I. a. About a quarter century ago, at the beginning of his The Invention of Culture, Roy Wagner wrote:
...the concept of culture has come to be so completely associated with anthropological thinking that if we should ever want to, we could define an anthropologist as someone who uses the word "culture" habitually. Or else, since the process of coming to depend on this concept is generally something of a "conversion experience", we might want to amend this somewhat and say that an anthropologist is someone who uses the word "culture" with hope -- or even with faith.
Partly as a result of the work of symbolic anthropologists like Wagner, stimulated in turn by the challenges of Levi-Strauss, the last thirty years has been characterised by unremitting critique, defense, and reformulation of the culture concept. Although I suspect that the anthropology of 2003 is still held together by the concept of culture, the concept is, I think, less "habitually" used in the field. The idea's simply not as easy to use as it once was. The reasons for that are complex, but a few of them are referred to in later quotes below.
b. Another quarter century before Wagner, the eminent American anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn collaborated on an extensive examination of the history and range of usages of anthropology's key term (1952 Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions). The following quotations omit their footnotes. Toward the end of their account, they give this judgment:
Again avoiding a new formal definition, we may say... that
this central idea is now formulated by most social scientists
approximately as follows:
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action.The main respects in which, we suspect, this formula will be modified and enlarged in the future are as regards (1) the
c. A couple of pages earlier, they had begun their conclusion with "A Final Review of the Conceptual Problem", thus:
Anthropologists, like biologists somewhat earlier,
were presented with a great array of structures and forms to describe.
As the concept of culture was explained, more and more things came
to be described as their possible significance was grasped. The overwhelming
bulk of published cultural anthropology consists in description. Slowly,
this harvest of a rich diversity of examples has been conceptualized in
a more refined manner. Starting with the premise that these descriptive
materials were all relevant to a broad and previously neglected realm of
phenomena, the concept of culture has been developed not so much through
the introduction of strictly new ideas but through creating a new configuration
of familiar notions: custom-tradition-organization-etc. In divorcing customs
from the individuals who carried them out and in making customs the focus
of their attention, anthropologists took an important step -- a step that
is perhaps still underestimated. When a time backbone was added to the
notion of group variability in ways of doing things, not only group differences,
but the notion of
the historical derivation and development of these differences entered
the picture. When the concept of "way" was made part of the configuration,
this conceptualized the fact that not only discrete customs but also organized
bodies of custom persisted and changed in time.
d. In 1945, Kluckhohn and W.H. Kelly, based on an earlier review of usage, had given this influential version:
By culture we mean all those historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational, and nonrational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behavior of men.
Our word "culture" derives in a very roundabout way
from the past participle of the Latin verb colere, "to cultivate",
and draws some of its meaning from this association with the tilling of
the soil. This also seems to have been the major significance of the medieval
French and English forms from which our present usage derives (for instance
cultura
meant "a plowed field" in Middle English). In later times "culture" took
on a more specific sense, indicating a process of progressive refinement
and breeding in the domestication of some particular crop, or even the
result or increment of such a process. Thus we speak of agriculture, apiculture,
the "culture of the vine", or of a bacterial culture.
The contemporary "opera-house" sense of the word
arises from an elaborate metaphor, which draws upon the terminology of
crop breeding and improvement to create an image of man's control, refinement,
and "domestication" of himself. So, in the drawing rooms of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, one spoke of a "cultivated" person as someone
who "had culture", who had developed his interests and accomplishments
along approved lines, training and "breeding" the personality as a natural
strain might be "cultured."
The anthropological usage of "culture" constitutes
a further metaphorization, if not a democratization, of this essentially
elitist and aristocratic sense. It amounts to an abstract extension of
the notion of human refinement and domestication from the individual to
the collective, so that we can speak of culture as man's general control,
refinement, and improvement of himself, rather than one man's conspicuousness
in this respect. Applied in this way, the word also carries strong connotations
of Locke's and Rousseau's conception of the "social contract", of
the tempering of man's "natural" instincts and desires by an arbitrary
imposition of will. The nineteenth-century concept of "evolution" added
a historical dimension to this notion of man's breeding and tempering of
himself, resulting in the optimistic concept of "progress."
