I’m having a huge cultural problem. I’m staring at the stack of electronic final papers from Introduction to Anthropology and getting the books ready for Cultural Anthropology, and then along comes David Brooks with What Our Words Tell Us.
Brooks is reporting on studies based on the Google Books database. They are interesting studies–taken with the proper dose of methodological caution, such searches can be good fooder for the kinds of papers I’m expecting from my Linguistic Anthropology course. Jane Hill’s (2005) Intertextuality as Source and Evidence for Indirect Indexical Meanings was a pioneering look at using a Google search on mañana to trace the meanings of Mock Spanish.
But then there’s the kicker:
Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.
First, the idea of “pervasive up and down society” is exactly the kind of methodological caution one would want to use with a Google Book analysis. Hello, this is a book search, and hello to Shirley Brice Heath’s long research on different forms of literacy.
But perhaps more importantly, the idea of a cultural problem immediately eviscerates economic and political alternatives. It’s a familiar theme for Brooks, who basically said that Haiti had a cultural problem which kept it from economic development. It’s also infinitely malleable. The fact that there is a large education gap between the rich and the middle class–surely a cultural problem with the middle class. That nearly one-in-three people in the U.S. are poor or nearly poor, and that poverty is increasingly located in the suburbs–must be a cultural problem with suburban America. That there is worsening wealth inequality by race: “White Americans have 22 times more wealth than blacks–a gap that nearly doubled during the Great Recession.” Well, that is surely a cultural problem with blacks (and we hear that claim again and again and again). As Michel-Rolph Trouillot said in Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises, the term culture is now thoroughly separated from power, inequality, economics, politics, and history. And that’s the real cultural problem.
Shirley Brice Heath in Words at Work and Play: Three Decades in Family and Community Life is much better. Heath “shows how families constantly rearrange their patterns of work, language, play and learning in response to economic pressures.”
Or see this comment from mancuroc:
Earth to Brooks: the economy strongly determines the culture. That is why we now talk of a culture of greed, the degree of which represents a tectonic shift in our culture and which has itself undermined community bonds.
Earth to Brooks indeed. But now it’s time to look at all those anthropology papers, where I hope I haven’t too badly played into Brooks’ game-plan by going on and on about culture.
Just remember:
Whenever you hear culture of poverty look for a culture of greed nearby.
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