The Progress of Culture by Even Keith Eppich Anthropology, Southern Methodist University

August 29, 2001 by Leave a Comment

Anthropology and the tools of thought

Science and culture possess a synergistic relationship.  While the concerns of the larger society are addressed through a scientific methodology, science itself makes innovations and discoveries that profoundly alter the larger society that spawns it.  The creation of knowledge exists as complex phenomena, simultaneously social and scientific.  Darwin might have profoundly altered a mid-nineteenth century worldview, but his discoveries also served to explain its existent inequalities (see Tambiah 1990: 17-18, 140-144; Trigger 1998: 63-73).  In our own time, we can easily see how scientific studies are used to support societal practices as well as challenge them.  The breakthroughs of technology change the way in which a society conducts itself, thus altering its very fabric.

Anthropology possesses an enormous scope of research, being nothing less than the totality of the human condition, past and present.  As such, it seems extraordinarily sensitive to the manner by which society perceives itself.  Trigger (1998), in particular, has argued how the changing economic fortunes of the middle-class appear to have determined the theoretical orientation of the discipline.  When society is riding a crest of economic prosperity and confidence, he argues, anthropology has portrayed human history as evolutionary and progressive.  When the position of middle-class society feels threatened, anthropology has adopted much more pessimistic views, abandoning the notion of a progressive social evolution.  It is within this context that anthropologists have built their overarching theories of human society.  Central to such theory-building processes are the tools with which anthropologists have used to redefine their discipline.  As the theory has changed, so have the basic concepts, the basic definitions that are discussed.  Definitions can be seen as a manner by which scientists can control the function of words and reduce ambiguity among colleagues (Cafagna 1960: 114-115).  They are conceptual instruments manufactured “to render experience intelligible” (White 1954: 463).  Redefinition of a single word possesses profound ramifications for the discipline, and hence, for society.  It is important to pay close attention to language and to ask what is meant by “progress” or “technology.”  These words are tools and tools that scholars shape and reshape to fit their own research goals.  They are “channels as well as tools of thought.  Some lead us into blind allies; others, to fertile fields” (White 1959: 53).  Following these changing definitions may be able to illustrate the manner by which these theoretical frameworks themselves change (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 36).

Words exist as potent and conceptual entities.  Within the science of anthropology there is no word more potent, nor more conceptual, than that of “culture.”  The focus of this study is to track the use of that word through a selected literature in the history of anthropological theory and to examine its relation, when applicable, to notions of evolution, progress and technology.


Modern Definition
As per the Merriam-Webster Online Language Center (www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm), the definition of culture is as follows:

cul•ture
Pronunciation: ’k&l-ch&r
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin cultura, from cultus, past participle.
Date: 15th century
1: CULTIVATION, TILLAGE
2: the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education
3: expert care and training <beauty culture>
4 a: enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training b: acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills

5 a: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, beliefs, and behavior that depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations b: the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group c: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation

6: cultivation of living material in prepared nutrient media; also: a product of such cultivation

Culture as the gradual perfection of man
To speak of “our culture” or “Eskimo Culture” or even a “Culture of Technology” is to use the meaning of the word as given to it by an anthropologist.  Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) was the foremost anthropologist of his day and for much of the late nineteenth century, anthropology was known simply as “Mr. Tylor’s science.“  He was the first English anthropologist to receive an appointment at Oxford University in 1875 and the first to become a full professor in 1896.  He was the first “compleat anthropologist“ and was instrumental in establishing anthropology as a branch of the British Association, serving as President of the Royal Anthropological Society in 1891.  In 1912, he was knighted (Bohannan and Glazer 1988: 61-63).  Before Tylor, what anthropologists as there were generally spoke of society, or of race, or even the “human family.”  After Tylor, they would speak of culture.

Tylor’s famous definition, which forms the basis of our modern understanding of the term, makes up the first sentence of his most influential work, Primitive Culture (1871).

Culture… taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.  The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action.

The use of culture in its ethnographic sense, number 5 in the Merriam-Webster definition above, did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary of 1893.  It would not appear in any dictionary until the Webster’s New International of 1929.  It is added to the Oxford Supplement of 1933 (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 33-34).  By the 1930s, this use of the word culture had entered into common usage.  By 1950, it appears in comic strips (ibid: i35).

Tylor was heavily influenced by the writings of German philosophers of the period, especially the works of the historian Gustav Klemm.  In the German, kultur, was stressed as a unifying body of folk customs, beliefs and language.  It was a definition that tended to de-emphasize the role of governing bodies, if not ignore them completely.  The German writers attempted to foster the unity of the German people at the mid-century and outside of the odd example, tended to use the word exclusively in reference to Germans (ibid: i10-19).  Tylor extends this German definition to include all human populations, while maintaining the spirit of the extent English definition of the word.

The famed Victorian writer, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), wrote in 1869, that “culture is, or ought to be, the study and pursuit of perfection; and that of perfection as pursued by culture, beauty and intelligence, or, in other words, sweetness and light…” (ibid: 29; Buckler 1958: 458-476).  This use of the word is that of the progressive sense, highlighting the means by which individuals seek improvement in their own aesthetics or intellect.  In short, the means by which individuals becomes “cultured.”  Tylor does not stray far from this.  He (1871: i27) writes,

civilization may be looked upon as the general improvement of mankind by higher organization of the individual and of society, to the end of promoting at once man’s goodness, power and happiness… a transition from the savage state to our own would be, practically, that very progress of art and knowledge which is one main element in the development of culture.

Culture therefore possesses a function, a goal and the relative progression towards this goal the measure by which societies may be ranked.  The development of mankind proceeds hand in hand with a continuous improvement of knowledge, the arts, and the combined standards of intellectual and moral advance.  Tylor sees Victorian society not so much as the end-product of human development, but the one furthest along the scale of development (ibid: i28-29).  Indeed, the very function of a science of culture is to act as a reforming science, to “expose the remains of crude old culture… and to mark these out for destruction.”  Because of the anthropology, “where barbaric hordes groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with clear view.“ (emphasis added, Tylor 1871: ii453).

Tylor admits the difficulty, if not impossibility, of being able to measure a group’s intellectual and moral progress.  He is interested in a science of culture, on those qualities which can be “observed as a matter of fact.“  To do this, he argues at length on how the advance of moral progress is inexorably linked to the advance of society in its entirety.  While certain aspects of a society may remain backwards and primitive, “on the whole the civilized man is not only wiser and more capable than the savage, but also better and happier.“  Hence, analyzing one aspect of a culture will give some indication as to its position within an evolutionary hierarchy.  To establish a ranked scale of civilization, “The principle criteria of classification are the absence or presence, high or low development, of the industrial arts, especially metal-working, manufacture of implements and vessels, agriculture, architecture, &c” (Tylor 1871: i26-31).  The proxy by which Tylor suggests that cultures will be ordered is that oftechnology.  After all, he argues, one can easily see the progression in firearms from a clumsy wheel-lock through various stages to the breech-loading rifle of his day.  “Mechanical invention supplies apt examples of the kind of development which affects civilization at large” (ibid: i15).

In this of course, Tylor was not alone, and many of his contemporaries emphasized the progressive nature of aspects of technology (see Trigger 1998:74-82; McGee and Warms 1996: 5-82).  Lewis Henry Morgan, in particular, based his 1877 hierarchy of civilization almost entirely upon technological criteria, with the bow and arrow differentiating Savagery from Barbarism and iron-smelting separating the Upper and Middle Statuses of Barbarism (Bohannan and Glazer 1988: 38).  In his 1875 lecture, George A. Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers sees in the inability of apes to fashion tools “a clearly defined starting-point for the commencement of culture” (Pitt-Rivers 1906: 32). Tylor’s definition of culture is then necessarily linked to that of improvement and specifically technological improvement.  Culture has a function, being this gradual improvement of man, and the various societies of mankind can be grouped according to how well they fulfill this function technologically.  Technology serves as the scale by which cultures are ordered with the word itself serving as an indicator of progress.


164 definitions for a word
Trigger (1998: 83-85) reasons that by the first few decades of the twentieth century the increasing and seemingly insurmountable social problems of industrial society invalidated an evolutionary approach to culture.  The horrors of the First World War certainly served to disassociate any relation between morality and technology.  Even the concept of progress seemed to have little relation with the human condition.  If evolutionary progress led anywhere, it would lead to the kind of socialist paradise being praised in the streets.  Both Marx and Engels were heavily influenced by the social evolution espoused by Morgan (ibid: 76, 93).  In one of the little ironies of history, Morgan, an American anthropologist, is cited inThe Communist Manifesto, chapter one, first sentence (Marx and Engels 1848: 9).

Stewart (1956: 70), on the other hand, argues that the collapse of evolutionary thought was brought about by epistemological flaws within the theory and an influx in new research.  The new data did not fit the technological hierarchies.  Groups simply possessed the wrong sets of attributes.  Confusing the issue further was the discovery that populations often borrowed some practices and technologies from neighboring groups instead of inventing their own. Situations where a culture could have literate members yet not possesses iron-smelting, or even agriculture, were impossible under an evolutionary hierarchy.  The theory simply collapsed of its own weight.

Whatever the reason, the first quarter of the twentieth century saw a rejection of a progressive evolutionism.  The scholar usually credited with this is the New York-based, German-born Franz Boas (1858-1942). The contributions of Franz Boas to the field of anthropology are far too impressive to list here (see McGee and Warms 1996: 128-130; Trigger 1998: 97-99). Suffice it to say he is easily described as “a sort of funnel through which all American anthropology passed between its nineteenth-century juniority and its twentieth-century maturity” and “the founder of modern field work“ (Bohannan and Glazer 1988: 81-83). Virtually every anthropologist educated in America is removed only a few degrees from Boas.  Boas can be said to open the scholarly critique on evolutionism in this 1896 article, “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” (in Bohannan and Glazer 1988: 85-93).  There he points out that often diffusion and migration can more easily explain the widespread occurrence of cultural traits.  Commonality in technology, such as fire-starting, does not necessarily imply commonality in evolution.  The comparison of cultures “will not become fruitful until we renounce the vain endeavor to construct a uniform systematic history of the evolution of culture” (ibid: 93).

It was the students of Franz Boas who most enthusiastically engaged in the debate.  The period 1909-1916 saw a series of critical papers attacking the various aspects of cultural evolution (Rowe 1975: 157).  The school of thought that replaced nineteenth-century evolutionism came to be known as Boasian anthropology, or historical particularism.  The Boasians stressed the intensive study of a single culture, characterized by long periods of fieldwork where the anthropologists would live with those they studied and learn their language.  There could be little use in comparing differing cultures and Boas is directly attributed the concept of cultural relativism.  All cultures were seen as unique, particular, and in no manner could they be placed on a hierarchy of evolution (McGee and Warm  1996: 129).

This, however, creates a problem with word culture.  As we have already seen, Tylor’s definition is intrinsic with progress and evolution.  By discarding Tylor’s theory, the Boasians are, to a large extent, discarding his definition as well.  The elimination of Tylor’s definition immediately begs the question, what then is being studied?

It is doubtful whether this would have even seemed a problem to Boas.  After all, in Germany, the word kultur lacked any precise definition, being used mainly by philosophers and historians whose interests were often  mystical and irreducible.  Kultur is described in a 1922 philosophic dictionary as “a mode of being of mankind,” die daseinsweise der menschheit(Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 27).  In nineteenth-century German, kultur functioned as essentially an undefined operative unit (Meinander 1981: 107-108).  Boas, educated at various universities in Heibelberg, Bonn and Kiel, would have known what is meant by culture and felt no great impatience to define it.  Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952: 151) describe him as being “interested in dealing with culture, not is systematically theorizing about it.”  Boas does write a definition for culture in 1930, at age seventy-two, for theEncyclopedia of the Social Sciences.  He writes, “Culture embraces all the manifestations of social habits of a community, the reactions of the individuals as affected by the habits of the group in which he lives, and the products of human activities as determined by those habits” (in Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 43).

