Spring 2014 Philosophy of Italian Culture Class Notes 1

Return to Philosophy of Italian Culture

JAN 14

1. Call roll. Brief Student introductions.
2. Introduce 4 units, homework, deadlines (TH)
3. Introduction to Course websites - start at Alfino.org. (MA)
4. Preparing for class. Study questions will be put up after each class
5. Tell us a bit about yourself:

• Name, major and goals for immediate future.
• Motivation for taking this course
• Relevant experiences - past course, travels, etc

Time remaining: Introduction to Girlfriend in a Coma - show clip from la mala italia, distribute file. Answer 4 questions posted on wiki page.

JAN 16

• Initial impressions of the films; question 1 & 2 together

• Group work: Find someone in the class you don't know. Answer questions 3-4

• Transition to historical unit.

• Goal to understand historical origins contemporary fragmentation in Italy
• Congress of Vienna, animation.

JAN 21

Wilson, The Social Conquest of EarthChs. 1-7

• Note on the place of anthropology in the structure of the course.

• Caution: Wilson's view is not biological or evolutionary determinism in any simple sense. Can't nec. tell that from 1st part of reading.

Here's a summary of the key ideas I'd like to focus on in the next half hour. Below this segment, you'll see more extensive notes from when I taught this more slowly.

Key Ideas, Wilson Chs. 1-7

• Chapter 1-2: Comparing two very different eusocial species. Logic of the argument.
• Chapter 3: Preadaptations. What do they explain, if anything? (Watching out for "just so" stories.)
• Chapter 4-5: More pre-adaptations; Gear for the up-to-date paleolithic tribe-hold. Nests.
• Chapter 6: Encephalation, Kin Selection, Multi-Level selection (e.g. learning), Chimps vs. Hominid Eusociality, (for more: Michael Tomasello). Group selection (biological and cultural - example of milk)
• Think about the way that cultures shape terms for agreement and disagreement. What does cooperation mean (demand from us) in different environments and cultures?
• Tribalism

• Determinisms, weak and strong

• For my chapter notes on Wilson, see the main course wiki page.

JAN 23

Basics of Philosophical Marxism

• Hegel, the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach and Marx
• Theory of commodity production

• Commodities have exchange value and use value
• The use value of a commodity in intuitive -- e.g. the value of food or clothing in keeping you alive and warm. But you can also think of it in terms of the "socially necessary labor" to produce it.
• Problem: How do you explain profit?

• Labor theory of value: The value of the worker's labor from the capitalists' perspective is the amount of commodities necessary to keep the worker alive and working effectively. If that is 2 hours a day, then the "necessary labor" of a worker is two hours and the other six hours are "surplus labor"
• Surplus value theory of labor/profit: For Marx profit emerges from the labor in the sense that other capital inputs are "constant" (example: if you buy a machine to make a product, the cost of the machine has to be recovered from the sale of the product, but if the machine makes a worker more productive, the added value (surplus labor) goes to the capitalist. Short version: in an industrial model you only make money from the difference between what you pay the worker and the "actual" value of the worker's labor.
• What's the remedy for this? Elite intellectuals who understand this need to raise the consciousness of workers so that they will revolt. In a just society, labor retains it's surplus value or agrees, democratically, on how it will be used. (More at [1]

• Theory of culture in a nutshell:

• Base and superstructure
• Econonic determinism vs. non-economic determinist marxisms

Crises of Capitalism: 2008 and 1914

• Contemporary Example - Global recession of 2008: RSA animation - Crises of Capitalism, first 7:30 minutes in class.
• Gramsci's "organic crisis" : crisis which challenges legitimacy of ruling class. Gramsci's distinctive response, in contrast to Lenin's emphasis on resistance as a means of raising the class consciousness of workers, is to promote the idea of the "organic intellectual" (more later).
• Trotsky's analysis of World War I as a capitalist war:

• "“The forces of production which capitalism has evolved have outgrown the limits of nation and state,” Trotsky wrote in the very first sentence of his analysis. “The national state, the present political form, is too narrow for the exploitation of these productive forces. The natural tendency of our economic system, therefore, is to seek to break through the state boundaries. The whole globe, the land and the sea, the surface as well as the interior have become one economic workshop, the different parts of which are inseparably connected with each other.” [War and the International (Colombo: Young Socialist Publications, 1971), p vii.]
• Resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International held in 1907. “Wars between capitalist states,” the resolution declared, “are as a rule the result of their rivalry for world markets, as every state is not only concerned in consolidating its own market but also in conquering new markets.... Further, these wars arise out of the never-ending armaments race of militarism.... Wars are therefore inherent in the nature of capitalism; they will only cease when the capitalist economy is abolished.” [8] Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (Allen Lane, 1998), p. 31.

