Culturalism

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The term culturalism is a term that is divergently related in various disciplines:

Culturalism in Philosophy

In philosophy , the term culturalism denotes schools of thought that emphasize the anthropological classification of human beings as a purposeful and purposeful acting cultural being and that regard science as one of these cultural achievements. Methodical culturalism is the name of the philosophical reflection that, based on this insight, methodically and systematically takes into account the connection of previous cultural achievements as the basis of scientific research and theory formation .

The culturalist position goes back to the time of the Enlightenment , in which the unimagined possibilities of human action were revealed more and more clearly. Accordingly, in contrast to other living beings, humans are a cultural being. According to this idea, he moves further and further away from a natural original state that can no longer be restored spatially and temporally. Rousseau calls this process alienation . In this sense, nature is only the material for design that is reshaped, replaced and displaced.

The opposite pole to culturalism is naturalism , according to which meaningful and expedient self-determined and self-designed cultural achievements are viewed as natural phenomena like others, with the result that they have to be explained in an undifferentiated manner according to natural law and thus can no longer be discussed and criticized methodically.

Peter Janich therefore defines philosophical culturalism as follows:

"In its most general form, culturalism denotes a philosophical-critical reference to the cultural character of the relationship between man and the world and, with particular weight, an emphasis directed against every form of naturalism, that all human products in everyday life, in the sciences and not least in philosophy itself Cultural achievements are. "

The methodical-constructivist direction of the Marburg School of Peter Janich , Dirk Hartmann and others is expressly referred to as methodical culturalism in order to programmatically differentiate it from naturalistic approaches . Output and methodical beginning of philosophy is the self-made here living world whose products (artifacts, material culture , for example in) and culture-specific practices science in terms of their determination of goals and the rationality of choice of means of action theory are reflected. Methodical culturalism's concept of culture is more technical than semiotic .

Culturalism in the Social Sciences

In the social sciences, culturalism is a term that critically describes research and ideologemes in cultural anthropology that take on a basic personality . The emphasis on the “cultural” before the “social” is also referred to as “culturalism”.

The strong emphasis on cultural factors - also in the manifestation of semiotic signs (culture as a system of symbols and meanings) - as pursued by Clifford Geertz and David Schneider , has been contrasted since the mid-1980s with tendencies that emphasize cultural factors as social examine conditional “cultural tools” (culture as tool kit) . William H. Sewell describes this shift in research focus as follows:

“What all of these approaches had in common was an insistence on the systematic nature of cultural meaning and the autonomy of symbol systems - their distinctness from and irreducibility to other features of social life. They all abstracted a realm of pure signification out from the complex messiness of social life and specified its internal coherence and deep logic. Their practice of cultural analysis consequently tended to be more or less synchronic and formalist. "

Culturalism in Ethnology

The term culturalism is also used in early works from the area of ​​English-language cultural anthropology and the cultural studies of Stuart Hall . In this context he means the too strong emphasis on the cultural versus the social, economic or historical.

Stuart Hall contrasts cultural materialism and structuralism . Culturalism explores cultures as ways of life and prefers the socio-historical reconstruction of cultures. He tries to correct the hyper-structuralism of earlier theories by bringing the collective as well as the individual subject back to the center of consideration.

Culturalism as an instrument of depoliticization

Timothy Gibson and Bernd Belina criticize culturalism using the example of the US debate about the underclass and their housing situation. They state that culturalist declarations depoliticize their objects; these are always only "different", but never political. In addition, culturalist explanations are tautological, because they explain the persistence in certain milieus (e.g. in slums) through socialization in these milieus. According to Belina, the talk of a ghetto culture obscures the fact that “what ghetto residents do is a matter of conscious and purposeful social practices, even if apparently 'not under self-chosen, but under immediately found, given and traditional circumstances' (Marx ) ".

Culturalism as neo-racism

Concepts that do not regard culture as historically constructed and not changeable, and in which ideas of culture are "reified and essentialized to such an extent " that culture "becomes the functional equivalent of the concept of race" , are called "culturalism" by some researchers. or “ cultural racism ”: John Solomos and Les Back, for example, take the view that race is now “coded as culture” and that “the central feature of these processes is that the characteristics of social groups are fixed, naturalized and pseudobiological defined culturalism. "

The word race is often replaced by culture (including ethnicity , people , nation or other terms) , as it usually has a negative connotation nowadays . However, since the term race does not usually appear in these arguments, culturalism is often referred to as a “ racism without races ”, which gives up the term race “without the devaluation and exclusion of the 'other ' becoming less acute” went.

