What does it mean to respect another culture, or the people and ideas within that culture? In the prevailing climate of contemporary academic religious studies, it seems taken as a given that one should refrain from criticizing other cultures and their beliefs and ideas. Older Buddhologists like Edward Conze are viewed as an embarrassment, with their strong opinions, positive and negative, about Buddhism and India. We are told not to judge other cultures the way Conze did. Sometimes the refusal of judgement derives from a positivistic desire to ape natural science, with an “objectivity” that denies reference to value; but more often, making judgements about other cultures seems imperialist and disrespectful, a form of Orientalism or even racism.
This refusal to make judgements seems to me to underlie the currently fashionable “performance theory” in studies of ritual, and religious studies more generally. The approach here (usually drawing on the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin) is to remove attention from ideas and truth claims and direct it instead toward social functions: don’t look at what people’s claims say, look at what the claims do in their social context. (As a former sociologist it’s curious to me that the hot and trendy methodology in religious studies – look at functions rather than ideas – looks very similar to the sociological functionalism of Talcott Parsons, an approach that sociologists now discuss only to explain how discredited it is.) One former colleague of mine, describing his studies of Vedic texts, explained his approach as follows: “What do these texts mean when they say ‘gold causes jaundice’? They can’t really believe that gold causes jaundice! There must be something else going on here, something that it does to say such a thing.” As far as I understand it, much of this performance theory is motivated by a desire to respect other cultures. Surely people can’t be so stupid as to mean these bizarrely unscientific things they say; they must be saying it for another reason.
It seems to me, though, that this view gets it exactly backwards. We truly show a disrespect for another culture when we refuse to take their claims seriously, as claims to truth. If we don’t air our disagreements, we effectively treat the members of other cultures like children. If a child tells us “I just saw a purple dragon,” we might reply “Oh! Was it a friendly dragon? Or a scary dragon?” If an adult tells us “I just saw a purple dragon,” we reply with some variant of “Are you on crack?” We do this because we respect the adult, in a way that we do not respect the child. Because we believe that the adult has mature intellectual ability, we are ready to tell the the adult that she is wrong. We don’t tell the child she’s wrong, because she’s a child; we don’t expect her to be right.
Similarly, I think, we give other cultures the greatest respect when we treat their views seriously, believe that their members could actually mean the things they say, take those views as candidates for truth – and for falsehood. The community organizer Saul Alinsky put the point very well a while ago, quoting and describing a conversation with some First Nations Canadians he wished to work with (warning, profanity):
Indians: Well, you see, … that would mean that we would be corrupted by the white man’s culture and lose our own values.
Me: What are those values that you would lose?
Indians: Well, there are all kinds of values.
Me: Like what?
Indians: Well, there’s creative fishing.
Me: What do you mean, creative fishing? …
Indians: Well, to begin with, when we go out fishing, we get away from everything. We get way out in the woods.
Me: Well, we whites don’t exactly go fishing in Times Square, you know.
Indians: Yes, but it’s different with us. When we go out, we’re out on the water and you can hear the lap of the waves on the bottom of the canoe, and the birds in the trees and the leaves rustling, and—you know what I mean?
Me: No, I don’t know what you mean. Furthermore, I think that that’s just a pile of shit. Do you believe it yourself?
This brought shocked silence. It should be noted that I was not being profane purely for the sake of being profane, I was doing this purposefully. If I had responded in a tactful way, saying, “Well, I don’t quite understand what you mean,” we would have been off for a ride around the rhetorical ranch for the next thirty days. …
[The conversation was filmed, and when they showed it to some white Canadians in the company of the Indians, the whites looked awfully sheepish.] After it was over, one of the Indians stood up and said, “When Mr. Alinsky told us we were full of shit, that was the first time a white man has really talked to us as equals—you would never say that to us. You would always say, ‘Well, I can see your point of view but I’m a little confused,’ and stuff like that. In other words, you treat us like children.” (109–112)
Likewise, it’s perfectly respectful to say that, based on their experience of the world, the composers of the Vedas found it the best available hypothesis to think that gold causes jaundice. I’m quite ready to believe that without access to the wide array of experimental evidence that we have now, people far smarter than me might have sincerely thought that the most convincing explanation for the particular natural phenomenon of jaundice. It is no disrespect to them to say that they did the best they could and a few centuries of experimentation has allowed us to do better. Moreover, as Robin Horton acutely notes, when it comes to psychology and sociology (let alone ethics), our knowledge in the West is still quite rudimentary; there may yet turn out to be many cases when the weird ideas we find in other cultures might actually be right, and ours wrong. But if we only look for functions and not for the content of ideas, we’re not going to find them. The study of Asian traditions would do well with more Conzes, ready to evaluate the truth and falsity of the ideas they study.
