where culture comes from II

To generalize, the natural sciences inquire into things in the world; the human sciences may, under certain conditions, make things in the world. People can define themselves and others through categories originating in human-science expertise — to be “charismatic,” “neurodiverse,” “neurotypical,” “manic-depressive,” to have an “Oedipus complex.”

We make our culture and our culture makes us.

We decide that “charismatic” is a good way to talk about a certain kind of human. And before you know it, we are living this category, unable to read the social world without it.

Some people are charismatic. No two ways about it, as we like to say. This isn’t simply the term that suggests itself when we are in the presence of certain people who act in a certain way. It’s exactly what they are. We are not applying a term. We are discovering it “in the wild.” There it is! Charisma!

We make the categories, often in superheated moments of social invention, and then we live by them as if they were the real real and the true true. So real is “charismatic” as a definitional box, we almost never think of it as an arbitrary term despite the fact that it almost never fits perfectly.

Never mind. Especially these days when so much resists comprehension, we seize on the things that feel really real and truly true.

Whew. World categorized. Job done. Reality realized.

And the we turn around and say, “What? Us? Making sh!t up? Not on your life.”

This is culture as dark matter. Out there operating to form and organize our universe. Acting on us invisibly. Making and shaping our world. But never ever something we are inclined to accept as artifice.

Quote:

Seven Shapin in the Chronicle of Higher Education here.