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Do Babies Have Culture?

Christina Toren

Brunel University

Alma Gottlieb. The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy

in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

[B]efore local officials of the Ivoirian government ordered all thatch-

roofed houses to be destroyed in the late 1960s, the Beng [of the Cte

dIvoire] lived in large, round dwellings that accommodated an extend-

ed family, which was meant to include not only the living but also the

dead. Every night someone in the household would put out a small bowlof food for the ancestors of the family, and the last person to retire would

close the door, locking in the living and the dead to sleep together. In the

morning, the first person to open the door released the wrus, who trav-

elled back to wrugbe for the dayonly to return at night for their dinner

and sleeping spot once again (Gottlieb 2003:.82).

Today all the dead spirits (wru) of all the worlds ethnic groups live together

harmoniously (98) in spirit villages (wrugbe) that are dispersed among in-

visible neighbourhoods in major cities in Africa and Europe (80). The dead may

be invisible to us, but we live alongside them. Are we invisible to them?

Presumably so. It would seem likely that from their own point of view the dead

lead a material existence, but why today is it an urban one? Perhaps the existence

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of the dead alongside us has to do with the wealth of the city and its plentiful

food; there, one might suppose, the dead have access to everything they need.

But perhaps the dead are not able just to have what they want? Perhaps access

to what may be obtained by the dead requires the mediation of the living?

Certainly it seems that living Beng have to make the dead recognize them, re-

member their ties to them as kin, and in doing so at once protect the living from

all forms of evil and ill chance and promote their well-being and fertility. By the

same token, it may be the case that from the spirits point of view wrugbe finds

its material continuity in the dutiful behaviour of the living towards the dead.1

Wrugbethe domain of the deadmay be accessible to adults in dreams

(82), but otherwise adults must undertake special procedures via diviners to con-sult the dead and gain their support. Babies, however, have unmediated access

to wrugbe where they spend a good deal of time (p169): all infants and young

children, as well as adult diviners, tack back and forth between past and pres-

ent by travellingone might even say commutingto wrugbe (80). Considered

as a spatiotemporal location, wrugbe is always present; and like our own lived

present, this one contains with in it its own past and its potential future.2 Beng

neonates incarnate specific ancestors, though often enough the ancestor re-mains unknown in that s/he cannot be identified with a named, now dead, once

living, person (89).

The living baby and the dead ancestor are, however, aspects of an entity

whose substance and sociality is slowly differentiated over the years of infan-

cy and early childhooda process that cannot itself really begin until the

stump of the newly born childs umbilical cord withers and drops off (83). A

child who dies before this time is not yet classified as a person, so the death isnot announced publicly, the neonate being deemed simply to have returned to

wrugbe (p83); indeed, it is perhaps because it is wru that the dead neonate is

buried in a muddy patch behind the home but is given no funeral (90). The

neonate is so closely at one with wrugbe that until the umbilical stump drops

off he or she must be washed four times a day using a special soap that is oth-

erwise used only to wash a person newly deceased, and four times a day the

childs mouth too must be washed with half a newly-cut lemon (116). A wholelemon is strung on a cord attached to the childs waista procedure that recalls

the washing of a corpse with lemon leaves and mourners wearing of a lemon

bracelet (116). Once the umbilical stump has dropped off (usually on the third

or fourth day) the infant is given its first enema (called splitting the anus[84])

a procedure that from this time onwards will be followed twice a day (before

and during twice-daily baths) throughout the childs infancy until the toddler

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has control of bowel movements; the enema is a bodily practice will remain

important for the rest of his or her life (126). After every bath, the infants face

and body is decorated with paints, bracelets, necklaces. Once it is rid of bodi-

ly wastes, bathed, and at least partially beautified, the child is fed. Until the

mothers milk comes in, a neonate is fed water; in addition it may be breastfed

by someone other than the motherthe mothers mother perhaps or other

close kin (p.203). Thereafter at every feeding and before it is allowed to drink

milk, the infant is made to drink a handful or more of waterwater being an

effective medium of communication between human and spirit [and] a lo-

cus of spiritual power in Beng ritual practice (189).

