PART I Frameworks of Analysis

INTRODUCTION Tony Bennett then examine the forms of cultural analysis that have been associated It is clear from our discussion in the general with the development of psychological and introduction that it is impossible to tie the sociological thought. Peter Burke’s discussion term ‘culture’ to a single concept or to a of cultural history provides a bridge into simple history of usage. It is better understood the next group of chapters focused mainly as referencing a network of loosely related on text-based disciplines. James English’s concepts that has been shaped by the relations account of the role that the analysis of form between the different histories and fields of has played in the development of literary usage with which the term has came to be studies is followed here by Tia DeNora’s entangled. A significant factor here has been consideration of music as both text and the different meanings deriving from the ways performance. Mieke Bal then examines the in which the concept has been used and relations between art history and the more interpreted in the social science disciplines recent development of visual culture studies. one the one hand and in the humanities The next two chapters – Tom Gunning’s on the other. These different disciplinary discussion of film studies and Toby Miller’s articulations of the concept are the focus account of broadcasting – are concerned with of the contributions composing this first the forms of cultural analysis that have been part of the book, which also assesses how developed in relation to the two main media the ‘cultural turn’ has affected developments systems of the twentieth century. The final within, across and between these different set of chapters explores the role played by disciplinary ensembles. a number of interdisciplinary perspectives The first group of chapters explores the in developing new and distinctive forms role that the concept of culture has played of cultural analysis. We include here Ien in the social sciences, beginning with Eric Ang’s account of the development of cultural Gable and Richard Handler’s discussion of studies, initially in Britain and subsequently as its role in the history of anthropological a wider international formation, and Griselda thought. Kay Anderson then looks at the Pollock’s discussion of the varied traditions role that questions of cultural analysis have of cultural analysis that have been associated played in constructing the human/nature with the development of feminist theory and divide that has played a key role in the politics. Daniel Miller then reviews recent development of, as it is sometimes still known, developments in the field of material culture human geography. Valerie Walkerdine and studies, arguing the need for a dialectical

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perspective capable of taking account of the After reviewing howAnglo-American anthro- relations between subjects and objects, while pology was influenced by French structural Andrew Pickering, writing from a contrasting anthropology, and by the work of Claude perspective, outlines the role that is accorded Lévi-Strauss in particular, Gable and Handler the relations between persons and things in the examine the revival of a Boasian orientation perspectives of posthumanist science studies in anthropology as evidenced by the work and technoscience. of Alfred Kroeber, Clifford Geertz and Our brief to all our contributors was that David Schneider. They conclude by assessing they should write an engaged account of their the varied forms of critical political self- topic, reviewing and assessing its most salient reflexiveness that now inform contemporary characteristics from the vantage point of their anthropological approaches to culture. own position within the contemporary debates Kay Anderson’s concerns overlap with associated with the fields of cultural analysis those of Gable and Handler at many points. in question rather than aspiring to a position She starts by reminding us that geography of Olympian detachment. In responding to was included among the cultural sciences long this brief, Eric Gable and Richard Handler before the emergence, since the 1980s, of seek to untangle the history of the rela- ‘cultural geography’ in response to the per- tions between anthropology and the ‘culture spectives of the ‘cultural turn’. However, she concept’ that is most commonly associated is equally clear that these perspectives have with that discipline: that is, culture as the significantly revised what had earlier been the organized system of beliefs, customs, and distinctive signature of geography’s contribu- practices comprising the way of a life of a tions to cultural analysis: that is, the influence particularly territorially defined population. of space and place on the distribution and They see this as a task of untangling precisely organization of human meaning systems and because the histories of this concept and those practices. The influence of structuralist and of anthropology have sometimes followed post-structuralist linguistics decisively shifted separate paths, and sometimes converged, approaches to these questions by effecting in ways that disqualify their often implicit what Anderson characterizes as a ‘move equation with one another. Although focusing from a positivist understanding of space as their attention for the greater part on the a “surface” on which people, events and so twentieth-century history of the discipline, on are distributed and arranged, to a notion they first show how Franz Boas’s work of space as relational and co-constitutive broke with the hierarchical and evolutionary of social process’ (00). Anderson then asks assumptions informing Edward Tylor’s initial what light this perspective throws on the formulation of the ‘culture concept’to propose history of earlier geographical understandings a more pluralist understanding of cultures as of the relations between space, place and bounded wholes that had a value and validity human cultures. Adopting a posthumanist that needed to be understood on their own perspective derived from contemporary fem- terms rather than – as had been the case inist thought and the related challenge to throughout anthropology’s earlier association essentialist conceptions of the nature/human with the history of colonialism – compar- divide emerging from the work of Bruno ing non-Western cultures unfavourably to Latour, she reviews the ways in which earlier Western ones. Gable and Handler then turn Enlightenment and evolutionary conceptions their attention to the subsequent history of the geographical relations between space, of the relations between anthropology and place and culture equated the essence of fieldwork, paying special attention to the humanness with distance from nature. In development, from Bronislaw Malinowski to assessing the consequences of such concep- Margaret Mead, of the ‘participant observa- tions for indigenous peoples who, throughout tion’ approach in which the anthropologist the history of colonialism, were seen as closer seeks to learn another culture by living it. to nature and therefore less human than their