Regardless of its more specific associations, however,
our modern term "culture" retains the several associations, and hence the
creative ambiguity, introduced by these metaphorizations. The confusion
of "culture" in the "opera-house" sense with the more general anthropological
sense actually amounts to a continuous derivation of one significance from
the other. It is in the area of this ambiguity, with its contrasting implications,
that we might expect to find a clue to what we most often intend in our
use of the term.
When we speak of "cultural centers", or even the
"culture" of the city of Chicago, we mean a certain kind of institution.
We do not mean steel mills, airports, grocery stores, or service stations,
although these would be included in the more catholic anthropological definition.
The "cultural institutions" of a city are its museums, libraries, symphony
orchestras, universities, and perhaps its parks and zoos. It is in these
specialized sanctuaries, set apart from everyday life by special regulations,
endowed by special funds, and guarded by highly qualified personnel, that
the documents, records, relics, and embodiments of man's greatest achievements
are kept, and "art" or "culture" is kept alive....
The connection between this "institutional" Culture
and the more universal concept of the anthropologist is not immediately
apparent, though it is in fact only thinly disguised by the facades of
libraries, museums, and opera houses. For the very core of our own culture,
in the accepted image, is its science, art, and technology, the sum total
of achievements, inventions, and discoveries that define our idea of "civilization".
These achievements are preserved (in institutions), taught (in other institutions),
and added to (in research institutions) in a cumulative process of refinement.
We preserve a vast panoply of ideas, facts, relics, secrets, techniques,
applications, formulas, and documents as our "culture", the sum of our
ways of doing things, and the sum of "knowledge" as we know it....
The productiveness or creativity of our culture
is defined by the application, manipulation, reenactment, or extension
of these techniques and discoveries. Work of any kind, whether innovative
or simply what we call "productive", achieves its meaning in relation to
this cultural sum, which forms its meaningful context....
...This productivity, the application and implementation
of man's refinement of himself, provides the central focus of our civilization.
This explains the high valuation placed upon "Culture" in the narrow, marked,
opera-house sense, for it represents the creative increment, the productivity
that creates work and knowledge by providing its ideas, techniques, and
discoveries, and that ultimately shapes cultural value itself. We experience
the relation between the two senses of "culture" in the meanings of our
everyday life and work: "Culture" in the more restricted sense stands as
a historical and normative precedent for culture as a whole; it embodies
an ideal of human refinement.
{Notice that, as another
artifact of our hierarchical society, there is an analogous distinction
between an "opera-house" and a "democratised" sense of the word "society":
"high society", which points to a distinction between those in it and those
not in it, v.s. for example "Canadian society", which includes everyone
regardless of status or life-style.}
III. This is from
the introduction to Raymond Williams' indispensible 1976 Keywords:A
Vocabulary of Culture and Society. In
that book, he refers to "culture" as "one of the two or three most complicated
words in the English language." Here, I excerpt from his story about the
way in which World War II's interruption of his university career led to
a fascinaton with language change as a signal of larger changes in the
sociocultural context. Initially, that work led to his publication of a
consideration of modern English literature called Culture
and Society, which itself became a classic,
and one of the foundational works in what the 1980's would come to call
"cultural studies."
In 1945, after the ending of
the wars with Germany and Japan, I was released from the Army to return
to Cambridge. University. The term had already begun, and many relationships
and groups had been formed. It was in any case strange to travel from an
artillery regiment on the Kiel Canal to a Cambridge college. I had been
away only four and a half years, but in the movements of war had lost touch
with all my university friends. Then, after many strange days, I met a
man I had worked with in the first year of the war, when the formations
of the 1930's, though under pressure, were still active. He too had just
come out of the Army. We talked eagerly, but not about the past. We were
too much preoccupied with this new and strange world around us. Then we
both said, in effect simultaneously: "the fact is, they just don't speak
the same language."
