Culture as Action
Authors: Laba Martin 
Published: October 2020

Culture is a mercurial concept -- volatile, contested, and somehow, less
than the sum of its parts. Its anthropology, it can be argued, was rooted
in an exoticising scholarship typical of the late 19th-century colonialist
ruminations on all things "other"; in contemporary terms of course, this
exoticising tendency would be termed, as it should, "Orientalist". Still,
there is something more than merely residual in the persistence of a
notion of culture as a summary, as a package of knowledge and practice, as
a name for identity, or even politics, all of which draw clearly from the
well of Edward B. Tylor's bold attempt to terminologically and
conceptually capture "the most complex whole", a people's entire way of
life (albeit non-white, non-literate, non-western people) from what we can
trust were the considerable comforts of his armchair. This Tylorean notion
of culture, as Clifford Geertz once suggested, leads to a "conceptual
morass" that "obscures a great deal more than it reveals" (4).

Another definitional foundation of culture for consideration is the
philosophical tradition of German Idealism. Culture as a process of
aesthetic education was for Friedrich Schiller a means of progressing from
a state of nature to a state of reason without the destruction of nature.
Schiller offered a critique of Kant's account of the development of reason
(the achievement of the state of rationality as key to the education and
progress of humanity) as necessarily predicated on the containment and
ultimately, the destruction of nature (against the chaos and moral abyss
that is nature). Schiller argued for the capacity of art to infuse nature
with morality, to serve as an intermediary of sorts, between chaotic
nature and the structures of pure reason. It is the cultivation of moral
character -- Bildung -- that is the foundation of this capacity, and that
defines the nature and purpose of "culture" as a process of aesthetic
education. There were two influential trajectories that seem inspired by
this philosophical source. First, there was an important sense from the
German Idealists that culture was a determining principle of nation (the
nation-state is achieved through Bildung, through cultivation), and
accordingly, culture was understood as the source of nationhood. Second,
culture took on the sense of moral authority, an Arnoldian equation of
culture with high culture and a concomitant mistrust of all things
democratic and popular, which debase and ultimately threaten the authority
of high culture.

Raymond Williams's reinterpretation of culture merits attention because
of its departure from previous traditions of defining culture, and because
it is a useful foundation for the view of culture proposed later in this
discussion. Williams offered a detailed historical analysis of the
reasons for the under-theorisation of the British labour movement, and the
glaring dislocation of the English proletariat from the ideas, the
concepts, the political theory of capitalism. Actual working classes in
Britain, the "lived culture" of workers, fit neither into broad political
theoretical currents, nor into an examination of workers as elements in a
historical process -- this lived culture defied the embrace of political
analysis. Williams argued for a more anthropological view of culture, and
decisively shifted the concept away from the British literary-cultural
tradition, away from Arnold's "high culture", to a view of culture as a
whole way of life, and open to the vision and the possibilities of social
integration, popular classes, and popular struggles in ordinary, everyday
life.

Williams argued compellingly for the "ordinariness" of culture. As Bill
Readings notes, "Williams's insistence that culture is ordinary was a
refusal to ignore the actual working classes in favor of the liberated
proletarians who were to be their successors after the revolution" (92).
In this sense, culture confounds political theory -- or to stretch the
point, culture confounds systematic theorising. In a similar vein, and in
a classic of anthropological inquiry, Clifford Geertz argued that the
analysis of culture was "not an experimental science in search of law, but
an interpretive one in search of meaning" (4). Such an "interpretive"
project demands above all, that that the analyst is also a participant in
a dimension of the culture she/he is describing.

I want to consider two of Geertz's assertions in his interpretive theory
of culture to frame my proposal for a concept of culture-as-action.
Geertz maintained that cultural analysis is guesswork rather than
systematic theorising, which he regarded as a manipulation or
reconstruction of reality through analytical practices in search of
elegant schemata. Cultural analysis is "guessing at meanings, assessing
the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses,
not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless
landscape" (20). Clearly, Geertz trained his critical sights on
anthropological trends to extrapolate from material data singularly
coherent, even symmetrical systems, orders, properties, and universals in
a method that wants to imitate, but is not science. Interpretation
resists scientism.