It can surely be no coincidence that, in this period, the number of definitions of culture begin to expand at an exponential rate.  Tylor’s 1871 definition is not followed by another in the anthropological literature for thirty-two years and even to 1916, only six additional definitions appear.  Not that the word is not being used, it’s simply that the definition is understood.  But between 1920 and 1950, there appear in the anthropological literature one hundred fifty-seven separate definitions (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 149).  Boasian anthropology didn’t particularly need a commonly held definition of culture, as there was no significant cross-cultural comparison.  The result was that not only was each ethnic group held to be unique, but the definition of the culture of each ethnic group was held to be practically unique.  This leads to the situation in 1952, with anthropology possessing 164 definitions for a single word.

There were even more than 164.  In the early twentieth century, debates between German and Scandinavian archaeologists demanded some measure of comparison and the scholars involved adopted to calling sets of widely associated artifacts an “archaeological culture” (Meinander 1981: 101).  It isn’t until V. Gordon Childe’s The Danube in Prehistory (1929) that a formal definition for an archaeological culture is penned.

While it is impossible to deal with the even the majority of the 164 definitions, a few general comments can be made about the relative similarity between them.  Culture tended to be viewed as being mostly mentalistic in nature, that is, originating from and consisting mostly of mental abstractions (White 1954: 467).  This conception of culture held its object of study to be subjective in nature, particular to a specific ethnic group in a particular time and place. Cultures are mostly incomparable and are possessed of some degree of statistical patterning (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 167).  “We thinking culture is a product; is historical; includes ideas, patterns, and values; is selective; is learned; is based upon symbols; and is an abstraction from behavior and objects of behavior” (ibid: 157).  Kroeber (1959: 398) himself regarded culture to be a subset within a larger society with data limited by “biotic and individual psychic factors.”  Cultural relativism was considered “both indispensable and productive.”  A closer examination of Kroeber’s research will prove illuminative of the type executed by anthropologists of this period.  Kroeber viewed anthropological research as scientific and anthropologists entering the field to “invent hypotheses in order to test them” (ibid: 404).  While the study of kinship and social structure seems the order of the day, Kroeber applied this approach to aspects of technology.  He argued that larger patterns of art and technology operated independently of the individuals that produced them (McGee and Warms 1996: 129).  Whereas Tylor (1871) used the “mechanical arts” and firearms and Pitt-Rivers (1875) weaponry, Kroeber (1919) uses a series of eight measurements to study the changing rhythms in the design of women’s dresses over the preceeding 75 years.  Kroeber uses the changes in the fashion of dresses to argue that social change is regular and cyclical and beyond the control of the individual.  To Kroeber then, the material (i.e. technological) arts are not progressive but cyclical, with such innovations as there are occurring randomly. He applies this to culture as a whole, seeing in civilizations “a sense of historic necessity, of rhythmic inevitability,” which he likens to “the wheel of fortune” (Kroeber 1919: 139).  There is no progress necessarily associated with technology at all, only cyclical rhythms of material fashion.

Culture as an extrasomatic means of adaptation
During a period of undisputed British ascendancy, British anthropologists, for the most part, argued for a view of culture as evolutionary and progressive.  It appears then as no surprise that after the Second World War, it would be American anthropologists who would reintroduce ideas of evolution and progress into anthropological theory.  This is Trigger’s (1998: 124-125) thesis, that the unrivaled power of America and the economic prosperity of its middle-class supported this view of human culture in an effort to reify their own position in the world.  The post-war period also saw a dramatic re-emphasis on science and many anthropologists of the day saw in a Boasian approach a fundamental lack of scientific creditability.  This drive towards the ‘scientizing’ of the discipline should be seen in the context of the Age of Sputnik, when the U.S. government poured federal monies into science and science education, leading to “an overemphasis on science and technology, to the detriment of the humanities” (Clowse 1981:13).

There were, however, real problems associated with conducting Boasian anthropology. Stewart (1956: 70) described the anthropology of the period as lapsing “into a methodology of  ‘shreds and patches’” becoming “fervently devoted to collecting facts.”  One of the problems with such an approach was the lack of coherence for the meaning of “culture.” A.R. Radcliffe-Brown writes in 1937 that “the word culture has undergone a number of degradations which have rendered it unfortunate as a scientific term” (in White 1954: 462). There is a vigorous debate within the anthropology of the 1940s and 50s concerning the word culture (see Gamst and Norbeck 1976).  Indeed, one of the products of this debate is the 1952 Kroeber and Kluckhohn volume itself.  Kroeber and Kluckhohn did not, however, attempt to settle the debate, simply presenting a “taxonomy of definitions” as a “gauge of the development of explicit conceptual instruments in cultural anthropology” (ibid: 36).  In true Boasian style, they present the data, believing “each of our principle groups of definitions points to something legitimate and important” (ibid: 157).  They are not, as has been argued (White 1954: 462), attempting to clarify the concept.  There were other attempts for conceptual unity, particularly Bidney (1944: 43-44), who argued that emphasis on only a few select aspects of behavior, i.e. reductionism, would lead only to a distorted view and create what he terms “cultural fallacies.”  Culture is therefore an inclusive whole with “neither natural forces nor cultural achievements taken separately” (ibid: 44).  Others took the opposite view, writing that culture is not capable of being defined, existing only as a subjective classification of observed phenomena (Haring 1949: 26).

The harshest critic of the Boasian concept of culture was the University of Michigan professor Leslie White (1900-1975).  Harris (1999: 105) has even referred to him as “Boas’s academic nemesis.”  To White, the intangibilities of an abstract view of culture were contrary to scientific inquiry.  “When culture becomes an abstraction it not only becomes invisible and imponderable; it virtually ceases to exist.  It would be difficult to construct a less adequate conception of culture” (White 1959a: 228).  He argued that anthropology should examine real and tangible objects, not mental conceptions which cannot be measured scientifically.  “The subject matter of any science is a class of objectively observable things and events, not abstractions.”  Continued dependence upon a mentalistic concept of culture would serve little purpose other than “delaying and making more difficult a return to the scientific tradition of a direct and immediate concern with objective things and events: Culture as a class of things and events in the external world” (White 1954: 467; but see also Osgood 1951). To White, the Boasian approach lacked scientific creditability.  “Science, “ he wrote, “is not a body of data; it is a technique of interpretation” (White 1949: 4).

Leslie White became convinced that the evolutionary approaches of Edward Tylor and Lewis Morgan were fundamentally sound, but had been formulated with inaccurate data (see Stewart 1956: 70).  He promoted their books, editing several himself.  Additionally, White was powerfully influenced by Marxist theory and deeply impressed by a visit to the Soviet Union in the 1920s (Peace 1998: 84-85).  He would incorporate the historical inevitability of Marxist thought into this theories although remained careful about citing Karl Marx in Post-War America.  Together with Julian Stewart, Leslie White is credited with the mid-century reintroduction of social evolution into anthropological discourse (see Bohannan and Glazer 1988: 319-322, 333-335; McGee and Warms 1996: 221-223).  The body of work that these two men produced remains impressive.

Finding none of the previous definitions of culture acceptable, White set about constructing his own.  He crafted a complex argument centered around the concept of symboling, that is, the assignation of meaning to objects (White 1962: 26).  While the specifics of how this exactly worked are not important here, suffice it to say that White viewed as the focus of a scientific anthropology the study of the objects that become symbolically transformed into culturally meaningful units.  Like the relationship between words, he argues (1959: 233-234), the relations between symboled units can be studied quite apart from human beings.  Indeed, human beings are not the focus of a scientific anthropology, only culture is.  While White’s definition subtly changes throughout his career, the most succinct one he gives is;

Culture, then, is a class of things and events, dependent upon symboling, considered in an extrasomatic context.  This definition rescues cultural anthropology from intangible, imperceptible, and ontologically unreal abstractions and provides it with a real, substantial, observable subject matter. (original emphasis, White 1959a:234).

The precise language of his definition does change and continues to evolve throughout his career.  Indeed, for a theorist quoted as often as Leslie White, the year of the quote makes a significant difference.  It was a definition that was not without debate, the most significant critique originating from A. L. Kroeber (see also Cafagna 1960: 128-129).  Kroeber (1948) writes that White’s concept of culture is reductionist and overly simplistic.  To Kroeber, culture is not extrasomatic, but psychosomatic.

White’s meaning of the word divorces it from human beings, situating the locus of scientific inquiry upon the symboled objects themselves and the relationship between that which is symboled (White 1959a: 235-236; White 1959b: 363).  White’s concept of culture places it beyond the control of humans as well.  After all, humans are unable to affect changes in their own language much less the larger structure of culture.  This leads to White’s (1949: 279) famous quote about the influence of the Pharaohs on Ancient Egypt, “the general trend of events would have been the same had [Pharaoh] Ikhnaton been but a sack of sawdust.”  This critical shift in focus allows researchers to “eliminate the human organism from our considerations entirely” (White 1949: 36).  Culture exists solely as the organizational principle which binds humans together, serving as “a cooperative enterprise which has been made possible by symbols” (ibid: 78).

This organizational structure, culture, exists as a thing unto itself, a thing sui generis (Lowie 1917, quoted in White 1959a: 239).  As such, it makes human cooperative possible and serves as the principle by which humans can adapt to their environment, as “an elaborate mechanism whose function is to make life secure and continuous for groups of human beings.”  The security and contiguity of life is explicitly linked to material and adaptive means.

In order to perform these functions, culture must harness energy in one form or another and put it to work.  Culture is, therefore, a thermodynamic system in the mechanical sense.  Culture grows in all its aspects- ideological, sociological, and technological- when and as the amount of energy harnessed per capita year is increased…  (White 1949: 166)

These subsystems of culture are not equal.  Philosophy serves to reify the existing social structure which is itself situated to most efficiently extract energy from the environment. The means by which this energy is extracted therefore has primacy over all else.  White (1949: 366) writes, “The technological system is basic and primary… We are now in possession of a key to an understanding of the growth and development of culture: technology.”  In the story of the evolution of man’s culture and society, “Technology is the hero of our piece” (ibid: 390).

Progress is then the means by which cultures become more efficient.  As in the manner one can measure certain machines by their efficiency, so one can rank human society by its degree of energy efficiency, placing the obvious nation at the top of the list.  This is the core of White’s argument on sociocultural evolution, “…culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased.  Both factors increase simultaneously of course” (White 1949: 368-369).  White’s own manner of expressing this efficiently takes the form of a formula with E equaling the amount of energy multiplied by T, the level of technology, resulting in C, the degree of cultural development.  He expresses it thusly,

E x T ® C
This simple and explicitly technologically deterministic view (White 1959: 22) differs significantly from Tylor’s view of technology.  Whereas Tylor saw all aspects of culture advancing apace and used technology as a kind of proxy, to White technological progress is the only kind of progress possible.  Tylor’s idea of evolution included moral and intellectual progress.  In the mechanistic formulations of Leslie White, there is a marked absence of any sort of intellectual or moral progress.  It would be ludicrous to assume a Tylorian future, where “cultured men” with “clear view” promote “goodness and happiness.”  Indeed, the future envisioned by Leslie White was anything but full of goodness and happiness.  Even in earlier writings, White (1949: 391) would casually refer to “the coming holocaust of radioactivity” and of humanity’s “eventual extinction.”  Towards the end of his life, White grew more pessimistic, eventually abandoning any notion of progress whatsoever (White 1975: 9).  He envisioned man trapped within culture, incapable of either controlling it or the technology that drove it.  He saw primitive societies as being characterized by “liberty, equality, fraternity,” while the modern civil society was a “cruel and inhuman institution” (ibid: 12).  At the last page of this final book, White (ibid: 178) writes, “the prospects for the future of civilization are rather grim.”  Trigger (1998: 148-149) refers to this view as “cataclysmic evolution” with overtones of the old degenerationists of the nineteenth century.

One of the problems with viewing culture primarily as an extrasomatic means of adaptation, other than nihilism, was a marked tendency to result in a kind of environmental determinism. This logic is present within the writings of Leslie White but never directly addressed.  Culture is never active, only reactive, being little more than “the response of a particular type of primitive organism to a particular set of stimuli” (White 1949: 146).  Even the invention of new technologies is held at a constant, “when an invention becomes possible it becomes inevitable” (White 1959b: 16).  The only variable aspect left becomes environmental.  The study of culture then becomes little more than the study of adaptive technologies, reactive only to climatic change.  Hence, to study cultural change one simply studies environmental change (see also Stewart 1955).