It is a common phrase. It
is often used between parents and children. I had used it myself, just
six years earlier, when I had come to Cambridge from a working class family
in Wales. In many of the fields in which language is used it is of course
not true. Within our common language, in a particular country, we can be
conscious of social differences, or of differences of age, but in the main
we use the same words for most everyday things and activities, though with
obvious variations of rhythm and accent and tone. Some of the variable
words, say lunch and supper and dinner, may be highlighted
but the differences are not particularly important. When we come to say
"we just don't speak the same language" we mean something more general:
that we have different immediate values or different kinds of valuation,
or that we are aware, often tangibly, of different formations and distributions
of energy and interest.... What is really happening through these critical
encounters, which may be very conscious or may be felt only as a certain
strangeness and unease, is a process quite central in the development of
a language when, in certain words, tones and rhythms, meanings are offered,
felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed. In some situations
this is a very slow process indeed.... In other situations the process
can be rapid, especially in certain key areas. In a large and active university,
and in a period of change as important as a war, the process can seem unusually
rapid and conscious.
Yet it had been, we both said,
only four or five years. Could it really have changed so much? Searching
for examples we found that some general attitudes in politics and religion
had altered, and agreed that these were important changes. But I found
myself preoccupied by a single word, culture, which it seemed I
was hearing very much more often: not only, obviously, by comparison
with the talk of an artillery regiment or of my own family, but by direct
comparison within the university over just those few years. I had heard
it previously in two senses: one at the fringes, in teashops and places
like that, where it seemed the preferred word for a kind of social superiority,
not in ideas or learning, and not only in money or position, but in a more
intangible area, relating to behaviour; yet also, secondly, among my own
friends, where it was an active word for writing poems and novels, making
films and paintings, working in theatres. What I was now hearing were two
different senses, which I could not really get clear: first, in the study
of literature, a use of the word to indicate, powerfully but not explicitly,
some central formation of values (and literature itself had the
same kind of emphasis); secondly, a particular way of life - "American
culture", "Japanese culture."
[It is tempting to imagine that Kroeber
and Kluckhohn were moved by similar shifts in North American usage to undertake
the investigation they published in 1952.]
Both the problem and the interest of the sociology
of culture can be seen at once in the difficulty of its apparently defining
term: "culture".... Beginning as a noun of process -- the culture (cultivation)
of crops or (rearing and breeding) of animals, and by extension the culture
(active cultivation) of the human mind -- it became in the late eighteenth
century, especially in German and English, a noun of configuration or generalization
of the "spirit" which informed the "whole way of life" of a distinct people.
Herder (1784-91) first used the significant plural, "cultures", in deliberate
distinction from any singular or, as we would now say, unilinear sense
of "civilization". The broad pluralist term was then especially important
in the nineteenth- century development of comparative anthropology, where
it has continued to designate a whole and distinctive way of life.
But there are then fundamental questions about the
nature of the formative or determining elements which produce these distinctive
cultures. Alternative answers to these questions have produced a range
of effective meanings, both within anthropology and in extension from it:
from the older emphasis on an "informing spirit" -- ideal or religious
or national -- to more modern emphasis on a "lived culture" which has been
primarily determined by other and now differently designated social processes
-- usually particular kinds of political or economic order. In the alternative
and contending intellectual traditions which have flowed from this range
of answers, "culture" itself then ranges from a significantly total to
a confidently partial dimension of reference.
Meanwhile, in more general usage, there was a strong
development of the sense of "culture" as the active cultivation of the
mind. We can distinguish a range of meanings from (i) a developed state
of mind --as in "a person of culture", "a cultured person" to (ii) the
processes of this development -- as in "cultural interests", "cultural
activities" to (iii) the means of these processes -- as in culture as "the
arts" and "humane intellectual works". In our own time (iii) is the most
common general meaning, though all are current. It coexists, often uneasily,
with the anthropological and extended sociological use to indicate the
"whole way of life" of a distinct people or other social group. The difficulty
of the term is then obvious, but can be most usefully seen as the result
of earlier kinds of convergence of interests. We can distinguish two main
kinds: (a) an emphasis on the "informing spirit" of a whole way of life,
which is manifest over the whole range of social activities but is most
evident in "specifically cultural" activities -- a language, styles of
art, kinds of intellectual work; and (b) an emphasis on "a whole social
order" within which a specifiable culture, in styles of art and kinds of
intellectual work, is seen as the direct or indirect product of an order
primarily constituted by other social activities.
