Showing papers by "Lewis A. Coser published in 1978"

Creating CultureCulture and Its Creators: Essays in Honor of Edward Shils.Joseph Ben-David , Terry Nichols Clark

Abstract: Over the years, Edward Shils and I have, as it were, listened to very different drummers; it therefore gives me all the more pleasure to review this distinguished festschrift published in his honor. Although, as the editors say, \"every part of the book deals with problems related to [Shils's] work and uses concepts derived from it,\" no other common thread runs through these pages. I shall therefore consider several individual papers in some detail while dealing only briefly with others that seem to me of peripheral interest. Among the outstanding contributions is a paper by the Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody, entitled \"Literacy, Criticism, and the Growth of Knowledge.\" Laying to rest the cultural relativism still prevalent among many social scientists with its sentimental contention that all cultures are of equal stature, Goody argues that systems of communication and intellectual processes in nonliterate cultures differ qualitatively from those of literate ones. Writing, so he argues, makes possible a kind of scrutiny of discourse which, in turn, increases the scope of critical activity, rationality, skepticism, and logic. Literacy, as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has argued recently in a similar vein, \"detaches cultural resources from persons\" and, hence, frees them from the narrow limits of individual memory. Arguing along lines that seem partly related to Basil Bernstein's work, Goody contends that nonliterate cultures tend to be closed systems since purely verbal modes of communication are tied to an \"occasion,\" whereas in written forms of communication thought can become abstract, depersonalized, formalized, transcending \"occasions,\" and hence subjected to a type of impersonal critique that is unavailable in nonliterate societies. Philosophical and logical discourse becomes possible only when writing allows the formalization of propositions that are abstracted from the concrete flow of speech. Goody states that he does not intend to introduce another single-factor theory and that he is aware that \"the social structure behind the communicative acts is often of prime importance\" (p. 242). But he does contend, and has persuaded this reviewer, that differences between open and closed forms of communicative systems, or between literate and nonliterate cultures, point to significant differences in people's capacity to store, evaluate, and augment knowledge, as well as differences in the quality of culture and interpersonal relations.