Regardless, White’s view gained popular acceptance within the discipline.  This was not to the total exclusion of alternative models, but for the decades following the Second World War, it could be argued that neo-evolutionism represented the dominant theoretical perspective. Within the subdiscipline of archaeology, its emphasis on the primacy of material culture proved irresistible and formed the core of the “New Archaeology“ of the 1960’s and 70’s (see Kushner 1970; Martin 1971).  The idea that culture as a complex adaptive system saw widespread use (see Sahlins and Service 1960; Buckley 1968; Cohen 1968).  While substantial modifications have been made within the larger body of theory (see Boyd and Richerson 1985), it is not at all uncommon to see anthropologists refer to culture as an extrasomatic means of adaptation and focus their energies accordingly.

Culture as symbolic communication (if anything at all)
Trigger (1998: 152-153) makes a cogent case that as the pace of technological change quickened, the world seemed comprised of mysterious and unintelligible entities.  Unforeseen vicissitudes in technology and the economy produced a growing sense of dismay and helplessness.  Beginning the 1970s, severe doubts were formulated about progress and technology.  As in previous times, artists and scholars turned away from objective reality and towards romantic and idealistic portrayals of the human condition.  Through the course of these changes, intellectuals have denied that there is objective knowledge.  This latest form of romanticism takes the form of postmodernism.  Objective knowledge becomes impossible and yet another form of  Western cultural domination.  Truth is inherently relative, local, plural, indefinite, and interpretive.  It becomes a “persuasive fiction” (Harris 1999: 154-156).  In anthropology this “means in effect the abandonment of any serious attempt to give a reasonably precise, documented and testable account of anything” (Gellner 1992: 29).  There was a near-complete loss of interest in social evolution, progress, technology, and, in some cases, culture.  It should be noted that it is a term which, of late, seems to have acquired a distinctly derogatory status (Pomo; see Harris 1999).

Clifford Geertz (1926-present) occupies a unique position in terms of this debate.  He is variously characterized as a postmodern anthropologist (Trigger 1998: 154; Harris 1999: 157) or not (Gellner 1992: 40; McGee and Warms 1996: 430, 480).  Under the rubric of symbolic anthropology, Geertz, together with Victor Turner, represents a move away from evolutionary or objective concerns and towards the study and analysis of cultural meaning.  Given by Geertz (1973: 89), his concept of culture is one that “denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”  In this circumstance, culture is treated exclusively as a mental phenomenon (McGee and Warms 1996: 430).  It is a multilateral mental phenomenon with the focus of the anthropologist’s research resembling that of a mental archaeology, where “a culture is exposed and explicated layer by layer until a mental image of it appears to the reader” (Bohannan and Glazer 1988: 530).  This is best exemplified by Geertz’s (1973: 50-51) own analysis of the cathedral at Chartres;

Chartres is made of stone and glass.  But it is not just stone and glass; it is a cathedral, and not only a cathedral, but a particular cathedral built at a particular time by certain members of a particular society.  To understand what it means, to perceive it for what it is, you need to know rather more than the generic properties of stone and glass and rather more than what is common to all cathedrals.  You need to understand also- and, in my opinion, most critically- the specific concepts of the relations among God, man, and architecture that, since they have governed its creation, it consequently embodies.  It is no different with men: they, too, every last one of them, are cultural artifacts.

One has, then, a web of symbolic meaning that includes all the participants in a culture and the material of that culture as well.  The locus of culture is then located both within humanity and without and the impetus for culture change can originate from either.  It is a systemic view of culture, but with each aspect of it possessing a variable importance at different times. Geertz (1973: 408) likens the movement of a culture over time to the movement of an octopus with different aspects moving at different speeds, sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards. The evolution of culture is “if not wholly unpredictable, very largely so.”

Within such a schema one can have change in size and complexity, but not progress.  Geertz does use the word progress, but in a purely temporal sense.  In fact, culture serves no function in Geertz’s concept, only the means by which humanity attempts to make sense of its surroundings, thus abrogating any kind of intellectual or moral progress.  The development of technology is, more or less, irrelevant, and material culture is investigated only for its embodied symbolic meaning.

Geertz (ibid: 89) does use the word, however, writing, “The term ‘culture’ has by now acquired a certain aura of ill-repute… because of the multiplicity of its referents and the studied vagueness with which it has all too often been invoked.”  Since the 164 definitions of Kroeber and Kluckhohn, meanings for the word culture have multiplied tenfold.  Among anthropologists, it has become virtually a matter of personal interpretation.  “Culture” itself seems to have lost any single specific scientific meaning (as per Cafagna 1960).  Victor Turner avoids its use altogether (Bohannan and Glazer 1988: 503).  Postmodern writers assail the word for its part in the objectification of the other in a context of power, which “facilitates the construction of these others as simultaneously different and inferior” (Abu-Lughod 1993: 8-9, see also Appaduri 1988).  The word itself serves as nothing more than a distasteful instrument of Western cultural imperialism and is accordingly avoided.


The use of conceptual tools of thought
A few words need to be spent on the twinned concepts of evolution and progress.  Progress implies improvement.  Evolution is the process of change, usually, but not necessarily, from the simple to the complex.  As has been indicated in the past, the two concepts are not necessarily connected (see Stewart 1956: 70).  Even in biology, increasing complexity of organisms is an “incidental consequence” of evolutionary pressures (Gould 1996: 197-198). There is no directionality to evolution, cultural or biological.  The tendency of some technologies to improve with time has lent potency to this illusion of directionality.  Any theory on the general evolution of human culture must be free of overall notions of progress or implied directionality (see Barton and Clark 1997).  This is not to deny directionality to individual human cultures, some of whom work quite hard at achieving very specific goals. If our own culture did not believe that an ever-growing body of knowledge would fail to help it manage itself, what use would science be?  Science is necessarily progressive and every scientist, in his or her own way, contributes towards this progression. In this light, “progress” is a culturally relative value and has little to do with a search for general laws of human social evolution.

The purpose of this paper was not to clarify the concept of culture; it wasn’t even to create a taxonomy of definitions.  The goal of this paper was to show how the concept of culture has been employed in the creation of theories in anthropology, especially those relating to sociocultural evolution.  As a conceptual device, the word “culture” has not become more efficient, if anything it seems to have become less so.  The use of it in the scientific discourse uncomfortably resembles less the onward progression of Tylor’s firearms and more the cyclic fashions of Kroeber’s dresses.  But the term has fulfilled its role, to Tylor, White, Boas, or any other anthropologist who chooses to use it.  It has aided in the progress and evolution of anthropology itself and in anthropology’s own creation of knowledge.  This body of knowledge have proven useful to society at large, which has adopted key aspects and concepts.  One concept it has taken up, and out of anthropology’s control, is the concept of “Culture.”


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Review – A World of Ideas by Adriano Vasco

August 24, 2001 by Leave a Comment

It is difficult for a textbook/reader entitled A World of Ideas to do justice to its title and live up to its implications.  How many volumes, one may wonder, would such a reader need to consist to cover a “world of ideas”?  It is significant that Lee A. Jacobus did not entitle this book The World of Ideas and thus, implicitly, makes no claim at presenting the world’s ideas in an exhaustive fashion;  it is understood that the editor has included only the ideas he, for whatever reason, has deemed worthy of being contemplated in an academic setting.  Any editorial position is both unavoidable and problematic.  While the reader does present a wide range of ideas expressed in myriad texts, with subjects ranging from  law and government to faith and spirituality, it is in essence canonical in its approach:  One soon realizes that the “great ideas” in the book have predominantly been thought and put into text by the proverbial (and recently rather infamous) dead, white, patriarchal males.  The champions of Western thought and achievement, such as Freud, Jung, Darwin, Rousseau, Marx, Plato, or Macchiavelli, seem to make up the major part of the book and dominate the world view implicit in the readings.  Similarly, in his preface Jacobus discusses — of all texts he could have chosen — a selection from Macchiavelli’s The Prince in great detail, and even presents an annotated excerpt.  While this choice may be purely coincidental, it is representative of the reader’s overall approach.

It would be hyperbolic and distorting to say, however, that A World of Ideas merely perpetuates Western ethnocentric thinking.  In eight sections — respectively entitled “Government,” “Justice,” “Wealth,” “Mind,” “Nature,” “Culture,” “Faith,” and “Poetics” — Jacobus endeavors to present the student with a wide selection of different ideas and expose him/her to different cultures and distant eras.  In an attempt to integrate diverse academic disciplines and subjects, Jacobus also includes cross-curricular texts, such as Michio Kaku’s “The Theory of the Universe.”  In a laudable attempt to expand students’ minds, Jacobus offers selections from Buddhist and Hindu scriptures as well as  ”thoughts” from the Tao Te Ching. He nevertheless seems to succumb to the tendency to give preference to authors and thinkers from Western culture.  Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist featured in the reader,  comments on the fact that we can never truly know a different culture from the inside; ironically, A World of Ideas to a large extent perpetuates this notion.  In the same fashion, in the section entitled “Culture,” we find mostly texts from outsiders rather than by members of another culture; both Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, the former offering a Nietzschean approach to Zuni culture and the latter a gender analysis of Manus culture, have an essentially anthropological approach.  They are Westerners, and inevitably present the cultures that they have visited through a Western lens.  Even Alvar Nunes Cabeza de Vaca, featured in the same section, is an outsider, a shipwrecked Spaniard through whose eyes we witness his encounters with the natives.  Thus, the majority of authors in the section “Culture” are Western in their approach and are merely writing about other cultures.  One wonders why Jacobus did not include more texts by members of other cultures, such as, for example, Native American poetry, or texts by Chicano, African-American or South American authors.  While, on the surface, A World of Ideas seems to do justice to a multicultural curriculum, it does rely heavily on what the West regards as “important ideas.”

The very notion of “important ideas” is problematic because it assumes that there is such thing as an important idea versus a not-so-important idea.  Moreover, terming certain ideas “important” implies that the editor has the ability to discriminate between different ideas, judge them, and present an approved selection to the student.  On what premise does Jacobus comb through the ideas generated by humanity as a whole and, in a process not unlike alchemy, distill the the ideas he deems refined enough and worthy of presenting?  A closer analysis of the language he employs in his preface may give a clue to this basis of discrimination.  Jacobus writes, “Since its first edition, A World of Ideas has attracted an audience of teachers and students who value the ideas that affect the way we [my italics] see the world” (v).  He then proceeds to describe the collection in the reader as “. . .a representative sampling of important ideas examined by men and women who have shaped the way we [my italics] think today” (v).  The author seems unaware that his “we” is, essentially, Western culture, and thus reflective of his ethnocentricity.  Jacobus uses inclusive language, assuming that there is indeed a common ideological/cultural ground between him and the myriad students who will use his reader.  Given the multicultural nature of this country, however, such an assumption might be unsound.  Thus, ironically, the ideological assumptions underlying A World of Ideas are to a certain extent incongruous with Jacobus’ goal of generating critical, independent thinking.

A World of Ideas relies heavily, if not exclusively, on the potential of the presented ideas to generate what Jacobus calls “good writing.”  He states, “Each [selection] was chosen because it clarifies important ideas and can sustain discussion and stimulate good writing” (v).  Unfortunately, the author never really defines what he means by good writing, neither in his preface nor in the introductions to the particular sections.  While the lack of practical advice concerning writing per se is indeed a shortcoming of the text, Jacobus does stress that the text’s main focus is to stimulate critical reading and thinking.  The student is intended to become an active, questioning reader in his/her approaches to the presented selection.  The underlying assumption seems to be that the student will — whether consciously or unconsciously — imitate the prose model and improve not only as a thinker, but also as a writer.  Thus, practical writing advice is indeed kept to a minimum; even in his appendix, “An Introduction to Rhetoric,” Jacobus focuses on in-depth text analysis rather than offering hands-on advice for writing.  Either the student is already expected to have a certain writing level, or the teacher is supposed to cover the mechanical aspects of writing in class.