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colonizers,Anderson also shows how colonial Tony Bennett considers the relations encounters with indigenous peoples – and between sociology and culture from three with Australian aborigines in particular – perspectives. The first of these focuses on often unsettled the logic of such humanist sociological analyses of those practices and ontologies. institutions which comprise culture as a Valerie Walkerdine and Lisa Blackman distinctive level, field or subsystem of society: also remind us that, at first, psychology too literary, musical and artistic institutions and was closely related to the cultural sciences. texts, and the media and entertainment However, the emerging dominance of Anglo- complexes comprising the culture industries. American psychology in the early twentieth In reviewing these traditions of work, Bennett century, its commitment to an experimen- outlines the different ways in which soci- tally derived cognitive universalism, and ologists have sought to explain social and the parallel parting of the ways between historical variations in literary and artistic psychology and psychoanalysis saw an end forms and practices, focusing particularly to this until the 1960s, when the disciplinary on sociological accounts of such genres as hegemony of such conceptions was chal- tragedy and the novel. He then considers lenged from a variety of quarters. In reviewing the consequences of the ways in which these challenges and placing them in their literary and artistic forms are classified and appropriate political and theoretical contexts, organized into cultural hierarchies, and moves Walkerdine and Blackman’s main concern on to review different sociological accounts is to trace the various attempts to develop of the development of distinctive literary and discursive, narrative, social and cultural artistic fields or systems, and of the nature psychologies, and to consider the influence and value of aesthetic experience. Bennett’s of all of these on the development of critical second main concern is with the role that the psychology. Focusing initially on cultural analysis of culture, understood as particular and narrative psychology, they show how sets of beliefs and values, has played in perspectives derived from Soviet linguistics the more general theoretical and political were translated into programmes of research concerns of sociology. He illustrates this by by Michael Cole, Sylvia Scribner and others considering the role of such conceptions in that incorporated a cultural perspective into the work of Emile Durkheim through to American psychology. They then turn their contemporary sociological constructions of attention to the parallel development of social ‘social problems’ in the literature focused on psychology in Britain. This sets the scene for the roles of social or civic capital in securing an analysis of the more general international social inclusion or social solidarity. Finally, currency of the linguistic and discursive turns Bennett reviews a range of different accounts in psychology and, in the context of these, the of the role of culture in constructing the influence of the Althusserean and Lacanian social that derive from different interpreta- approaches to subjectivity in reformulating tions of the ‘cultural turn’. His discussion the concerns of Freudian psychoanalysis. In here encompasses Stuart Hall’s account of considering the influence of the Foucaultian ‘new ethnicities’, Foucaultian accounts of school of discourse psychology and the discourses and their role – in the context psycho-social approach to the understanding of governmentality theory – in ordering of subjectivity, Walkerdine and Blackman the social, Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, and conclude by outlining those directions in Bruno Latour’s approach to the social. current research which they believe offer In his account of cultural history, Peter a route beyond the social/psychic dualisms Burke argues that while the concept – in the that have reflected a continuing failure Germanic notion of Kulturgeschichte – is over to satisfactorily integrate the social and two hundred years old, it is only in the context the psychological mechanisms of subject of the cultural turn that cultural history has formation. assumed a recognisable intellectual profile

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and influence alongside economic, social and has been central to its claims to distinctive political history. And it is only since the 1990s forms of academic legitimacy and authority. that it has achieved significant institutional Exactly how such claims have been pitched, form as reflected in the titles of journals, however, and the consequences that have academic positions and programmes. It is, followed from this, have varied significantly though, Burke suggests, a term that sometimes depending on how the relationships between disguises as much as it reveals if account is literary studies and other disciplines have been not also taken of the significantly different in organized in different historical moments, meanings and uses of the concept of culture national settings and institutional contexts. that it encompasses. He distinguishes three It is on the shifting contours of what has been main understandings of culture, each of which at stake in literary studies’ commitments to has quite different implications for the project the analysis of form that English focuses his of a cultural history. According to the first, attention. This ranges across the influence of culture is interpreted as a synonym for the programmes of formal analysis proposed the arts, with the tasks of cultural history by the Russian Formalists, Practical Criticism accordingly being defined as being concerned and the New Criticism and the reaction with the development and functioning of against these by the moral and communitarian specific artistic practices and institutions forms of criticism associated with the Arnold- and, sometimes, the respects in which the Leavis-Williams tradition – which nonethe- relationships between these add up to a more less remained deeply affected by a formalist encompassing account of the history of high impulse – through to moments of Theory in culture. The second inverts the structure of American literary criticism. It is also, English attention associated with this conception to suggests, the continuing influence of formalist focus on popular cultural practices, and in principles of textual analysis on the methods particular the ways in which these have been of cultural studies that explain why cultural shaped in opposition to the field of high studies, while imaginarily opposing itself to culture. The third tradition adopts a more literary studies, has in fact served as the anthropological perspective to focus on the vehicle through which the reach of formalist role of cultural practices in everyday life, no techniques of analysis has been expanded matter whether ‘high’ or ‘low’. In examining beyond the narrow confines of the literary these different traditions, Burke consider the canon to encompass all cultural practices. relationships between cultural history and A concern with aesthetic form and its parallel tendencies in neighbouring disci- analysis has been equally strong in the plines – sociology, anthropology, cultural history of Western musicology, albeit that studies and cultural geography, for example – its influence has been challenged by the and reviews some of the key conceptual and development of new forms of socio-musical methodological problems that the project of a analysis that have significantly expanded the cultural history needs to address. repertoire of methods that the study of musical The focus of James English’s account of practices can now draw on. To trace the paths literary studies is ‘to trace the longstanding and the logics of these transformations is connection between literary form and insti- the task that Tia DeNora sets herself in her tutional form, between scholars’concern with account of the relations between cultural and the formal particulars of “literature itself” and musical analysis. Her starting point is with their collective, ongoing struggle for recog- the high/low music distinctions of the modern nition and security in the modern university’ Western musical system. Taking a leaf out (00). No matter what phase of its history of Pierre Bourdieu’s accounts of the auton- is considered, he argues, the contention that omization of art and literature in the course of the defining characteristic of literary studies the nineteenth century, DeNora examines the consists in its capacity to analyse the formal related processes through which a composer- organization and operations of literary texts centred musical canon was differentiated from

