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KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 65 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [65], (3) Lines: 38 to 76 ——— 13.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [65], (3) 4. Power as the Transmission of Culture greg urban An anthropological cliché: language is a mechanism for the transmission of culture. Around the crackling campfire at night (to continue the cliché), shadows flickering against the loblolly pines, someone tells a story. Others listen to it, and later themselves retell it. The “it” here, the myth, is not intrinsic to the language; one can speak the language without knowing the myth. However, two individuals, let’s say A and B, must share a language in order for the myth to pass between them. Language facilitates the passage of myth between people. It is the medium through which myth moves on its journey across space and over time. And in the course of that journey, the myth maintains its integrity as a thing or cultural object. Myth, in this way, is quintessential culture; it is passed on or transmitted via social learning. From this point of view, imperatives, as part of language, pose a problem .1 They seem not to facilitate the transmission of culture in the way that language more generally facilitates the transmission of myths. If A tells B to do something, A is not transmitting (or not necessarily transmitting) a piece of socially learned, socially circulating culture. A may be ordering B to do something that A has never done before and, indeed, that B has never done before. There is a factor of novelty here. In addition, in the case of the myth, B copies or tries to copy what A has done or, in this case, said. B has heard A tell the myth, and, in his or her own turn, B tells the myth to someone else. B replicates the actions of A. However, in the case of the imperative, A socially transmits something to B, but B does not simply parrot A’s words—pace the scenario in which A says “repeat after me,” and B echoes “repeat after me.” Instead, the transmission that takes place involves a magical conversion. The meaning KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 66 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [66], (4) Lines: 76 to 83 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [66], (4) of the words uttered by A becomes the reality of the actions performed by B—the words transubstantiate; they, in effect, become flesh. I want to argue in this paper that, despite the foregoing comparison, imperatives are, indeed, closely bound up with the transmission of culture . The problem is not with imperatives, which seem to lie outside of “culture.” Rather, it is with the concept of culture itself, which makes those imperatives seem alien, something other than culture. We need a new way of thinking about the motion of culture through space and time. A study of imperatives as facilitators of the flow of culture forces us to rethink the nature of that flow, of what culture is and how it moves. I will argue, in this chapter, that when culture flows through imperatives that culture itself is modified or reshaped; its movement is altered. Culture, in short, undergoes acceleration. Within classical culture theory, power is problematic. Scholars have looked at folk conceptualizations of power (see the papers in Fogelson and Adams 1977, especially those by Bean, Black, DeMallie and Lavenda, Fogelson , Issacs, Lane, Mackenzie, Pandey, and Stross)—at the way power is construed by culture but not at the relationship of power to the movement of culture itself.2 This is in part because, within classical culture theory, culture is unproblematically inertial; once set in motion it tends to continue in motion. What has been in the past will be in the future. From this point of view, culture appears to be only backward looking. In thinking about it, one...

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