While A World of Ideas does not offer a great deal of practical advice for writing, it does include intelligent questions for critical reading and some suggestions for writing at the end of each selection.  Particularly interesting among these questions are the “connections,” which encourage the students to not only question the text and read critically, but also to evaluate a particular author’s ideas in light of the ideas of another author.  Moreover, a large portion of the questions for critical reading asks the student to relate the ideas encountered in the text to his/her own life and experience.  This, in turn, establishes a close experiential connection between the reader and the text.  Ideally, once the students realize that many of the ideas in the text relate to and reflect their own thoughts and experiences, they will be motivated to express their views as fully and clearly as they can in their writing.

While A World of Ideas displays some significant shortcomings, such as its predominant focus on “dead white males,” a certain ethnocentricity, and its lack of practical writing instruction, it nevertheless is an extremely valuable reader for a college level writing class.  A World of Ideas is useful in a writing course once the instructor has become aware of its inherent limitations.  The text’s most redeeming quality is its focus on getting the students to think as individuals, to closely analyze a text and discover the rhetorical techniques employed, as well as to respond to it intelligently.  Though the instructor would have to cover aspects of the writing process, such as audience, purpose, or form during class, A World of Ideas, within its boundaries and arbitrariness, is an excellent way to expose the students to a selection of sophisticated ideas in order to get them to read, think, and write critically.

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Making Meaning and Value for Edison’s Light and Power in the Human World by Charles Bazerman, UC Santa Barbara

August 10, 2001 by Leave a Comment

Incandescent light is more than a light bulb. It requires complex systems of related technologies—switches, circuit breakers, meters, and power lines; transformers, power stations, and generators.  It also requires multiple systems of human cooperation, action and meaning–power companies, government regulators, consumers, manufacturers of equipment, bill collectors, accountants, rate payers, electric sign designers and people reading by lamps into the night.  The material technological systems won’t go until people make them go–that is until people attribute meaning and value to the technology, frame actions that incorporate the technology, and communicate to maintain the operations of the technology.  With meaning and communication we are in the world of symbols. Electric light must be part of language to be part of our living rooms. And it must be part of many languages—journalistic, technical, corporate, financial, legal, judicial, governmental, and consumerist–maintaining its full place in each if it is stay in our lives. In the Edison papers and other archives one finds documents from all of these communicative domains.  These domains are among the most prominent and powerful in late nineteenth century–laws, finances, politics, journalism, technology, corporations.  Edison had to create presence, meaning and value for incandescent light and central power in each of these to build the social network that made his material technology possible.

Of all the early electrical inventors and manufacturers, Thomas Edison seemed particularly aware of the many meanings electrical light had to establish.  It was attention to the successful representations of the light in many different communities and networks of communication, as much as his technical accomplishments, that led to Edison having a dominating role in the early electrical industry. He had to create valued stable meanings within each communication realm in each social network that would grant incandescent light and central power the necessary status to be accepted, supported, approved of, employed, or otherwise actively a part of each system brought together over communication.

The first and most immediate representations are those of the laboratory, appearing in the notebooks, notes, and other jottings of Edison and his coworkers for their own use.  In the pages of the notebooks imaginative constructs of the inventive team come into being, based on prior material and literate experience. The notebooks also coordinate the thinking and work of the several people working with Edison.  And the pages also contain plans for constructing actual physical objects.  Notebook sketches serve as first drafts for the formalized representations that become filed with the patent office, and later the notebooks serve as evidence in patent hearings and courts.

But patents are worthless without the capital to develop the technology. The railroads and telegraph had transformed American industry and finance, changing typically small local investments personally managed, into distant financial stakes in large national corporations run by professional managers and built upon technology. Capital markets grew and changed in character, with industrial stocks being a new and risky component of the market during the 1870’s and 1880’s, a period of extreme speculation, heated up by telegraphic ticker technology, and driven by stock manipulators like Jay Gould, who orchestrated trust-building ventures.

It was into this new and overheated financial world that Edison had to insert electrical technology. At first to gain backing for research and development, and later for corporate development. To achieve capitalization, Edison light had to establish itself as the new potentially enormously profitable technology–the new main chance. As such it had to be news in the financial pages of the newspapers.

This new world of corporations and finance was one that Edison was already familiar with through his early career, which had already familiarized him with both the inner network of financiers behind the railroad and telegraphic empires as well as the role of the press and telegraphy.  As a result he was able to play both to maintain support. With the insiders he played on trust, stretching almost to the breaking point, and with the broader public he understood the importance of having the right stories appear at the right time and making himself a good interview subject.  He so valued having a good press presence that he was willing to pay for it, by giving some of his favorite reporters stock in Edison companies and during the crucial 1881 Paris International Exhibition of Electricity, bribing every one of the key writers and publishers.

And so it was in each domain of communication–whether organizing his growing companies or holding the public and financiers at bay during a year and a half when he nothing to show.  Whether trying to maintain credibility in a technical communication system that treated him with suspicion or protecting his control of the technology through a forest of patents which competitors were attempting to flatten in a series of court cases.

From a cultural studies perspective, particularly interesting is the work Edison and his colleagues had to do to bring domestic meaning and value to a technology that was first perceived as industrial. That work was saturated with issues of gender, class, and new urbanization, as is suggested by Edison and his colleagues bringing light into homes wrapped in a bouquet of flowers.   Early fixtures were ornate, illustrations of domestic scenes incorporating light were florid and elegant, and promises of domestic lighting were pervasively aesthetic. Even now, a trip to a local K-Mart suggests that this cultural formation endures.

The practical benefits of incandescent electric lighting for industry had early established commercial customers.  However incandescent lighting was not obviously compatible with or necessary for domestic life, which had developed patterns of hearth and lamp that would be disrupted by this ubiquitous technological sun.   Bathing the house in artificial light would require establishing an aesthetic which was in conformity with acceptable values for family life and ambitions.

This aesthetic of electric lighting was actively constructed by Edison companies and other members of the early incandescent industry in order to make electric light attractive to the domestic market.  This aesthetic spoke to aspirations of the changing, newly urbanized, and increasingly prosperous American family.  It spoke to a market highly inflected by gender and class perceptions and roles. And it helped give cultural shape to a changing family life, formerly gathered in shared production in the day and around the hearth at night–but soon to be dispersed in careers, shops, and leisure activities during day and night and when gathered home dispersed to separate corners and separate rooms.  Electric Lighting became attached to new family values of consumption, cultivation, and upward class affiliation.  As such it was intertwined with other aspects of late 19th century American life, such as advertising, life-style journalism, the department store, domestic furnishing, and urban residential architecture.

The 1883 Catalogue of. Bergmann & Co  makes visible how thoroughly early incandescent lighting was wrapped in florid ornamentation.  Even the plain electroliers and bracket fixtures presented on the first two pages configure the shades and lights as abstracted flowers with illuminated hubs projected forth, and the supporting tubing has the sinuous bend of vine and branch.  Starting with the third page of illustrations the floral motif becomes more concrete, as the shades become ribbed and fluted like morning glory petals, and two pages later wrought iron and pressed metal vine and flower decorations begin to bedeck the fixtures.  Over the next twenty pages the designs become increasingly ornamental, with floral and plant motifs occasionally mixed with neo-classical vase and column figures.  By page 24, a vase overflows with glass flowers, with incandescent stamens. Majestically ornate chandeliers follow all with floral designs–some formal, but some with the random abundance of an English Garden.  A few pages later, the glass shades described as “colored glass flowers” and “etched globes” all embody floral designs.

Sigmund Bergmann, a long time employee and then supplier for Edison, was one of the earliest and most influential manufacturers of fixtures.  The Electrical World of December 22 1883 featured Bergmann & Company as “A Representative American Electrical Manufactory.”  While much of the article’s text was devoted to a mechanical description of their products, power system, and manufacturing processes, a large illustration and nine more figures of equipment, almost all of floral design lighting fixtures, focused on the aesthetics of lighting.  Most of these illustrations were taken directly from the company catalogue.

In the large illustration of the company’s showroom, the most visible clients are two couples.  In the center is what appears to be a husband talking to his wife, probably about the fixtures they are viewing, and another husband is pointing out a fixture with his cane to his wife.  The role of appealing to women becomes extremely important in domestic lighting, as appears nowhere else in the early story of incandescent enterprises, which takes place very much in a man’s world.

Eventually consumption decisions for lighting fixtures were to become predominantly the woman homemaker’s choice, being subsumed entirely into the role of middle class women as ornaments of fashion and creators of domestic elegance.  However, during the early days of incandescent lighting the consumption decision involved major utility choice and minor construction. Since the earliest central stations were in business and industrial districts, domestic electric lighting involved setting up a small isolated plant, with motor and generator.  The decision to include wiring in new apartments was a major architectural construction decision, with an eye towards marketing.  All of these, were in the world of the times, clearly men’s decisions made in the man’s world.  Yet all these consumption decisions needed to be made, as the men were aware with the consent and approval of women who were given aesthetic and life-style charge of the domestic space.  Handing over aesthetic control to women for the production of an elegant home and elegant accouterments to life were precisely within the ambitions of the male heads of middle and upper class urban households.  They wanted elegant and leisured wives presiding over elegant refuges from the world of commerce.

This male construction of the female explains the curious allocation of content in this and other articles about the aesthetics of lighting appearing in the male industrial journal Electrical World.  Most of the article on the Bergmann and Co as “A Representative American Electrical Manufacturer” was technical, describing the construction of the product, the factory floor, and the assembly process.  While aesthetics are mentioned several times mentioned in passing as a business necessity, the actual discussion of the aesthetics of the fixtures, is brief and grandiose:

Polished metals, brilliant lacquers, outlining the framework of each fixture, glass globes, pendants, and ornaments of every conceivable shape and every possible color, and, withal brilliant flowers, all combined to surpass the rich munificence of the grandest pageantry and to remind us of a  peep at fairy land. (276) Dec 22, 1883

Then the article returns to the technical description.  Nonetheless, this article is richly illustrated with the ornamental fixtures and of men accompanying women at the store display.  Men may not be interested or able to talk aesthetics, but they can recognize pictures and associate it with women.  They might even bring illustrations home to share with the family, as in the nearly wordless Bergmann catalogue.

Just a month earlier, in the November 24th issue, the connection between flowers, lighting and female aesthetics is made explicitly in a brief note, unusually poetic in this industrial journal:

POETRY OF THE ELECTRIC LIGHT.  A Lady, writing to a Western journal of the recent exposition at Louisville, gives the following glowing description of the scene at night: “… All through the park the Brush lights glow like great animated lilies in the air. As the water-lily sways on the stream and is hidden sometimes by the swelling waves, so the current of air seems to bend and break over this great bed of electric flowers.” (210)

A month before that, the aesthetic reasoning behind the design of lighting fixtures was made even more explicit in an October 13, 1883 interview with Edgar Johnson, Vice president of Edison Electric Light Co.

At first the desire was to attract the popular fancy by means of elaborate and ornate designs.  There, you see, is a specimen from our European exhibition, a flower-pot overgrown with a wilderness of foliage all done in polished brass.  The lights spring from among leaves like flowers from their stems.  While such forms were well enough for an occasional public exhibition, they were found to be unsuited to any other purpose.  Men of wealth who wished to have the electric light in their houses wanted the supports to unite elegance and simplicity.  The highly ornate plans of the English workers in brass had to be thrown aside.  But the idea of treating the glowing bulb as the stamen, which was the first to occur to us, has, however, been retained through all the changes that were made to meet the requirements of popular taste.  It was Mrs. Edison who suggested these floral forms as the best adapted to our purpose.