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other musical forms.Afailure to take adequate culture understood, in its most obvious sense, account of the relativity of this musical system as the field of visual images and objects. While is, for DeNora, one of the main shortcomings including these, Bal argues the case for a more of Theodor Adorno’s otherwise exemplary – extended field of study that will encompass and, for twentieth-century musicology, abso- the ways in which different scopic and visual lutely indispensable – contributions to musi- regimes organize particular forms of visibility cal theory. But it is, DeNora notes, echoing and draw objects, images and persons into some of the points made by James English in them. The inclusion of distinctive forms of his discussion of literary studies, a contribu- visuality – different ways of performing the tion focused largely on the analysis of musical act of seeing – and their organization in forms. In approaching these as capable of gen- the context of different historical configu- erating distinctive cognitive effects with spe- rations of the relations between the senses cific political consequences that might be read is an equally significant component of an off from their formal properties alone, DeNora adequately theorized conception of the remit argues, Adorno’s work did not adequately of visual culture studies. Having defined the question some of the founding assumptions of field of study in these ways, Bal proposes a the composer-centrism of the modern Western set of principles for analysing the role of the musical system. Her concerns in the rest of the visual in social life. chapter consequently focus on a broadened set Tom Gunning’s account of film studies of approaches to the analysis of the socio- is, in some respects, at odds with Bal’s cultural aspects of musical practices. She advocacy of the virtues of a visual culture looks first at the new cultural musicology, studies paradigm. While in no way wanting exploring both the strengths and some of the to separate off film from other visual media weaknesses associated with its understanding or to deny the significance of the ways of texts as social representations. Her final in which, historically and in the present, concern is with music as a technology of social film is significantly shaped by its ecological action and the role it plays in providing a struggles with other media, Gunning argues resource for the everyday performance and that the absorption of film studies into the embodied enactment of social relations. more general concerns of media or visual Mieke Bal takes Rembrandt’s Judith culture studies comes at too high a price: that Beheading Holophernes as her point of entry of neglecting the specificity of film. This is into her discussion of the topic of visual not, though, a case of special pleading for analysis (or, more fully, of visual culture film and film studies as somehow unique in studies). By contrasting an art-historical this regard. To the contrary, Gunning argues, reading of this painting, a reading concerned it is necessary, when studying visual media, with rediscovering an original and canonical to recognize the specificity of each medium – meaning, and a more visual meaning, one the specificity of its aesthetic, technical and that responds to the painting without trying to industrial forms, the specific organization of convert it into a series of art-historical clues, its relations to other media, and the specific Bal maps out the territory of visual analysis as histories of its uses and reception. Nor is his a distinctive set of concerns that has developed argument one in favour of a purely formal along three paths: an internal critique of concern with film. While acknowledging the art history, the ‘visual turn’ evident in the importance of Classical Film Theory, and the development of visual sociology and visual work of Bordwell and Thompson in particular, anthropology, and the democratic extension for the enormous contribution of its approach of the visual as a field of study outside the to film as language, Gunning argues the need narrow confines of the arts to include everyday for a broader approach, one which, focused practices and performances. She is adamant, on the analysis of the heterogeneous array of however, that the object of visual culture activities which comprise what he calls ‘film studies is not to be confused with visual practices’, stresses not the ‘division between

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texts and context, between the aesthetic and of widespread predictions of its impending the social, the ideological and the cultural – demise. but rather a continuous process of exchange In the first of the contributions focused and interaction which explains the power of on interdisciplinary traditions of cultural film (or cinema) as a cultural force’ (00). analysis, Ien Ang argues that cultural studies For Toby Miller, too, the study of broad- has played a significant catalytic role in casting necessarily encompasses not just the placing questions concerning the relations practices of broadcasting institutions, their between culture, politics and the social on the distinctive textual regimes, their technical agendas of a wide range of humanities and infrastructures and industrial organization, but social science disciplines. This has, however, their uses, the modes of their regulation, been accompanied by significant disputes and and the more general social discourses in tensions within cultural studies as to what which their roles are debated and contested. exactly it is or should aspire to be. Rather than Dividing the study of broadcasting media taking sides between such contending views into three broad traditions of work focused Ang seeks to distil from them what they share on the political economy of their owner- and, taking her bearings from this, to offer an ship, organization and control, their textual assessment of where cultural studies currently regimes, and their influence on or uses by stands and what it still has to offer in a context their audiences, Miller discusses how these in which many of its original arguments have have been differently applied in relation become more widely shared. She bases this to radio and television. Common to both, assessment on a thumbnail sketch of the his- however, has been a concern with the (usually torical development of cultural studies. While deleterious) effects that broadcast media, in stressing that cultural studies has always been one moral panic after another, are supposed to a transnational critical discourse and, as such, have had on their audiences. Miller therefore not one that can be accorded an origin in any reviews in some detail the different ways in particular national context, she argues that the which media effects have been theorized and work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural operationalized in programmes of research. Studies at the University of Birmingham has Focusing initially on the ‘domestic effects nonetheless played the role of an exemplary model’ in its concern with the media as forces harbinger for cultural studies – instantiating that can shape the activities and identities of and developing its concerns in ways that have citizen-consumers, he then turns his attention greatly facilitated its parallel development to the ‘global effects model’ centred on the in other national contexts. This is followed role of the media in either subverting or by a discussion of the distinctive moral and maintaining distinctive national cultures in political registers of the ‘culture and society’ the context of global media flows. Miller is tradition in British cultural studies, and of also concerned with the forms of cultural the later, more dispersed understanding of analysis that are conducted within and by culture associated with the revisions within broadcasting institutions themselves, usually cultural studies prompted by its relation- as aspects of their marketing strategies, and ships to postmodernism. After reviewing throws valuable light on the role that this the multiplication of the sites of political has played, particularly in the USA, in struggle that cultural studies has become the development of new forms of faith- engaged in since its original class-centrism, based audience segmentation. In concluding, Ang draws on complexity theory to argue Miller draws on the varied repertoire of that an engagement with cultural complexity the different forms of cultural analysis entails that the business of cultural studies will reviewed earlier in the chapter for the always be unfinished and, as a consequence, light they collectively throw on TV weather not susceptible to neat or tidy definitions. programming as a case-study that illustrates Griselda Pollock, in seeking to unravel the broadcasting’s continuing centrality in spite intricate set of connections between feminism