Are the infants faeces a substance it brings to the world that attaches himor her to wrugbe? A substance the child must be properly rid of, so that it may

take in the food offered by its living kin and, by virtue of consuming it, become

attached to them? Certainly all these procedures at birth and during early in-

fancy at once help to detach the baby from wrugbe and to establish him or her

materially in the parallel domain of the living. The baby is enticed into staying

(87): by virtue of being kept clean, beautified and fed, the infant is persuaded

into recognising its kinship with the living. At the same time, these proceduresdeclare the childs continuing connection to the wru remaining in the ancestral

realm and also to those other spirit beings whom the child will be obliged to

recognize and respectthe Earth spirits and forest spirits. So a toddler must nev-

er be allowed to defecate under a kola tree: if one of the nuts from the tree falls

onto the faeces beneath, the child will die at once; and a man will likewise die

if his shadow falls across the place where he will be planting a new kola tree

(125). Is this because difference can be maintained only when like substancesare kept apart? Certainly any form of contact with a corpse is extraordinarily

dangerous to infants and the inevitable disease associated with such contact can

be cured only by the use, for a boy, of plants gathered by the mother that are

growing on the grave of a dead women; for a girl, her father gathers plants

growing on the grave of a boy or man (p120). The babys contact with death

threatens assimilation of its own substance to the substance of the dead, a

process that is negated (or interfered with or curtailed) by the childs beingwashed or painted with the different substance of the living plants gathered by

the cross-sex parent from the grave of one who is the afflicted childs mirroring

Other (wru and cross-sex).

All the cleansing and beautifying procedures are entailed by a babys mate-

rial attachment to the invisible spirit domain, wrugbe, where it is also at once

ancestor and baby just as it is the domain of the living (81): in wrugbe the ba-

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by has its wru parents who continue to look out for their baby even after the

infant has begun to leave them (92). They

will be displeased if they judge that the childs parents of this life are mis-

treating the baby the mother may not be breast-feeding her infant of-

ten enough, or may not be offering enough solid foods to an older infant.

She may leave her baby to cry, may wait before taking her sick baby to a

diviner or healer, or may use poverty as an excuse to avoid buying the

items or conducting the sacrifices that a diviner declares necessary to the

babys spiritual well-being (92)

What babies want is what they liked in wrugbe (p87, p97), where there is no ma-

terial want and where currency is abundant: precolonial cowry shells and

early French colonial silver coins (273).

The procedures are at once aesthetic and prophylactic for they ward off dis-

eases (112-115), most importantly those that might be visited on the child by

spirits offended by some failure to observe proper relationship or by witchcraft

(237). It makes sense therefore that beauty in general, and bodily beauty in par-ticular, is conceived as illustrative of inner moral strength (130). Moreover, a

beautiful baby is one who attracts others to admire it and want to care for it,

including those older children who act as baby-carriers-cum-sitters and whose

work is so crucial to a mothers being able to put in the long hours required to

produce the crops and vegetables that keep her family alive (132-33, 137-46).

A beautiful, admired, and cared-for baby is not so tempted to return to wrugbe

(239-40).Provided the infant does not diesuccumb to disease or just decide to give

up life in this realm and go back to wrugbe (284)it eventually becomes fully

detached from its other invisible home.

When children can speak their dreams, or understand [a drastic situation,

such as] that their mother or father has died, then you know that theyve

totally come out of wrugbe. by seven years old, for sure! At three yearsold, theyre still in-between: partly in wrugbe and partly in this life. They

see what happens in this life, but they dont understand it. (85)

The young child is fully anchored in the world once he or she is able to objec-

tify its relation to where it comes fromwrugbeby explicitly differentiating

dreaming life from waking life, able to recognise and acknowledge fully its re-

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lation to its this-realm kin and, generally, able to posit objectively what goes on

in this-realm life.

The progressive detachment of the child from wrugbe is evinced in its crawl-

ing, cutting its first tooth, starting to walk, and gradually giving up the speech of

wrugbemanifest to living humans as infant babbling. By these latter means the

infant tries to make known its desires to caregivers who have long lost the an-

cestral knowledge with which they too had entered the domain of the living and

which had allowed them, in their own early infancy, at once to understand all

languages and yet be unable to make their wants known (98-103). A corollary of

this is that a difficult labour may be the result of a babys refusal to emerge from

the womb until it is called by the right name, the name it has in wrugbe and,likewise, that the older infant who responds to hearing its own (this-realm)

name spoken is deemed ready to take solid food (207)that is, food given by the

ancestors blessing whose concern for their living kin is manifest in the fertility

of land, animals and people themselves. By the same token,

[i]f an infant should happen to utter one or more real words in a known

language this would inidcate that the young child had completely leftwrugbe behind and had fully entered this world . a process that nor-

mally ought to take several years the premature uttering of articulate

speech is interpreted as a sign that a close relative will soon die (223).