This statement reveals several underlying cultural themes to which the floral design appealed. Domestic lighting was to appeal to the man of wealth.  Lights were clearly marketed as an aspect of the affluent life.  And at this point it was treated as a male decision.  But the affluent male was not simply practical–he wanted elegance with his simplicity.  But elegance was portrayed as provided by the feminine.  This is the one time that Mrs. Edison (Mary, his first wife, who was to die of illness the next summer) is ever mentioned in any of the Edison business stories.  The floral design is presented as the woman’s touch.  While we may not want to make too much of the sexual imagery of the stamen among the petals, it is certainly no stretch to see the female floral as softening the harshness of the light technology when it is brought into the domestic nest, where the true beauty of the light may literally flower.  After all Johnson in the same interview notes “Our aesthetic tendency did not receive much encouragement in the demand for electric lights in the factories. Utility and simplicity was the rule of those places…. But the beauties of the light itself are not quickly exhausted….” There is one final theme underlying this discussion, that of European taste, aesthetics and craftsmanship. This theme of America matching European standards of taste framed the article two months later about Bergmann and Company. That article begins:

In our leading article of September 8 ult., in which we studied the relations of “The Incandescent Light and Decorative Art,” as exemplified at the Munich Electrical Exposition, we promised to show to our readers that American products in this line are quite the equal to those of European art. To enable us to fulfill our promise, we paid a visit some time ago to the establishment of Messrs. Bergmann & Co….

That September 8 article makes the explicit link between aesthetics and the domestic market for lighting.  It opens:

It was not enough for the incandescent light to have achieved the distinction of being practical.  In order to supersede its rival and obtain a foothold in public buildings or private residences, it was obliged to accommodate itself to the requirements of decorative art.”

The article describes the Munich exhibition moving beyond the demonstrating the practicality of incandescent lighting to portraying the ornamental side. Munich is said to be a center of art, “the Florence of Germany” with great museums to inspire artisans. The article ends

It must not be believed, however, that because we lack the advantages which Europe possesses in having able artists and skilled artisans in large numbers, we are unable to use the incandescent light to good advantage for producing tasty and brilliant effects.

This article thus had begun a four-month period, where every month an article highlighted the aesthetics of incandescent lighting.

Even earlier Edison and the electrical world had shown some concern for the aesthetics of lighting, trying to make a link between European art, incandescent lighting, and an elegant affluent light.  At the 1881 Paris exhibition, Edison’s representatives had gone to some expense to have fixtures produced by top craftsmen in order to produce an aesthetic effect, and had vied to light art galleries and opera houses.  Illustrations in the Electrical World, often originally from La Lumiere Electrique, regularly placed incandescent light within artistic settings. These illustrations have something of the flavor of the latest Paris fashions for the home–carrying with them the model of civilized affluent modern living. 

One widely reproduced illustration encapsulates the sense of European Elegance tied to a new model of a family.  Illustrated is the father happily witnessing the elegance prosperity of his dependents, engaged in varied domestic activities made possible by lighting. The mother is reading and watching a child.  The older daughter is playing the piano for a suitor.  Objects of taste and comfort provide for an affluent life while displaying to others the attainment of class. Incandescent light was now made part of that picture.

The expansion of urban salaried middle class removed the man from the family and the home.  That is, men went to work and made money.  The value of this work was less in the identity formed within the community or the enterprise one was part of, as that it provided the means to lead an affluent life and assured a class position. The home became the site for enjoyment of the affluence and leisure, particularly through the consumption of the new products and aesthetic objects increasingly available.  Moreover, the main way to display the class position, thereby reflexively engendering the trust that one indeed belonged in the positions of trust, was through the visible life style of the family the man could support through his earnings.

It was hardly an accident that the Aesthetic movement in the United States arose at this cultural moment with particular emphasis on the decorative arts.  This movement, centered in New York as both the cultural and economic center of the country, and helped distinguish the newly affluent urban elite from the masses of urban poor.  Further it permitted the new American elites to claim their place alongside the longer-standing European elites. Lighting fixtures were among the domestic furnishings that were the object of aesthetic attention, and arguably the most famous products of the movement in the form of Tiffany lamps that were first produced in 1899. Louis Tiffany, however, worked with Edison on electric lighting as early as 1885. Cincinnati, one of the secondary centers of the American Aesthetic movement, not coincidentally, was the site an ornate display of floral lighting at the centenary celebration of 1888. 

As Alan Trachtenberg in The Incorporation of America, and Gunther Barth inCity People have pointed out, the city became a place of differentiated locales as well as culture.  It became important to mark out one’s domestic space as one of those places of elegance and culture, lest it be assimilated into one of the less desirable locales that the city was proliferating, such as the tenement.   The department store was another of those differentiated locales of elite urban feminized domestic consumerism. Like the Aesthetic movement it was a product of the 1870’s and 1880’s.  The same journals that set the tone for the aesthetic movement and developments in lighting, such as Scribner’s also carried news of department stores.  These same department stores were among the leaders in interior electric lighting, with Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia installing arc lighting in 1878 and switching to incandescent lighting at its early availability. Other department stores early illuminated by Edison light included Arnold Constable and Sterns in New York, Marshall field in Chicago, and Jordan Marsh in Boston.

Thorstein Veblen in the Theory of the Leisure Class examined just this emergent urban consumer culture.  In particular, he pointed out how the home became the site of conspicuous leisure and the women became the ornamental property assigned the task of displaying the conspicuous leisure in themselves and in the domestic sphere. The men of course were too busy within the world of work to themselves expend the leisure nor to carry out the leisured occupation of consuming conspicuously. Thus the elegant woman, as the ultimate property and extension of the prosperous male, became the vehicle of affluence, leisure and distinction. Moreover, as Veblen points out, it is particularly important to display that one is engaged in leisured, non-industrial activities when one is out of public sight, so that the leisured, elegant home becomes a potent class symbol.

Thus it was very useful to attach incandescent lighting to the most desirable consuming lifestyle. Once an item of consumption became valued by a society’s most prestigious members, it would also become a site of emulation for the aspiring classes.  J.P. Morgan’s installation of an isolated plant at the renovation of his home at 219 Madison Avenue in 1882 was well publicized. After some early problems, including a fire which ruined new wall paper, it inspired several other members of his class, D. O. Mills and Whitelaw Reid to have their houses wired.  He then became instrumental in getting a central station uptown to service his and the other mansions.  These were the very homes in which the aesthetic movement thrived. Further, in 1887, the Electrical World ran a feature story about the elegant light installation at the home of Edgar Johnson, the same Edison vice-president who originally engineered the aesthetics of incandescence. Some of the fixtures in Johnson’s home were in fact designed by Tiffany:

The main hallway is finished in quartered oak.  The ceiling is composed of eight groined arches, each capped with a miniature sun made by Tiffany & Co.  Behind these are Edison lamps, which, reflecting through the different thicknesses of glass, give the well-known outline of the man in the sun.

In conjunction with a few very high prestige installations which created the association between electric lighting and affluent elegance, hotels and apartment houses helped establish the domestic value of incandescent lighting.  Hotels and apartments provided the trappings of affluent life to those transient in the city or those who could not quite afford the expense of their own mansions, but who still aspired to the life of urban affluence.  In New York the publicized installations as of 1885 included the most prominent apartments built in the period: the Dakota, the Osborne, the Barrington, Franke apartments and the Steinhard apartments.  Hotels that were early sites included the Buckingham, the Murray Hill, the two Everett Hotels, and the New York Athletic Club.   An entire 28 page Bulletin for Agents of the Isolated System, dated July 25, 1885 was devoted to hotel and apartment installations.  It pointed out that “the popularity of a hotel is dependent, not only on the elegance of its appointments… but also on the appearance of brilliancy it portrays.”  Many of the installations are illustrated and described, including an extensive description of the newest and highest prestige apartment house in New York, the Dakota, that (with the surrounding private houses) was being wired for ten thousand lights, by far the largest residential installation of the time.

Electric lighting thus early became one of those elegant appointments that made it appear that apartment living could be stylish, appropriate to those of the aspiring classes. Indeed a 1913 commemorative volume produced by the New York Edison company, Thirty Years of New York, 1882-1912, devoted an entire chapter to the association between central light and power and the growth of apartment living in New York City.

While there had been a long history of flats in European cities, apartment life did not come to American cities until mid-nineteenth century and did not expand rapidly until the closing decades of the century, just when electric lighting became available.   While incandescent lighting made more possible the kind of tenement living New York became notorious for, the very presence of electrically illuminated tenements made it all the more important to distinguish the use of incandescent lighting in middle-class homes and apartments as a form of elegance through ornate fixtures. Ornate fixtures also allowed working class families to express their upwardly mobile ambitions. Lighting could then be perceived as one of the rewards of urban strife, producing upper class elegance rather than the artificial, machine conditions of the bare bulb.

Given the traditional associations of flowers with the leisured garden, feminine beauty, cultured elegance, and domestic charm, it may seem only natural that electric lighting would take on floral hues when entering the home.  Yet when we look into the cultural moment of Urban America in the 1880’s with its special drive to create the appearances of beauty, leisure, elegance, culture, and charm as marks of distinction within the new social and economic order and to create a place distinguished from the urban technological financial strife, we can understand why there was such a strong and immediate marriage between the technological marvel and the aesthetic of the cultivated nature. We can see why Johnson, Bergmann, and others of the Edison world were so attracted to flowers and saw that flowers were the way to make the light attractive, meaningful, and valued in the home.

As in all the other discursive domains in which Edison had to establish the light, appropriate representations had to be made of the electric light to establish Light’s presence, meaning and valuable.  The light had to be possible.  It had to be Edison’s.  It had to be patentable.  It had to be patented.  It had to be economic.  It had to be workable. It had to be profitable. It had to produce dividends.  It had to be a good investment and a reasonable management task for  participant investors. It had to be compatible with comfortable, pleasant living.  Representations of light had to turn on a lot of mental switches.

None of these representations, although each made in differing discourse arenas with different generic and rhetorical means, is however isolated from the others. Each new status relies on the previous ones and they all evolve in response to each other. Legal representations in the patent system influence financial, corporate, production, and consumer representations.  Even the meaning, value, and application of the patents is sensitive to changing finances, corporate arrangements, production, and consumer interests.  Most fundamentally they all rely and interact with the emerging material technology, which must be produced to warrant the various projections and claims. But even that material production must be displayed in persuasive ways so as to symbolize its own success. Technological accomplishments are not only heterogeneous technical achievements, they are heterogeneous rhetorical achievements.

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Using ‘Jeopardy’ in Classroom Instruction by Jennifer Young

August 10, 2001 by Leave a Comment

I would like to share with my fellow writing instructors a game I created for my first semester of teaching RWS 100. The game was inspired by the recent game show craze on television and is a mix of “Jeopardy,” the Win Ben Stein’s Money show on Comedy Central, and “Family Feud.” Its purpose is to test the students’ knowledge on pertinent information in the class.

In most television game shows, the object is usually for an individual to win and pocket the profits. However, in a classroom setting this would obviously grow tiresome, so the students must work together as a team. In addition, the element of speed, being the first to hit the buzzer, must be eliminated, since it is often too difficult to monitor whose hand was raised first, and the students usually become rowdy and disruptive in this setting. Each team is instead assigned a question, and if one team fails at providing the correct answer, the question is then passed to the next team. I do not require the answer to be in the form of question and I allow no more than one minute for the teams to give the correct answer.

For my MWF 50-minute class, I separate my students into two teams. The groups are quite large this way, but in such a short amount of time it is difficult to give three teams fair opportunity at answering questions. Also, I have found that my students work together well, combining knowledge to come up with an answer. If one student is the odd person out, he or she becomes my scorekeeper. No notes are allowed, though I do choose a scribe from each team to use a piece of paper and a pen/pencil to write down information.

I put different categories on the board, beginning with low points like 100, then move on to higher points when the easier questions have been answered. My categories, which were created from my course content and texts, include: My Syllabus, Miscellaneous Info You Should Know (such as resources at the Love library, Quandahl’s “How to do Things with Texts,” opening and concluding paragraph techniques, etc.), MLA Format, Vocabulary, Keys for Writers, Literacies, and the different essays I assigned them to read. I type out the questions for myself and check off the ones the teams answer.

If the teams are equally matched late in the game, I add in a Daily Double question, and at the end of the game I ask a Final Jeopardy question. I give my students candy as a prize, but coming up with a point system would be effective.

I have scheduled this game twice in the semester on a day when students have completed their final revisions for an essay and want something fun to do. The response has been positive and I plan to use the game again next semester. If anyone would like to have a copy of sample questions from my game, let me know. My e-mail address is jenyoung@aznet.net.

