posted on 2024-11-18, 15:09authored byInaugural addresses
Inaugural lecture--Department of Anthropology, Rand Afrikaans University, 26 August 1982@@If ethnic units (or "volke") are to be the object of study or the starting point of explanation for everything else in the field of Anthropology nothing, man included, is explained. The understanding of man can fruitfully be effectuated by a study of culture defined as collective ideas (a conceptual framework) which influence and direct cultural
perception, values and norms -and not by an empiricist definition of culture. The definition of culture as collective ideas facilitates the identification of the multicontextual existence of culture: a universal and particularistic context. The particularistic
context, again, reflects multiple dimensions: a mental dimension (ideas); a substantive dimension (customs, institutions, material objects, etc); and an adaptive dimension
(enculturation and acculturation). The comprehensive context of culture operates dialectically through its component phenomena to such an integrated extent that the theoretical exclusion of anyone context or dimension renders explanation incomplete.
From the perspective developed here it is believed that the study of ethnicity
becomes analitically more profound. The adaptive dimension (of the particularistic context) of culture expounds the cultural experience of individuals and the bearing this has on perception and identity. It thus also expounds the multi-faceted nature of identity and the complexity of collective alliance. The theoretical construct of the complex collective alliances of people (culturally speaking), situationally formed on one or more dimensions of identity creates a much more flexible approach to ethnicity. It provides for a continuum to be constructed on which collective entities could be ranged according to a scale depending on the degree of ethnic magnitude, approaching a 100% measure of homogeneity, hypothetically speaking. This will alleviate the difficulties in determining ethnic boundaries. Comprehensive cultural homogeneity ("volke") is a rather rare phenomenon, whereas culture abounds in association with people. The study of homogeneous ethnic groups either as an instrumental or teleological, theoretical
concern, is therefore both methodologically and practically self-defeating.