Geertz, Common Sense

1
Geertz, Common Sense
2
Common Sense as a Cultural System

• Geertz seeks to understand roughcast shapes of
  colloquial culture vs. worked-up shapes of
  studied culture
• common sense dimension of culture not usually
  conceived as forming an ordered realm

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Common Sense as a Cultural System

• the elementary forms of religious life among the
  Australian aborigines, native botanical systems
  in Africa, spontaneous sense of design on the
  Northwest Coast, concrete science in the
  Amazon
• traditional occupation of anthropologists to find
  out about systematized knowledge in different
  cultures

4
Common Sense as a Cultural System

• common sense
• immediate deliverance of experience
• realm of the given and undeniable,
  matter-of-fact, self-evident realities
• just life with world as its authority
• if it rains it is common sense to step into the
  house
• what everyone with common sense knows

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Common Sense as a Cultural System

• common sense
• not a tightly integrated system but based on
  conviction by those who have it on its validity
• common sense (problem of everyday experience,
  how we construe the world we biographically
  inhabit)
• interpretation of experience constructed
  cultural system what leads to what
• system of thought based on pre-suppositions

6
Common Sense as a Cultural System

• common sense
• Discuss Zande vs. Evans-Pritchards common
  sense (what is the underlying system?).
• Why is it useful to look at categories that cross
  cultures (e.g. hermaphroditism)?
• Give own examples of common sense systems
• that have shifted historically
• that demonstrate cultural relativity

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Common Sense as a Cultural System

• common sense
• How is common sense knowledge system built?
• What are transmission systems for common sense
  knowledge systems?
• Give examples of how common sense can regulate
  activities of the society (e.g. economic,
  agricultural, etc.). What are the limitations?

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Common Sense as a Cultural System

• common sense
• Give examples of how anomalies in the system of
  commonsense thought can be explained away?
  (Zande witchcraft)
• Discuss each of the stylistic features
  (quasi-qualities) of common sense naturalness
  (p. 18), practicalness (p. 20), thinness (p.
  22), accessibleness (p. 24).

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Common Sense as a Cultural System

• common sense / everyday experience
• categories organized into systems
• transmitted body of knowledge
• natural symbols
• formalized knowledge information infrastructures
• Why? moral order creates meaning

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knowledge information data

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Introduction to Knowledge Systems
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Introduction to Knowledge Systems

• critical analysis of knowledge processes
• repositioning of discourses (self-awareness,
  situated knowledges)
• include diversity
• civic responsibility, driving democratic change,
  balancing power
• or what? loss of capacity for social criticism

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Introduction to Knowledge Systems

• how structured knowledge systems operate
• relationship of knowledge systems to moral order
• deviance
• culture / nature
• naturalizing discourse
• memory (social, personal)

14
Origins of Knowledge Systems

• knowledge systems
• related to post-Enlightenment epistemology
• critical analysis of knowledge practices in
  particular time periods (discursive formations
  supported by institutions)
• concepts ideology, hegemony
• assumption knowledge systems are not neutral,
  they promote the interests of the ruling class
• situated knowledge
• personal experience
• communities of practice and information
  infrastructures supporting information flow

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• history of knowledge
• by subject? by period? as succession of
  epistemes?
• history or archaeology of human sciences
  (Michel Foucault) avoids producing the
  traditional unity of subject, spirit,or period

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• history of knowledge
• history of knowledge represented as a dynamic,
  constantly changing totality
• shift from a traditional historical inquiry into
  what was known at a given moment to discursive
  practices that rendered something knowable
• discursive practices are first hand evidence to
  understand what was knowable

17
Origins of Knowledge Systems

• analysis of an episteme theorization of the
  grounds of knowledge by analyzing the
  representational paradigms which organize the
  theorization
• what could be knowable? boundary objects?
  anomalies? displaced categories?
• episteme historically specific, dynamic field
  of representations of knowledge

18
Origins of Knowledge Systems

• episteme
• defined in Michel Foucaults Archaeology of
  Knowledge as the total set of relations that
  unite, at a given period, the discursive
  practices that give rise to epistemological
  figures, sciences, and possibly formalized
  systems
• Foucaults Order of Things (17th / 18th century
  shift) the problem of order as organizing
  episteme

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Origins of Knowledge Systems

• episteme
• episteme is multiplied by communication among
  different disciplines
• language technology of transmission totality
  of peoples interactions ...