What constitutes the substance of the living and brings kinship into being is

unclear, but it must have a good deal to do with feeding. A mothers breastmilk

and semen are perhaps forms of the same substance (212), for she must takecare that no drop of milk falls on the genitals of her infant son who will oth-

erwise be impotent at maturity; there is no danger to her infant daughter

(192). Does semen nourish the child as it grows in the womb? Breastmilk man-

ifests fertility in a female form just as semen manifests fertility in a male form;

it follows that breastmilk is susceptible to witchcraft (193) as, presumably, is se-

men. Perhaps it is because of the implications for this-realm fertility of sexual

fluids that the married couple must take immense care to ensure that thattheir sexuality does not infect their infant children (117-119, 192) who are still

part of wrugbe. Is it because the products of human fertility are fundamental-

ly of the same order as the products of the fertility of other beingsancestors

and other spiritsthat they cannot be allowed contact with one another? So,

for example, breastmilk is inimical to the cooked meat from animals sacrificed

by a Master of Earth and vice versagirls and women are forbidden this food,

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which is eaten by men and boys, but only once the infant boy has been weaned

(192); and the dirt from sex that has not been washed off will ruin the yams

that are growing in the fields (193). According to this same logic, sexual dirt it-

self is used to counteract developmental delay in a child whose parents re-

sumed having sex too soon, thus afflicting their child with the illness called dirt

(228); here like cures like in the sense that two negatives cancel each other out.

In my reading of Alma Gottliebs The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The

Culture of Infancy in West Africa the Beng of the Cte dIvoire are concerned

above all with the nature of their relations with one another, including crucial-

ly with their own dead, and with other spirit beings. With the dead they can, up

to a point, take kinship for granted but even so they must continually strive torecognize (and in so doing establish) particular kinship ties that will obligate the

dead to look after them (even as, from their own perspective, the dead are per-

haps engaged in a similar endeavour in respect of the living). This is a difficult

undertaking, one requiring constant attention, because for the Beng their dead

are their mirroring Otherat once continuous with them and co-terminous in

the sense that a death in either world means a re-birth in the other. So they strug-

gle to ensure that a living persons life cycleespecially during the infant yearstakes its proper form: a child should crawl by six months or as early as four (227),

should cut its first tooth on the lower jaw (223-225) before learning to walk

(226); and only once the first tooth is cut should the infant begin to speak the lan-

guage of this-realm (225). Any developmental delay in the child denotes the like-

lihood of improper sexual activity on the parents part; sex between spouses may

resume only once the child is walking and then weaned; sex before time is so

dangerous that, for example, a child may never begin to walk and may die(212). By the same token, any precocious development suggests that, in remov-

ing itself too rapidly from wrugbe, the child will bring about the death before

time of one of its close kin. Thus the struggle to maintain the fragile balance of

lives in this world vis--vis those in wrugbe (233) finds its locus in the neonate and

infant who is the literal embodiment of relatedness between the living and

wrugbe, and between the living themselves.3

But the dead are not the only spirits with whom the Beng engage; there arealso those who live in the bushthe most important of whom are the pygmy-

sized beings who live on the border between the village and the forest (67) just

as, [d]epending on whose perspective one adopts, the homeland of the Beng

is situated on the northern edge of the forest zone or the southern edge of the

savanna zone (p.62). The lives of the forest spirits parallel the lives of people

in that they have the same sorts of family arrangements, the same desires and

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the same lacks (241). There are too the Earth spirits whose names are too

powerful to utter in normal discourse (67) and to which each village is affili-

ated; they are attended on by Masters of the Earth who every six days offer

them prayers and animal sacrifices on behalf of individuals or, occasionally,

groups (68). These relations with forest and Earth spirits are at once expressed

and constituted in multiple forms of proper conduct that acknowledge the

spirits existence and solicit their goodwill and/or protection. Unlike the wru,

these spirits are not kin to the Beng; they are beings with whom people must

do their best to maintain exchange relations (in the case of the bengze) or pro-

pitiate (in the case of the Earth Spirits).