These positions are often classified as (a) idealist
and (b) materialist, though it should be noted that in (b) materialist
explanation is commonly reserved to the other, "primary", activities, leaving
"culture" to a version of the "informing spirit", of course now differently
based and not primary but secondary. Yet the importance of each position,
by contrast with other forms of thought, is that it leads, necessarily,
to intensive study of the relations between "cultural" activities and other
forms of social life. Each position implies a broad method: in (a) illustration
and clarification of the "informing spirit", as in national histories of
styles of art and kinds of intellectual work which manifest, in relation
to other institutions and activities, the central interests and values
of a "people"; in (b) exploration from the known or discoverable character
of a general social order to the specific forms taken by its cultural manifestations.
...[I]n contemporary work, while each of [these]
positions is still held and practiced, a new kind of convergence is becoming
evident.
This has many elements in common with (b), in its
emphasis on a whole social order, but it differs from it in its insistence
that "cultural practice" and "cultural production" ... are not simply derived
from an otherwise constituted social order but are themselves major elements
in its constitution. It then shares some elements with (a), in its emphasis
on cultural practices as (though now among others) constitutive. But instead
of the "informing spirit" which was held to constitute all other activities,
it sees culture as the signifying system through which necessarily (though
among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced
and explored.
Thus there is some practical convergence between
(i) the anthropological and sociological senses of culture as a distinct
"whole way of life", within which, now, a distinctive "signifying system"
is seen not only as essential but as essentially involved in all forms
of social activity, and (ii) the more specialized if also more common sense
of culture as "artistic and intellectual activities", though these, because
of the emphasis on a general signifying system, are now much more broadly
defined, to include not only the traditional arts and forms of intellectual
production but also all the "signifying practices" -- from language through
the arts and philosophy to journalism, fashion and advertising -- which
now constitute this complex and necessarily extended field.
Whitehead once offered to the natural sciences the maxim
"Seek simplicity and distrust it"; to the social sciences he might well
have offered "Seek complexity and order it."
Certainly the study of culture has developed as though
this maxim were being followed. The rise of a scientific concept of culture
amounted to, or at least was connected with, the overthrow of the view
of human nature dominant in the Enlightenment -- a view that, whatever
else may be said for or against it, was both clear and simple -- and its
replacement by a view not only more complicated but enormously less clear.
The attempt to clarify it, to reconstruct an intelligible account of what
man is, has underlain scientific thinking about culture ever since. Having
sought complexity and, on a scale grander than they ever imagined, found
it, anthropologists became entangled in a tortuous effort to order it.
And the end is not yet in sight.
The Enlightenment view of man was, of course, that he
was wholly of a piece with nature and shared in the general uniformity
of composition which natural science, under Bacon's urging and Newton's
guidance, had discovered there. There is, in brief, a human nature as regularly
organized, as thoroughly invariant, and as marvelously simple as Newton's
universe. Perhaps some of its laws are different, but there are laws; perhaps
some of its immutability is obscured by the trappings of local fashion,
but it is immutable.
A quotation that Lovejoy... gives from an Enlightenment
historian, Mascou, presents the position with the useful bluntness one
often finds in a minor writer:
The stage setting (in different times and places) is, indeed, altered, the actors change their garb and their appearance; but their inward motions arise from the same desires and passions of men, and produce their effects in the vicissitudes of kingdoms and peoples.Now, this view is hardly one to be despised; nor, despite my easy references a moment ago to "overthrow," can it be said to have disappeared from contemporary anthropological thought. The notion that men are men under whatever guise and against whatever backdrop has not been replaced by "other mores, other beasts."
...The first of these is that culture is best seen
not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns -- customs, usages, traditions,
habit clusters -- as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as
a set of control mechanisms -- plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what
computer engineers call "programs") -- for the governing of behavior. The
second idea is that man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent
upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such cultural
programs, for ordering his behavior.