20
Origins of Knowledge Systems

• constraints
• a range of fields in a given historical moment
  demonstrates a set of discursive practices common
  to all the fields
• constraints and limitations imposed on a range of
  discourses in the human sciences and other
  knowledge practices

21
Origins of Knowledge Systems

• post-Enlightenment epistemology
• modernity ideas of progress, science, nature
  (as logical and ordered), reason
• reflected in the discourse of science and
  technology (technocriticism Haraway)

22
Origins of Knowledge Systems

• studies of science and technology
• focus on nature / culture / discourse /
  infrastructure (bureaucracy, institutional
  contexts for the circulation of knowledge)
• dichotomy of nature / culture (cf. Haraways
  natureTM or nature as not nature and cultureTM
  )

23

• Instead of a search for the perfectly
  proportioned image containing the 'soul' of the
  knowledge to be remembered, the emphasis was on
  the discovery of the right logical category. The
  memory of this system of logical categories and
  scientific causes would exempt the individual
  from the necessity of remembering everything in
  detail ... The problem of memorizing the world,
  characteristic of the sixteenth century, evolved
  into the problem of classifying it
  scientifically.
• (James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory,
  1992, 13)

24

• In the late 18th century, science becomes
  established as cultural apparatus, in the form of
  materialized semiotic fields.
• (Haraway, Modest Witness_at_Second_Millennium)

25
The Laboratory, or, The Passion of
OncoMouse(Lynn Randolph 1994)
From Donna Haraways, Modest_Witness_at_Second_Mille
nnium.FemaleMan _Meets_OncoMouseTM), 46.
26

• Knowledge Structures the link between of
  knowledge production and social control
• production of knowledge and handling of knowledge
  in organized systems (information
  infrastructures)
• how institutions such as bureaucracies moderate
  this process
• how process affects individuals
• analysis of sites of struggle over representations

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Knowledge and Society

• knowledge and power, ideology, hegemony

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Knowledge and Society

• constraints and limitations inherent in knowledge
  systems (Foucault)
• hegemony (Gramsci)
• critiques of ideology and culture (Marx-Engels
  Marxist critics Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci,
  etc.)

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Knowledge and Society

• hegemony (Gramsci 1930s)
• ability in certain historical periods of the
• dominant classes to exercise social and
• cultural leadership and by these means, rather
• than direct coercion of subordinate classes, to
• maintain their power over the economic,
• political, and cultural direction of the nation

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Knowledge and Society

• hegemony binds a society together without the use
  of force, under the leadership of the dominant
  classes
• how achieved? manipulations of images and
  meanings institutions as producers of sense,
  knowledge, and meaning
• hegemony operates by winning of consent for
  unequal class relations

31
Knowledge and Society

• consent is achieved in the realm of consciousness
  and representations
• a totality of social, cultural and individual
  experience is capable of being made sense of in
  terms that are defined, established and put into
  circulation by the power bloc

32
Knowledge and Society

• consent is achieved in the realm of cultural
  agency of institutions
• the state, the law, the educational system, the
  media, the family are prolific producers of
  sense, knowledge, and meanings
• organizers and producers of individual
  consciousness, institutions are taken as
  impartial or neutral, representative of everybody
  (no apparent reference to class, race or gender)

33
Knowledge and Society

• consent is achieved in the realm of cultural
  agency of institutions
• institutions shape the knowable, and hide the
  fact that they are shapers of knowledge (they are
  ideological)
• institutions are sites in which hegemony can be
  established and exercised if captured or
  colonized by a power bloc

34
Knowledge and Society

• consent is achieved in the realm of cultural
  agency of institutions
• power bloc finds allies in professionals and
  managers and intellectuals of various kinds
  (subaltern classes for Gramsci) who perceive
  their interest as congruent to or identical with
  those of the dominant group

35
Knowledge and Society

• Results? Hegemony naturalizes what is
  historically a class ideology, and renders it
  into the form of common sense
• Power is exercised not as force but as authority
  cultural aspects of life are depoliticized
  ideology is naturalized
• Culture may be seen as mode of domination and
  liberation (cultural studies)

36
Knowledge and Society

• critiques of ideology and culture
• analysis of culture in terms of its relationships
  to a mode of production and its specific social
  formation (Marx-Engels Marxist critics Georg
  Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci)

37
Knowledge and Society

• critiques of ideology and culture
• capitalist mode of production structure
  political, legal and cultural institutions of
  their time
• culture is a form of superstructure which
  articulates the interests and ideologies of those
  who control the economic base of society
  (reductionism, economic determinism)

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Knowledge and Society

• critiques of ideology and culture
• contribution of cultural analysis analysis of
  art, literary form and ideology
• reading of cultural texts as expressions of
  social experience and ideology
• recognition that institutions are involved in
  distribution of power in society