JAN 28

• Recap on Marxism and Crises of Capitalism

• Marx's view of exploitation, crises of capitalism, and culture (base/superstructure)
• Contrasting views of the causes of WW1: failure of diplomacy vs. effects of capitalist imperialism (race for Africa). Note parallel to 2008 recession.
• Competing strategies between socialists and communists in the trade union movement around WW1 and after. syndicalism defined. Gramsci, as a revolutionary marxist opposed syndicalism along with liberalism. He saw both as forms of economism.

• Three Gramscian concepts (see handout):

• economism - mistake of making theoretical separation of economic dimension from social and political ensemble (the rest of culture). economy, state, and culture function as historical bloc.
• historical bloc - dialectical unity of base and superstructure. Central concept to his difference from economic determinism.
• hegemony - used in various theories and cultural critique to describe or prescribe the focal point of dominance in society. "In "The Southern Question," Gramsci argues that the proletariat can only become hegemonic, a ruling class, if they overcome self-interest and ally with poor peasants and organic southern intellectuals.

• Gramsci on the Southern Question

• Defining the "southern question"
• Turin communists' statement
• Cultural attitudes about southerners (173); what G. calls the "bourgeois ideology" of the Socialists about southerners.
• Syndicalism and the Fiat strike.
• Gramsci's "ethnography" of southern intellectuals

• 1. Traditionally the intellectual was integrated in the peasant and artisanal class, but under capitalism he becomes a "technocrat" (applied science) who helps organize the state in relation to peasantry.
• 2. The small landowner who wants to use the peasantry to generate cash for a middle class lifestyle (college, dowries, etc.)
• 3. The southern clergy in contrast to the northern clergy.

JAN 30

Wilson, Chapters 20-24, "Human Nature, Culture, Cultural Variation, Language, Morality & Honor"

• more detailed chapter notes linked from the main course wiki page.

From Cave-persons to Culture

• Epigenetics - between nature/nurture: genome, epigenome, phenotype
• Prepared Learning - cognitive adaptations that allow transmission of culture through learning and provide capacities for specific kinds of learning.
• Gene-culture co-evolution: Lactose intolerance; incest taboo; Westermark Effect; color perception

Cognitive Archaeology

• Memory, building scenarios (215) (70,000 years of abstract thought and syntactic language).
• Note on biological determinism from 1st Wilson reading: Culture is evolved yet sui generus (in a class of its own, unlike anything that came before it). Once the imagination is on board, the possibilities of culutral variation explode. "cultural plasticity" (Chapter 23)
• Intentionality and "mind reading" (227); theory of mind
• Detached representations -- capacity to refer to things not present or not in existence (the subjunctive).

Morality and Honor

• Individual and group selection (egoism and altruism).
• Social network, alliances,
• altruism as cognitive "blurring" of differences between self-others (Pfaff - 246)
• Pinker: "other condemning emotions," "other-suffering emotions," "self-conscious emotions"
• Managing status: "Do good and talk about it" (or get others to).

FEB 4

Davis, "Family and State in the Mediterranean"

• Connection from Wilson: Culture is connected with human society in which status is negotiated (using social cognition, theory of mind, etc.)

• Question for Mediterranean anthropologists: "Is status negotiated in a distinctive way in Mediterranean culture? Unity advocates say yes, and generally agree that "honor and shame" dynamics provide the evidence.

• Why might cultures like those of the Mediterranean have developed honor culture? General hypothesis: environment (land, climate, flora/fauna, etc.) favors pastoral lifestyles in which reputation and identity are hard to establish as in envirnments favoring more permanent or concentrated settlements.

• What is Honor, honor culture?

• from Bowman: willingness to hit back. "good opinion of people who matter to us"
• Cultural values and dynamics which manage social status and equilibrium in relations (property, marriage, justice)

• Honor cultures allow individuals to retain use of violence to defend claims about status (consider, for example, duelling). Honor cultures resist allowing the state a monopoly on violence.

