why
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generalization.25 One may question, as does Bourdieu, the whole social phenomenon of scientism, of which one manifestation is a search for universals: Q. In your work you have made no room for universal norms—unlike Habermas, for instance. A. I tend to view the problem of rationality or norms in a strictly historicized way. Instead of asking myself if there are “universal interests,” I would ask, “Who benefits from universals?” Or, better, “What are the social conditions that must be fulfilled so that certain agents have a stake in universals?” (1987:43, translation mine)
Here the reader can fill in the blank (“capitalism,” “imperialism,” “colonialism” are the most likely culprits). But, even if a search for universals may be seen as a product of imperialism, of exercising control, the lure of universals runs deep. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to understand human nature? Wouldn’t we all be better off if we could find commonalities among all humans? Over the past several decades, researchers in the fields of ethnobiology, linguistics, and psychology have become increasingly sophisticated (perhaps speciously so) in their search for universals.26 What the biologists and psychologists have found is that, at a certain middle level of generalization, categories might well be universal.27 This relates most directly to chapter 3 of the present study, which deals with categories. I suspect that one would be hard-pressed to find universals in the area of musical affect (again, it depends on what one is looking for): the objects of musical perception—the emotional stimuli—are far too varied. But again, rather than look for “true” universals, one could look for preponderant trends—what Bruno Nettl has called “statistical universals” (2000). One way of using the present study for etic purposes would be to compare my 25. See Abu-Lughod 1991 for a thorough critique of generalizing modes of discourse. It should be pointed out, however, that even she cannot avoid generalizations in her own examples of particularist, narrative-based ethnography. Indeed, without them her narratives would make no sense to someone unfamiliar with Bedouin ways. 26. See Lakoff 1990 and Brown 1991 for overviews. Some of the principal names Lakoff mentions are Brent Berlin, Paul Kay, Roger Brown, Paul Ekman, and Eleanor Rosch. An ambitious (if troubling) recent attempt to demonstrate linguistic universals is to be found in Goddard and Wierzbicka 1994. With respect to music in particular, investigations into the biological basis of musical experience—though not necessarily with the goal of establishing universals—are to be found in J. Becker 2004 and Juslin and Sloboda 2001. 27. While on the surface this claim makes sense to me, I can think of many exceptions. I shall cite a few, taken from the realm of concrete objects, all of them at a middle level of specificity. There’s no word for “nut” in French, only for specific kinds of nuts. There’s no word for “wall” in Indonesian; one must distinguish between a masonry wall and a partition. There’s no word for jam [I] in English; one must distinguish between a clock and a watch. There’s no word for kaki [I] in English; one must distinguish between a foot and a leg. It could be claimed, with the possible exception of the last example, that the fact that a language is missing a word doesn’t mean that the concept is missing (Eleanor Rosch has argued this with respect to color terms). And yet many of the claims for linguistic universals are made at the level of terminology and not concepts.
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