Page 22 - 2022(1) International Confusion Studies

Reflections on Lao Sze-Kwang 15

as having an inherent logical necessity. Simply put, calves are raised to become
cows and seed corn is cultivated to become cornfields, and clearly seed corn
2
cannot grow into pigs nor can pigs grow into wheat fields. I want to suggest that it
is because we are influenced by, if not default to, these same kind of generic,
teleological assumptions in how we are given to think about the actualization
of human culture broadly that we stand in danger of uncritically projecting
just such an understanding onto the Chinese tradition when in fact “culture” as
wenhua (文化) within this alternative context seems to be grounded in a much
more open-ended, aesthetic and hence particularistic metaphor for the evolution
of culture.
In his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams
famously describes “culture” as one of the two or three most complicated terms in
the English language (Williams, 1976). He attributes this complexity in part to the
relative recency with which the meaning of “culture” has been metaphorically
extended from its original sense of the physical processes of nurturing and
cultivation—that is, the perhaps mundane yet vital practices of horticulture and
husbandry—to point toward a characteristic mode of human material, intellec-
tual, spiritual and aesthetic development. Just as our commonsense would
dictate, we tend to see these horticultural and husbanding practices as teleo-
logically motivated and determined in bringing to fruition characteristic forms
inherent in the objects of cultivation, where human intervention serves as both a
source of discipline and control, and as an external facilitation. The assumption
is that the plant or animal will flourish if it is protected, unimpeded, and properly
nourished.
According to Williams, it was only in the eighteenth century that “culture” was
first used consistently to denote the entire “way of life” of a people, and only in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries that it was identified with specific civilization-
distinguishing patterns of practices and values. In this latter case, it was used in
the context of theories of progressive “social evolution” as something that sets
apart and divides societies, making one “culture” more advanced than another.
One contemporary vestige of this sense of contest among evolving populations is
the contemporary media’s frequent characterization of multicultural tensions in
the curricula of our educational institutions as “culture wars.”

2 Of course, our various and complex ecologieschallenge such severe distinctions. Maize, cracked
corn, cobs, and husks too can be an integral part of good pig feed, and deep-pit swine finishing
manure can serve as an ideal top-dress fertilizer for the wheat fields early in the spring growing
season. That is to say, there is much room to argue that corn does become pigs, and pigs do become
fields of wheat.