RWS 100 Pseudo-“Jeopardy” Game

Players
2 teams (students)
1 scorekeeper if odd man out
1 judge (teacher)
1 rep. from each team as scribe

Categories
My Syllabus
Miscellaneous Info You Should Know
MLA Format
Keys for Writers
Vocabulary
Margaret Atwood and “An End to Audience?”
Stuart Ewen and “Chosen People”
Cornel West and Wynton Marsalis’ “Jazz, Hope, and Democracy”
Alice Walker and “Everyday Use”

Points
100, 200, 500, 1000, Daily Double, Final Jeopardy

Directions
–Put categories and points on board (start with low points, then move on to high points)
–Cross out points when all questions in that level are answered
–No need to put answers in form of question
–Team chooses point level and category and answers question together–if wrong, other team can answer back and forth (no rush to be first)
–Daily Double if tie, late in game
–Final Jeopardy: answer one question from each category on paper
–No notes allowed, though scribes may use paper and pen to write info down

My Syllabus

100

1. Where is my office located? (Storm Hall 240)
2. What are my office hours? (11-11:50 MWF)
3. Name the two required texts for this course. (Keys for Writers and Literacies)
4. What two texts must be brought to class every day? (Literacies and dictionary)
5. What two required texts may be brought to class occasionally but are primarily for home use? (Keys for Writers and thesaurus)
6. What is my system of grading? (contract)
7. Late papers are accepted. True or false? (false)
8. How many essays are required in this course? (4)
9. Failure to turn in work on time will not lower my grade. True or false? (false)
10. Chronic absences and tardiness will put my final grade in jeopardy since class discussions, group work, and in-class assignments cannot be made up. True or false? (true)

200
1. What type and size font is required for all papers? (12, Times New Roman)
2. All papers for this class should be double-spaced, as should the heading, and the Works Cited page. True or false? (true)
3. What size margins (in inches) are required for all papers? (one inch)

500
1. How many drafts must be turned in with final copies of essays? (all drafts)
2. Where is the Drop-In Tutor office located? (Storm Hall 240)

1000
1. What is plagiarism and what are its consequences? (using another person’s work or ideas without giving proper credit, could receive an F for course and be expelled)
2. Define rhetoric. (art or study of using language effectively and persuasively; style of speaking or writing; language that is pretentious or insincere)

Daily Double

Define literacies. (ability to read and write, how we learn to read and write)

Miscellaneous Info You Should Know

100

1. Miss Young’s course calendar is subject to change. True or false? (true)
2. Miss Young will provide a stapler for me to staple my papers with. True or false? (false)
3. Handwritten papers are accepted. True or false. (false)
4. What is the name of the SDSU library? (Malcolm A. Love)

200
1. Where is the reference desk of the library located? (1st floor, not basement, to L of computers)

2. Where are the periodicals (journals, magazines, newspapers) located in the library? (1st floor, not basement, throughout hallway and past elevators)

3. Name two suggestions from Ellen Quandahl’s “How to do Things with Texts.” (study and highlight cohesion, notice language that shows who audience for piece is and situation in which piece was written, map movement of essay, describe opening move of piece of writing, translate paragraph into own words, mark writers’ references to sources, notice difference between reporting and interpreting info, ask questions, extend author’s argument by further illustrating it, select one paragraph and extend it by providing own examples, circle subject or topic of each independent clause in paragraph, circle verb of each independent clause in paragraph, follow or map significant repetitions or particular thread in piece of writing, consider how piece of writing might provide vocabulary for analyzing some other text or info or experience)

4. Name two out of the six questions required of each essay. (what is question at issue, to what problem does piece respond, what question is text answer to, what questions does it silence, what am I being asked to believe, consider, investigate, or do, which sentences provide partial answers, which provide reasons, what, for you, is most important sentence, what is most interesting/arresting/noteworthy word in sentence, why, why is this sentence significant to you)

500
1. Name one introductory paragraph technique. (provide background info, explain significance topic has for writer or reader, provide related anecdote, ask question that will be answered, state problem that will be solved, use quote, provide meaningful fact, give example, define important term or concept, contradiction (begin by disagreeing with commonly held belief or idea)

2. Name on concluding paragraph technique. (restate or summarize thesis in new way, introduce new idea that is related to thesis–echo anecdote or quotation used in intro, discuss personal experience that led to topic–, give thesis or main points larger application–change time or place, future expectations, arouse reader’s interest/call to action, give info for future investigation–, mention any conclusion or discovery that can be drawn from your theme, try to solve or suggest solutions to problem raised, pose questions for reader to ponder, avoid apologizing or hedging/maintain conviction)

3. Name one “Invitation to Read and Write.” (reading actively, what does this have to do with my life, taking a second look at the reading, getting started on an essay, what is the assignment really asking, integrating quotations with interpretation, what do the teacher’s comments mean, asking your own questions, organizing or making relations clear, responding to a peer’s draft)

4. What is the name of the SDSU library’s basic search program? (the PAC)

Daily Double

Name the 3 reference librarians that Miss Young recommends. (Markel, Mark, and Phil)

How many copies of your paper should you bring for peer critique?

MLA Format

100

1. When doing a basic book citation, after starting with the author’s last name, then first name, then a period, then the title of the book, then a period, what piece of information should come next? (place where book was published)

2. When citing page numbers of a source within a paper, you should put the name of the author in parentheses, followed by the letter p, then a period, then the page number. True or false? (false, author‘s name and page number with no comma or p.)

3. A long quote should be set aside 1 tab in from the left and right margin. True or false? (false, 2 tabs in)

4. How many tabs in from the margin should a long quote be set aside? (2 tabs)

5. A quote that is more than how many lines should be set aside from the left margin? (more than 3 lines)

6. When interrupting a quote, what should be typed in between the first part and the next part of the quote? (ellipses or dot, dot, dot)

200

1. When an author’s name has already been referred to in a sentence, it is still necessary to put his or her name in a parenthetical citation following the sentence. True or false? (false)

2. When paraphrasing an author’s words, it is not necessary to cite his or her name in parentheses. True or false? (false, any idea that is not your own must be cited or it is plagiarism)

3. True or false: Every line but the first line of entries in the Works Cited page is 1 tab in. (true)

500

1. What does MLA stand for? (Modern Language Association)

2. When the same page number is being cited throughout a paragraph, where should the page number appear in that paragraph? (after the last sentence in the paragraph that is from that page number)

3. When citing a three-digit page number in the Works Cited page, what happens to the numbers after the hyphen if they are in that same three-digit number (for example, citing pages 300 to 323)? (drop first digit after hyphen)

Daily Double

Cite the following essay in an anthology, using quotes, underlining, proper punctuation, proper order, any tabs:

Jazz, Hope, and Democracy by Cornel West and Wynton Marsalis on pp. 726-744 of the 2nd edition of Literacies, edited by Terence Brunk and other editors, published in 2000 in New York.

(West, Cornel, and Wynton Marsalis. “Jazz, Hope, and Democracy.” Literacies 2nd ed. Ed.

Terence Brunk et al. New York: 2000, 726-44.

Keys for Writers

100

1. What is a thesis? (the author’s main idea, point he/she is proving in an essay)

2. Name two brainstorming techniques for essay writing (outlining, listing, clustering, freewriting).

3. Spell-check is all the proofreading necessary for a paper. True or false? (false)

4. A thesis should not state a fact but prove something. True or false? (true)

5. Explain the difference between loose and lose.

6. Explain the difference between there and their.

7. What are 3 things that students often mistake for a thesis. Hint: overhead info (title, announcement, statement of fact)

200

1. Name three titles that get quotations put around them in an essay. (short stories, short poems, articles, chapters, essays, songs, TV shows)

2. Name three titles that get underlined in an essay. (movies, books, CD titles, magazines, journals, newspapers, long poems, plays, musicals, ships)

3. When quoting, it is not necessary to quote the author’s exact words or put words in italics just because the author did. True or false? (false)

4. Periods and commas following quotations go inside quotation marks in American writing. True or false. (true)

5. Exclamation points and question marks go inside quotation marks if what is quoted is either an exclamation or a question; if not, they go outside the quotation marks. True or false? For example, Sandra asked, “Where is the Aztec Center?” Did the invitation say, “R.S.V.P.”? The instructor barked, “Clean your rifle, soldier! Don’t ever say, “I think I’ll just stay in bed today”! (true)

6. When paraphrasing, it is not necessary to cite page numbers or the author’s name. (false)

500

1. Name three things that should be avoided when writing an academic essay, besides errors (slang, jargon, cliches, generalizations, hasty conclusions with inadequate support, non sequitur, causal fallacy, ad hominem attack, circular reasoning, false dichotomy or false dilemma).

2. What is a comma splice and how can it usually be corrected? (putting a comma between 2 independent clauses, use semi-colon or period or join sentences by adding conjunction)

3. Name the problem with the following sentence and tell how to correct it:

When one is going to shop at the mall, she should always bring two credits cards so he can pay sales associates and you should always make a stop at Mrs. Fields so they can get a sugar fix. (pronoun usage, be consistent)

5. What is a sentence fragment and how can it usually be corrected? (incomplete sentence, join to previous or following sentence with conjunction)

6. What is wrong with the following sentence? “Everyone likes music.” (avoid absolutes)

7. What is wrong with the following sentence? “We should all just get along and exercise our democratic rights so that the world would be a better place.” (avoid preaching and ‘we‘)

8. What is wrong with the following sentence? “Like they say, money talks and bullshit walks, and dreams really do come true.” (avoid cliches, tired expressions)

9. What is wrong with the following sentence? “When you are trying to talk to people, they should listen to you because that’s what democracy is all about.” (avoid ‘you,’ preaching, and contractions).

10. What is wrong with the following sentence? Since the beginning of time, man has developed and so has society. (avoid generalizations, use concrete language)

11. What is wrong with the following sentence? “The conversation ‘Jazz, Hope, and Democracy’ is concerned with jazz, hope, and democracy.” (avoid stating the obvious, repetition, wordiness)

12. What is wrong with the following sentence? “The middle class can’t compete with the upper class because they don‘t have enough money.” (avoid contractions)

13. What is wrong with the following sentence and how could you fix it? Ewen equates democracy with consumption, he also says the middle class is experiencing an identity crisis. (comma splice, add conjunction, use period or semi-colon)

14. What is wrong with the following sentence and how could you fix it? West and Marsalis negotiate their differences. Because they have a mutual respect for each other (fragment, join to previous sentence)

15. What is wrong with the following sentence? West and Marsalis say one must have a mutual respect for another person. Just like my father. (fragment, incomplete idea, join sentence and complete idea)

16. Name two ways you can integrate a quote. (use colon, say ‘As Ewen states,’ etc.)

17. What is wrong with the following sentence? We went to the movies and bought popcorn, eat Raisinettes, and are drinking soda. (parallelism, keep verbs parallel)

Daily Double

Name 5 linking words or phrases used for comparison (similarly, similar, just as, likewise, continuing with this idea, like, complements, adds to, etc.)

Name 5 words or phrases used for contrast (in contrast, however, but, yet, dissimilar, unlike, complicates, different, on the other hand, etc.)

Vocabulary Words

1. Atwood: Define 2 out of 5: oblique (indirect or evasive), evocation (summons, calling, elicitation), Philistine (member of ancient people in Palestine, one who is indifferent or antagonistic to artistic and cultural values, Boorish or uncultured), quiescent (still or dormant, inactive), solopsism.

2. Ewen: Define 3 out of 6: accoutrements (outfit and equipment for military duty), laudatory (expressing or conferring praise), parvenu(s) (person who has suddenly risen to higher social and economic class and has not yet gained acceptance by others in that class), sumptuous (of size or splendor suggesting great expense, lavish), renumeration, vicissitudes (sudden or unexpected change or shift).