The relation between living humans and these different spiritsand espe-cially perhaps those that inhabit wrugbeis a dynamic one, forever changing

as a function of the way that actions in one domain set off a series of reactions

or counteractions in the other that are only in part predictable and thus guard-

ed against, though they may always be explicable with hindsight or through the

actions of a diviner. Often enough the dynamic play of relations between the

various spirits and the living have reference to relations between the living

themselves. These are formalized as a materially layered grid whose networksare superimposed upon one another and manifest in the very land, in village

buildings and fields, in the named paths that crisscross the forest and lead both

from village to fields and between villages (70). Thus the extended house-

holds whose component houses are clustered together round an open courtyard

are crosscut by a dual descent system

with each individual holding life membership in both a matriclan anda patriclan Each village is split into neighbourhoods affiliated with

and named for a single matriclan [the] space of each matriclan extends

into the adjacent forest dividing the entire forested region of Bengland

patriclans segment social space in both village and forest along a second

axis within each matrilaterally constituted neighbourhood [of a village],

the courtyards house patrilaterally constituted extended families with-

in each matrilaterally constituted region in the forest, men establishfields by reference to paternal ties: a man and his sons farm pie-shaped

wedges grouped in a full circle (70).

These well-ordered, controlled relations between people related to one an-

other as mutually concerned kin and affines is threatened by the jealous depre-

dations of witches who are, of course, likely to be certain of these same kin

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driven by jealousy or desire (pp 248). The continual care that is put into main-

taining proper and therefore (it may be assumed) mutually beneficial relations

with spirits (especially with ancestral kin in wrugbe) finds its most potent effect

in the protection they afford from witches.

Beng lives are, it seems, given over to bringing into being anew the relations

that sustain them as Beng in a history of relations with others which has en-

compassed centuries of transforming vicissitudes and which, over the previous

century, has required them to enter yet again into new forms of relationship

(pp62-75). To take just one example:

By 1900, the French had imposed a head tax on each household In or-der to gain access to the necessary cash, African farmers were obliged to

convert a good portion of their labor from farming subsistence crops to

farming cash crops that the colonial rulers introduced... in order to dis-

cuss anything having to do with taxes, rather than adopting (or adapt-

ing) the French word impt, the Beng instead coined the phrase nen

zra which means, literally, to throw away [ones] soul (276).

It thus denotes not a commodity exchange as such, but extortiona relationship

(if it can be so described, clearly the Beng do not understand it as such) that can-

not be analagous to sacrifice, for it is closer to predation. It is interesting, there-

fore, that when the early French colonial silver coins were superceded in 1945 by

new franc coins, the old coins became, along with cowry shells, the currency of

wrugbe, and fitting decorative additions to a babys necklaces (275). An infants

clasped fist indicates that it has brought gold from wrugbe into the world (89) andthe childs first gift should be a cowry shell, which is important as a currency for

the ancestorsthe second most important thing after gold (87).4

What transformations in relations with otherswhether human or spirit

are instantiated in the different material substances in which those relations are

made to take form? And what transformations of substance allow the newly

born child to emerge from wrugbe clutching tightly in its hand the gold whose

material absence throws into relief the same childs poverty?Today, Gottlieb tells us, the living Beng (who number only 12,000 in a nation

of over 14.5 million) find themselves struggling desperately against the terrible

and grinding poverty that even before the onset, in 2002, of civil war between

north and south had become day-to-day reality for the Beng. She details a

heart-rending catalogue of ills: ecological decline consequent upon new and un-

suitable farming practices, more land given over to unprofitable cash crops, less

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land for subsistence farming, more hunger, more disease, malnutrition, rising

infant mortality. Who knows but in their urban existence in wrugbe, the wru of

the ancestors are struggling to effect new material conversions to enable con-

tinuing exchanges of substance between their domain and that of the living and

thus ensure the continuity of the Beng, their forms of sociality, their manifold

relationships. Certainly, the wru make sure to continue their protective associ-

ation with those closest to them, notwithstanding changes in house design, con-

version to Christianity or Islam, and more drastic changes consequent upon the

poverty that drives people (and especially young people) away from their an-

cestral lands:

The wru of your family will always follow you, no matter where you are:

even if you move to a big city, your parents souls will acccompany you. This

is true even if your family splits up: the wru of your parents and other close

relatives will still accompany you in all your scattered locations (304).