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as always both a social movement and an While disciplines such as architecture and intellectual practice, is similarly alert to the archaeology have been concerned with the open-ended and necessarily unfinished forms study of material culture, understood, in of cultural analysis that have been developed Daniel Miller’s pithy summary, as ‘objects in association with feminist projects. She is created by us’ (00), material culture studies alert, too, to the ways in which feminist is a much more recent development. Its con- cultural analysis has been affected by its temporary formation, Miller argues, can partly relations to the changing dynamics of feminist be explained in terms of the realignments struggles centred on questions of gender between these disciplines and others, most and sexuality and by the ways in which notably anthropology, that share a concern these have been connected to questions of with the role of humanly produced material class and race, particularly in the context phenomena in social life. However, he also of postcolonial struggles. Her point of entry suggests that the lateness of the arrival of into these questions is to consider how the material culture studies and, related to this, question ‘What is woman?’has been answered its failure to engage fully with the materiality in different traditions of feminist thought. of its objects of study have reflected a deep Beginning with the terms in which Simone bias against materiality on the part of Western de Beauvoir first posed and answered this religious and secular cosmologies, in which question, Pollock reviews the different terms the central purposes of human existence in which the question has since been engaged are defined in opposition to the merely with by Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and material world. One of Miller’s purposes is Monique Wittig. This account teases out therefore to review those aspects of the major significant differences in the ways in which world religions, particularly Christianity, that cultural factors have been invoked in feminist have impeded a theoretically frank and open accounts of sexed and gendered differences engagement with materiality. In doing so and sets the scene for a more detailed account he shows how this anti-material bias has of the ways in which feminism has been significantly affected the intellectual trajec- shaped by, and in turn helped to shape, tories of disciplines such as anthropology a range of different traditions of post-war and archaeology by bending these away, for cultural analysis. The relationships between large parts of the twentieth century, from the feminist cultural analysis and psychoanalytic strong concern with material things that had theory and practice; the significance of characterized their work in the nineteenth critical work on the nature/culture divide by century. According some importance to the Donna Haraway and others for the agendas role played by the revived interest in Marxist of ‘cyborg feminism’; feminism’s critical thought in the 1960s and 1970s in placing engagement with structuralism, particularly questions of matter and materialism back onto as represented by the work of Claude Lévi- the intellectual agendas of the humanities Strauss; the influence of post-structuralist and social sciences, Miller then traces the thought, particularly of Michel Foucault’s contours of two different approaches to work on sexuality; and the influence of the role of things in social life. In one Foucault’s concern with technologies of the tradition – exemplified by the work of Bruno self on Theresa de Lauretis’s approach to Latour’s approach to actor networks, Maralyn technologies of gender: these are among the Strathern’s account of personhood, andAlfred traditions of engaged feminist analysis that Gell’s anthropology of art – attention focuses Pollock’s account encompasses. In conclud- on identifying the independent agency that ing, she reviews the implications of these is exerted by things in particular contexts traditions of work for the process of working and situations. In the second – Miller calls toward a social ordering of sexuality and it the dialectical tradition, which he traces difference that will displace the formations of to Hegel and, in the present, associates with phallocentric masculinity. Pierre Bourdieu’s work – the object world is

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an externalization of human creativity and, of analysis); and as evolving open-endedly as such, is then appropriated in practices and emergently in time’ (00). In fleshing of human self-creation. In giving reasons out what such a programme for cultural for favouring this tradition, Miller proceeds analysis might look like, Pickering reviews to show how different aspects of the two the history of the relations between science traditions inform current work in material studies and technoscience on the one hand and culture studies by reviewing current research earlier work in the ‘sociology of knowledge’ on housing, clothing and new media. tradition on the other. He then shows how the In the final chapter Andrew Pickering reformulations of the concerns of the latter articulates a set of concerns that resonate by the former have been generalized to other very strongly with those discussed by Kay areas of work through the new terms for the Anderson. Addressing the relevance of recent analysis of cultural practices, human-animal developments in science studies (defined by relations, the environment and politics that the work of scholars such as Karen Knorr they propose. Cetina) and technoscience (exemplified by It is difficult, when surveying these com- figures such as Donna Haraway and Bruno manding reviews of such a wide and varied Latour) to the development of new forms body of work, not to be impressed by the of cultural analysis, he is additionally con- sheer scope and diversity of the methods of cerned to situate these within a posthumanist analysis that are now available for probing ontology of the social. The implications the organization of cultural practices and of this last step are, as Pickering frankly their relations to social processes. It is acknowledges, radically unsettling for the also not difficult to see how far some of assumptions underlying many of the ways the new theoretical logics that are in play in which the relations between culture and in these debates unsettle, and often quite the social have hitherto been represented in radically so, the founding assumptions of Western social and cultural theory. The ‘key the forms of cultural analysis developed features of “culture” as it appears in posthu- during the latter half of the last century. manist science studies’, he argues, are that It is too early to assess how enduring the it should be conceptualized ‘as visible; as influence of these new modes of reasoning visibly multiple and heterogeneous (material, will prove to be. From all the indications conceptual, social); as having no outside (in of the approaches reviewed here, however, the sense of base/superstructure models; there questions concerning the definition of culture is nothing basic that explains culture); as a and the appropriate methods for its analysis decentred field of symmetric encounter of seem likely to be just as centrally implicated multiple agencies (including, importantly, that in the key theoretical and methodological of the material world itself); as having no controversies of the twenty-first century as pregiven boundaries (the question of units they have been over the past fifty years.

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Anthropology and Culture

Eric Gable and Richard Handler

Concerned, as were many of the early or anthropological meaning’ of culture ‘in ‘Boasian’ anthropologists, to comment on a English’, thereby ‘deliberately establishing distinction between the objects of ‘historical a science by defining its subject matter’ science’ and ‘natural science’ that Franz Boas (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952: pp. 9, 150). (1887) deemed crucial, Alfred Kroeber once Stocking countered that Tylor’s definition of wrote, ‘the tree of life is eternally branching, culture was more Victorian and evolution- and never doing anything fundamental but ary than modern and relativistic. Following branching, except for the dying-away of Stocking, we can conclude that whatever branches. The tree of human history, on the anthropology was in 1871, it was not contrary, is constantly branching and at the dependent on the later, Boasian understanding same time having its branches grow together of culture around which the twentieth-century again’ (1943: p. 86). Kroeber’s metaphor of discipline formed in North America. And we entanglement can serve well enough for the can ask what culture meant to anthropologists history of anthropology, and of the culture before Boas. concept in relationship to the discipline. But Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, to untangle the strands of such intellectual and anthropology came together as a discipline institutional histories, we should remember institutionalized in museums, universities, that the history of the culture concept is not government bureaus, and amateur and profes- the same thing as the history of anthropology. sional societies. The story is one of branching Indeed, in one of the seminal papers that led and growing-together-again. In Stocking’s to the recognition of ‘history of anthropol- overview (2001), not so different from Boas’s ogy’ as a sub-field within anthropology, the telling a hundred years earlier (Boas, 1904), historian George Stocking (1963) disputed ‘anthropology represents an imperfect fusion Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s nomination of four modes of inquiry … including not only of Edward Burnett Tylor as the apical natural history, philology, and moral philoso- ancestor of modern cultural anthropology. phy, but also antiquarianism’(Stocking, 2001: Kroeber and Kluckhohn claimed that Tylor, in p. 308). As different schools and national 1871, had ‘established’ the ‘modern technical traditions emphasized one or another of those