3. West and Marsalis: Define 5 out of 10: dissonance (disagreement, inconsistency between beliefs one holds or between one’s actions and one’s beliefs; combo of harsh sounds that creates tension; agreement in sounds), consonance (harmony or agreement among components, in sounds; correspondence or recurrence of sounds esp. in words, spec. recurrence or repetition of consonants esp. at end of stressed syllables w/o similar correspondence of vowels), Creole (person of European descent born especially in West Indies or Spanish America, mixed French or Spanish and black descent), vitriol (criticism, bitterness), codify (to arrange or categorize), impetus (impulse, driving force), amalgamation (combination, blend, unison), dichotomies (division into two usually contradictory parts or opinions), aesthetic (of or concerning appreciation of beauty, good taste, appearance), perennial (everlasting)

4. Walker: Define 5 out of 10: organdy (type of fabric; stiff, sheer material); tottering (unsteady or unstable); earnest (serious or somber in behavior); furtive (stealthily or sneaky in movement and action; sly; elusive); ream (to squeeze or force out, to say or shout); doctrines (texts, statements of beliefs, usually thought of as ancient; teachings); dasher (part of a device that churns butter); clabber (curdled sour milk); homely (plain or unattractive); collards (green, leafy vegetables; stalked, smooth kale)

5. Walker: Define 5 out of 10: chitlins (small intestines of pigs, especially when cooked as eaten as food); alcove (arched opening to a room); porthole (opening with a cover or closure, especially in the side of a ship or aircraft); furtive (doing something clandestinely); lye (strong alkaline liquor, rich in potassium carbonate, leached from wood ashes and used especially in making soap and for washing); recompose (to restore to composure); whittle (to cut or carve off small shavings from wood with a knife); rifling (to steal and carry away); sidle (to cause to move or turn sideways); churn (container in which milk and cream is stirred in)

Margaret Atwood and “An End to Audience?”

100

1. What is Atwood’s thesis or central message? (Literature and authorship, as we know it, are in serious danger of becoming extinct)

2. Who is Margaret Atwood and where is she from? (storyteller, writer, novelist, poet, critic from Canada)

3. “An End to Audience?” was originally an essay from a magazine article Atwood wrote. True or false? (false, speech and in book)

4. How does Atwood’s speech begin? (why she’s there, what type of story she should tell)

5. How does her speech end? (call to action from audience, readers, us)

6. What type of class did Atwood observe and comment on? (creative writing, summer writing)

7. What did Atwood compare the class’s tone to? (Quaker prayer meeting)

200

1. Fill in the blank: “Blank and blank are Siamese twins. Kill one and you run the risk of killing the other. Try to separate them, and you may simply have two dead half-people.” (writer and audience)

2. Fill in the blank: “In any totalitarian takeover, whether from the left or the right, blank, blank, and blank are the first to be suppressed.” (writers, singers, journalists)

3. Fill in the blank: “A country or community which does not take blank blank blank will lose it.” (serious literature seriously)

4. Fill in the blank: “I will leave such questions with blank, since blank are, after all, the audience.”

(you, you)

5. Fill in the blank: “It could well be argued that the advent of the printed word coincided with the advent of blank as we know it; that the book is the only form that allows the reader not only to participate but to review, to re-view what’s being presented.” (democracy)

6. Fill in the blank: “They will stop writing for readers blank blank and write only for readers blank blank, cosy members of an in-group composed largely of other writers and split into factions or ‘schools’ depending on who your friends are and whether you spell I with a capital I or a small one.”

500

1. What was the prompt for Essay #1? (Early in her article, M.A. says, “my central…extinct” (13). In making this claim, what problems is Atwood responding to, how does she justify her claims, how does the concept of audience factor into her reasoning, and what implications does she suggest her ideas have for democracy?)

2. Name two allusions to authors or works in “An End to Audience?” (Joyce, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)

3. Name 3 problems Atwood sees with writing (writing not viewed as honorable profession but as selfish self-expression, philosophy of creative writing classes, suppression, split literary world, threat of blockbusters and big business, not taking serious lit. seriously)

Daily Double

Name two forms of suppression Atwood mentions. (yanking books out of schools and libraries—religious objections to sexual activity, semi-political—court cases)

Stuart Ewen and “Chosen People”

100

1. Who is Stuart Ewen? (writer on economics, American cultural historian)

2. How does Ewen frame his essay, how does it begin and end? (with quote and familiar image of junk mail and commercial)

3. According to Ewen, what is the American Dream? (we all have chance to be someone, to stand out, to be rich and famous)

4. What is pictured in Ewen’s 19th century middle class identity kit? (pressed cut glass bric-a-brac)

200

1. Name the opening quote. (“It’s not what you own, it’s what people think you own.”)

2. Name 2 search engines that Jeanne and Christina recommend for finding articles on economics. (JSTOR, EBSCO)

3. Fill in the blank: “This highly individuated notion of personal distinction–marked by the compulsory blank of images–stands at the heart of the “blank blank.” (consumption, “American Dream”)

4. Fill in the blank: “To a certain extent, this continuous offer of personal distinction may indicate an epic blank of blank that lurks within the inner lives of many Americans. Nonetheless, the promise is also an essential part of the way of life that is anxiously pursued by people who are now, or wish to become, part of the great American ‘middle class.’” (crisis, identity)

5. Fill in the blank: “Out of these two conflicting ways of seeing and experiencing the new industrial reality, there emerged two distinct ways of apprehending the very question of blank and blank. (status and class)

6. Fill in the blank: “As they frenetically pursue this semiotic world of objects, they perform a role written for them, by Ira Steward, more than blank blank blank blank.” (one hundred years before)

500

1. What is Ewen’s thesis? (At the heart of the American Dream and middle class identity is image and personal distinction, achieved through consumption of material goods. According to the Dream, all people have a fair shot at status and recognition, which reinforces the idea of democracy. However, with this promise of wealth and importance often comes an identity crisis, characterized by emptiness, loneliness, anxiety, and insecurity.)

2. What is the prompt for essay #2? (How do your two articles add to or complicate Ewen’s argument: do they stress the importance of consumption and its role in democracy, do they contribute to ideas about the commodity self in America, do they suggest that industrial culture improves or degrades people’s sense of individuality or personhood, how do they amplify what you learned from Ewen?)

3. Name 3 selves Ewen mentions. (commodity, inner, outer)

4. Name 3 time periods Ewen refers to. (1830s, 1870s, 1950s, 1980s)

Daily Double

Name the 2 conflicting ways to see and experience the new industrial reality. (equating democracy with consumption, finding identity in acquiring mass-produced objects, or losing individuality and personhood when laboring in factories)

Cornel West and Wynton Marsalis and “Jazz, Hope, and Democracy”

100

1. Who are West and Marsalis? (West is an African-American educator, lecturer, and author at Harvard and Marsalis is an African-American jazz musician and classical composer)

2. Describe blues and jazz (blues is musical 12-bar form, jazz is free-form musical form)

3. Fill in the blank: “BLANK is freedom.” (jazz)

4. What is “soul-wrestling,” according to West? (having enough courage to wrestle with yourself in the midst of doubt, mystery, and uncertainty without any irritable reaching after reason or fact; remaking yourself, reinventing yourself, finding your voice)

5. Name the 2 great jazz musicians West and Marsalis mention (Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong).

6. Who are the 2 rappers killed that are mentioned by Marsalis? (Tupak Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.)

7. Fill in the blank: “Jazz is fundamentally about a mutual BLANK, a learning how to relate to others in such a way that you BLANK and learn about good manners” (respect, listen).

8. Fill in the blank: “Jazz music is our art form that was created to codify BLANK BLANK and give us a model for it.“ (democratic experience)

9. Fill in the blank: “Jazz music was invented to let us know how to BLANK to each other, how to BLANK.” (listen, negotiate)

10. Fill in the blank: “It’s a lack of compassion and understanding of the bandstand. And no interest in listening and actually interacting with other people. And just a BLANK for the process. It’s like what we have for America: a BLANK for the process of BLANK. (disrespect, disrespect, democracy)

11. Fill in the blank: “You can’t create a common language without assuming that everybody has something to give that is of worth and is of value. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be BLANK. (equal)

12. How does the conversation begin and how does it end? (talking about blues, defining it, saying Martians will ask to hear blues)

13. Fill in the blank: “Even in the era of BLANK, the musician always was like a little different class.” (segregation)

500

1. Who does West cite as saying “Jazz is freedom”? (Duke Ellington)

2. What happens at the schools in America that Marsalis visits and does his experience there relate to what happens on the jazz bandstand? (no one listens to soloist, musicians play too loudly and don‘t listen to each other)

Daily Double

1. What was the prompt for Essay #3? (jazz teaches us how to listen, how to negotiate, is model for democratic experience, using evidence in Marsalis’ and West’s conversation as well as from your own history, propose an explanation of “democratic experience,” use and discuss terms not ordinarily associated with democracy, like dissonance and consonance, education and ignorance)

Final Jeopardy:

1. Who wrote “Sonny’s Blues”? (James Baldwin)

2. What is the name of the narrator and what is the name of his brother? (unnamed, Sonny)

3. How do the narrator and Sonny come together and learn to negotiate their differences? (through jazz, Sonny plays)

4. Compare and contrast Atwood, Ewen, and West and Marsalis’ ideas about democracy.

(Atwood: democracy is about choices, diversity, expression, participation, should not be like Quaker prayer meeting creative writing student environment, can’t function without literate public with moral sense and well-developed critical faculties, etc.; Ewen: democracy equated with consumption, American Dream shapes it, etc.; West and Marsalis: democracy is about listening, negotiating, mutual respect, having open mind, takes time, jazz is model/metaphor for it, etc.)

Alice Walker and “Everyday Use”

1. Who is Alice Walker? (African-American poet, novelist, and essayist; wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple)

2. Who is the narrator and what are her daughters’ names? (Mama, Dee, Maggie)

3. What is the name of the elder daughter’s boyfriend whom she brings home? (Barber, Hakim-a-Barber, Asalamalakim)

4. What does the elder daughter change her name to? (Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo)

5. What happened to the first house the family lived in? (it burned down)

6. What is the recurring dream the narrator has–who is in the dream and what are the narrator’s appearance and personality like in it? (she and Dee are on a TV talk show with Johnny Carson; daughter pins orchid on her with tears in her eyes; she is the way her daughter would want her: hundred pounds lighter, skin like uncooked barley pancake, glistening hair, quick and witty tongue)

7. How does the narrator characterize her younger daughter? (thin, like lame animal, homely, burned, dark skinned)

8. How does the narrator characterize her elder daughter? (nice hair, full figure, light skinned)

9. The narrator says, “Dee wanted nice things.” What are those things? (yellow organdy dress to wear to h.s. graduation; black pumps to match green suit she made)

10. Describe the narrator’s physical appearance and her talents. (large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands, kills and cleans animals, works outside all day, cooks)

11. Describe the elder daughter’s appearance when the narrator sees her step out of the car. (wears loud, loose dress with yellow and orange colors down to ground in hot weather, gold earrings hanging down to shoulders, bracelets, black as night hair that stands straight up like wool on sheep and is in two long pigtails that rope around like small lizards disappearing behind her ears)

12. What does the elder daughter do when she sees her mother and sister? (takes pictures)

13. Who does the narrator say the elder daughter named for? (Aunt Dicie/Big Dee, Grandma Dee, Great-Grandma Dee, relatives back to Civil War)

14. What does the elder daughter’s boyfriend say about the food the narrator cooks? (doesn’t eat collards and pork is unclean)

15. Name the five material objects the elder daughter wants from her mother‘s house? (benches daddy made for table, Grandma Dee’s butter dish whittled by Uncle Buddy, dasher whittled by Stash/Henry/Aunt Dee’s first husband, two quilts pieced by Grandma Dee, Big Dee, Mama, Maggie made out of bits of family’s fabrics)

16. Why does the elder daughter want those particular quilts? (they are hand-stitched, not made by machine, priceless, for hanging)

17. Why does the elder daughter object to her sister having the quilts? (says Maggie will be backward enough to put them to everyday use)

18. Who does the mother give the quilts to? (Maggie)

19. What does the elder daughter say her mother and sister do not understand? (their heritage, making something of themselves in this new day and age)

20. When the elder daughter and her boyfriend leave, what do the mother and sister do? (dip checkerberry snuff, sit there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed)

Daily Double: What is the prompt for Essay #4? (Stuart Ewen suggests that people “construct” or “assemble” their identities through consumer goods. Think about how this idea and others in Ewen are useful in discussing Walker’s “Everyday Use.” How do material objects help people form identities in the text by Walker?

