Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 20.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 06:20:39 +0100
From: Hartmut Krech <kr538@uni-bremen.de>
Subject: Re: 15.638 cultural divisions
As a cultural anthropologist by training, I feel addressed personally when
WM raises "a core problem in ethnography." As a human being, I can only
draw upon my own personal life experience that is necessarily subjective
and limited. But it is also the only concrete material to start with and
work upon. In other words: I can only write about the experience of an
"independent scholar" in Germany during the last decades of the 20th
century. The new millennium has not yet begun for me.
Theoretically speaking, cultural differences arise from different modes of
communicating. Communication is an expression of the basic human capacity
to symbolize and to negotiate a shared agreement upon the meaning of such
symbols. Traditions of meaning and usage are transmitted within communities
that we call cultures. The identity of such a community is embedded in the
meanings that it attaches to more or less arbitrary symbols. We are not
born humans, we are made humans by way of culture. Culture is the second,
the proper nature of human beings. We can achieve this final and perfect
state of true humanity by way of learning, literature, and the musical
arts. Endeavours to reach this stage have been part of all humanisms that
have come into being during the long course of history.
One might expect that the problems of crossing the "frontiers of
understanding" and of "translating the literature and interpretations of
one research community to the other" have been solved already. Those are no
new problems at all. And it is quite obvious that their lingering presence
becomes even more pressing, as we are given the digital instruments that
allow us at least potentially to encode all the knowledge of this world in
one single language. But just take the word "the humanities" and you will
encounter unsurpassable difficulties translating it into German. There is
no equivalent in the German language describing all the nuances of its
meaning adequately. To make matters worse, the "post-modernistic turn" of
recent years has amounted to an inflation of subjective and often odd
meanings attached to words of which they have never formed a part.
In line with this disoriented post-modernity of interdisciplinarianism and
misunderstood interculturalisms, there has grown a mainstream of academia
that establishes its consensus through trivializing Genglish babbling.
Sarcastically speaking, a fair share of the scientific establishment in
Germany resembles a strange concoction brewed from such ingredients as the
Prussian Civil Service applied to intellectual freedom, post-Cold War needs
to control unwanted convictions by way of swamping fields of inquiry with
trivial content (Gresham's Law applied to knowledge) and an uncontrolled
race for public recognition of mediocre results. I may be excused for this
harsh judgment by pointing out that similar problems seem to exist at least
in France where efforts are under way to limit the effects of its
scientific Mandarinate. At the root of this problem rests the fundamental
question of who is given the material security to publish whatever he or
she regards as scientifically valid. If your research duplicates studies
that have been successful in the United States, you avoid the uncomfortable
question if your findings are right or wrong. Your paper may even get
quoted abroad and the stylish international look of your research
annihilates any doubts about your political correctness. I do not want to
waste your time discussing provincialism in science, although it may
characterize an influential segment of a country's current scientific
production. Very obviously that is a one-way street.
The problems of bridging cultural traditions of meaning by finding a common
denominator have been known to generations of scholars. There are several
feasible solutions that are time-consuming. Although international
collaboration among scholars is needed in a final stage, we must not be
mistaken that only dedicated research in the course of several decades can
pave the way in a terrain that has not been mapped before. The usual length
of a research project will not be sufficient. The tendency to give
employment to inexpensive "junior professors" immediately upon the receipt
of their doctor's degrees will not bring about results that by definition
are time-consuming. We are speaking of traditions that have taken centuries
to develop. I am thinking of books of which there is only one single copy
left, whose pages have not been opened for years, sticking together like
the thin layers of a tissue-paper. I know what I am writing about.