• What role does it play in society?

• 24: Code of honor bolsters intra group rivalry but also defends family against Church and State (Schneider)

• Comparison to Libya:

• Diffs: on divorce, polygamy (note loss of 1/4 of male pop 1911-44)
• Qaddafi's view of the state as paradigmatic (acc. to Davis) "acephalus society"

• Misc. from Bowman: two big developments affecting honor culture:

• rise of modern state and
• Victorian revival of "gentleman"

FEB 6

Notes on Anti-Fascist resistance writings: Croce, Levi, Gramsci

• Levi: Incident at the Bog and Symbolic enactment (great opp to try out ethnographic hypotheses)

• Croce:

• job of intellectual (154)
• some very traditional aspects of Croce's piece: separation of politics from other spheres, "contamination", the "old faith that, for two and a half centuries formed the core of Italy's resurgent spirit"
• accuses fascists of stimulating what Wilson would call our "groupishness" (155)
• accuses fascists of lack of "civic virtue" (156)

• Gramsci:

• Critica Fascista writer confusing two problems (365)
• G's analysis:

• Strengths: concept of hegemony to foreign culture.
• Problems: deeper reasons for why the italian intellectual may be out of touch with the peeps.

FEB 11

Schedule

• Finish up Gramsci discussion 10min
• Reconstruction & Post-WWII Elections 15min
• Geertz, "Thick Description"
• Paper Topics

Geertz, "Thick Description"

• various definitions of culture
• His: "Semiotic: following Weber: "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun"
• not experimental science in search of law (note: this connects him with Boas)
• not an operationalist, but likes idea of focusing on what anthropologists actually do: they do ethnography
• from Gilbert Ryle: "thick description"

• example of description of "twitching, blinking, winking, parody of winking, rehearing"
• invokes social code, but not reducible to it.

• Story of Cohen, the Marmusha, the mezrag, murder, sheep, the French (analogy to blinking: if you just recount events vs. significance)
• doing ethnography is like trying to read a manuscript ...(made up of) "transient examples of shaped behavior"

• critical of obscuring the task with abstract ideas like Durkheim's "superorganic"
• critical also of Cognitive Anthropology -- not just studying the psychology state of knowledge of a culturally competent individual.

• aim of Anthropology: "enlargement of universe of human discourse"
• should be actor-oriented: "cast in terms of the construction we imagine Berbers, Jews, or Frenchmen to place upon what they live through"
• p. 9: thick descriptions aren't too systematic or "neat"- coherence is limited by the actual circumstances. shouldn't overstate the formal coherence of the exchange; uncertainty (under-determined), things in the Cohen story could have gone differently.
• the ethnographer "inscribes" or "fixes" social discourse.

• summary statement at 11: ethnographic description (thick description) interprets the flow of social discourse from it's perishable state.

• the kula is gone but "The Argonauts of the Western Pacific" (Malinowski's study of the kula gift exchange) remains.

• ethnographic description is "microscopic"

• ways that anthropologists go wrong: "jonesville-is-the-USA" fallacy -- either way its a fallacy.
• anthropologist don't study villages, they study in villages
• no general theory of culture

"the essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said" 16

Advice about Paper Topics (5-10)

• Assigned - how to come up with a topic.
• Requirements: extensive use of at least two course readings. thesis or general claim, supported.
• Other - short and longer research, class presentations.

FEB 13

Diamond, "Why Do Cultures Make Such Disastrous Mistakes?"

• Examples of Cultures that have made "big mistakes"

• Easter Islanders: imagining the sitation. How could it really happen

• Four main reasons:

1. Fail to anticipate the problem

2. Problem arrives, but isn't perceived

3. Problem perceived, but no effort to solve it

4. Effort to solve the problem is ineffective

1. Fail to anticipate the problem

• ex. of Forest fires in the west
• forgetfulness: Mayan droughts, 1973 oil crisis
• false analogies: Viking agriculture in Iceland

2. Fail to perceive problem

• hard to see state of soil nutrition
• slow trends: climate change
• distant managers

3. Failure to try to solve the problem

• rational bad behavior: toxic waste dumping in environment without sufficient penalties.
• tragedy of the commons: overfishing
• international logging
• denial: research on resident's near damns; holocaust denial by WWII European Jews.

4. Ineffective efforts

• invasive species abatement
• rabbits in Tasmania, Australia