A response paper for dr. Ang
Cultural Complexity
By Lokman Tsui

The culturally complex notion that multiple (but not necessarily equally valid) perspectives exist has both descriptive and normative implications for advancing research. This is an exercise in sketching some of these implications.

Cultural complexity can be juxtaposed to complex culture(s): the idea that culture can be a distinct, closed and bounded unit of analysis for research is no longer tenable, especially in this post-modern capitalist world (Ang, 1996). Does it still make sense to analyze culture an sich, for example over time (Pierson, 2005), or to do cross-cultural, comparative research? (Nisbett, 2003) Departing from this first implication, the one where culture is no longer a viable unit of analysis, does this mean that at the same time there is nothing we can say, or even should say, about culture? That seems unlikely and nihilistic. We should not confuse radical contextualism with moral relativisim: the idea that context, both that of the practice of inquiry as well as that which is inquired, is crucial does and should not equal that there is no value judgement possible. What the existence of multiple perspectives does not imply, however, is the equal validity of them all. For example, genocide is a phenomenon that is not, and should not be, condoned universally.

How can the notion of cultural complexity actually aid in explaining, creating new simplicities, rather than denunciate it and relativizing all meaning to death? (Mol & Law, 2002) The reduction of a complex notion to something that we call culture is just that: a reduction, a simplification, a model, a metaphor. It is a framework, a perspective to facilitate and help us think, talk and take action in an otherwise unnavigable chaos of information overload. It makes agency possible – we have to reduce, to simplify, in order to make sense, act and create meaning. The question then becomes not whether the model is true or not, whether it reflects reality, but rather whether it is alive or dead – how much is it revealing, what is it concealing and, most importantly, within the question is carried the awareness that this is only one, perhaps dominant, model, but what other possible models can we utilize and what do they an sich, or in contrast or in combination with existing models, reveal to us? If culture is one model, what other sketches, can we imagine, that add, contrast to our existing understanding? How can we make extra or other facets simple, but simple, as in being in control, having understanding by adding complexity to the current model? Compare that to different notions of society, traditionally closed but in the vision of Castells (2000) as a network society, an open-ended, connected set of nodes; what would be the culture equivalent of the network society?

In short, the first descriptive notion implicit in cultural complexity is the step to awareness that a model is just that, a model – more models, other possible perspectives exist. What follows out of the acknowledgement of the existence of multiple perspectives is the normative claim that we ought to keep open the possibility of multiplicity, acknowledge and respect the perspective of the other(s).

Most important, the awareness of multiplicity binds us to the moral obligation to develop the capacity for having multiple perspectives, especially as a scholar in cultural complexity. The always open-ended nature implicit in cultural complexity leads to the co-existence of multiple, otherwise seemingly contradictory, explanations of reality: this phenomenon has been called distant proximities, fragmegration (Rosenau, 2004), and glocalization (Robertson, 1995). It does not merely extends itself to culture as the object of inquiry, but also to the context of inquiry itself. For example, the way your perspective and experience shapes your inquiry. Commanding several languages, windows to other perspectives, is a first necessary, albeit not sufficient, step to develop and sustain a capacity to take the perspective of the other. We have to be critical of what we study, but we also have to be self-critical, of how we study.

Two challenges are posed by cultural complexity: first, if explanation, and meaning is the purpose and intent of our inquiry into the world of cultural complexity, one danger is that we make more complex, but do not reveal nor explain. We theorize in the abstract without grounding it in the specific, or we describe the specific without thinking beyond the case as it is and connect it back to a larger, but not necessarily the whole, picture. Second, while we have a challenge to come up with new words, new models to think beyond just simplicity, and not simplicities and their relations, these new words need to be conveyed to an audience. In order to reach the audience, we need to find a balance between the necessity of sharing a common vocabulary, and at the same time fulfilling the need to come up with new perspectives that make sense. There is thus an obligation to scholars to invent, imagine models and perspectives that, first, makes us uncomfortable with what we are already comfortable with; our rigid, stale, assumed and taken-for-granted perspectives of reality. Ultimately, once we realize these assumptions, we can go beyond to further our moral obligation to be comfortable with the uncomfortable.

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Literature

Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently .. and Why? New York: Free Press, 2003.

Ien Ang, In the Realm of Uncertainty: the Global Village and Capitalist Modernity, 1996.

Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

James N. Rosenau, Distant Proximities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Robertson,Roland. “Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity.” In: Featherstone, Mike; Lash, Scott; Robertson, Roland, eds. Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications, 1995: 25-44.

Manuel Castells, ‘Conclusion: The Network Society’, in The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 500-509.

Annemarie Mol & John Law, ‘Complexities: An Introduction’, In Law & Mol (Eds.), Complexities. Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002, pp. 1-22.