“We truly show a disrespect for another culture when we refuse to take their claims seriously, as claims to truth.” – perfectly put. I’m working on this a bit in terms of early Buddhist meditation and cosmology which, as you mention, seems awfully outdated these days.
But… Thinking of the cosmology (with its many hell and heaven realms, sometimes described in ornate detail) in terms of *meditation* we see a clearly pragmatic approach. Rather than evaluating the descriptions of hells as mere boring sermonizing, we can think of meditating on the immense suffering of others as perhaps cathartic to our own suffering, deep enough to allow us to release our selfish hold on that suffering as somehow special and different. Likewise with the joys and triumphs of the heavenly beings.
I’m not sure about the Vedas, but at least in Buddhism, the connection of disease with riches (or, more specifically thirsting/tanha/trshna for those riches) is very obvious on ethical, psychological, spiritual grounds. On the other hand, simply having wealth wasn’t a bad thing; what mattered(s) is how it was viewed and used. I imagine that modern science will find that people driven by greed for wealth are more prone to chronic illness than their counterparts who achieve equal status out of love of their work or a feeling of service.
Hey Justin – this point seems to take us back again to the question of noble lies and skill in means. Should we contemplate falsities as if true, in order to improve ourselves? Again, Kant would say no, but I’m not a Kantian and I get the impression that even you are not ready to take a Kantian stance on this one. And I suppose there’s a subtler dimension to the point this time. Surely, one might think, there’s a value in edifying stories that one contemplates even when one knows they are not true? To use an example closer to our time, where motivations in writing are easier to discern, Ayn Rand believed that truth was a good thing, and she was not delusional enough to think that John Galt himself existed, but she told a story about him anyway. If one reads Atlas Shrugged with the idea that its narrative portions (as opposed to its didactic portions) were literally true, one is missing the point; one must pay attention to the performative dimension of that text, to what the text is supposed to do to its reader and not merely to the truth value of the sentences.
I may have put the point more strongly than I intended. I don’t want to rule out performative readings of other traditions. Surely, there are times when people say things for their effects rather than for their truth value, just as is the case with us. What worries me is that sometimes academics seem to resist the possibility that statements which seem weird to us could have been claims to truth in the first place. If we do that, I think we risk missing some of the most powerful ideas they have.
(Also, in some elements of Buddhism, including ?, I think having wealth is considered a bad thing – but that’s a topic for another post.)
Amod, thanks a lot for this very interesting post. I agree with your invitation to “take other cultures seriously”. I am just not persuaded by your use of “truth”. What do you mean by that? Truth as correspondence with an outer state of affairs? If so, it is of almost no use for philosophy, religion, psychology etc. So, it may make sense to take into account also a concept of truth as inner consistence. In order to do that, one has to know the frame of reference of a certain theory or idea. Upani?adic statements have no sense at all for us, but they make much more sense if one forces oneself into the framework of Vedic ritual.
I am afraid we might disagree about the role of the context as we already did in the case of homosexuality in Buddhism. I agree with your claim that we should take, e.g., Indian philosophy as philosophy (and not just as folklore having nothing to say to us). But I am not sure that one can distinguish immediately and without any reference to a certain context what is the philosophical kernel and what its historical ‘envelop’. More important, if one is not aware of the role of one’s background, I am afraid that the objective truth you aim at risks to boil down to a much narrower “truth as consistence within the XXI century, U.S.,… world view”.
Hi Elisa – I certainly don’t think that context should be disregarded entirely. In argument people start where they are, in a context with worldviews formed by the culture(s) they have lived among. But if there is a common language, there are always enough shared assumptions for argument to proceed across cultures. I think you’re right that context is importance to help distinguish between “philosophical kernel” and historical surroundings; but it’s important to acknowledge that there is a philosophical kernel that can cross cultural boundaries.