If you have read this far, you may want to learn more about the reasons why
my research (about which I can only speak) has remained unpublished in
Germany. Suffice it to say that I felt called as an anthropologist-to-be,
when a group of Native Americans occupied a small village in South Dakota
on the morning of my 22nd birthday, a few weeks before the Vietnam War came
to an end. I then founded a society that became recognized as charitable
under German law to provide information completing the picture behind the
news headlines. To give it direction, I defined as one more field of
anthropological practice all processes whereby communication is brought
about between cultures through technical media (this was no new idea, of
course, but my later terms "ethnopraxis" and "ethnotechnics" were). The
American Indian leaders were finally acquitted by a well-meaning judge when
he learnt that the FBI had amassed over 5.000 files on their activities,
some of them illegally. Comparing my limited possibilities as an
anthropologist to "observe" foreign cultures with those state-of -the-art
surveillance techniques, I began to study the history of anthropological
research techniques. In my dissertation ("An Image of the World") I have
compiled a multitude of quotations from rare books that you will not find
elsewhere, beginning with Magnus Hundt's definition of "anthropology" in
1501. One hundred copies were printed photomechanically in 1989. Although
my book traces the origin of scientific racism and although I was granted
the second to best grade (magna cum laude) after five long years of
litigation in German courts, my career had ended before it had begun. I had
no other choice than to extend the scope of my research to comprehend other
disciplines. This has led me to study on my own in special collections
throughout Germany.
On the negative side, I am looking back at twenty years of unemployment,
interrupted by a total of fours years of short-term positions in local
historical collections and four years of teaching as an Appointed Professor
on a contract basis. On the positive side, I am aware that I have been able
to spend an incomparable greater amount of time researching than any
professor burdened with office work, examinations, grant proposals, etc.
One might expect that I have an unrivalled store of information to feed a
flood of publications making my name known in Academia. But before the
advent of the Internet and electronic publishing, I was left at the mercy
of slow-handed journal editors and publishers controlled by the same tacit
assumptions and allegiances that govern the filling of academic positions.
Even worse: I had to rent a safe-deposit at a local bank for my core
material and pack up and seal three dozens of document files, when I came
to know that nowadays even security locks can be opened without leaving any
traces. When I apply for a position or grant in Germany, I can congratulate
myself if my research proposal is not turned into somebody else's
colloquium, symposium, or exploratory paper.
Having studied psychology for a couple of years, I am aware of the dangers
of paranoia and the narrow dividing line between delusion and reality. An
old friend of mine, now a distinguished professor, head of a university
department and referee for a national granting institution, has convinced
me in long personal talks that my situation is no exception at all. Rather
it follows from the customary procedures of how research grants and
university positions are distributed among the shareholders in this game.
If you are outside, there is no way to get in, no matter how dignified the
research material may be that you happen to control.
So, how can we solve the problem of "translating the literature and
interpretations of one research community to the other" ? There is one
simple truth that I have learnt over the years, a truth that even those
will acknowledge whose business it is to prevent the emergence of
applicable knowledge: Without at least one dedicated individual, nothing
will ever happen in human affairs. Contrary to WM's suggestion, I do not
think that there is so much cultural difference between the mainstreams of
science and the humanities in Western countries nowadays. Rather the
situation of the independent scholar remains unsettled.
What do we need ? Independent scholars from foreign countries should be
invited to co-teach courses and co-edit publications on their individual
merits rather than their institutional affiliations. Although they may have
spent much more time on their research than their institutional colleagues
to qualify their findings, they are handicapped twice: in the application
process and following the cease of their appointments. Also travel grants
to international conferences should be available to independent scholars
first and preferably from the conference organizers rather than third
parties to avoid conflicts of interest. Both measures could resolve the
difficulties of independent scholars to receive professional credits and a
fair judgment of their research within their own countries. For example, I
cannot apply for an academic position in a foreign country, because I lack
the "three letters of recommendation" that are usually required
In order to bridge cultures, we should begin to invest in individual human
beings, as we already do in software and hardware. And we should be aware
of individual biographies, the unlimited perfectibility of the human mind,
as we should be aware of the persistence of cultural traditions that only
in the eyes of some individuals appear to be counter-productive, inhuman,
perhaps even cruel. Let me repeat: The philosopher's stone has been found,
much of the way to make it useful has been gone, but we are still lacking
the confidence in an individual's dedication and we still refuse to extend
the material security that is necessary if we want to bridge cultural divides.
If you feel called upon to help qualify the results of my research, please
feel invited to get in touch. Thank you for your attention.
Dr. Hartmut Krech
The Culture and History of Science Page
http://ww3.de/krech
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