1558 American Anthropologist [67, culture) and any other-culture student of our culture would have to be trained by a representative of our

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1556 American Anthropologist [67, 196.51 may be impractical to expect all of the anthropologies under a single roof in these competitive days.

1 1556 American Anthropologist [67, may be impractical to expect all of the anthropologies under a single roof in these competitive days. But there is a too-real problem if the 50 and more degree programs are taken at face value. What level of preparation can be afforded? What continuing responsibilities to the graduate student will be maintained? What niches in anthropology will their students be expected to occupy? In a competitive world of growing academic opportunity, will some Ph.D. s in anthropology own a restricted license fitting them only for teaching in academic limbo? Now I do not hold for academic bigness, though bigness is often associated with technical facilities and educational opportunities, human and otherwise. I do not argue against the all-purpose teacher who must work triply hard to maintain professional competence in any of his chosen fields. But among the 50 and more institutions that claim to grant higher degrees in anthropology there are many I am reluctant to send students to, with suspicion of under-education, under-opportunity, and for fear that they would acquire a degree with limited negotiability among anthropologists. Never have we talked about accreditation. Never have we sought to restrain some colleague from teaching whatever he wished, or to confer such degrees as he wished. But never have we had so many different degrees of degrees. There is the problem, and it may be distasteful, of whether some minima may be set for the benefit of all concerned. There are deans who would like to know what an adequate graduate program would involve. There are teachers of anthropology who do not have knowledge of a11 teaching departments sufficient to make effective recommendations to potential graduate students. And there are undergraduates bent on a career in anthropology who have their lives to invest and need to do it wisely. Informally, of course, many of us do engage in a kind of accreditation, recommending some schools and not others, knowing their strengths and weaknesses. With more than fifty degree-granting institutions, with very large variations in size and resources, we do have the need to consider what constitutes adequate graduate education in anthropology. STANLEY M. GARN The Fels Research Institute Yellozw Springs, Ohio OTHER-CULTURE vs. OWN-CULTURE : SOME THOUGHTS ON L. WHITE S QUERY In Anthropology 1964: Retrospect and Prospect, his presidential address published in the June issue of the American Anthropologist (67: ), Leslie A. White raises a number of questions, but the chief one, the thematic one, as it were, is the following (p. 635): Can the Science of Culture make a significant contribution to the study and comprehension of the great nations and cultures of today? If the answer is No, then let us face it and remain in our traditional areas of the nonliterate and the prehistoric.

Brief Communications 1557 Like any other question of similarly broad scope, this question could be considered from a variety of viewpoints, the practical, the theoretical, the methodological, or the

2 Brief Communications 1557 Like any other question of similarly broad scope, this question could be considered from a variety of viewpoints, the practical, the theoretical, the methodological, or the historical. And, as in other similar cases, all four viewpoints have something to contribute. Of course one could start by pointing out that if the Science of Culture is the science of culture, the very asking of such a question involves a contradiction. But White s own sequel to the question sets the framework within which it has been asked. As is well known, the chief reason why the cultural anthropologist has had more success with pre- or nonliterate cultures than with literate ones is that most of the latter are too close to home. Man is a cultural animal and, as such, all too frequently confuses cultural with natural. Many of the intricacies of his own culture are considered natural and therefore unnoticed by the participant, but as an observer studying the workings of an alien culture the anthropologist manages to achieve a certain amount of detachment, if he is a successful worker, and this distinguishes him from the nonanthropological observer who is likely to see everything with culture-bound eyes or even downright prejudice. This, perhaps more than anything else, was the raison d etre of the theory of cultural relativism, now being abandoned by one worker after another, especially those participating in the rising vogue of the search for universals. If anthropologists are to be credited with discovering culture, as Kroeber implies (1936[1952]: 75) and as supported by White (1965:635), th is was achieved through the study of other-cultures, not own-cultures, and this is because only in this way were they able to acquire sufficient emancipation from the usual own-culture bias to make a study of an other-culture. Indeed, what anthropologists actually discovered was not culture (this had long been known) but other-culture, and therein lies the very big difference. Kroeber himself implies this (1936: 76), for he says: The most outstanding fact about any group of primitives is their culture--& striking d inencefrom our own. The first interest in this culture was very often precisely its exotic pzralitics. But, as time went on, these small, apparently insignificant, easily mastered cultures were found through their very remoteness to be much more readily treatable objectively than any others.... This habit in turn contributed enormously to the discooery or consciousness of culture, which has already been cited as the distinctive achievement of anthropology. [Emphases mine.] But White is right, it is time we learned how to study our own culture. Yet this is not as simple as it sounds, since the very emphasis of anthropology has been on the different, the exotic, in a word, the other-culture at the expense of the own-culture. Since it is axiomatic that we can study other-cultures and make observations that we should completely miss in our own culture, it seems logical to suggest that our culture should be studied by a representative of another culture. A truly ideal case of such a study, however, is impossible, because cultural anthropology itself belongs to our culture (in the broad sense of Western

1558 American Anthropologist [67, 19651 culture) and any other-culture student of our culture would have to be trained by a representative of our culture and in this very process would himself become