It will be apparent to the reader that The Afterlife Is Where We Come From is

filled with richly layered (and often moving) material on the daily lives of Bengpeople, especially on what they say about babies and how what they say in-

forms their day-to-day practice in caring for infants. Gottlieb knows a great

deal about Beng ideas and practices, their cosmology and how they conceive

of the world, kinship and family, gender, and Beng history including their en-

counter with French colonialism, with Christianity and Islam and how it comes

to be the case that today their lives are characterised by gruelling poverty. The

breadth of her knowledge is admirable and the book is engagingly written andbound to be widely read, by the public at large as well as by anthropologists.

Gottliebs project in this book is twofold. She wants to persuade others of us

to undertake an anthropology of infancy, one that considers infants lives as

texts to be read (53)an undertaking that requires that the anthropologist en-

gage directly with infants and understand adults ideas about how and what ba-

bies communicate and with whom. By these means we might identify the

existential conditions which constitute [babies] experiential world (56) andproduce a richly theorized anthropology of infancy (42). Her second objective

is to lay bare the striking differences that mark contemporary North American

and Beng child-rearing logics and by means of these comparisons to argue that

both systems are the result of cultural construction (xviii et seq). These twin ob-

jectives ensure that Gottliebs work will find many sympathetic readers. In cer-

tain respects, her book recalls the best work of Margaret Meadthat is, the early

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works such as Growing Up in New Guineaand seems likely to hold much the

same fascination for readers; Gottliebs comparisons, like Meads, are intended

to shake the readers faith in their own taken-for-granted explanations of the

way the world is, primarily the certainties expressed in child-rearing manuals

concerning what is biologically natural to babies.

The account with which I began this essay is intended to suggest, however, that

Beng categories may be rendered analytical without recourse to the idea of cul-

ture or cultural construction. Indeed, I should wish to argue that the idea of cul-

ture obstructs, rather than illuminates, our understanding of others (including our

understanding of the Beng). Even so, I agree wholeheartedly with Gottlieb that in-

fants and children are worthy (even especially worthy) of anthropologists re-spectful and fascinated attention.5 But what I want to see is not an anthropology

of infancy or childhood, but a more adequate (more knowledgeable, more in-

formative, more epistemologically aware) anthropology.6 Thus I would want to ar-

gue that if we anthropologists are to arrive at a richly nuanced understanding of

what other people take for granted as self evident, it is theircategories of know-

ing we must attempt, for our own purposes, to render analaytical. By the same

token, if we are to explain ourselves, we have to undertake an ethnographic in-vestigation into how the ideas we use are constituted in and through our relations

with one another as professional anthropologists. Only thus can we turn our cat-

egories back on ourselves and explain what were doing.

I am aware that certain of the views expressed in the previous paragraph will

be rejected out of hand by some, so I have to beg the readers forbearance. Let

me explain.

The idea that much (if not most) of what humans say and do is the productof cultural construction is a truism of contemporary cultural anthropology.7 I

maintain that the idea is not explanatory, that if it was once useful it is no longer

so, that it is time we addressed head-on the necessity for an epistemology that

is appropriate to anthropological findings. I say this even though I can find in

my own earlier work a number of appearances of the terms cultural and con-

struction and even cultural constructs. But its not construction that bothers

me so much, its culture that is analytically empty.8

I acknowledge that formany readers this assertion amounts to plain heresy, but its precisely for this

reason that I make so bold. Culture has achieved an ascendancy that renders

it virtually unassailable. It is appealed to by all to explain all kinds of phe-

nomenafrom religious fundamentalism to the failure of one multinational

corporation to outdo another, from sexual practices to house design and the use

of space. What seems to go unnoticed is that in all cases and whatever gloss is

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put on it, from the perspective of the person who makes use of it, culture is al-

ways the domain of error.9 In crude terms, this is because culture as what is rel-

ative and particular inevitably implies its analytical counterpart, biology, as

the domain of the irreducible, the universal. The analytical poverty of this dis-

tinction becomes especially apparent when we turn our attention to anthro-

pological studies where the focus is on children.