In a second assertion, Geertz argued that any sustained symbolic action --
the stuff of culture -- is "saying something of something" (448-53).
While this assertion appears disarmingly simple, it is profound in its
implications. It points to the possibility that cultural analysis, if it
is to grasp and interpret layered, textured, and often thoroughly complex
significations, must attend to "semantics" rather than "mechanics"; the
representation of the substance of culture, its symbolic expressive forms
and its unfolding action, rather than the insinuation, or even the bold
declaration of systems and formulas, however elegant, of cultural patterns
and process. The concern in interpretation -- a form of representation --
is that "a good interpretation of anything -- a poem, a person, a history,
a ritual, an institution, a society -- takes us into the heart of that of
which it is the interpretation" (18). To describe culture is to attend to
action -- actual and resonant -- and such descriptions representations
have responsibility; specifically, they must seek to grasp and portray
social discourse and its possible meanings in ways that allow symbolic
action -- the vocabulary of culture -- to speak on its own behalf.

We arrived back in Lahore after a day's journey by jeep over the bone-dry
and dusty roads of rural Punjab. The air was a toxic soup, and the heat
was crushing, as it always is in Pakistan in monsoon season. The interior
of the vehicle was an oven, and I was feeling sealed and cooked, even with
all the windows open. My friend and driver, Ashicksahib and I were soaked
with sweat from the journey, and we were eager to finally get out of the
jeep as we pulled into the city in the late afternoon. I had been through
a half dozen bottles of water, but I still felt dizzy with dehydration. I
knew that this day was the celebration of Mohammed's birthday, and while I
expected many people on the streets, I was unprepared for the magnitude of
the event that was taking place.

The crowds consumed us. We crawled along until we couldn't continue. The
jeep had to stop as the sea of celebrants became denser and denser inside
the city, and Ashicksahib shrugged his massive shoulders, smiled at me
from under his thick white moustache, wiped his neck with a sodden cloth,
and said in Urdu, "That's it, we cannot move, there's nowhere for us to
go. We must be patient." I had never seen this much humanity gathered in
a single place before. There were only boys and men of course, thousands
and thousands of them moving along in joyous procession -- on foot, piled
on platforms of flatbed trucks, stuffed into rickshaws, two or three
sharing scooters and bicycles. The usual animal multitudes -- herds of
water buffalo, goats, some camels, the ubiquitous miserable and thread-
bare donkeys with their carts -- all stood passively in the midst of the
chaos, too exhausted or too confused to register any instinctive response.
Blasting loudspeakers competed from a hundred different directions, chants
and patriotic music, prayers and devotional declarations, the staccato
delivery of fundamentalist pedagogy and the improvised reveries of
individuals with small bullhorns. The soft drink vendors shouted to the
crowds to make way as they spun their carts around over and over again,
and darted off into fray.

I brought out my camera, and because the noise was deafening, I mimed to
Ashicksahib my intention to take some photos from the roof of the jeep.
He motioned with an affirmative sweep of his hand and the typical and
essential south Asian head roll, and I pried open the door and squeezed
out against the celebrants pressed up to the side of the jeep. I hoisted
myself onto the roof and sat cross-legged to steady myself for some wide-
angle shots of the celebrations. I had some concern over my obviousness --
white and western -- but everyone who saw me shouted greetings in Urdu or
Punjabi, waved and smiled, and young boys ran up very close to the jeep to
see what I was up to. I heard Ashicksahib laughing, and all seemed safe --
until the squadrons of Sunni fundamentalists caught sight of me as their
trucks crawled by in a formation that seemed remarkably disciplined and
militaristic in the direct contrast to the emotionalism and formlessness
of the event.

Like the wave in a sports stadium, the young men stood up one by one on
the back of the trucks, their green turbans cut into the indefinite wash
of a grey, polluted sky, their eyes searching until they fixed on me, now
exposed and vulnerable on the roof of the jeep. And quickly they leapt
from their trucks like a SWAT team responding crisply to a crisis, precise
and efficient, jaws clenched, cocked for action. I saw them first through
the lens of my camera, and uttered an expletive or two appropriate to the
situation. I knew I was in trouble, and clearly, I had nowhere to go.

