Description
This book amounts to an anthropological critique of the idea that human cultures are formulated out of practical activity and, behind that, utilitarian inter- est. The idea at issue I generally call "praxis theory" when attention is centered on forms of economic activity or "utility theory" when it concerns the logic of material advantage supposed to govern production. "Praxis" I should like to confine mainly to the sense of productive action, its principal sense in Marxist writing, including, as in that literature, both the objective and subjective aspects of the process: on one hand, the historically given means and relations of production; on the other, the experience men have of themselves and the objects of their existence in the course of productively transforming the world through a given instrumental mode."Utility" likewise may be thought of in subjective and objective dimensions, although many theories rather underspecify which practical logic they take as the basis of cultural order. For some, however, it is clear that culture is precipitated from the rational activity of individuals pursuing their own best interests. This is "utilitarianism" proper; its logic is the maximization of means-ends relations. The objective utility theories are naturalistic or ecological; for them, the determinant material wisdom substantialized in cultural form is the survival of the human population or the given social order
ISBN:9780226733616
