Stuart Hall once said, “A culture includes the ‘maps of meaning’ which make things intelligible to its members… but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted” (Moran 56). In making this comment, Hall points out that only members of a certain culture can have a shared value system, because culture is learned; it is not in one’s nature to adapt to French culture if they have French parents but lived their entire life in America. Through the members’ shared value system, they interpret the world from their personal beliefs that can sometimes differ from another group’s. Hall’s theory of culture is extremely useful because it boils down to cultural relativism, or the idea that all cultures are of equal value and can only be understood within their own cultural context. An example of cultural relativism would be the varying interpretations of tattoos. As found by the Pew Research Center, Tattoo Finder, and Vanishing Tattoo on December 11th, 2013, the total percentage of people with tattoos who say their tattoo makes them feel rebellious is 29%; feeling sexy because of a tattoo goes up to 31%, while only a meager 5% say that their tattoo makes them feel more intelligent. While rebellion and sexuality are associated with tattoos for some, outside of the United States tattooing is a sign of maturity or a rite of passage, where a child moves onto adulthood. In Greenland, it is a sign of status to have a tattoo, particularly for women. This proves that the symbolism behind a tattoo isn’t universal.
This idea of cultural relativism opposes the work of Raymond Williams. Williams aims to “locate the ‘structure of feeling’” (Moran 52), a notion that suggests that Williams believes in “the idea of a ‘common culture’, a social totality which can be discovered” (Moran 52). Williams’ claim rests upon the questionable assumption of a common culture. If culture is defined as the shared ideals relative to the individual that are used to generate behavior and interpret the world, how can there be a universal culture? People learn from all sorts of sources, from their immediate family to their region, to make up their values. A country can serve as a source, as a person living in America feels the pressure to live up to the ideals of being an American. For those with tattoos, that means choosing a life that is interpreted by 31% of surveyed people as a life of sexuality and not intelligence. As shown by Jerre Mangione in his book Mount Allegro: a Memoir of Italian American Life which recounts his life growing up a part of a proud Sicilian family in Rochester, as children his siblings and he just wanted to be Americans in a family that originally only spoke Sicilian and participated in Sicilian practices. Though his family tried their best to keep to their Sicilian culture with examples such as playing games of briscola as opposed to poker every Sunday, eventually the family adapted to American cultures simply by living in America; even Mangione’s mother, who could speak a broken English at best, started to add to her speech words that are not in the Sicilian language but have American basis, like saying “minuto” to mean “minute”. If she were to go to Sicily and say, “Minuto” it would be unintelligible. Does that mean American culture is better than the Sicilian culture since the Mangiones chose that path when Americanizing? No. It all comes down to cultural relativism; each cultural should be seen as equals.
However, I agree with Williams claim that “the ways in which we can draw on other experience are more various than literature alone. For experience that is formally recorded we go not only to the rich source of literature, but also to… anthropology” (Moran 52). During my senior year of high school, my English class read William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I wrote assignment after assignment about Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, enjoying diving into these women’s lives. I thought I knew everything I could possibly about their stories. However, it wasn’t until my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology professor assigned the reading “Shakespeare in the Bush” by Laura Bohannan that I learned I was not practicing cultural relativism. Before Bohannan left to live with the Tiv in West Africa, she thought, “Human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over.” This simply wasn’t the case, as when she told the Tiv elders Hamlet, the elders constantly brought up problems with the stories based on the Tiv’s shared values. The Tivs don’t believe in ghosts, so they interrupted Bohannan right from the start to tell her that the ghost of King Hamlet (a dead chief in her version of the story as an attempt to make Hamlet relatable) was actually an omen sent by a witch. They continued to raise the factual issues with her story based on their beliefs. Having written a creative writing piece from Ophelia’s first person point of view of her committing suicide, I was pleased to see the Tiv elders say, “Only witches can make people drown. Water itself can’t hurt anything.” I was learning outside of my own interpretation of reading Hamlet the first time; I was turning toward anthropology to back my analysis of Ophelia’s ambiguous death as suicide. The most shocking part of the article was that the Tiv elders were able to provide ample evidence that Laertes killed his sister by witchcraft to sell her body to the witches to pay off his debts. Never would I have ever come to that conclusion based on my own American culture, just like Bohannan. She found herself conceding the story over to the Tivs, allowing them to instruct her in the “true meaning” of Hamlet. In no way did Americans view Hamlet the same way as the Tivs, proving that there is no common culture, because it was each culture’s shared beliefs that made them interpret Hamlet each way, neither more correct than the other as cultural relativism shows.
Williams says, “The original meaning of ‘literature’ was interdisciplinary… it referred to all types of writing… the notion of literature has become a specialized, highly valued kind of writing which deals with the imaginative or creative as opposed to the factual or practical” (Moran 51). Hamlet as a piece of literature can be studied in more than one discipline, particularly English and anthropology. While Hamlet is a creative play when studied in English, in “Shakespeare in the Bush” it becomes a piece of a culture’s various facts and values. In order to create a balance of literature in each discipline, cultural relativism must be practiced to make sure the cultures aren’t unequal in value, as each culture has its own beliefs that affect their lives and literature.