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strands, anthropology in North America and essay will be culture in relation to North Europe became a discipline more interdisci- American and British (and, to a lesser extent, plinary than the other social sciences, one European) anthropological studies of society that spanned a range of approaches from and culture, we will consider the social the natural scientific and positivistic to the or cultural anthropology of both regional historical and hermeneutic. Its object was traditions, including the central role that apparently humankind in all its biological, culture has played in what one of the few historical, linguistic and cultural diversity. In major scholars who was able to appeal practice, it developed as the science of ‘the simultaneously to both traditions, Gregory people without history’(Wolf, 1982), of those Bateson, might have called their schismogenic people deemed unworthy by the storytellers relationship (Bateson, 1936). in the other social sciences, for whom The study of culture and society within ‘civilization’ and ‘Western’ were more or less anthropology – which we can call socio- synonymous (Segal, 2001). Anthropology’s cultural anthropology when we wish to elide ‘peripheral’ peoples, its objects of study, the differences between the North American had ‘dropped through the boundary spaces and British traditions – combines two intellec- between the gradually separating disciplines’ tual traditions in the human sciences broadly of the human sciences during the nineteenth conceived. One tradition (most strongly century (Stocking, 2001: p. 311). Thus the reflected in British and French social anthro- ‘work’of studying them fell to anthropologists pology) emerged out of classical European only because, as Boas put it, ‘no one else cares sociology. Here the emphasis was on the for it’ (1904: p. 35; see Bunzl, 2004: p. 437). grand-theory dichotomy between primitive or Only in North America did anthropology traditional society and modern or capitalist develop institutionally as a single discipline society, a pressing issue in the context both that contained within itself the four ‘sub- of the demise of feudalism and the rise of fields’ of physical anthropology, archaeology, democracy and capitalism in Europe, and of linguistics, and social or cultural anthropol- the contemporaneous European colonization ogy – sub-fields that to some extent replicated of Africa and Asia. Anthropologists working the four modes of inquiry from natural within this tradition have, in some instances, history to philology. In Great Britain and confirmed or exaggerated the difference Europe, ‘social anthropology’ or ‘ethnology’ between ‘the West and the rest’ (for example, has tended to be institutionally distinct from by positing diametrically opposed value archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthro- systems in gift versus commodity societies). pology and imagined as a branch (albeit an In some instances, anthropologists inverted institutionally independent one) of sociology difference in order to make sense of the (Kuper, 1973). The culture concept has been societies they encountered (by mediating in relevant to all of anthropology’s four fields, ironic ways [e.g., Dumont, 1970] the contrast as these have developed in various national Durkheim [1893] drew between ‘mechanical’ traditions over the twentieth century. But only [egalitarian, undifferentiated] solidarity in in the North American four-field tradition did primitive societies, as opposed to the ‘organic’ the concept come to define the discipline. solidarity generated by Western societies’ Moreover, it has also distinguished North hierarchical and complex division of labor). American anthropology from the British Or they have tended to erase difference tradition of social anthropology, which more by stressing the degree to which human or less explicitly rejected culture as a central motivations and interests are everywhere intellectual concept even while deploying the same, albeit expressed through locally the word as a synonym for ‘society’ – a distinctive cultural practices (arguing, for way of life practiced by a people in a example, that magic and ritual satisfy basic place (as in John Beattie’s textbook, Other human needs or reflect similar tendencies for Cultures [1964]). Because our concern in this humans toward rationality).

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Much of social anthropology has used and document indigenous artists as producers either the erasures or the exaggerations of of the primitive equivalents of literature – of the dichotomizing tradition to enact what ‘texts’. is now known as ‘cultural critique’, usually Socio-cultural anthropologists today directed at Western arrogance or compla- (whether in Britain, the USA or elsewhere) cency. A typical narrative tactic in this kind tend to combine (sometimes unconsciously) of critical social anthropology is to treat what elements from both the culturalist and used to be considered as the most lurid and the sociological traditions in their efforts disturbing of so-called primitive or traditional to explain, as coherent or systematic, a cultural practices – such as witchcraft – particular group of people acting and talking as symptoms of the malaise of modernity in a particular place. This reflects both the itself (e.g., Gluckman, 1963; cf. 1995, 2002). fact that since the 1930s, anthropologists As a rule, anthropologists working within trained in Britain became key players in the the sociological tradition tended toward a development of university departments of science of society – an effort to discover, anthropology in North America, and a certain for example, ‘general principles of political trans-Atlantic confluence of theorizing about manoeuvre which transcend cultures and the cultural. Especially salient here have been which could be the tools of research in a the ways that Anglophone anthropologists variety of different cultures’ (Bailey, 1969: have borrowed from and critiqued French p. xiii). In all cases, grand-theory dichotomies anthropologists and scholars in other drove and shaped what anthropologists call disciplines (e.g., Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi- ethnography – the written product of research Strauss, Dumont, Bourdieu and Foucault). in a particular place among a particular group Currently the best anthropologists tend to of people. disrupt old paradigms precisely as they Another tradition emerged out of romantic- call into question assumptions of social or era European theorizing in political philos- cultural coherence. Anthropologists do so ophy and cultural history about the nation as they attempt to reintroduce historical and the Volk (Kuper, 1999). Carried to North contingencies into their ethnographies, or America by Boas, it blossomed as American as they try to re-center the stories they cultural anthropology in the context of the tell around individual actors who are often development of the USA as a pluralist, yet resistant to, or creating against, what these often racist, nation of emigrants and the actors see as dominant ideologies or practices. descendents of slaves along with an enduring As anthropologists do so, however, they are population of indigenous tribal peoples. Such also always looking over their shoulders theorizing had an ironic relationship to essen- to evaluate whether they are importing tializing theories of human difference based into their descriptions of history or of the on biology – or ‘race’ – in that the positing of person notions of agency and causality that national or cultural difference could serve, on are the outgrowths of their own cultural the one hand, as a critique of racialism and, on traditions. The best modern socio-cultural the other hand, as a replacement for it (Evans, anthropology has become, in short, doubly 2006). Here the emphasis was on the plurality reflexive or skeptical. On the one hand, of cultural features that could define a people anthropologists are leery of the power of as a people. For Boasian anthropologists, culture to permeate their analyses such that influenced not only by Herderian romanticism they ‘re-naturalize’ their own presuppositions but also by European philological studies, in what they write about others. On the language was often seen as the essential other hand, anthropologists worry at their component (or, at least, the primus inter tendency to exaggerate pattern, difference, pares) of cultural identity (Hymes, 1970). or coherence at the expense of understanding Hence their early interest in myths and folk- particular people at particular moments taxonomies, and their efforts to understand in time.

