The Invention of Culture

By Roy Wagner and Tim Ingold

“This new edition of one of the masterworks of twentieth-century anthropology is more than welcome…enduringly significant insights.”—Marilyn Strathern, emerita, University of Cambridge
 
In the field of anthropology, few books manage to maintain both historical value and contemporary relevance. Roy Wagner's The Invention of Culture, originally published in 1975, is one that does. Wagner breaks new ground by arguing that culture arises from the dialectic between the individual and the social world. Rooting his analysis in the relationships between invention and convention, innovation and control, and meaning and context, he builds a theory that insists on the importance of creativity, placing people-as-inventors at the heart of the process that creates culture.
 
In an elegant twist, he also shows that this very process ultimately produces the discipline of anthropology itself. Tim Ingold’s foreword to the new edition captures the exhilaration of Wagner’s book while showing how the reader can journey through it and arrive safely—though transformed—on the other side.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226423319

Book preview

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1975, 1981, 2016 by Roy Wagner

Foreword to the Second Edition © 2016 by Tim Ingold

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42328-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42331-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226423319.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wagner, Roy, 1938– author.

Title: The invention of culture / Roy Wagner ; with a new foreword by Tim Ingold.

Description: Second edition. | Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN: 2016031851 | ISBN 9780226423289 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226423319 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Culture. | Anthropology. | Symbolism.

Classification: LCC GN357 .W33 2016 | DDC 306—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031851

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Roy Wagner

The Invention of Culture

Second Edition

With a New Foreword by Tim Ingold

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

To David M. Schneider

Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition by Tim Ingold

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1   The Assumption of Culture

The idea of culture

Making culture visible

The invention of culture

Chapter 2   Culture as Creativity

Fieldwork is work in the field

The ambiguity of culture

The wax museum

"Road belong culture"

Chapter 3   The Power of Invention

Invention is culture

Control

The necessity of invention

The magic of advertising

Chapter 4   The Invention of Self

An important message for you about the makers of time

Learning personality

On doing your own thing: The world of immanent humanity

Learning humanity

Chapter 5   The Invention of Society

Cultural change: Social convention as inventive flow

The invention of language

The invention of society

The rise of civilizations

Chapter 6   The Invention of Anthropology

The allegory of man

Controlling culture

Controlling nature

The end of synthetic anthropology

Notes

Index

Foreword to the Second Edition

The Invention of Culture is a brilliant, vertiginous, eccentric, and exasperating book. It is one of those rare and visionary books that somersaults out of left field, apparently from nowhere, beholden to no intellectual tendency or current of thought, couched in a language all of its own, resistant to any sort of characterization, yet contriving to turn everything we might have taken for granted on its head, then turning it back up again, until we finally realize that what matters is not which way up everything is but our awareness of the turning itself. The sense of giddiness you get from reading the book is like stepping off a roundabout: as long as you stay on it, all is fine, but try to take a stand on firm ground and you will fall over yourself. Anthropology, for Roy Wagner, is the discipline that, for as long as it has existed, has been falling over itself beside the roundabout of culture. In trying to fix the lively revolutions of the world, it only winds itself up into a vortex of ever increasing disorientation.

It all seems so easy at first. At the beginning of the book we find ourselves in the presence of a kindly and benevolent mentor who lowers us gently into the waters of anthropology, as though we had never dipped into them before. He tells us about anthropologists’ obsession with the idea of culture, and explains how the study of culture can never be anything other than a relation between one way of living life and another, in which each—as it were—bounces off the other and rebounds in its turn. We learn about the consequent dilemmas of anthropological fieldwork, in a reflection sprinkled with candid and sometimes comical observations from Wagner’s own work among Daribi people in Papua New Guinea. We begin to understand how anthropological research has to be a two-way process, in which each side—anthropologist and people—is simultaneously attempting to make some kind of sense of the other’s actions on their own terms, while using this sense as a springboard on which these terms might be rethought. We begin to realize that all human beings are anthropologists and that all life is fieldwork; or, conversely—as it will more likely appear to those whose communities are visited by anthropologists—that these anthropologists, once you get to know them, turn out to be human beings, and that their so-called fieldwork is actually life. It is not, then, that some of us are on the roundabout and others are on firm ground. We are all on the roundabout: only when we try to get off do we call it culture. And it is then that our problems truly begin.

