Agar - Culture : how to make it work in a world of hybrids

Culture

Books by Michael H. Agar

Angel Dust: An Ethnographic Study of PCP Users (coeditor)

Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs

Independents Declared: The Dilemmas of Independent Trucking

Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation

The Lively Science: Remodeling Human Social Research

The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography

Ripping and Running: A Formal Ethnography of Urban Heroin Addicts

Speaking of Ethnography

Culture

How to Make It Work in a World of Hybrids

Michael H. Agar

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Executive Editor: Nancy Roberts

Assistant Editor: Megan Manzano

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield

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Copyright 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Agar, Michael, author.

Title: Culture : how to make it work in a world of hybrids / Michael H. Agar.

Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018035259 (print) | LCCN 2018046231 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538118122 (electronic) | ISBN 9781538118108 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781538118115 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Culture.

Classification: LCC GN357 (ebook) | LCC GN357 .A43 2019 (print) | DDC 306dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035259

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Foreword

R ecently the time horizon became visible. This is how Mike opens Culture: How to Make It Work in a World of Hybrids , and I knew that twenty years of our conversation regarding culture was coming to a close.

This book is a bittersweet irony for me. In the spring of 2017, Mike let me know that the draft was done, if I had time to look at it. I printed off a copy and started reading it after long days at work, in between running my sons to baseball practices and dance lessons. In one of my last email exchanges with Mike, I wrote about some of my impressions from the first chapter, not having gotten very far into the book. I told him the ideas were powerful to me, particularly foregrounding Culture as something shared by all of humanity rather than culture as a set of beliefs and values that can divide and separate us. After I signed off, I said, P.S. Glad you are finally answering my question: what is culture? ; ) He quickly shot an email back: Good lord, maybe I wrote the thing to finally answer your question about culture.

Two decades ago, Mike graciously agreed to meet with me at a coffee shop. I wanted to pick his brain on discourse analysis for a grad school paper I was writing. The conversation eventually turned to culture. I was struggling with the term as a grad student in anthropology. I was teetering on the edge of throwing the concept out the window even though the discipline I was courting had invented the term. It has been coopted by so many to the point that I wasnt sure it held any meaning. While I knew that my own values and beliefs were coded with culture, I had no idea what words to use to define my culture. Mike humored me and took me seriously. We engaged in a long email exchange, a printed copy of which I keep in my filing cabinet to this day. But, if Im truly honest, I never felt settled with the term until I read this book.

And yet Im not sure that resolving the issue of culture was Mikes point of writing this book; he wanted to make sense of that contested term with an eye toward getting us to think differently about human interactionsfrom the beginning of timeand suggest a few possibilities that might help us live a little more successfully on this planet. To quote Mike (who was quoting a bumper sticker), whirled peas. However, I also struggle with putting my own interpretation on Mikes words, because, from my past experiences reading his books, I will understand Culture in a whole new way the next time I read itand each person who reads this book will bring their own experiences and perspectives to it. That is the power of Mikes writing. He writes in a way that is easily accessible, but the theoretical implications run deep and wide, pushing us to expand our thinking from where we are in our own time and place.

Rather than interpreting Mikes words with a guide to Culture that I can only write through my own lens, Im simply going to tell you about some of the concepts that struck me as I read it. My hope is that you will read Mikes words first.

As you probably guessed, Culture is firstnot culture with a lowercase c (the values and beliefs that bind a group of people together with a common way of seeing the world) but Culture with a capital C . Mike reminds us that Culture with a capital C is the evolutionary trajectory of humankind, or, as Klein and Edgar called it, the Culture Big Bang. He tells this story in an engaging way that forced me to think about the transformative role of Culture at the beginning of our human storyat least the one that started some fifty thousand years agoand how it continues to this day.

From Culture with a capital C , our hunting-gathering bands of ancestors formed cultures with a small c , each creating their own histories and their own ways of doing things. Culture with a small c harnessed the new human abilities of generativity to do things differently, and it employed social constraints to keep all that innovation in controlgenerativity and constraint were dual forces in the Big Bang.

The focus of anthropology has traditionally been on those small- c cultures. But now that we live in a global society where we are all mixes of a variety of influences, describing a culture is no longer very usefulor even possiblein understanding someone or resolving differences when we try to work together. We are pretty much all hybridsmultiple cultures snake and weave themselves through you and me, people living in a globalized, diverse, interconnected world. And yet culture is still largely seen as the problem that we try to solve with diversity training or efforts at intercultural communication. However, since we are all hybrids in an interconnected world, as Mike proposes, resolving cultural differences with culture no longer works. So what might?

At the close of chapter 1, Mike writes, If at least two people share a way of doing at least one task together, a way that could in principle be changed, then we could say that those two people share a culture for doing that task (emphasis mine). By defining culture in this way, Mike situates us in the here and nowtwo or more people engaged in a task and the tacit knowledge that allows them to work together to accomplish it. Mike grounds his concepts in the basics of everyday life: people trying to get something done together.