Neither of these ideas is entirely new, but a number
of recent developments, both within anthropology and in other sciences
(cybernetics, information theory, neurology, molecular genetics) have made
them susceptible of more precise statement as well as lending them a degree
of empirical support they did not previously have. And out of such reformulations
of the concept of culture and of the role of culture in human life comes,
in turn, a definition of man stressing not so much the empirical commonalities
in his behavior, from place to place and time to time, but rather the mechanisms
by whose agency the breadth and indeterminateness of his inherent capacities
are reduced to the narrowness and specificity of his actual accomplishments.
One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin
with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in
the end having lived only one.
The "control mechanism" view of culture begins with
the assumption that human thought is basically both social and public --
that its natural habitat is the house yard, the marketplace, and the town
square. Thinking consists not of "happenings in the head" (though happenings
there and elsewhere are necessary for it to occur) but of a traffic in
what have been called, by G.H. Mead and others, significant symbols --
words for the most part but also gestures, drawings, musical sounds, mechanical
devices like clocks, or natural objects like jewels -- anything, in fact,
that is disengaged from its mere actuality and used to impose meaning upon
experience. From the point of view of any particular individual, such symbols
are largely given. He finds them already current in the community when
he is born,and they remain, with some additions, subtractions, and partial
alterations he may or may not have had a hand in, in circulation after
he dies. While he lives he uses them, or some of them., sometimes deliberately
and with care, most often spontaneously and with ease, but always with
the same end in view: to put a construction upon the events through which
he lives, to orient himself within "the ongoing course of experienced things",
to adopt a vivid phrase of John Dewey's.
Man is so in need of such symbolic sources of illumination
to find his bearings in the world because the nonsymbolic sort that are
constitutionally ingrained in his body cast so diffused a light. The behavior
patterns of lower animals are, at least to a much greater extent, given
to them with their physical structure; genetic sources of information order
their actions within much narrower ranges of variation, the narrower and
more thoroughgoing the lower the animal. For man what are innately given
are extremely general response capacities, which, although they make possible
far greater plasticity, complexity, and, on the scattered occasions when
everything works as it should, effectiveness of behavior, leave it much
less precisely regulated. This, then, is the second face of our argument:
Undirected by culture patterns -- organized systems of significant symbols
-- man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless
acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless. Culture,
the accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just an ornament of human
existence but -- the principal basis of its specificity -- an essential
condition for it.
The term "culture" has not
always been used in literary studies, and indeed the very concept denoted
by the term is fairly recent....
How can we get the concept
of culture to do more work for us? We might begin by reflecting on the
fact that the concept gestures toward what appear to be opposite things:
constraint
and mobility. The ensemble of beliefs and practices that form a
given culture function as a pervasive technology of control, a set of limits
within which social behavior must be contained, a repertoire of models
to which individuals must conform. The limits need not be narrow....
Art is an important agent
then in the transmission of culture. It is one of the ways in which the
roles by which men and women are expected to pattern their lives are communicated
and passed from generation to generation....
...We return to the paradox
with which we started: if culture functions as a structure of limits, it
also functions as the regulator and guarantor of movement. Indeed the limits
are virtually meaningless without movement; it is only through improvisation,
experiment, and exchange that cultural boundaries can be established....
What is set up, under wildly
varying circumstances and with radically divergent consequences, is a structure
of improvisation, a set of patterns that have enough elasticity, enough
scope for variation, to accomodate most of the participants in a given
culture....
...[Novels, for example] do not merely passively
reflect the prevailing ratio of mobility and constraint; they help to shape,
articulate, and reproduce it through their own improvisatory intelligence.
This means that, despite our own romantic cult of originality, most
artists are themselves gifted creators of variations upon received themes.
Even those great writers whom we regard with special awe, and whom we celebrate
for their refusal to parrot the cliches of their culture, tend to be particularly
brilliant improvisors rather than absolute violators or pure inventors....
