RAIN On Being Our . .· · .· Own . A Talk by Peter Berg Anthropologists I want to talk tonight about place-locatedness. Recently a woman_ from Germany visited me, who teaches a course on American popular culture at the University of Frankfurt. Every summer she goes around the United States dutifully collecting data about Am_erican popular culture. And it was strange talking with her; anyone in this room now would hav:e felt the same way, because I was suddenly a representative of American popular culture. I didn't know whether to offer her a beer, joint, coffee, or organic strawberry juice, right? So I began thinking about how synthesized American culture is, wond~ring what things were deep-seated, long-term parts of Amer- •ican Civilization. So tonight, I would like for you to imagine a Balinese, someone who has ~een studied to death by Western antpropologists, say a Balinese dancer in her early 20's coming here to study American culture. She's a third generation of the Balinese who have been mi- . .nutely documented. Gregory Bateson photographed her grandmother breast-feeding her baby. Her father was filmed doing a monkey d~nce by a BBC documentary team. When she was a kid her .toilet habits were studied by-Margaret Mead. So her family has impressive credentials as subjects of cultural anthropologists. But, .,. none of these Balinese subjects know where these people who were studying them came from. So let's say that in an incredible bureaucratic mix-up in the U.N. our Balinese dancer is given a grant to come to the U.S. to study Ame.rican culture for the Balinese, She arrives at the L.A. airport, right in the middle of American global monoculture. She's given a rented car with a chauffeur, gets a suite at the Hilton Hotel, and then goes out to find Americans, to find out what their deep-.seated culture is. And the people she runs into on the street are gas station attendants, shoppers, somebody distributing the Watchtower, and so forth. She wades thrnugh all our technological garbage to find people to.talk to. Every time she goes across .the street there are lights directing her. There are more. machines than she's ever seen. Everybody relates to machfoes. Everybody seems to be dominated by these machines. • , Our Balinese dancer wants to find out what the people hav_e in common, the roots of their culture. So like a good cultural anthropologist she asks them wha_t they call the days of the week. They say Monday, Tuesday, . . . She finds out that this is Norse Mythology! Moon day, Tuwaz'sday-the one-armed hero's day, Wo4en day, Thor's day, a day for Frei-the goddess of fertility, and Sunday-the sun's day. So, all our days are either named after Norse gods or planets. This sounds a little like Bali to our visitor. And then what about the months? She finds out that they start . with]a,:zus, the two-faced god of the Romans. And the rest are .mainly drawn from Roman roots. Some of them are named after Roman numbers; Sept, Oct, Novem. She detects that there was a Norse world of gods and planets that was overthrown or displaced by Romans. And the years? The years are an accumulation after the _birth of an Amaraic-speaking Judean prophet! So, can you begin to see that there is something about this so- , ciety, about its dislo cated,ness, the Super Society, the media society of the United States, Canada, North America, the West generally,· that's built to slide? It's been tran.sformed so many times that we'vegot a barely remembered pantheon of Norse gods that the ,Romans knocked out and now we're accumulating numbers after the birth_of I didn't know whether to ' offer her a beer, joint, co fee, - . or organic strawberry juice, _right? Christ toward what? Toward Judgement day! Becaus.eit is officially ordained that we will end as a species; the world will end and we are keeping a countdown of the years before that happens. Our civiliza- '. tion is an accumulation of dislocated and displaced cultures. It's really not the product of a progression-"the ascent of man.'' It's not really a triumphant march upward. so'me people on the planet still have cultures that are place-located like the Balinese. The things they see around them resonate with their culture. But American, Western culture is set up in a spirit of transformation. Transformation is its dominant theme. • Beware of futurists. That's what I'm coming to. But first, I want to work up to that from some other aspects of transformation. For example, our science is transformative science. There are, of • course, other ways of thinking which are integrative. But our science takes things apart to change them. We are compelled to feel that we should change everything. Change for its own sake. There is·another sense of time, too. The other sense of time'is nowever time. There are people who think of time being an ever- 'present re-cr~a tion ot everything that's gone before, and every- · thing that will come out of that. Nowever time, cyclictime. Our • cont.
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