For as he warms to his theme, Wagner, too, gets caught up in the revolutions of his own thought, in a language that grows increasingly convoluted as the argument proceeds. One of the oddities of the book, indeed, is that its author never seems to be quite sure to whom it speaks. Is it to students, who might be encountering the subject for the first time? Is it to old hands, who will know what he means and nod in recognition at familiar references to (for example) Nancy Munn’s work on the Walbiri or to the interest of Geertz’s Balinese in chickens? They will know—as the novice will not—that the Walbiri are an Aboriginal people of the Australian Central Desert and that Munn studied the iconography of their sand drawings, and that Clifford Geertz wrote a celebrated essay about cockfighting in Bali as the self-dramatization of a cultural ethos. And they will not be intimidated by the roll call of big names—Morgan, Sapir, Radcliffe-Brown, Lévi-Strauss, Leach, Bateson, Schneider, and many more—that echo from the pages. Even old hands, however, may find themselves bewildered as the line of argument loops and spirals into knots that would challenge even the most assiduous detective to unravel. In these moments, it sometimes seems that Wagner is no longer speaking to us at all. He is rather rapt in a soliloquy of his own, and you would have to get right inside his head, and think exactly as he does, to follow what is going on.

Once you do so, however, you discover that whatever the complexities of the arguments, the logic that drives them is surprisingly simple. All you have to do is imagine the way we think and turn it upside down. Then imagine how right-way-up thinking would look from an upside-down perspective. And finally, imagine how this look, the upside-down view of the right-way-up, would react upon its converse, namely the right-way-up view of the upside-down. Got it? For example, the so-called cargo cults that have broken out periodically in the colonial history of Papua New Guinea should not be regarded, according to Wagner, as mere outpourings of frustration over the colonists’ refusal to share the shiploads of artifacts that they had illegitimately expropriated for themselves, but rather as the precise opposite of the culture cult that is nothing other than anthropology itself. If the anthropologist aspires to convert the lives and relationships of others into the ethnographic artifacts we call cultures, then the people aspire to take hold of others’ artifacts and convert them into lives and relationships. Both—making artifacts and making lives-in-relationships—are inventive projects that bounce against the resistances, respectively, of native and colonial intransigence. And the realities that both invent are assumed by their inventors to be given in the first place: thus ethnographers delude themselves into thinking that they are merely describing cultures that already exist on the ground, as objective entities, while native people delude themselves into thinking that they are merely revealing relations that are likewise intrinsic to the make-up of the world.

So invention is going on everywhere, all the time. Human life, before all else, is an inventive process, continually pushing out against the resistance of what has gone before. For example, every time we use a word, or a particular combination of words, perhaps to tell an interlocutor about something that has happened, we choose it because of the meanings it has gathered from previous contexts in which we have heard it used, and because we have reason to believe that these usages and these contexts will also have been familiar to the person with whom we speak. If he is familiar with them, then he will understand, at least in part, what we are saying. If not, we’ll have some explaining to do. That familiarity, thanks to which our words make sense to others, is what Wagner calls convention; the improvisation by which, in any utterance, we adapt words to novel and unforeseen situations is what he calls invention. There can, then, be no invention without convention, else it would be meaningless. And vice versa, there can be no convention without invention, for how else could it arise save from past improvisation? In life, conventions are never given but are the hard-won and always provisional outcomes of our incessant and never wholly successful attempts to make ourselves understood. To treat them as given, then, is to mask the creative process of their formation, as though they preexisted the processes that gave rise to them. And anthropology stands accused, in Wagner’s book, of masking the creativity of other people’s lives by inventing cultures for them to live in. It is as if all they ever did was speak in proverbs.

But who are we? According to Wagner, we are people who objectify the world in a particular way. That is, we take as our starting point a world that is primordially diverse, made up of myriad discrete entities. The human project is then to put all the pieces together, by assigning every entity to its class and assembling the classes into higher orders of relationship. There are atoms, but we assemble them into molecules; there are individuals, but we assemble them into cultures or societies; there are letters and words, but we assemble them into literature. But our way calls up its opposite. This is to suppose that the world is primordially one, not a universe of entities but a field from which whatever exists—be it plant, animal, or person—has to work to differentiate itself, to fashion being from the undifferentiated flux of potential that is a world in becoming. If ours is the way of science, the collective and self-conscious articulation of universal truth, theirs is the way of the soul, the differentiation from within of a vitality immanent in the cosmos as a whole. In short, our way begins where the other way ends: we mask our invention of a given world of nature in order to highlight the scientific achievement of our knowledge of it; they mask the invention of a universe of relations in order to highlight the work of differentiation. And these, Wagner insists, are the only two possibilities. There is nothing in between. Everyone, therefore, has to go one way or the other.