The turbans formed a green ribbon winding through the mass. As they
approached, the eyes of the militants were trained on me with the focus of
a predator about to take down its prey. I slipped back into the jeep
through the window, and motioned for Ashicksahib to look over the crowd
and see the slow and steady movement of the green turbans toward us. His
smile vanished instantly, and he readied himself for confrontation. When
the first militant reached the jeep's window, Ashicksahib's entire body
was taut and urgent, like a finger twitching on the trigger of a pistol.

"American! American! No photo! No photo!" The leader of the group
shouted at me in English and began to bang the side of the jeep. Ten or
twelve young men, eyes flaring under their turbans, screamed at me and
joined in the assault on the jeep. Ashicksahib had waited for a
particular moment, it occurred to me later, a certain point in the rising
arc of tension and emotion. He opened his door, but did not leave the
jeep. Instead he stood on the step on the driver's side, half in and half
out, slowly unfurled his considerable frame to its full height, and began
his verbal assault. He stood on his perch above the action and in a play
of passions, he shouted his opponents into submission. There were a few
physical sorties by the militants, attempts to kick the door of the jeep
into Ashicksahib, but these were displays, and Ashicksahib kicked back
only once. And suddenly they wavered, an erosion of spirit evidenced in
their eyes, a bending to the force roaring above them. They gave up their
attempts to grab my camera, to gain entry to the jeep, and with a swift
gesture of his hand, the leader called his small army into retreat.

This same festival that mobilised great masses of people in celebration,
that enacted the inextricableness of nationalist and Pakistani Muslim
commitment and identity, that on the surface appeared to articulate and
demonstrate a collective belief and purpose, also dramatised conflictive
divisions and the diverse interpretations of what it means to be a
Pakistani, a Muslim, a Punjabi, an Indus person, a Lahori, a poor person,
a person of means, and numerous other identities at stake. As an obvious
westerner in the midst of the event, I was variously ignored, warmly
greeted as a friendly foreigner, or accosted as an unwelcome interloper,
each interaction unfolding within a broader and deeper passionate ritual
which for some meant play and celebration, and for others meant a serious
and forceful demonstration of affiliation, faith, and nationalism.

I had been working in both village and urban contexts on issues and
strategies around communication/education and advocacy with South Asia
Partnership-Pakistan, a non-government organisation based in Lahore that
was engaged in front-line work for social change. The organisation was
driven by the pursuit of the principles of civil society, and on a daily
basis, it contended with the brutal contradictions to those principles.
Its work was carried out against a bulwark of poverty and fundamentalism
that seemed impenetrable, and this moment of imminent confrontation
resonated with the complex historical, cultural, and political dynamics of
identity, religion, nationalism, colonialism, and a seething cauldron of
south Asian geopolitics.

As Paulo Freire argued that world views are manifested in actions that
offer insight into broader and prevailing social and political conditions,
so Geertz maintained that societies "contain their own interpretations".
This was not essentialism -- there were none of the conceits or
romanticism of essentialist readings of the commonplace as encapsulated
social and political axioms. Rather, these views were a call for
analytical honesty, a participatory and political dimension to cultural
analysis that works to gain some access to these "interpretations" by
encountering and apprehending culture in forms of action. Cultural
analysis becomes a kind of trial-by-fire, a description from a viewpoint
of participatory engagement. By "participatory", I mean everything that
the bloodlessness and obfuscation of so much of Cultural Studies is not --
an actual stake in action and consequence in a real world of politics.

The interpretation of culture is valuable when it attends to action
rather than theoretical insinuation; to cultural volatility and
contingency, and the broad determinants of social discourse rather than
schemata and structure as critical ends. Interpretation has a
participatory dimension -- an involvement, an engagement with culture
described and interpreted -- which eschews the privilege of theory
unimpeded by empirical evidence.

References

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth. Penguin, 1972.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic
Books, 1973.
Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
Schiller, Friedrich. Notes on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans.
E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of
Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Customes. 2 vol. New
York: Henry Holt, 1877.
Williams, Raymond. "Culture is Ordinary". Resources of Hope: Culture,
Democracy, Socialism. Ed. Robin Gable. London: Verso, 1989.

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