The following properties in particular are described as characteristics of culturalist concepts:

  • Ethnic formulation: culture would only be connected with the (ethnic, national) origin.
  • Homogeneity : All members of an ethnic group should have the same culture .
  • Reducibility: The essential characteristics of individual people would be limited to the cultural characteristics of a group.
  • Rigidity: Cultures cannot be changed or can only be changed over long periods of time (within the framework of generations).

According to such concepts, “culture” is viewed as an insurmountable barrier that cannot be overcome politically. Corresponding naturalizing and biologizing arguments would occur both in right-wing extremism and in the abbreviated ethno-pluralistic approaches of the New Right in the form of “culturalizations of difference” (Müller). The emancipatory “culture” concept of multiculturalism is reversed here in its political meaning (called “ retorsion ” by Taguieff ). This “culturalistic” (actually naturalistic) “culture” concept is not compatible with emancipatory ideas of the fundamental changeability of societies, which assume that people constantly deal with their surroundings, so that they are not passive bearers of culture , but actively culture and also change the cultures of their environment.

Gazi Çağlar goes so far as to bundle objectively very different cycle models as "culture-cyclical" ones and to include them in the culturalism debate. He includes in particular Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations . According to him, cyclical cycle theories interpret the history of societies as the “sum of the history of individual cultures or civilizations”. Culturalist racism uses fragments from the cycle theories, especially those of Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee . According to Gazi Çağlar, the paradigm of civilization , as explained by Samuel P. Huntington in Clash of Civilizations, is based on these cycle theories .

Ethnopolitical and geopolitical concepts that amount to the idea of ​​a culture war and refer to the tradition of the nationalist nationalism of the Conservative Revolution can be found in Alain de Benoist , Armin Mohler , Karlheinz Weißmann and other thought leaders of the New Right .

Culturalism as a social practice

Particularly in relation to the immigration society, culturalism can be understood as an ensemble of political and social practices that are shaped by the idea that cultural identities are in principle immobile and that cultural differences are practically indissoluble. Arata Takeda argues that such practices should not be blanketed with accusations of racism, but that they should be differentiated in terms of their content and motivations, and above all differentiate between “derogatory”, “structural” and “benevolent” forms of culturalistic practices.

  • The aim of “derogatory” culturalism is to protect the “purity” of one's own culture, which is thought to be superior, and in this it shows a special proximity to racism.
  • The “structural” culturalism does not claim absolute superiority of its own culture, but it does claim a normative leading function within society.
  • The “benevolent” culturalism welcomes cultural diversity as a social enrichment and accordingly strives to preserve the foreign cultures, which are different from one's own culture, in their “ otherness ”.

According to Takeda, all three forms of culturalism are a hindrance to the cultural self-discovery of the individual in a globalized world. For the future of the immigration society, he sees the task of raising awareness of the different forms of culturalism and promoting the willingness to criticize culturalist practices.

See also

literature

Lexicons

  • WFH [Werner Fuchs-Heinritz]: Culturalism. In: Werner Fuchs-Heinritz u. a. (Ed.): Lexicon for Sociology. 3. completely rework. u. exp. Edition. West German Verlag, Opladen 1994, p. 381.

Methodical culturalism

  • Peter Janich: Constructivism and knowledge of nature. On the way to culturalism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1996, ISBN 3-518-28844-X .
  • Dirk Hartmann, Peter Janich (ed.): Methodical culturalism. Between naturalism and postmodernism. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1996, ISBN 3-518-28872-5 .

On culturalism as neo-racism

  • Martin Barker: The New Racism. Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe. Frederick (Maryland) 1982.
  • Benjamin Bauer: Culture and Race. Determinism and collectivism as elements of racist and culturalist thought. In: Berliner Debatte Initial , Volume 30, Issue 1 (2019), pp. 15–26.
  • George M. Fredrickson : Racism. A historical outline. Hamburger Edition , 2004. (Introduction)
  • Institute for Science and Art : Racism and Culturalism. In: Messages from the IWK. 1997, No. 3 (online) (PDF; 1.1 MB)
  • Angelika Magiros: Critique of Identity. 'Bio-Power' and 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' - tools against alien defense and (neo-) racism . Munster 2004.
  • Pierre-André Taguieff : The power of prejudice. Racism and its double. Hamburg 1988.
  • Mark Terkessidis : Kulturkampf. People, Nation, the West and the New Right. Cologne 1995.
  • Mark Terkessidis : Psychology of Racism . Opladen / Wiesbaden 1998.

