External Reality or Cultural Projection?

In social science literature, debate has centered on why cultures and civilizations manifest in such varied forms and what the agents of this variety may be. The arguments have diverged historically depending on whether environment-centered or culture-centered explanations are emphasized.

Karl Wittfogel’s and Julian Steward’s work on the hydraulic society (Wittfogel, 1957) and cultural ecology approaches (Steward, 1955), respectively, recognize environmental factors as central to the emergence and development of cultural features. Wittfogel proposed that large-scale irrigation was a key causal factor for the rise of powerful states in history due to its need for complex management and bureaucracy to function. He states:

If irrigation farming depends on the effective handling of a major supply of water, the distinctive quality of water-its tendency to gather in bulk-becomes institutionally decisive. A large quantity of water can be channeled and kept within bounds only by the use of mass labor; and this mass labor must be coordinated, disciplined, and led. Thus a number of farmers eager to conquer arid lowlands and plains are forced to invoke the organizational devices which on the basis of a premachine technology offer the one chance of success: they must work in cooperation with their fellows and subordinate themselves to a directing authority. (Wittfogel, 1957:18)

Since early large-scale irrigation mostly occurred in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world like Mesopotamia, China and Egypt, as Steward added, the hydraulic hypothesis implied, hence, that particular environmental factors provided the preconditions for the rise of the state.

Steward’s own unique position on the effects of environmental conditions on human culture is expressed through his concepts of cultural ecology. Cultural ecology asserts that human adaptation to the environment is the essential factor determining cultural variability. From this, “the local environment [is] the extracultural factor” and thus “the adjustments of human societies to [it] require particular modes of behavior or…a certain range of possible behavior patterns,” (Steward, 1955:36) latitude permitted. Influenced by biological and ecological terminology, Steward argues that humans are part of the web of life, but not just in the biological sense. The human community, he clarifies, is part of the total web only “to such cultural features as are affected by [their environmental] adaptations” (ibid, 39). These particular features of a culture are what constitute Steward’s cultural core. This concept is defined as “the constellation of features which are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements” of a society. The features of the “core [include] such social, political, and religious patterns as are empirically determined to be closely connected with these arrangements” (ibid: 37), or in other words are those patterns most “intimately related to the bio-physical environment in which it has evolved” (Aase, 2005). Thus, Steward is mainly concerned with how human adaptations to the environment influence cultural development and change. Although Steward’s idea of cultural adaptation to the environment is criticized as determinist, it should not, however, be entirely dismissed. Biological terms and categories such as ‘adaptation’ and ‘niche’ imply that “the natural environment is simply

a given which requires organisms [and culture] to shape themselves to interact with it and fit into predetermined slots provided by it” (Mikesell, 2002). This narrow characterization of the concepts overlooks their intended meaning. Rather, Steward’s use of ‘adaptation’ was influenced by Marx’s dialectic and materialist approach which, “[starting] from the standpoint of humans as producers of their life through creative engagement with the world” views humans as “both the product of their environment and the producers of it” (ibid). This wider characterization of human adaptation as a dialectic between human action and environmental limits broadens the potential for describing humans’ interaction with the environment and the ensuing cultural traits that may result from this. Whether there are any such traits in the cases of Mustang and the Colca Valley will be discussed in Chapter 8.

In contrast, the ‘culturists’ take a different approach to explain the relative position of environment in the development and change of culture. Using the same figurative image of the spider’s web as Steward in reference to ecology, Geertz states, “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Geertz, 1973a: 5). The web Geertz refers to, though, is culture itself. The culturist argument at face value asserts that culture is entirely human constructed—that the cultural world we inhabit is the result of our own creation. Steward would criticize this as tail-chasing “in the fruitless assumption that culture comes from culture” (Steward, 1955: 36). However, the culturist approach goes far beyond notions of culture spontaneously springing into being as Steward would charge. The key to cultural development is in its complex development through the growth and construction of systems of meaning. Geertz would criticize Steward’s approach as reductionist and dismissing of the potential of “meaningful forms”, or anything that has meaning to explain culture (i.e. any ‘event’, broadly speaking: actions, symbols, signs, text, speech, etc.). In Geertz’s own words, “meaningful forms…have as good a claim to…existence as horses, stones and trees, and are therefore as susceptible to objective investigation and systematic analysis as these apparently harder realities” (Geertz, 1973b, in Shankman, 1984: 269).

Geertz’s systematic approach—intelligible interpretation of culture through ‘thick description’ and the context of a cultural event—relies on semiotics or the interpretation of signs and all contextual phenomena to penetrate cultural meaning systems. But despite the depth of culture and meaning systems, we must not, even in Geertz’s own terms, lose sight of the “hard surfaces” on which cultural phenomena sit, so to speak. Even if culture is explained by differential meanings between them, humans are still tied to the physical environment.

With this in mind, contradictions and all, I now turn to more background on cultural

perceptions as to further discuss other arguments on the culturist side of this epistemological debate.