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ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURE Thus, for example, Matthew Arnold thought AND RACE civilization (the civilization of steel and railroads) had advanced in the England of the The history of the culture concept and industrial revolution, but culture (inward cul- the history of modern anthropology came tivation, ‘sweetness and light’) had declined together in the Boasian critique of Tylorian (Arnold, 1868). Tylor, then, set out to prove (Victorian) anthropology. Boas transplanted that humanity had progressed in the moral an orientation to culture drawn from as well as the material realm; hence, his nineteenth-century German romanticism and overriding concern with ‘primitive religion’ historicism to North America (Bunzl, 1996). in the past and ‘superstition’ in the present, From there, he set about systematically both doomed, he thought, in the face of the demolishing the Victorian anthropological inevitable progress of civilization, or culture synthesis, grounded in notions of inevitable (for him, those terms were synonymous; see civilizational progress and universal human Stocking, 1963: p. 73). rationality, both often crosscut by theories of Both Tylor and Boas had to define culture racial hierarchy. in relationship not only to civilization, but The Germanic version of culture was also to race. By the late nineteenth cen- part of a longer, Continental tradition of tury, race had become another keyword in speculation about human development and Western understandings of human diversity. progress, a tradition of thought Kroeber and Its conceptual history is as tangled as that of Kluckhohn (1952) meticulously documented. culture. As Stocking put it, the term brought At issue in that centuries-long discussion together ‘the residues’ of several traditions of was collective human progress in both the thought – ‘the ethnological, the Lamarckian, material and spiritual domains, with culture the polygenist, and the evolutionist’ (2001: and civilization (and, later, race) being the p. 9). Race was often synonymous with nation, key terms. From some points of view, human tribe or breed. And culture (or way of life, history was a story of ‘progress’, as mastery mentality, tradition, etc.) was often imagined of nature increased, as social arrangements to be carried ‘in the blood’ of racial-national became more rational, or more in accord with groupings. Lamarckian ideas made it possible a transcendent moral order, and as hard-won to imagine that such racial-national groups wisdom accumulated for all humankind. For were trans-historical entities with fixed socio- other thinkers, the agents of human history geographic boundaries, but open nonetheless were individuated peoples, and history itself to the impress of history and environment, the consisted of local progressions and retrogres- forces of which were over time absorbed into sions. Retrogression, or degeneration, could and carried in the blood of the people. be imagined either in terms of the Biblical Tylor believed in the psychic unity of narrative of a fall from divine perfection, or mankind. Human difference was to be secularly and episodically, that is, lacking explained not by race, but by the ‘differ- an overall direction, with local advances ent grades of civilization’ through which followed by local degenerations. From either humankind progressed, more or less uni- perspective, progress could be imagined for directionally (Tylor, 1871: p. 7). For Tylor, all domains of human experience, or in the human mind and human rationality some but not others; thus, writers might were essentially the same everywhere, but assert that progress in the material domain in primitive cultural stages, people did not was, or was not, matched by progress in have access to accumulated knowledge. Their the spiritual or moral domain. Civilization minds worked in rational fashion, but, ‘in a and culture were often the terms used to mental condition of intense and inveterate distinguish the material and the spiritual, ignorance’, their progress was slow (1871: although culture in one writer’s system might p. 23). Nonetheless, most social-evolutionary be analogous to civilization in another’s. anthropologies were easily racialized, as the

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stages of cultural development (e.g., savagery, language changed at different rates than racial barbarism, civilization) could be explained as type (which Boas considered more ‘stable’ a function of collective biological differences. than the other two, although he showed, in Boas and his students articulated a his important study of immigrant head form nurture-over-nature position that by the mid- in New York City [1911a], that type, too, twentieth century had become dominant changed with changing social circumstances). in the Anglo-American academy (although Indeed, Boas argued that there had never been scientific racism has never been laid to rest an original moment when race, language and and reasserts itself with regularity). From the culture coincided (1911b: p. 136). Empirically 1880s through the 1920s, Boas attacked the grounded, inductive history, then, gave the lie notions that ‘race, language, and culture’ to the social evolutionists’ deductive scheme (the title of his 1940 collection of essays) of uniform stages of human development, in moved together through history; that it was which race, language and culture marched possible to establish a hierarchy of racial in lockstep, such that a primitive race by achievement based on an absolute standard; definition was possessed of a primitive and that biological race determined mental language and a primitive culture. or cultural capacity. In a striking historical But it was not only the uniform direc- irony, this anti-racist anthropology, borrowed tionality of the social evolutionary notion from the German historical tradition of Herder of development that was at issue. Boas and the brothers Humboldt, flourished in its mistrusted, and over time decisively refuted, transplanted, North American version, while the assumption that it was possible to establish it languished in Germany. As Proctor (1988) an absolute standard by which to measure and Bunzl and Penny (2003) have shown, mid- the degree of culture of different human nineteenth-century German anthropology was groups. This was perhaps most easily shown cosmopolitan and anti-racist; it emphasized in language, where the categorical features the variety of world cultures, conceived to of linguistic structure (and, ultimately, of be local developments each one of which thought itself) were least available to native constituted a contribution to the full story speakers for conscious scrutiny. Social evolu- of human civilization. Yet by the turn of tionists presumed they knew what a primitive the twentieth century, just as Boas was language was: for example, a primitive drawing together the threads of his attack on language had a primitive sound system, so racialist evolutionism, German anthropology, primitive, in fact, that the sounds were and German society, veered rightward toward not fixed. In an early essay that Stocking increasingly racist explanations of human (1965: pp. 157–160) considered seminal for difference. Indeed, the judgement of contem- all Boasian anthropology, ‘On Alternating porary German historians of anthropology Sounds’ (Boas, 1889), Boas showed that seems to be that the discipline never recovered alternating sounds were a function of the in that country (Gingrich, 2005). observer’s misperceptions. Unfamiliar with But in North America, Boas tirelessly the phonemic systems of the languages they propagated the anti-racist position, from were studying, observers heard sounds now one social crisis (such as American anti- one way, now another, with the alternatives immigration hysteria after World War I) to related to the phonemics of their own, native another (the rise of Nazism in the 1930s). language. In reality, all languages had a fixed Again and again, Boas pointed out that system of sounds, and each such system was throughout history, people of one physical fully adequate to the work of expressing the ‘type’ had taken on (either through borrowing culture and thought of its speakers. or imposition) the language or culture of What was true of sound patterns was another; and that two groups might share a true of grammar, syntax and semantics. language but differ in culture, or vice versa. Boasian linguistic anthropology, developed It was also possible to show that culture and to an exquisite art by Boas’s great student,