On culturalism as a social practice

Web links

Wiktionary: Culturalism  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c cf. WFH [= Werner Fuchs-Heinritz]: Culturalism. In: Werner Fuchs-Heinritz u. a. (Ed.): Lexicon for Sociology , 3rd completely revised. u. exp. Edition. West German Verlag, Opladen 1994, p. 381.
  2. ↑ Gregor Schiemann : 1.5 Nature - Culture and its other. In: Friedrich Jaeger u. Burkhard Liebsch (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften, Volume 1: Fundamentals and key terms. JB Metzler, Stuttgart - Weimar, 2004. ISBN 3-476-01881-4 . Pp. 64-65, 71.
  3. ↑ So the self-portrayal of Dirk Hartmann On publications on methodical culturalism ( Memento of the original from December 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. s. under literature @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.uni-due.de
  4. ↑ cf. Peter Janich: Culture and Method. Frankfurt a. M. 2005
  5. ^ William H. Sewell: The Concepts of Culture. In: Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt: Beyond the cultural turn - New directions in the study of society and culture. University of California Press, 1999, ISBN 0-520-21678-4 , p. 51.
  6. ^ Stuart Hall: Cultural Studies. Two paradigms. 1980
  7. ↑ [1]
  8. ↑ Timothy A. Gibson: “I don't want them living around here”: ideologies of race and neighborhood decay. In: Rethinking Marxism 10 (1998), pp. 141-155.
  9. ↑ Bern Belina: We may be in the slum, but the slum is not in us! In: Geography. Vol. 62 (2008) No. 1, pp. 15-26.
  10. ↑ Belina, Berlin 2008, p. 23.
  11. ^ Karl Marx: The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. (1852) (= Marx-Engels-Werke 8, Berlin 1969; pp. 111-207).
  12. ^ A b George M. Fredrickson: Racism. A historical outline. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2004. Introduction Archived copy ( memento of the original from March 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.deutschesfachbuch.de
  13. ↑ For example Angelika Magiros (2004): Critique of Identity. 'Bio-Power' and 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' - tools against alien defense and (neo-) racism . Münster 2004, esp. P. 166 ff. Other authors: Barker, Taguieff, Balibar, Bielefeld, Jaschke, Terkessidis, s. under literature .
  14. ↑ cf. Pierre-André Taguieff 1988; Mark Terkessidis: Kulturkampf. People, Nation, the West and the New Right. Cologne 1995; Jost Müller: Racism and the pitfalls of ordinary anti-racism. In: Die freundliche Zivilgesellschaft (Ed .: Redaktion diskus), Edition ID Archive, Berlin 1990; Kanak attak: multiculturalism? The Capri fishermen strike back! [2]
  15. ↑ Gazi Çağlar : The Myth of the War of Civilizations: The West against the Rest of the World. A reply to Samuel P. Huntingtons . 2002
  16. ↑ Gazi Çağlar: The Myth of the War of Civilizations: The West against the Rest of the World. A reply to Samuel P. Huntingtons . 2002, p. 48.
  17. ↑ Detlef Felken : Oswald Spengler. Conservative thinker between empire and dictatorship. Munich 1988.
  18. ↑ Gazi Çağlar: The Myth of the War of Civilizations: The West against the Rest of the World. A reply to Samuel P. Huntingtons . 2002, p. 10.
  19. ↑ Martin Dietzsch , Siegfried Jäger, Helmut Kellershohn, Alfred Schobert: Nation instead of Democracy - Being and Design of "Young Freedom". Edition DISS, Vol. 4. Duisburg 2003
  20. ↑ Arata Takeda: Consequences of Culturalism. From confrontational to participatory approaches to conveying language, culture and values . In: operations , No. 217, 56. Jg, Issue 1 (2017), pp 129-132, 136...