At this point, things get a little tricky. For it turns out that we are not just anthropologists, or even scientists, but what Wagner calls middle-class Americans, or on occasion, urban Westerners. They, by contrast, are modeled on the Daribi. Now the problem is that middle-class, urban Americans and Daribi people add up to only a tiny proportion of the total population of the world. But if there are only two possibilities, then everyone else has to side either with the Americans or the Daribi. Wagner’s inclination is to lump everyone else with the Daribi. And what a motley crew they are! Their precise designation varies from page to page in this book, but it includes religious or tribal, tribal, peasant, and ‘lower-class,’ tribal, peasant, and ethnic, tribal, peasant, and religious, tribal, peasant, and lower-class urban people, and many more. To be on the other side, then, one has at least to be secular, to admit to no tribal affiliation or ethnic identity, to reside in a city rather than live from the land, and to categorize oneself as middle-or upper-class. As a rather typical exemplar of the academic middle class, I would actually fit this description quite well. But I am not American! And I certainly find much about American middle-class life peculiar and even exotic, most notably its addiction to all forms of culture. So does that put me with the Daribi, along with the tribals, the peasants, assorted religious devotees, and the lower classes?

Wagner, to his credit, does not adopt that clunky hybrid of later anthropological literature, namely Euro-American. But he did set the stage for subsequent comparison with the equally contrived Melanesia, in which Melanesia and Euro-America, with their respective cults of cargo and culture, came to be cast as inversions of one another. This is all very well in theory. What is mistaken is the attempt to pin caricatures that are nothing if not the outcomes of a giant thought experiment onto real-life people, whether resident in Papua New Guinea, Europe, or America. The conventional alternatives, non-Western and Western or traditional and modern, though awkward in many ways, at least make no pretense to describe anything other than idealizations. It is not unreasonable to define the human being for the sake of argument in such-and-such a manner, and to ask what consequences would follow were humans to behave in ways contingent upon our definition. If we define them as possessors of reason, we could calculate what would happen if they acted rationally; if we define them as users of symbols, we could imagine what life would be like if every action were symbolic, and so on. But these are as if scenarios—as if all action were rational or symbolic. It is not to suggest that these scenarios bear any immediate relation to reality. What is truly jarring is to find anthropologists, of all people, confusing the thought experiment with real life and imagining that there are people, for example in America or Europe, of a certain background or class, who actually fit the description.

And it jars, too, in The Invention of Culture, perhaps because the book is trying to do two things at once. For this is not just a book about anthropology. It also attempts to diagnose the condition of middle-class America and to account for the dynamics that appear to have set it on an irreversible path of self-destruction. For this to work, we have to put aside our suspicions that Wagner’s apparent belief in the existence of middle-class Americans masks his invention of them. And while his diagnosis of their curious obsessions may have some truth to it, it seems oddly detached from any analysis of the forces that have been manifestly responsible for the impoverishment of billions of people beyond the havens of the middle classes and for the destruction of their environments. Maybe we can follow Wagner in drawing a limited parallel between Daribi garden magic, where the gardener, in mimicking the industrious bush fowl, hopes to harness in his own endeavors the fowl’s capabilities in raking up brushwood, and the American consumer’s surrender to the mystique of advertising, which persuades him of the magical powers of certain chemicals. But the apparent symmetry of the comparison glosses over the undeniable fact that behind the power of advertising lie the interests of multinational petrochemical or pharmaceutical giants that have likely prospered from the wreckage of the gardener’s environment and the expropriation of the knowledge that allowed him to draw a living from it.

The Invention of Culture is both timeless and manifestly of its time. It is timeless because it refuses any accommodation to the history of its subject. In the final pages of the book, Wagner lampoons the earnest efforts of textbooks and their writers to present the history of anthropology as an accumulation of masterly contributions, all adding up to an authoritative literature. For what does this literature amount to? Nothing more than a kind of collective amnesia or somnambulism that sucks out the inventiveness of human lives and works, wherever they may be carried on, and uses it to drive its own progress, leaving other cultures as the eviscerated husks of its scientific project. It is the output of a machine that relentlessly converts lives into publications—that writes people up. Indeed, so far as Wagner is concerned, not just anthropology but the academic establishment in its entirety has been complicit in banishing the creativity of other life-worlds in order to support its own endeavors of world making, and it would be a cruel irony if Invention were slotted into the same enterprise. The book, as Wagner himself insists, is not just anomalous and divergent with regard to academic ideologies, but directly in contradiction to them. Indeed, it punctures a hole in the pretensions of academia to offer an authoritative account of how the world works. The Invention of Culture, then, is not—and never will be—a contribution to the literature. It is rather a contribution, by way of the written word, to life.