I do think of truth as involving some element of correspondence, but not merely correspondence with an “outer” reality. We can misperceive our inner states quite easily as well; I noted in an earlier post that we can be incorrect about whether or not we are happy. Statements about inner reality, it seems to me, can be true or false in a way that goes beyond their consistency with one’s larger worldview; they are not qualitatively different in this regard from statements about the observable physical world.
I know it is somehow unfair, but I replied to your last statement on my blog, because I did not want to deviate too much from your initial post.
Not unfair at all – I’ve done the same thing with others. Important thing in such cases is just to send a note like this, as a notice that the comment is there.
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Have you read J.Z. Smith’s classic article, “I Am A Parrot (Red)”? Smith, like you, is suspicious of ethnographers’ attempts to dismiss the apparently nonsensical statements of a foreign culture as mystical or metaphysical. At the same time, however, he is also suspicious of any ethnographer who judges these statements by scientific standards. This is important because the anthropologists who’ve studied the Bororo have generally assumed that the Indians are either idiots (they say they are parrots but they are obviously not parrots!) or mystics (they are “parrots” in some profound sense that logical Western minds can’t fathom!). Smith has issues with both approaches, and in the end (in inimitable Smithian style) he looks at the source material and concludes that the Bororo never said they were parrots anyway. Even if they had, though, Smith’s cautions are good ones: we tend to let cultures that we like get away with saying crazy stuff because of their ‘beautiful culture,’ while we condemn cultures we dislike for their ‘bad science.’
At any rate, I have more sympathy for the functional view of religious statements than you seem to have. (I like Malinowski, to whom I imagine you must be quite allergic.) Consider, for instance, statements like “every fetus starts out female” or “human life began in Africa” or “homosexuality is genetic” as they are used in our culture today. Those statements may be “true” and they may be good science, but they are also extremely ideologically charged. To me, the ideology is just as important as the scientific validity or lack thereof of a given truth claim; on the ground, the ideology may well affect more people in a more direct way than the scientific facts of the matter. I think it’s important to understand the ways in statements about evolution/skin colour/gender/disease/sexual orientation/whatever are granted a particular kind of attention when other equally-true statements are not.
I can’t judge the gold-jaundice statement, which might be a throwaway observation in the Vedas (and whose ideology is therefore unimportant) which is scientifically wrong (and whose science is therefore bad). I don’t know the source material and I therefore can’t make any contributions to a discussion of the statement as science or as ideology. But I would hesitate to end the conversation at “The Vedas were wrong about the causes of jaundice, so call Dr. House and call it a day.” I think that’s ending the conversation way, way too soon. Moreover, I don’t think it’s infantilizing the culture to say “now let’s talk about how your understanding of this thing works in your society.” I do that with the science of our culture all the time — including the good science.
I agree with you here overall. I haven’t read Smith’s article but I think I would probably be relatively sympathetic to it. And generally I’d admit overstating the case here some. What I’m objecting to is the common tendency to jump to a performative or functionalist understanding and shy away from literal meanings, from people actually meaning what they say. I do think that the performative aspect of speech acts matters, and that people can in many cases say things primarily because of their effects – but that’s not the only reason, even in cases when what they say seems unjustifiable on our current understanding.
And I certainly didn’t mean that we should end the conversation at “The Vedas were wrong about the causes of jaundice, so call Dr. House and call it a day” – I suspect that my post can be read that way, which is another reason I think I overstated the case. A lot of the time, a statement that seems absurd at first (especially in a scientific context) can make more sense when we understand the complex of ideas surrounding it – but then it can make more sense to us, can be something we consider as potentially true, not merely something we explain away through its functionality. (I think of today’s post about Aristotle as an example: the idea that form or teleology could be a “cause” struck me as highly implausible until I got a better understanding of the context.)
I really like your point at the end, that it’s worth talking about function and performance with respect to our own culture and to science including good science. I have no problem with sociologizing science, and think it’s quite a worthwhile endeavour, as long as we don’t lose sight of the truth claims made by science, or the ability to distinguish between good science and bad science (even as we recognize that that distinction can be difficult to make). In examining our science as in examining other cultures, we need to take seriously both the ideas and their effects.
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