文化、历史与习性

Culture,History,Habit

这里主要谈了三个话题。首先,回顾了习性作为一个关键概念在现代社会、文化和美学理论中所扮演的角色,并表述了一系列与重复在社会生活中所起的作用有关的问题。这些问题也与福柯学派关于文化、习性和自由治理之间关系的论述有关。这里关键的问题聚焦于习性在区分拥有历史社会和无历史社会、在为有历史社会保留文化自我治理的自由形式方面所扮演的角色。接下来,较为详细地审视了这种逻辑的具体例子:19世纪晚期的生存法则中习性的作用。然后审视了这种逻辑对于殖民管理形式发展的后果。本文的结尾,主要考虑了这种关于习性的特殊论述与习性概念在人类学和生命科学中的后达尔文主义争论中所扮演的更为宽泛的、更为多样化的角色之间的关系。

This paper addresses three main issues.First,it reviews the role that habit has played as a key hinge concept in modern social,cultural and aesthetic theory,articulating a linked set of concerns centred on the role of repetition in social life.These concerns are connected to Foucauldian accounts of the relations between culture,habit,and liberal government.Key questions here focus on the role played by habit in distinguishing between societies with and without history,and in reserving liberal forms of cultural self governance for the former.A particular example of this logic is then examined in detail:that accorded the role of habit in the late-nineteenth-century doctrine of survivals.The consequences of this for the development of colonial forms of administration are then examined.The paper concluded by considering the relations between this particular account of habit and the broader,more varied roles that the concept of habit played in post-Darwinian debates in anthropology and the life sciences.