Does it make sense to think of a neonate as an organism that is born bio-

logical only to become cultural as a result of actions performed on it by its care-

givers? Surely not, for even in this perspective the infants capacity to become

the carrier of culture is inherent to it; thus culture has to be in some sense giv-

en if its particular forms are to be achieved. But if our capacity for culture is bi-ologically given, what allows us to retain the distinction between biology and

culture as an analytical one? How are we to sort out which aspects of human

being are properly to be analysed as biological and which as cultural? And giv-

en that these questions themselves imply that the biological and the cultural are

aspects of one another, why retain the distinction at all? Anthropologys ob-

jective is to explain the extraordinary multiplicity that is human being in the

world or, more exactly, how the uniqueness that is peculiar to every one of usis located in what we have in common.10

So, to reiterate one of Alma Gottliebs questions: do babies have culture? My

answer is no, generally speaking they dont. But its not just because babies are

babies that culture escapes them. Only those of us who take culture for grant-

ed as an idea (and perhaps particularly as an explanation) could be said to have

culture. Of course, there are many of us who do. As an anthropological trope,

culture is taken to be at once self-evident and a model of and for human be-ings connectedness to one another. Lay usage appears to owe a good deal to

this view, though it is worth noting that in the process of being taken into day-

to-day usage as an explanatory term, culture has also come to denote a new

form of essentialism.11 In any case, how exactly culture comes to be understood

as at once self-evident and explanatory is a worthy object of ethnographic in-

vestigationone that, to be truly illuminating, should include an ethnograph-

ic analysis of its ontogeny.

ENDNOTES

1These questioning observations are provoked by Eduardo Viveiros de Castros ethnography

of the Arawet of eastern Amazonia (1992) according to which he argues, using the idea of

perspectivism or point-of-view, for a redefinition of the classical categories of nature and cul-

ture, culture and society, and the relations between them (1996, 1998). Whether or not the

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idea of point-of-view is analytically applicable in the case of the Beng (i.e. warranted by

ethnography) is, of course, itself an ethnographic question.

2The lived present is our artifact, an emergent aspect of the way that as living systems that

are human, we function at once to constitute and incorporate our own historythat is, the

history of our relations with others in the peopled world (see Toren 1999a, 2002b).3For an interesting ethnographic comparison of the way that ideas about children inform the

day-to-day material relations between people that constitute a particular subsistence econ-

omy, see Gow (1989). Other works by Gow (2000, 2001) make use of data about children and

from children to illuminate the ideas and practices through which people make sense of

themselves and their relations with one another in the environing world.

4Cf. Thomas Gibsons (1986) analysis of transformations in modes of relationship among the

Buid of Mindoro.

5So, for example, in Making Sense of HierarchyI set out to show how the continuity of an his-

torically specific form of political economy that is the artifact of day-to-day life in a Fijianchiefdom could only be properly understood through an ethnographic study of ontogeny

(see Toren 1990). My argument here and elsewhere is that children (including infants) should

be included in anthropological fieldwork on precisely the same basis as any of our other in-

formantsbecause only they can give us access to what they know about the peopled

world and whatthey know can provide us with analytical insights that cannot be obtained

any other way. For other examples of what we can learn from child-focused ethnography, see

e.g. Part II of Toren 1999a, also 1999b, 2002a and 2003.

6For my argument as to how this might be achieved, see Toren (2002b).

7

I think I am right in saying that the idea of cultural construction originally appeared in thedomain of academic psychology; certainly this is where I first came across the idea in respect

of children (see Kessen 1983). The idea is also central to the development of the contem-

porary sociology of childhood, where it is inflected by an idea that the childs agency chal-

lenges the discourses that constitute particular ideas concerning what a child is (James,

Jenks and Prout 1998)an idea with which Gottliebs work is implicitly in sympathy.

8My own attempts to theorise construction have involved, firstly, using Piagets ideas to ren-

der Bourdieus notion of habitus psychologically viable and capable of incorporating histo-

ry (see Toren 1990). Nowadays, however, it seems more satisfactory to me to do away

altogether with the over-systematised and paradoxically static habitus and to put forward a

synthesis of certain of Piagets ideas with Merleau-Pontys account of intentionality andVygotskys perspective on language as a tool for thought, and embed this in an idea of hu-

man self-realisation as a social process (see Toren 1999a and 2002b)

9For example, the domain of culture may be glossed as symbolic or metaphoricalthat is,

as standing for something other than itself.

10For an insight into why cultural construction is not adequate to this task, see for example,

Toren (2002b), which argues for an anthropology of onotgeny that is capable of rendering

analytical not only our informants categories, but our own.

11Kuper (1999) provides an historical analysis of the development of the idea of culture as

used by anthropologists and a provocative discussion of its contemporary uses.

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