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Edward Sapir, and Sapir’s protégé, Benjamin Boas himself never abandoned his Lee Whorf, rested ultimately on the notion nineteenth-century notion of scientific that language was by definition a system truth, but the possibility of establishing of abstractions, of categories, that made it such truths (perhaps in the form of general possible for a finite human mind to make laws of mind) receded as he pursued his sense out of an infinitely complex natural particularistic studies of Northwest Coast world. Boas himself was somewhat timid in (and other) cultures. As Stocking has noted his treatment of the capacity of ‘primitive’ (1974b: p. 17), it was left to Boas’s students peoples to develop abstract thought. If the to develop the full implications of his Indians he studied on the Northwest Coast anthropology, and, on the epistemological of North America did not have words for issue of the relativity of scientific knowledge, the philosophical abstractions of Western it was Sapir who did so most incisively: ‘Now cultures, it was not because their mental fantasied universes of self-contained meaning (racial) capacities or their languages were are the very finest and noblest substitutes we inferior to those of Europeans; the Indians can ever devise for that precise and loving simply didn’t have use for such concepts in insight into the nooks and crannies of the their daily life (Boas, 1911b: pp. 148–153). real that must be forever denied us’ (1939: p. It was left to Sapir and Whorf to state 581). Other Boasians, however, favored other the matter more boldly: all languages are combinations of models and truths, and other logical, or deductive, systems, each equally ideas about anthropology’s status as a science. arbitrary from the point of view of all others Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) (Sapir, 1921; Whorf, 1956). And human is the most important (and widely read) thought, grounded by necessity in language, statement of Boasian cultural anthropology, was always ‘abstract’ (that is, not merely presenting the discipline as an authoritative reflecting the world, but structuring it, editing science equipped not only to discern, describe it, categorically). and interpret cultures, but also to make The arbitrariness of one set of gram- suggestions to improve them. Benedict relied matical categories from the point of view on vision metaphors: culture is a lens of another became a metaphor for Boasian through which people see the world. The cultural relativism. Indeed, Boas phrased his lens structures their vision, but they cannot critique of the social-evolutionary synthesis in themselves see the lens or analyze its formula: similar terms: ‘attempts to classify mankind, ‘No man ever looks at the world with pristine based on the present distribution of type, eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set language, and culture, must lead to different of customs and institutions and ways of results, according to the point of view taken’ thinking. Even in his philosophical probings (1911b: p. 133). More generally, in Boas’s he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his conception of a ‘historical science’, the object very concepts of the true and the false will of study (a culture or a historical epoch), still have reference to his particular traditional ‘originat[ed] in the mind of the observer’, customs’ (1934: p. 2; see also Benedict, not in the natural world (1887: p. 642). From 1946: p. 14). In each culture, customs and the infinite complexity of human history, institutions fall into ‘patterns’. Over time, anthropologists (and historians) abstracted cultures tend to ‘integrate’themselves in terms their objects of study, based not only of a few key values, values which, then, on the empirical facts available, but also come to inflect all aspects of the culture, on their own culturally (and personally) even those borrowed from other peoples, grounded viewpoints and interests. Studying for whom that material might have a very culture, then, was a matter of establishing different meaning than it would come to have interpretive relationships between anthropol- when integrated into the borrowers’ culture. ogists and the peoples of interest to the And as cultural materials and ‘traits’ become discipline. integrated into a culture, a way of life, they

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become invisible to the people who make were historically open-ended organizations, habitual use of them. Indeed, people rarely individuals might change them through their have the ability rationally to scrutinize their creative efforts. In particular, Benedict and culture; rather, when challenged, they provide her equally famous protégé Margaret Mead rationalizations to defend their practices, as were cultural pluralists who wished to make Benedict noted in remarks on the absurdity room for the marginalized within what now is of war: ‘War in our own civilization is called the mainstream – for racial and ethnic as good an illustration as one can take minorities, and for the sexually deviant. By of the destructive lengths to which the writing about other cultures and other patterns development of a culturally selected trait may of the normal and the deviant, and by making go. If we justify war, it is because all peoples cultural otherness a popular topic, Boasians always justify the traits of which they find hoped to make Americans more tolerant and themselves possessed, not because war will America a more capacious cultural place. bear an objective examination of its merits’ (1934: p. 32). Benedict’s sally against Western violence ANTHROPOLOGY AND FIELDWORK is a fundamental feature of her anthropology; it complements, and even undercuts, the In order to capture and catalogue the range rhetoric of objective scientific authority she of human diversity, both American cultural elsewhere establishes (Handler, 2005: ch. 5). and British social anthropology developed As a scientist, she claimed to be able to strong fieldwork traditions along the lines describe the pattern of a culture, as if that of natural history. Fieldwork initially drew culture were an object available naturally to on an older practice of scientific expeditions scientific inspection. Yet Benedict was also (team fieldwork), as in the polar research a moralist (see Geertz, 1988: pp. 102–128), projects so popular at the end of the nineteenth and sometimes in her work the voice of the century (one of which took Boas to the engaged, even partisan, moralist clashes with Eskimo; Cole, 1999: pp. 63–82) or the Torres the calmer tone of the detached scientist. Straits expedition of 1898–1899 (Stocking, The word ‘pattern’ could be bent to either 1983). But by the 1930s the ideal became purpose. As Stocking suggested (1976: p. 22), to replicate what later was to be recognized that word implies a less rigid, more open- as the myth of Bronislaw Malinowski’s lone ended form of organization than the word anthropologist-hero exploring the heart of structure, the preferred term among both darkness (Kuper, 1973). Malinowski spent British and French social anthropologists of years in the Trobriands living with his the period. Indeed, ‘weaving’metaphors were subjects (as did Boas in the 1890s on as central as vision metaphors to the Boasians. the Northwest coast of North America). In Terms such as pattern, weaving and warp and what quickly became one of the canonical woof facilitated their discussion of cultures works of anthropology, Argonauts of the as historically active organizations. Cultures, Western Pacific, Malinowski set out the basic as Boasians such as Benedict construed them, methods of anthropological research. ‘The were animated by an organizing energy, the ethnographer’s magic’ entailed combining drive to ‘integrate’ the multiplicity of a good theory with living ‘without other white people’s experiences into a coherent way men right among the natives’ (1922: p. of life. But cultures might also fail to 6). The goal of such fieldwork was to integrate aspects of collective experience, transform ‘a strange, sometimes unpleasant, or fail, even, to cohere over time as ‘a’ sometimes intensely interesting adventure’ culture (Benedict, 1934: pp. 223–226). And into something more mundane and familiar. just as saliently, cultures might transform To do this the anthropologist had not only themselves for the better. Boasians were to learn the local vernacular and eschew especially eager to stress that because cultures scheduled interviews in favor of spontaneous