...[Cultural mobility] is not the expression of
random motion but of exchange. A culture is a particular network
of negotiations for the exchange of material goods, ideas, and -- through
institutions like enslavement, adoption, or marriage -- people. Anthropologists
are centrally concerned with a culture's kinship system -- its conception
of family relationships, its prohibitions of certain couplings, its marriage
rules -- and with its narratives -- its myths, folktales, and sacred stories.
The two concerns are linked, for a culture's narratives, like its kinship
arrangements, are crucial indices of the prevailing codes governing human
mobility and constraint. Great writers are precisely masters of these codes,
specialists in cultural exchange. The works they create are structures
for the accumulation, transformation, representation, and communication
of social energies and practices.
Culture. The notion of culture has recently
been undergoing some of the most radical rethinking since the early 1960's.
Within anthropology, where culture was in effect the key symbol of the
field, the concept has come under challenge precisely because of new understandings
regarding power and history. Thus, for example, one of the core dimensions
of the concept of culture has been the notion that culture is "shared"
by all members of a given society. But as anthropologists have begun to
study more complex societies, in which divisions of class, race, and ethnicity
are fundamentally constitutive, it has become clear that if we speak of
culture as shared, we must now always ask "By whom"? and "In what ways?"
and "Under what conditions?"
This shift has been manifested in several very visible
ways. At the level of theory, the concept of culture is being expanded
by Foucaldian notions of discourse, and Gramscian notions of hegemony (on
the latter point, the works of Raymond Williams have been particularly
influential). Both concepts emphasize the degree to which culture is grounded
in unequal relations and is differentially related to people and groups
in different social positions. Connected to this point, at the level of
empirical work, there has been an explosion of studies, both contemporary
and historical, on the cultural worlds of different classes, ethnic groups,
racial groups, and so on and the ways in which these cultural worlds interact.
Another core aspect of the concept of culture has
been the notion of culture's extraordinary durability. The cultures of
"traditional societies" were thought to have changed extraordinarily slowly,
if at all. The virtual absence of historical investigation in anthropology,
until recently, has meant that cultural systems have, indeed, appeared
timeless, at least until ruptured by "culture contact." But as anthropologists
have begun to adopt, at least partially, a historical perspective, the
durability of culture has dissolved. In many cases, timeless traditions
turn out to have been "invented", and not very long ago at that. In other
cases, the long-term configurations have, indeed, been very stable, but
we now realize that this is a peculiar state of affairs, requiring very
sharp questioning and investigation.
Finally, a central aspect of the concept of culture
has been the claim of relative coherence and internal consistency -- a
"system of symbols", a "structure of relations." But an intriguing line
of discussion in contemporary critical theory has now posed a major alternative
view: culture as multiple discourses, occasionally coming together in large
systemic configuration, but more often coexisting within dynamic fields
of interaction and conflict.
Perhaps the main point about the current situation
is that the anthropologists no longer "own" culture. At least some of the
critique and transformation of the culture concept derives from its use
in creative, and not simply derivative, ways in other fields -- in history,
philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism, to name only the most obvious
cases. The field of "cultural studies", which established itself with astonishing
effectiveness in the last decade, draws on literary criticism, social history,
sociology, and anthropology to fashion what has become a distinct perspective
on the culture of power, the culture of resistance, and the politics of
cultural production and manipulation.
We may note a number of lines
of divergence in current uses of the culture concept. First, there are
those who adopt an ideational definition (symbols, values, representation)
as against those who take an inclusive approach, including ideas and symbols
along with the material products, technology, social organization, and
other dimensions of group life.... Second, there are differences in whether
culture is seen to reside in the mind (with behavior and artifacts as outcomes
of mental models) or in behavior (e.g., its common definition as learned,
socially transmitted behavior). Third, there are differences with regard
to the location of culture: in the individual(who exercises choice-making
and manipulation) or in a social entity (a group that "has" a culture).