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Cyberethics: Back to the Future by Dr. Jane Robinett, San Diego State University

August 1, 2001 by Leave a Comment

Computers have reshaped our world and our lives in ways we have not anticipated. They have redefined not only the way in which work is done in offices, schools and manufacturing complexes, but also the nature of work itself. They have shown us that political boundaries are indefensible against invasions of ideas. The steady transborder flow of information and images that computer-based telecommunications networks provide, can threaten and alter even the most entrenched political structures. Computer-based medical technologies have redefined the boundaries of life and death. We have been forced to examine our facile assumptions about life as the ultimate good and death as the ultimate ill which can befall us. This has led to the creation of a new domain for ethicists: bioethics. Bioethics, for all its complexities, has a fundamentally familiar feel to it because it deals primarily with physical or instrumental reality. But computers have created another kind of reality one which Umberto Ecco (Travels in Hyperreality) and Jean Baudrillard, among others, have termed hyperreality. Ecco, who published Travels in Hyperreality in 1975, defines it as a reality that combines the real and the artificial. This combination results in more, a world, that is denser, more packed and vivid than reality itself. Chief among his examples is Disneyland, a world built around the latest technologies and using audioanamatronics, a combination of animation, audio, video, holographics, computers, robotics and lasers.

Baudrillard points to hyperreality as simulation which absorbs reality, a sel-referential object, a hyperreal object without a subject.(1) But for the purposes of our discussion, Albert Borgman’s definition of hyperreality are most helpful. Hyperreality is made possible by information processing “to the extent that it overcomes and displaces tangible reality.” (2) Borgman divides hyperreality into two categories: instrumental hyperreality, like the hyperreality of the financial world, an imaginary world constructed by telecommunications technology (phones, fax machines, modems and computers large and small), and final hyperreality, a not-yet fully realized hyperreal world which involves all our senses and creates a simulated world in which we can live. Although it is an artificial reality, hyperreality can and does replace physical reality because of three characteristics: it is “brilliant”, that is, it includes all physical senses and excludes unwanted information or noise (the sense of machinery operating somewhere in the background), it is rich (dense, allowing for all possibilities), and it is pliable, that is, it can be manipulated in any way we want. It is also attractive because it frees us from the unpredictability and intractability of physical reality and human beings. Hyperreality extends beyond novelty into a kind of parallel world made possible by computers, an electronic reality. It is this new kind of reality which behooves us to re-formulate both traditional ethical theory and traditional definitions of reality. We might call this re-formulation “cyberethics.”

The word “cyber” comes from the Greek [kybernetes] for helmsman, the person who controlled and directed the course of the ship. It was Norbert Wiener who first coined the word “cybernetics.” From this word comes “cyborg,” an acronym for “cybernetic organism,” those artificially created human-like beings which populate our science fiction and foreshadow other kinds of life. In 1985, the fiction of William Gibson first posited a new form of “cyber”: cyberspace, a form of electronic reality generated by the minds of those who use it in what he calls a “consensual hallucination.” Although Gibson’s cyberspace is, at this point, non-existent, instrumental forms of electronic or electro-mechanical hyperreality already exist, and forms of final hyperreality, including Virtual Reality, are now being pioneered by Jaron Lanier and others. What we need to navigate these uncharted waters of this new reality is a new understanding of ethics to steer by.

Ethics deals with the problem of determining what constitutes the correct behavior toward other human beings. It is based on values, some of which are fundamental to all cultures [the value of life and the acceptance of death, honest/truth-telling, fairness/rightness] and others which are culturally determined. Ethics is something which we all take part in. In dealing with people, we always have to choose between alternate courses of action. We base these choices, implicitly or explicitly, on values. In the light of such values, we develop more detailed concepts of what constitutes right and proper conduct toward others. Of course, this does not mean that we all have exactly the same ideas about what right and proper conduct is, nor does it mean that we work from the basis of a formal ethical system. But, in trying to live responsibly, we cannot escape attempting to articulate and apply our values — that is, we cannot escape being ethical.

Typically, in a traditionally-defined community, ethical principles underlie our public and private behavior toward each other, and in general, we act in accordance with these principles. We respect the lives of others, their privacy and property, and their right to self-determination. We observe rules of public order and courtesy based on these principles. We learn forms of ethical behavior from the time we are young. We are taught both overtly and by the constant examples we see around us, by what we read, hear and watch. This ethical behavior is reflected in the order of the communities we live in. Of course, there are always people who actively disregard ethical behavior. The results of this appear daily in the headlines, but it is news because it deviates so sharply from the norm. The surprising thing is not that people commit murder and mayhem, but that so many of us arrive home in the evening without having done grievous bodily harm to at least one of the people we have encountered during the course of the day.

Because we have so much practice, it is usually easy for us to determine what the correct action is when we are dealing with another person, even if we don’t do it. But it becomes increasingly difficult for us to behave ethically when the other person is not physically present, or when we have no sense of another physical person, when such a person is only present representationally in a data construct or a holographic representation. When we enter the hyperreal worlds which computers make possible, it becomes difficult to see that ethical behavior is even called since no physical or material forms of life are present.

By contrast to traditional notions of ethics, cyberethics should designate the correct form of behavior toward human beings, as the boundaries of their lives are redefined for us by information technology. Each of us, although we are rarely aware of it, exists not only as a physical person, but also as a collection of information located in various data bases. That informational representation of our selves does much to determine our lives. Because we now have this kind of dual existence, ethics must deal not only with actual physical people in a material reality, but also with their extended representations — that is, with the models or constructs of those lives which computers create and make widely available (the virtual person as opposed to the physical person). Cyberethics should also extend the boundaries of ethical behavior to encompass other kinds of lives and resources as they are included in an augmented understanding of what is essential to life, both human and non-human life.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of why and where cyberethics are needed, lies in computer networks. In order to begin, we need to understand how networks are constituted, not in terms of hardware and software, but in terms of the people who are linked together through them. A system built around networks and used to a greater or lesser degree by several thousand (or several hundred thousand) people is not at all unusual. The people who use any on-line system, regardless of its size, constitute a community, that is, they constitute a group of human beings who live or work in close hyperreal proximity to each other, and who share common resources of computing power, storage space, communication lines, programs, hardware, and processing time to achieve their various purposes. The people in this community take part in the same kinds of activities we find in any human community. They work at particular projects, trade information, gossip, argue, joke, play games, ask for (and get) help, strike up new friendships, get angry and shout (called flaming in English) and even commit acts of abuse and violence. In short, a network community, although its physical structure is entirely distinct from a traditional community, is identical in its fundamental aspects to any neighborhood.

But a network community is, to a large extent, invisible as such. It has no single physical location, no visible boundaries, no city limits. Unlike other human communities, it does not consist of the buildings, streets and parks of a physical town which tell us that we are in a place where other humans live, a place where ethical behavior is called for. It has no material existence, and hence, no material reality. It is a community of the mind. Its territory is all virtual territory, existing electronically within the system. It is not visible unless the user is logged on, and even then, the full scope of it is never visible to a single individual. Each user has only a single window from which to view this vast virtual country. But, no matter how large or complex, this community still consists of human beings, each of whom has an electronic home/office (an account) on the system. All of these users must share network resources to achieve their various purposes, and all of them are entitled to the same respect in terms of privacy, property, and self-determination, among other things, as they are in the physical communities of which they are a part.

Networks transcend our physical, social, cultural and national boundaries. When we use them, as we do more and more frequently, we are no longer citizens only of the physical place and time that we inhabit, but of a much larger human community whose territory is composed of virtual space, that is, not of physical expanses (towns, cities, farms, fields and mountains) but a hyperreality equivalent in important ways to physical/material space. Although it is not space in (physical) fact, it is very much space in effect. In this community, unlike other kinds of human communities which are constituted around the physical presence of their members, cannot teach or enforce a code of ethics by example. We have always depended heavily on the presence of others to remind us that we need to behave ethically. In a community of the mind where the nature of reality is significantly altered, it is difficult for people to understand that ethical behavior is required or to learn what constitutes ethical behavior because they feel themselves to be alone. But logging onto a multi-user system means walking into a community of other people. Learning what constitutes right and proper behavior in that hyperreal community is difficult unless these ideas are deliberately articulated, disseminated, and discussed. Many universities and research facilities that use networks have, in recent years, drawn up codes of ethics for members of this community, but many users never bother to read them.

Network communities are not the only example of the new kind of reality with which cyberethics must deal. Data models (information constructs) of the person also exist in this hyperreality. Those information constructs are routinely bought and sold in great volume. Many people regard these kinds of files as ethically inert. When the person is represented only by a few lines in a database or by a series of linked files, it might seem that there is no need to even consider ethical behavior. Should those files be erased, edited, altered, copied or damaged, there is no sense of causing harm, because there is no sense of damage to either physical persons or material property. The hyperreality in which those files exist appears to be clearly separate from physical reality. However, any alteration to that hyperreal model of the individual can have very damaging effects in the physical reality which the person inhabits, effects no less damaging and far more enduring, than a punch in the eye. Although computer files exist in hyper, not physical, reality, they affect and intrude on material reality.

The whole concept of virtual entities (virtual memory, virtual machines, virtual space, virtual communities, virtual persons, virtual reality) constitutes a good example of a new concept that computers have made possible for us. These forms of hyperreality are both real in effect and intangible in fact — virtual memory behaves like memory in your computer, but it is a space created or designated by the computer and not an physical array of memory chips. Among them is the most completely realized form of hyperreality that currently exists: virtual reality. Virtual reality is an entirely computer-generated physical environment which we enter via a virtual reality helmet and goggles and a set of gloves. Within this hyperreal world, we can move around, open doors, walk through rooms, poke around in cupboards, maneuver objects, play handball, perform surgery, or manipulate genes, just as if we were operating in a physical reality. It is an entirely new kind of reality, no less real than physical reality in effect but different in nature than physical reality. Just as it took entirely new tools to create, it will need entirely new definitions of reality before we can begin to think about how human beings should behave in such an environment.

The idea of a reality with no tangible physical existence is entirely new territory for us. Traditional theories of reality (ontologies), as Albert Borgman points out are “powerless to explicate the difference between the real and hyperreal….” (Crossing the Post Modern Divide, 95) In the same way, present perceptions of ethics do not encompass human behavior in this kind of reality. Traditional ethics defines our areas of ethical responsibility too narrowly to be helpful in dealing with the kind of reality which these systems present us with.

The hyperreality which virtual reality systems combined with holographics and audioanimtronics make possible, although it may appear identical to physical reality, is nevertheless disconnected from it. When we enter hyperreality we are cut off from physical contexts, even when the illusion of the physical is perfect. Hyperrealities are disposable; we can dispense with them when we wish, an impossibility with physical realities. When we leave, we find ourselves within the context of the physical world.

The job of cyberethics, then, is threefold: first, it must redefine the concept of reality to include the present and future hyperrealities which electronic, holographic and audioanimatronic systems create. Second, it must redefine ethics to include what lies beyond old bounds of the physical person and the physical community. We can no longer afford an concept of ethics which applies only to our behavior toward the physical person. The same respect and care accorded to the physical person of human beings must be extended to include the information constructs that, in one way or another, define and support their lives and well-being, information that exists in another kind of reality. Cyberethics must begin to map out guidelines for both the ethical uses of and ethical conduct in hyperrealities. It should help us consider not only our behavior to the members of the generations of which we are a part, but of those yet to come who will be faced with hyperrealities far more extensive and powerful than those we now have. Finally, it must, like the far older ethical understanding of societies we have been pleased to call primitive, look to correct and proper behavior toward other kinds of lives, large and small, human and non-human, physical and virtual, and toward the resources which support and sustain not only human lives, but the life of the planet.

In order to go forward into a future increasingly mediated by technology, particularly computer technology (a world of biochips, complex hyperspace realities, intelligent machines, and augmented humans), cyberethics must also look ahead to delineate the correct and proper behavior toward the machines and systems which will support and sustain both human and non-human lives, and may in turn, come to be a form of life themselves.

1. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, for a full discussion of his position.

2. Albert Borgman, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 82.

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