Knowledge, Culture and Society. Peter Burke

cultural history had a prominent presence, also if we think about a literate like Voltaire, who, despite not using the term culture, did refer to the human “spirit” and dedicated a text to manners (Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations [1756]). We can’t forget that History is the discipline chosen by the Enlightenment to be the reasoned philosophical science that will account for the progress of the spirit of nations37 or, if we think, later, about cultural analysis among historians such as Marc Bloch (The Magic-Working Kings) and even Lucien Fevbre (his works about Rabelais, Luther and Erasmus…).

As for the second tradition, I would like to briefly emphasize three moments and two authors, important for the recognition of knowledge and, in general, of cultures of subordinate groups and non-Western nations. The first is Gustav Friedrich Klemm, who was credited by the Encyclopaedia Britannica with the development of the “culture” concept; a definition that was later adopted by Edward Burnett Tylor, and that, with time, was established as canonical for decades. He was also recognized for his ethnographic collection, which became a model to others.38 The second, a German immigrant to the United States, Franz Boas, considered one of the pillars of American Cultural Anthropology, established in 1920 a set of basic principles that confronted evolutionist interpretations and the hierarchical organization of cultures: cultural aspects of human behaviour and manners are acquired by learning, through unconscious processes; all cultures have their own development and history, which respond to their own priorities and needs, so none of them is better, nor more or less primitive than any other and, consequently, each culture must be interpreted by analysing its internal elements; an idea directly against evolutionist stances,39 still in vogue today. About the third, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, we will make a brief mention further on.

Starting from this historic-genealogical frame, sketched in a somewhat coarse way, I understand cultural history as a perspective of analysis concerned with the logics and rationalities that guide society, governments, politics, the economy, people’s actions and their ideas about the world; a perspective that also brings human conflicts to the centre, and not only meaning, as more culturalist tendencies have done by using cultural analysis in various disciplines, forgetting the necessary anchoring in society that every analysis dealing with human societies must retain.40 Cultural practices, as well as representations and knowledge emanating from them, are socially differentiated and, in turn, influence and transform the surroundings in which they are produced, become appropriated and start circulating (culture circuit = production, circulation and appropriation, which, by the way, must be unravelled during the research process).

As Pierre Bourdieu showed in Practical Reason, his theory of action,41 social agents act and are equipped with a practical sense, an acquired system of perceptual preferences, as well as with cognitive structures typical of each culture and/or particular human group. So, it’s therefore possible and necessary to reveal what he calls “the intrinsic dynamic of practices”, that is, translated into my own words, the logic, strategies and rationalities with which social relationships are weaved and produced, including conflicts, of course, since social relationships are relationships of symbolic force, which may or may not be shaped as relationships of physical force. Karl Marx (and Max Weber of course) had already emphasized this important part of domination mechanisms: symbolic domination42, which became explicit in such difficult life conditions by Antonio Gramsci in his Jail Notebooks: cultural hegemony, hegemonic block, subordinate classes…On the other hand, Georg Simmel showed us (1904), with midday clarity, that conflict lies at the centre of all human relationships and is, most of the time, a constructive force43; in the same way, Italian Microhistory brought the role of conflict to the centre of its concerns, along with the role of different perceptions and appropriations of the social world by diverse groups,44 against generalisations established by the notion of mentality.

The West has set itself up as the norm of knowledge, and its wise men, whom we call scientists, used for decades, under the shadow of colonial expansion, a censorial right to qualify, classify, and revile other-cultures and their knowledge; exotic cultures with which disciplines like Anthropology and the History of Premodern Cultures have dealt, as they have with the subordinate knowledge of the West itself, offspring of the same societies…This is not new. Michelet himself had brought attention to that fact in his well-known book The Witch, where he ascertained that witch hunting had taken place, partly, to deprive women of their traditional medical-healing knowledge, which he characterized as feminine, and T.S. Elliot, when analysing the self-centredness of culture, also wondered about how to assume the conflict that ensues in the face of diversity.45

This rejection or undermining is a product of the Enlightenment. We can’t even imagine how enlightened we are, how close we still are to Diderot, D’Alambert or Kant…I invite you to read the enjoyable book of Tzvetan Todorov about the Enlightenment, written for a wide audience, in which he shows how we are still enlightened: The Spirit of the Enlightenment.46 Since, as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in 1944, in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment:47 the strategy of reason is, already from the Odyssey’s logos, in a veiled or explicit way, a structure of domination.

This structure has been applied for centuries, in many parts of the world and with diverse strategies (territorial, nationalist, economic, etc.), through colonialism, a “global shared experience” (Jürgen Habermas), which has been strong during processes of knowledge domination (colonialism of knowledge) and of global neo-colonialisms in our contemporary consumer societies, which also exercise domination through knowledge and its transmission media (mass media, web, …) in the form of already-globalised new colonialisms. And, during these domination processes, great treasures have been lost, especially for traditional cultures.48

      2.

Since magical knowledge and traditional medicine, a kind of knowledge unrecognized and disqualified by erudite and ruling groups in Europe and America, is one of my research topics, I want to show how, in the end, other types of knowledge fulfil the same order requirements as those applied to erudite academic knowledge, the offspring of Western universities.49 This task, it seems to me, is pertinent in a country of such cultural diversity, where many forms of other-knowledge live together, many of which, unfortunately, now begin to disappear without being fully included in our social world. And here I think again about the book on popular culture by Professor Burke, which presents a moment when, thanks to the expansion of erudite thinking, the accelerated disappearance of popular knowledge in Europe and certain places of America began.

In short, we can say: knowledge, different ways of thinking and rationalising, and the subsequent knowledge that derives from such a symbolic stream and from learning abilities (Sperber), available in each culture (Geertz), vary from one society, community, or even sociocultural group to another, and respond to a general symbolic dispositive typical of the human species (Sperber, Cassirer, Durkheim, Boas, Turner, Lévi-Strauss, Durand…). As Giovanni Levi showed, in the great book guided and compiled by Professor Burke, Formas de hacer historia, even within the same culture or community, symbolic structures in different social contexts produce a “multiplicity of representations that is fragmented and differentiated”,50 which materializes in different practices and knowledge (magical, discursive, political, medical, economical