Related to this is the issue of agency, some treating culture as if it
is a thing in itself (and capable of doing things), others seeing it as
an aspect of individuals. Fourth, there are differences in assumptions
about integration, between those who regard culture as a "package", moving
as a piece, and those who see the question of integration as one to be
empirically determined. Those who take the latter position generally prefer
to use "cultural" as an adjective rather than "culture" as a noun. Finally,
the distinction between the singular "culture" (as a general attribute
of humans and as an entity that evolves) and the plural "cultures" (which
addresses the diversity of human groups in time and place) is still alive.
Other distinctions could be added to the list.
The question, then, is, why
the worry [about the culture concept]? One answer lies perhaps in the fact
that culture condenses a number of tenets held by anthropologists...: the
distinction between genetic and social inheritance, the connection among
different domains of life, the patterning of cultural content (even when
the degree of organization is left an open question), the historicity of
such patterns, and their potential adaptedness to specific conditions.
In much the same way that Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in this volume, endorses
the "conceptual kernal" behind the culture concept even as he advocates
abandoning the word, anthropologists agree on what the concept summarizes
much more than they do on the term itself.
Other answers are specific
to American anthropology. For a discipline committed to the study of both
human evolution and the time/space diversity of group life, the concept
of culture (in both its singular and plural senses) provides a unifying
thread. The American notion of culture did not give rise to the four-field
organization, itself the product of specific historical conditions, but
it afforded a means of discourse among the fields, a sense of shared problems
and purpose. It is not an irony (as it might appear at first glance) that
the move to abandon the culture concept is most prevalent among cultural
anthropologists; for them, anthropology without culture is not only feasible
but well established in British and continental traditions. For many biological
anthropologists, primatologists, archaeologists, and linguistic anthropologists,
however, it is "culture" that cements their placement within anthropology
rather than in the sister disciplines that each of these specialists straddles.
X. A few of the introductory remarks in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's contribution to Anthropology Beyond Culture, entitled "Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises".
The conceptual kernal behind
the word "culture", as deployed in North American anthropology, provides
a useful and fundamental lesson about humankind. Yet the word culture today
is irretrievably tainted by both the politics of identity and the politics
of blame -- including the racialization of behavior that it was meant to
avoid. Contrary to many of the critics... I do not see the concept as inherently
flawed on theoretical grounds. I agree with Richard Shweder that something
akin to a culture concept remains necessary to anthropology as a discipline
and to social science in general. The distinction between concept and word,
however, is central to my argument. So is the related emphasis on the sites
and processes in which the word and concept are deployed and on the modes
of engagement that mediate between concepts and words. For if concepts
are not just words, then the vitality of a conceptual program cannot hinge
upon the sole use of a noun.
Culture's popular success
is its own theoretical demise. Its academic diffusion has generated new
institutionl clusters on North American campuses: cultural -- and multicultural
-- studies. Culture has also entered the lexicon of advertisers, politicians,
businesspeople, and economic planners, up to the high echelons of the World
Bank and the editorial pages of the New York Times. Culture now
explains everything: from political instability in Haiti to ethnic war
in the Balkans, from labor difficulties on the shop floors of Mexican maquiladoras
to racial tensions in British schools and the difficulties of New York's
welfare recipients in the job market. Culture explained both the Asian
miracle of the 1980's and the Japanese economic downturn two decades later....
The massive diffusion of the
word "culture" in recent times awaits its own ethnographer, but even the
trivia are revealing. One internet search engine found more than five million
pages linked to the keyword "culture", after exclusion of most references
to cultivation and agriculture. When culture was coupled with anthropology
or ethnography, however, the total fell to 61,000 pages. Similarly, whereas
the search engine of a major internet bookseller produced more than 20,000
titles containing the word culture, the list dropped to 1,350 titles when
culture was coupled with anthropology or ethnography in the subject index.
Culture is out there, and anthropologists have no control over its deployment....
...[T]he North American trajectory of the concept
of culture seems to offer a contradiction. The kernal of the conceptualization
teaches fundamental lessons about humanity that were not as clearly stated
before its deployment and that cannot easily be unlearned. Yet the deployment
of the word culture today, while evoking this conceptual kernal, carries
an essentialist and often racialist agenda outside and especially within
the United States.
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.