Understanding Other Cultures and Criticizing One's Own

A continuing legacy of Winch’s philosophy has been a set of deep questions about how it is possible to understand radically different cultures from one’s own, or, relatedly, how to interpret and establish a critical relationship to practices and patterns of belief in one’s own society.

This line of argument plays a significant part in the argument of TISS and also seems to be at work in Winch’s critique (in UPS) of Evans Pritchard’s application of the scientific outlook of his own culture in his dismissal of the Zande belief in witchcraft. However, Hutchinson et al. argue that this is a misrepresentation Winch’s position. First, they argue that Winch (following Wittgenstein) should be read as offering only ‘grammatical reminders’, and that he does not seek to offer positive guidance for the social studies. Rather, his arguments should be taken in a wholly negative spirit - as therapeutic guidance aimed at helping us to avoid gross misunderstandings.

Perhaps he [Schatzki] would accept that one can and sometimes does learn from others and transform oneself, in the encounter with other cultures, if one lets it be a genuine encounter, rather than being like the encounter of a biologist with a laboratory specimen.

(p. 49)

... whatever one says about the social world must be responsible to social actors, in a manner having no parallel in the physical sciences.

(p. 52)

If we are to risk generalizing at all, we shall say that the production of descriptions or representations of human action/behaviour which are not interpretations, let alone explanations, is the only way to avoid grossly failing to ‘capture' that behaviour, given that such rule-following etc. behaviour is utterly unlike what we call the ‘behaviour' of inanimate objects.

(p. 61)

This strong ontological anti-naturalism that Hutchinson et al. share with Winch is what underlies the tendency towards both cognitive and moral relativism that many of Winch's readers have seen in his writings. For them, we can't measure, manipulate, experiment on, generalize about and even classify or compare different cultures, practices, patterns of belief and so on in the way we can with physical objects and processes, and (most) other animals. Encounters with other humans are different in kind, we must be ‘responsible' to them in the way we characterize their activities, we must be open to learning from, and even to being changed by, the encounter.

Now, this is no mere ‘grammatical reminder', nor even a piece of methodological or therapeutic advice. It is a substantive ontological claim, and one that is open to empirical evidence. This is hinted at in the phrase in parentheses in the third of the above quotations. We do now have good evidence that some primates have a sense of self, and this seems to be part-acknowledged by Hutchinson et al. It is also true that many other species are social. And we could ask many questions about them. Are they social in the sense of organizing their social lives on the basis of conventional rules? Can they be said to interact meaningfully? Could we learn to understand them? Do any of them have what we might call ‘culture’? Might scientists ‘be responsible' to them, too? All interesting questions simply cut short by the human/nature dualism of their central ontological doctrine.

But what about understanding other cultures? Hutchinson et al. (rightly) claim that neither Winch nor Wittgenstein denied the possibility of this. As always, Hutchinson et al. agree with Winch and Wittgenstein (on their reading). Contrary to popular misrepresentations, both philosophers did think that cross-cultural understanding was possible, and that it was, after all, legitimate to use standards drawn from one’s own culture to criticize the practices and beliefs of others (for example, Hutchinson, Read and Sharrock 2008: 119-21).

It seems that, according to Hutchinson et al., the sorts of questions most readers have understood to be posed by Winch (and Wittgenstein) actually don’t arise at all (so we should just avoid playing those ‘intellectualist’ games), or, alternatively, they do arise but can be resolved so long as we take the trouble to get to grips with serious understanding of what the ‘others’ are up to. This is a process in which we neither incorporate the other’s culture into our own nor abandon our own to take a leap into another cultural world. Rather, it is a process of engagement in which we are changed by the encounter, and our own culture also changed.

The argument that questions as to the ‘commensurability’ of cultures do not arise because there is no specific context to provide decision-making criteria could be countered by recognizing that there is, after all, such a context. Questions about the identity and difference of cultures, relativism, commensurability and so on do get raised and find answers (albeit generally contested ones).

It seems to me that Winch was genuinely puzzled about how it was possible to understand a culture as radically different from his own as that of the Azande as ‘presented’ by Evans Pritchard. Hutchinson et al. argue against critics of Winch such as Martin Hollis and Donald Davidson (2001) who attempt to solve Winch’s problem. For Hollis (1970), mutual understanding between cultures is possible on condition there is a ‘bridgehead’ of shared beliefs (shared rationality in this case), while Davidson appeals to ‘transcendental’ conditions of possible understanding in our common humanity. Hutchinson et al. consider this exercise to be absurd, as there is no context or standard for deciding how different cultures are from one another. This is disappointing, as not only did Winch himself clearly think there was a problem, but actually made a very interesting suggestion about what the required ‘bridgehead’ might be.