Between Cultures. Jerrold Seigel
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done the most to focus attention on cultural difference and its significance in modern history, the frontier between the originally European West and the other regions of the world it came to dominate.3 That some of our subjects did this from a European starting point and others from one rooted elsewhere created sharp contrasts between them, especially because all of them understood the deep harms visited on other peoples by European colonialism. Such differences are of great import, to be sure, but we will see that they did not blot out the common elements and issues all of them confronted in attempting to live between cultures.
Let it be clearly noted at the start that such a way of being is by no means always a happy one. There can be something disorienting, even threatening, about inhabiting two different and sometimes hostile worlds at the same time, and it may well be impossible to carry out in a satisfying way; to some degree all the figures we consider failed in the attempt or chronicled the failures of others. But even when the failure brought pain and regret, and perhaps especially then (most deeply in the case of Lawrence), there was and remains something exemplary about the lives and histories they fashioned as a result. I hope the chapters that follow will show that this project of simultaneously cultivating identities rooted in different cultures, notably in “Western” and “Eastern” (or at least “non-Western”) cultures, raises large and important questions, involving not just the specific relations between Europe and other regions of the world, but also what it means for human beings to be cultural beings, both creatures and creators of cultures.
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I think it will be helpful to give some sense of what these questions involve at the start, by thinking for a moment about the capacities human beings must possess in order to live as cultural beings. For this there can be no better point of entry than language, probably the greatest gift human cultures bestow on their members. The benefits of language are legion: other creatures communicate in various ways, but human speech and writing provide vehicles for exchanging information that are at once far more stable and precise, and more general and flexible, than what other living beings possess. Language is, in Steven Pinker’s phrase, “the stuff of thought,” but it is also a tool for conveying and refining feelings, allowing people to exercise and cultivate both intellectual and affective capacities that would remain undeveloped without it. It also provides human groups with a chief medium of collective memory, making real or fictional accounts of past experience available to successive generations and offering rich resources for individual and communal nurture, albeit ones that are not always employed in beneficial ways.
Because humans begin to acquire language at a very early stage of life, when much of the capacity for analytical thinking they will exhibit later has not yet emerged, we may be tempted to conclude that language learning is a chiefly passive process, in which infants merely imitate the gestures and actions of adults. But recent studies suggest that such a conclusion misses much of what takes place when children acquire languages. Humans are born with linguistically relevant capacities that distinguish them from other animals. One of these is an ability to recognize the difference between random sounds and sonic elements that are susceptible to being organized into systems of meaning; a second is the power to reason about such signs in ways that can resolve inevitable linguistic ambiguities. Infants display the first of these aptitudes within a few months of birth, before they begin to imitate the sounds made by people around them, by responding with heightened attention to the language or languages regularly spoken in their hearing, while remaining relatively indifferent to sounds introduced casually or haphazardly: “Infants are sensitive to the difference between relative pitch, which is linguistically relevant, and absolute pitch (e.g., male versus female voices), which is socially relevant; to rhythmic aspects of linguistic input; to vowel duration; to linguistic stress; to the contour of rising and falling intonation; and to subtle phonemic distinctions.” The preference infants exhibit for the way a particular language organizes these elements even before it is “theirs” constitutes the first stage in the process by which they select and begin to develop “particular pathways for representing and processing language.”4
Since infants respond in this way in whatever cultural situation they inhabit, they have the potential to attach themselves to an indefinite number of such pathways: in principle all human infants have the ability to learn any human language (and to acquire more than one if their situation encourages it). By puberty this possibility is lost (or at least much diminished), but in the meantime children have exhibited other innate capacities essential to becoming language users. Around age two children give evidence of being able to view verbal signs through logical categories, grasping, for instance, that words must apply to objects at some particular level of generality. They recognize that “cat” refers neither to the paw nor fur of the creature designated, nor to the more abstract idea of “animal” of which it is only one exemplar; adults who help them to distinguish these separate modes of reference must rely on some potential that is already present in their pupils. More significant still, sometime between the ages of four and six children begin to act as “little grammarians,” focusing on linguistic anomalies in an attempt to make usage more predictable and regular than they find it to be. A young American girl, told that an object her mother was using was a typewriter, replied, “No, you’re the typewriter. That’s a typewrite”—rejecting the application of the active term “writer” to a passive object. Certain French children, confronted with the uncertainty created by using “une voiture” to mean both “a car” and “one car,” have invented the construction “une de voiture” for the latter, thereby signaling their desire for a separate formula to refer to a singular member of a class of things. Later, recognizing that people around them are able to distinguish the two meanings without having distinct signs for each, they go over (or back) to the standard usage; but their path to this point makes clear, as Annette Karmiloff-Smith concludes, that “infants and young children are active constructors of their own cognition.”5 Sometimes this activity goes as far as bringing forth a new language; in one recently documented case, children in a remote Australian village evolved a spoken idiom of their own, taking over words from both English and tongues native to their area, but inventing grammatical forms (such as verb tenses) distinct from those employed in the languages spoken around them, requiring those who want to employ the new idiom to learn new rules.6
A kindred perspective on language, applied to adults as well as infants, was offered by a much earlier writer, Michel Bréal, the late nineteenth-century French professor of linguistics who was responsible for inviting his Swiss contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure to teach in Paris. Bréal pointed out that certain features of language make it serviceable only to beings who can bring intelligence and reflection to bear on it; one feature was that words often carry a variety of possible meanings and uses, so that people must be able to assign some particular one depending on context and the perceived intention of speakers. Bréal illustrated the point by observing that a common French dictionary devoted no fewer than twelve columns to illustrating the diverse and potentially confusing uses of the little word à, in its various guises as complement, conjunction, or preposition, and “yet the people find its way with no difficulty in this seeming chaos.” This situation illustrated what it is that makes language deserve its appellation “the educator of the human race”—not because its vocabulary and syntax provide ready-made frames for thought and expression, but just the opposite: because of the incomplete guidance it gives to users, the gaps and inconsistencies speakers must fill in and resolve for themselves, and which stimulate the mind to develop its powers.7 To quote Annette Karmiloff-Smith again: “What is special about humans is the fact that they spontaneously go beyond successful behavior.”
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew the implications of such an understanding at greater length:
The human dialectic … manifests itself first of all by the social and cultural structures that it brings into existence and within which it confines itself. But the objects it employs for practical purposes and as bearers of cultural meaning [ses objets d’usage et ses objects culturels] would not be what they are if the activity that brings them forth did not also point in the direction of being able to negate or go beyond them.
Every generation of human beings comes into a material and cultural world partly shaped by the imagination and inventiveness of those who preceded it, finding in this inheritance both resources