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190 HOW OTHERS DIE

CHAPTER ÎEN

This brings us to one last observation. As we see it, there simply is no way
of getting directly at 'the others.' Anthropologists and other analysts of modern Culture, time, and the
reactions to death must find or construct a meta-level of interpretation if they are
to share their findings. In the late nineteenth century, this may have been the idea
object of anthropology [1985J
of a natura! science of man in search of universa! laws of progress to be verified
by ethnographic 'data' whose 'objective' otherness was not seriously doubted.
Today we seem to be left with the task of constructing a social hermeneutic, an
interpretation of social reality (no matter whether it is primitive or modern) which
CULTURE: A NEGATIVE CONCEPT
conceives of itself as part of the processes it attempts to understand. Lévi-Strauss
AND ITS NEGATION
was right: the anthropology of death is a form of dying, or of conquering death-
which, in the end, may be the same.
Now is the time of knowledge. As a life-activity, knowing is continua! pres-
ence and process. But knowledge can be known, our dominant tradition seems
to feel, only through re-presentation and re-production, through sign-systems,
models, law-relations, or at least taxonomies whose common mission is to create
order. That which is to create order demands chaos, disorder, confusion as its
raison d'êire. Myths which tel! the story of creation as an imposition of order onto
chaos continue to legitimize, however remotely, our conceptions of knowledge
as well as its pursuit. In anthropology, structuralism, an amalgam of empiricism
(the provider of chaos) and rationalism (the provider of order), comes to mind as
a particularly apt example. Just because it talked French, structuralism was by no
means an exotic bird in the anthropological menagerie. This particular order-out-
of-chaos act belonged to the same circus and played under the same tent called
culture.
Before I get entangled in my simile, I had better state the point I want to
make here: Culture gained its currency as a cover-all concept and its historica!
function as a point de repère in our discipline by serving as a short term for a
theory of knowledge and not (although this will be debated by others) for a
theory of conduct. Herder, Comte, Bastian, Tylor, and Boas may be maligned
as intellectualists, but they were around, each in his own time and historica!
constellation, before their critics and successors with a moralist bent succeeded
in making of anthropology a 'behavioral science.'
Anthropology has, of course, no monopoly on the notion of culture. It
did, however, contribute significantly to an arsenal of legitimations of knowledge
which constantly is in need of being stocked and restocked with concepts of
order, ranging from laws of evolution to rationality, the current subject of much
debate. Perhaps, as our hindsight improves with recent progress in the histo-
riography of our field, we will one day realize that we needed 'culture' as an
organizing principle only to tide us over a period of uncertainty that stretches
somewhere between alchemy and molecular biology or neuroscience-a rela-
tively brief period in Western history, by the way-when we lost assurance that
great and small orders, micro- and macrocosms might be fundamentally of the

191