Good, you are still here. I just took a shower, felt badly all the time, and finally decided I could do better. So here goes. Forgive the patronizing tone in advance.
The term "culture" gives many of us in the social sciences a mild case of heartburn. It's so difficult to decide what the referent might be, it's used in so many different ways, it seems like a powerful term but then when you look at it carefully, it just dissolves like, I don't know, warm butter.
But having said that, let me take a cut at your use of it.
First, the relation between founding texts, like a constitution, a piece of scripture, whatever, and the contemporary actions, beliefs of a religious group, a nation state, whatever, is always, always problematic. It's so for two large reasons. First, there are multiple interpretations of the meaning of the texts. Second, the degree to which any member or group within the society connects itself to those founding texts can vary and vary extremely.
Second, most serious attempts to conclude something about an actually existing "culture" (still in quotes because no one's certain what it means) are inductive rather than deductive. At least for the present. Those attempts to be deductive, to go to classic texts and say these must be the culture, have been criticized so heavily, I can't think of a serious instance of it at the moment. Perhaps they are out there. But they certainly don't come readily to mind.
So, the prevalent and normative practice is to proceed inductively. Next question is what to do you look at? The grossest breakdown of that is to look at either actions or verbal statements of belief systems. So you either watch what people do or ask them why they do it. The action folk generally suspect that people's statements are less trustworthy than their actions so they either dismiss them, use them as some sort of secondary source, or note the disparity and move on. The belief folk argue that actions can be contrary to beliefs without undermining the argument that culture is beliefs. We, they say, do things about which we feel guilty. It's the guilt component that testifies to the strength of the "culture."
Any good investigator, though, looks at both, tries to work out as best they can, in the specific setting of their work, just what the relation between the two might be.
All this was buzzing through my head as I was trying to deal with your use of founding texts to give evidence of culture.
If you've read this far, my congratulations. I probably would not have.
One final problem. Referring to a religion as a base for a culture, as in the phrase Muslim culture, is a different thing than referring to a nation state as a culture. I don't want to walk down this road very far but it's been one of my problems with the talk of Muslim culture versus American culture.
Finally, my working solution to all this, the one that I use for conversational purposes, is to look at practices rather than cultures and compare those. In my previous posts, I've said as forcefully as I could that the practice of physical abuse of any human being but, most particularly, in the context of the above comparisons, of women by men, is abhorrent. When that is done, as was reported by Human Rights Watch in that WSJ op ed piece, it not only should be condemned, we should all be donating money to them to help stop it; or doing something even more powerful.
But if one is concerned about that, one can do something right at home by helping out in a domestic abuse shelter.
I'm doing worse here than rambling. Guilt is driving the fingers over the keyboards.
You best ignore this and put me on ignore. |