And yet the book is of its time. Most obviously, it is of a time when anthropologists, as well as the people with whom they reside in fieldwork, were assumed by default to be male. But the date of its first publication, 1975, still gives cause for astonishment. Indeed, it is because the book is of its time that we can also appreciate, looking back, how far it was ahead of its time. Its critique of the ethnographic objectification of other cultures, and of the denial of others’ creativity this brings in train, preceded the whole debate about writing culture and the crisis of representation, in which anthropology would be engulfed, by over a decade. Its insistence that nature is as much an invention of science as is culture of anthropology—that scientists delude themselves and everyone else into thinking that nature exists a priori, just as anthropologists do with culture, in order to establish their authority to pronounce upon it; indeed that the very distinction between nature and culture is an artifact of Western ideology—anticipated by two decades the movement of critical thought that nowadays goes by the name of science studies. Its demolition of the idea that there exists a level of real reality, accessible only to science, of which native understandings offer only a pale and illusory reflection, anticipated phenomenologically inspired critiques of both semantic and ecological anthropology that had also to await another twenty years. And the book’s conclusion, that humans have never in their evolution been more natural or more cultural—indeed that their very humanity is the inadvertent, incremental, and ever-unfinished achievement of living with and through other people and things—would not be out of place in contemporary debates on the post-human.

But all these debates honor other ancestors, some more recent, others further in the past. The Invention of Culture will not fit into any intellectual genealogy. It has left no Wagnerian school of thought. Stubbornly out of joint, it is a book that stands resolutely for nothing but itself, an erratic in the landscape of anthropology. Yet for all its flaws—and these are many—The Invention of Culture is not just a work of rare vision. It is a stunning intellectual achievement. It pays to revisit it.

Tim Ingold

University of Aberdeen

May 2016

Preface to the Second Edition

As Joel Robbins once put it, The Invention of Culture is one of those books that is not only read, but also understood, by title only. In fact, most books are like that these days—they make heavy demands on the attention span, do not encourage acronyms, etc. People don’t really read them but collect them, like trophies, or shrunken heads, or worse.

So what makes this book so special? To understand why Joel’s comment was not one of disparagement but of high praise, one has to consider the paradoxical nature of the text itself. To put it simply, I did not write it. It wrote me! What I mean by this is counterinvention, one of the main points in the argument, illustrated very aptly by M. C. Escher’s Drawing Hands, which could easily be interpreted as the Hand of God and the God of Hand, or, if you prefer, the agency of the Innate and that of human artifice, each in its turn depicted by the negative feedback of the other. The semblance of Nature is not opposed to that of Culture, but rather precipitated out of the inadequacies of our experimental and technological attempts to control it (the bridle and the bit become the horse itself), whereas the antinomic Culture develops out of Nature’s flawed attempts to control us.

But if the natural and the cultural are nothing but the same thing, seen from two different perspectives, like two different families making a profitable living for themselves by taking in each other’s laundry (I think this is how the futures market works), then the problem of understanding them is not one of complexity but of simplicity. By fueling its energy on its own shortcoming, the nature/culture dialectic becomes one of obviation, an underdetermination, turning its idealistic fantasies of democracy, progress, and achievement into a cyclical decline of the West scenario.

What could be simpler than the wheel? What could be more complex than a civilization? The wheel principle, as I have pointed out elsewhere (An Anthropology of the Subject, 2001: IV), is too simple to understand. Even the attempt to do so shows up our overdetermined rationalizations for what they are worth. Obviation, by contrast, is not only underdetermined, it is the art of underdetermination itself!

In other words, the very condition of being too simple to be understood is itself too simple to be understood, a fact that fairly guarantees the anonymity of the whole process. The more we change in time the more time changes in us: as we invest more time, effort, and ingenuity into safeguarding the pristinity of the innate, establishing nature preserves, reorganicizing food products, and re-imagining ecology on the analogy of economy, environmentalism incrementally takes on the attributes of the artificial, whereas the realm of human responsibility conversely evolves into (apes) the pristinity of the natural world. In effect the innate and the artificial exchange attributes reciprocally to the point where each morphs into the other and, as Americans like to say, we’re not in Kansas anymore. In a manner that is too understandable to be simple, the whole nature/culture polarity is reversed on itself, and in a way that is oblivious to the eye of the beholder. Hence the dictionary definition of the word obviate: to anticipate and dispose of.

To invent a culture as part of the process of understanding it is a first step in obviating it, a prima facie evidence for the fact that no one really knows what the term culture either means or is supposed to mean. Thus one is tempted to quote Oscar Wilde: For each man kills the thing he loves, some do it with a word . . . (The Ballad of Reading Gaol). This also explains the title of my first book on obviation, Lethal Speech.

Anthropologists are distinctive for their apprehension rather than their comprehension, for their underdetermination of things rather than their explanation. So the reader is entitled to ask what this, in turn, means, and I shall take my example from the work of the normally reliable Lévi-Strauss,