3 1558 American Anthropologist [67, culture) and any other-culture student of our culture would have to be trained by a representative of our culture and in this very process would himself become in some degree acculturated to our culture. But in spite of this intrinsic handicap, work of this type holds out promise; some, indeed, has already been done by Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and other other-culture anthropologists. But cultural anthropologists, even when they study cultures other than their own, labor under a handicap-a handicap that can be mitigated with experience but never completely eliminated-namely that they see other cultures through the screen or filter of their own culture-and this is something distinct from ethnocentrism. In linguistics I have termed one aspect of this deficiency as hearing with an English ear (i.e. own-language ear), and while the tendency is most noticeable among beginning students in phonetics, it is not entirely absent even among professional linguists. Certain features of Burmese phonology, for instance, have been repeatedly interpreted, by both American and British linguists, as if they were English sounds, and this despite the fact that both phonemic and morphophonemic patterning point to a different interpretation. And in another instance we find that an experienced linguist has proposed a phonemic solution for the vowel systems of two unrelated Oriental languages that coincides in the most surprising detail with his proposed solution for the English vowel system! It is clear, then, that to say each investigator should study an other-culture and not own-culture is not a satisfactory answer to our problem and this for two reasons, (1) Bias is not entirely eliminated even when investigators concentrate on other-cultures, and (2) We are no longer satisfied to be told that we cannot develop means to study own-cultures. Are there, then, any other methods? There is one which is being groped for, I think, by more than one worker, but it is by no means fully developed or understood. It is the use of models-not empirical models (though these often have great utility) but formal models, the more formal the better. Hints of what may be in store are to be found in more than one place in this same issue of the American Anthropologist (67, no. 3), particularly Nutini s article Some Considerations on the Nature of Social Structure and Model Building: A Critique of Claude LCvi-Strauss and Edmund Leach (1965) and to some extent Leach s review of LCvi-Strauss s Mythologiques: le CIU et le cuit (1965). But cultural anthropologists are still very much empiricists, even more so than present-day linguists. Many are unhappy even with empirical models and are sure to be even more unhappy with more formal models. The climate is more favorable than it was a decade or so ago, but one has only to read the comments brought forth by LCvi-Straws s Social Structure (1953) as reported in An Appraisal of Anthropology Today (Tax et al. 1953: ) to get some notion of the way many cultural anthropologists reacted to his discussion of models at that time. More recently Floyd Lounsbury has developed the theory of what he calls the formal account as explained in The Formal Analysis of Crow- and Omaha-Type Kinship Terminologies (1964). But Leach, by no means adverse

Brief Communications 15.59 to models, refers to it as Floyd Lounsbury s ingenious exercises in the componential analysis of kin-term systems (1965: 780).

4 Brief Communications to models, refers to it as Floyd Lounsbury s ingenious exercises in the componential analysis of kin-term systems (1965: 780). Lounsbury (1964: ), however, invokes strict criteria: A formal account should be distinguished both by its sufficiency and by its parsimony... the model should not underpredict, overpredict, or wrongly predict. To the extent that it achieves this goal, it satisfies the requirement of sufficiency.... The parsimony of a formal account consists in its specifying only the absolute minimum of assumptions that are necessary to account for the data of the empirical collection, or to generate an exact replica thereof. Now Lounsbury is offering something which shows promise of being developed as a means of overcoming bias-own-culture bias, functional bias, value bias, or any other kind of bias. If such a tool could be developed, anthropologists would have a precision instrument and would no longer have to operate solely by rule-of-thumb. But Lounsbury is well aware that formal accounts are likely to be peculiarly unsatisfying to many anthropologists (1964: 352) and he explains why this is so: Thus... a simple rule that tells one the exact minimum he needs to know in order to predict accurately who gets called what in such and such a system of kinship terminology, and nothing else, is quite likely to be rejected because it fails to tell him other (and doubtless more important) things that he wants to know about the society.... But in spite of resistances to be overcome, it seems that we have here one of the means by which cultural anthropology may move in the direction of greater objectivity. Other methods and other means will also need to be devised before the great nations and cultures of today can be adequately studied, but all will have to measure up to rigorous standards of objectivity. Among the most pressing needs are means to cope with problems of SCALE and of TIME. The importance of the former can be seen by changing the emphases in one of Kroeber s sentences (1936: 75) quoted above, so that it reads:... these small, apparently insignificant, easily mastered cultures were found... to be much more readily treatable objectively than any others.... Now moving from a small, relatively self-contained type of culture participated in by a few hundred individuals to a highly complex many-layered type participated in by millions introduces a vast difference in scale that will require new techniques and not just more statistics. Similarly, time in the study of a complex literate culture enters into the problem in ways which are quite different than in the preliterate culture. In the latter, time is inferred from stages (vertically, as in archeology) or distributions (horizontally) but is not documented. Hence coping with documented time alone may almost overwhelm the student of a literate culture. And time in a literate society has another important effect, for what is written in one era can continue to influence the culture of succeeding eras or can be laid aside and then rediscovered in another century or millennium. MARY R. HAAS University of California, Berkeley

5 1560 A merican A nt hro pologist [67, REFERENCES CITED KROEBER, A. L [1952] So-called social science. In A. L. Kroeber, The Nature of Culture, pp Chicago, University of Chicago Press. LEACH, EDMLJND 1965 Review of LCvi-Strauss: Mythologiques: le cru et le cuit. American Anthropologist 67: L~VI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE 1953 Social structure. In Anthropology Today, pp , A. L. Kroeber (Ed.). Chicago, University oe Chicago Press. LOUNSBURY, FLOYD G A formal account of the Crow- and Omaha-type kinship terminologies. In Explorations in Cultural Anthropology: Essays in Honor of George Peter Murdock, pp , Ward H. Goodenough (Ed.). New York, McGraw Hill. NUTINI, HUGO G Some considerations on the nature of social structure and model building: A critique of Claude Lki-Strauss and Edmund Leach. American Anthropologist 67: TAX, SOL et al. (Eds.) 1953 An appraisal of anthropology today. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. WHITE, LESLIE A Anthropology 1964: Retrospect and prospect. American Anthropologist 67:

CHAPTER 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

CHAPTER 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 2.1 Poetry Poetry is an adapted word from Greek which its literal meaning is making. The art made up of poems, texts with charged, compressed language (Drury, 2006, p. 216).