tackling these problems. We also need to look at culture in less anthropocentric terms. In the discussion Robert Burns made a good point that all human history is cultural history, because most things that humans do which are of interest to historians are unique to human culture. However, we need to be careful to avoid a binary opposition between human and animal. There is increasing evidence of animals using tools (chimps have been in the news recently). There is also some experimental evidence that monkeys have mental concepts of the predators signified by alarm calls and can critically evaluate the calls rather than automatically responding to them (see review of Why We Talk at Babel’s Dawn). This is looking more like language and culture than instinctive behaviour.

If animals do have their own rudimentary culture, it would be impossible for historians to study it because of the lack of evidence. However, the same problem arises with early humans. It has been common to suppose that the appearance of symbolic material culture, evidenced by surviving artefacts, marks the beginnings of human language, but Edmund Blair Bolles takes the view that speech is likely to be much older than symbolic culture. By emphasising speech as a tool for directing joint attention, he implies that focusing too heavily on symbolic culture is jumping the gun. Early speech might have had a closer relationship with the real than later symbolic representations would have.

It now looks difficult to define “human”. Is it all about genes, or is it our unique culture which makes us human? While surviving evidence cannot prove the existence of symbolic culture more than 200,000 years ago, EBB suggests that homo habilis could have been speaking a few words 2 million years ago and that homo erectus could have had a sophisticated spoken language 1 million years ago. At what point did the few words of homo habilis become different enough from monkey alarm calls to count as something unique or special? The first words might even have been adapted from monkey alarm calls!

Maybe we don’t always have to worry about what happened 2 million years ago to understand the more recent past, but it’s important to remember that nothing is fixed or permanent. During the discussion, the person on my left asked a brilliant question: how far back and how far afield do you have to go to provide a sufficient and necessary explanation of the cultural phenomenon of the bottle of mineral water on the table in front of you? It was disappointing that Peter Burke was completely unable to deal with that question. To me, the obvious answer would be: it depends on how much explanation you want. There is no self-evident optimum amount of explanation. There isn’t even any minimum or maximum. It all depends on how much the historian and audience agree to take for granted as not needing to be explained. The purpose of doing history, whether you admit it or not, is to make other people agree with you. Therefore, you need enough explanation to convince the people you’re trying to convince. How much that is depends on who they are and what their expectations are. I’m becoming increasingly aware that the audience is a central part of history: what you write or say is necessarily influenced by the target audience. It’s possible to take the explanation of a bottle of mineral water back to homo habilis 2 million years ago, or even further, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t. Deciding what is and isn’t relevant to a historical enquiry is an arbitrary decision. We have to make those arbitrary decisions in order to make research and writing manageable, but we must never forget that they are arbitrary.