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conversations, but also to take advantage of fieldwork among three dramatically different serendipitous events: ‘it must be emphasized New Guinea societies to make a similar that whenever anything dramatic or important argument about the cultural construction of occurs it is essential to investigate it at the core temperaments associated with gender very moment of happening’ (1922: p. 8). along with core experiences of sexuality, of Like animal ethologists, the anthropologist’s the body and of pleasure. Malinowski, Mead goal was to carry out research in the natural and their peers developed what has become habitat of his subjects; but because his a standard form of cultural criticism. First, subjects were human, the anthropologist also fieldwork provides data showing that what had to understand their habitat from what was once taken to be a human universal Malinowski called ‘the native’s point of view’ is a cultural norm. The Oedipal complex (1922: p. 25). Hence the invention of what makes sense but only among ‘the overfed later came to be known as the method of and nervously overwrought people of modern ‘participant-observation’, or later still and Vienna, London, or New York’ (Malinowski, more critically, as the rhetorical evocation of 1927: p. 15). Then a different set of cultural the authority of ‘being there’or ‘I witnessing’. practices is demonstrated as leading to a If fieldwork entailed an effort to ‘enter different set of basic human motivations into the soul of the savage’ to see the world and attitudes – Arapesh women and men ‘through his eyes’, Malinowski stressed that do not experience or seem to desire sexual such an awareness of basic cultural difference ‘climax’ or orgasm (Mead, 1935: p. 105). would allow us (that is, Westerners) ‘to The exercise should lead to the acceptance understand our own nature and make it finer, of alternative ways of being, as well as intellectually and artistically’ (1922: p. 518). the recognition of one’s implicit prejudices. Indeed, early ‘being there’ ethnographic Thus did Malinowski and Mead, and indeed accounts filled an important and long-standing many of the anthropologists of the discipline’s role in what might be called the politics of formative years, anticipate and theorize about culture in the West, by providing nuanced the kinds of preoccupations that would later accounts of the ‘savage slot’(Trouillot, 1991). be associated with cultural constructivism in Untouched or undistorted by civilization, post-structuralist philosophy. If in the work ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ people were assumed of Judith Butler, and contemporary scholars to be closer to a state of nature and therefore like her, the cultural Other whose perspective paradigmatic of human nature. Arguing that is used to attack the universalizing claims savages had a culture, and that ‘every of a dominant perspective are homosexu- human culture gives its members a definite als, women and racial minorities, then in vision of the world, a definite zest of life’, Mead’s and Malinowki’s anthropology ‘other Malinowski used Trobriander material to cultures’ provided the necessary ammunition. debunk generalizing theories of human nature After Malinowski, Boas, and then Mead and and to assert or imply a basic human pluralism. others, ‘participant observation’ became the Thus, for example, Malinowski attacked the standard for the discipline. Most anthropol- universalizing excesses of Freudian psycho- ogists spent long periods living among their analytic theory: since it is ‘essentially a subjects. Their ethnographic accounts were theory of the influence of family life on often deployed, both as a rhetorical device the human mind’ (1927: p. 2), a culture and as data to be analyzed, to give an inter- with a family structure dramatically different subjective sense of what it was like to be an from that of the West would not generate a outsider trying to gain a foothold in a strange Western-style Oedipus complex, but different community. Such encounters in the field with neuroses, different repressions – in short, a congeries of individuals whose actions different ‘psychologies’. and beliefs were conventionally taken to be A decade later Margaret Mead (1935) representative of a culture or a society became used the authority of two years of intensive at once the method and the implicit theory of

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anthropology (Wagner, 1975). Indeed, it is in a sustained comparison of Nuer and Azande. the various ways that fieldwork allows for this Rather, he used ethnographic accounts of each kind of representation to occur that the notion society to comment on the stock contrast of societies or cultures as entities in and of between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ that was themselves came to be the standard view of inherent in the dichotomizing tradition of anthropology. As Evans-Pritchard remarked, classical sociology. If, for example, Nuer time comparing his fieldwork with the hierarchical was experienced as relative to social structure, Azande and the egalitarian Nuer: ‘Among to the movement of cattle and people, to Azande I was compelled to live outside the the closeness or distance among kin groups community; among Nuer I was compelled (Evans-Pritchard, 1940: pp. 94 –110), so too to be a member of it. Azande treated me was a seemingly objective conception of as a superior; Nuer as an equal’ (1940: time in the twentieth-century West a product p. 15). Here Evans-Pritchard’s assertion of of ticking clocks and the reiterated routines experience among each group heightens the of the factory floor. If Azande could be ‘reality effect’of the two ‘case studies’he had skeptical about the powers of particular witch created (1937, 1940) out of those experiences. doctors but credulous about witchcraft, so For the full effect, one needs to hold in one’s too could Westerners damn this doctor or hand a monograph from a monograph series, disparage that treatment while bowing to perhaps Napoleon Chagnon’s Yanomamo, the the god of medicine. By focusing on the Fierce People, the best-selling of all the persistence of religious practices in the face many titles produced in the Holt, Rinehart of skepticism about the efficacy of particular and Winston series, Case Studies in Cultural diviners, rites and charms, and the accuracy Anthropology (Chagnon, 1968). On the back of particular witchcraft accusations, Evans- covers of the books in that series, students Pritchard’s monograph explicitly blurred the found a list of all the other titles in the series, boundaries between Western and African and thereby learned that the world is made modes of thought. For him, Azande were just up of discrete, bounded cultures – despite the as suspicious of the truth claims of others, just fact that over and over again in the history of as likely to test forms of curing empirically, as anthropology, field workers have had to admit were Westerners. that boundaries they assigned to the societies By contrast, Americans, often as not, under study were not the boundaries that the used the estrangements of the fieldwork natives themselves used. encounter to stress fundamental cultural Evans-Pritchard’s juxtaposition of the differences. If British anthropologists noted ‘ethos’ of Nuer and Azande was a rhetorical how similarly blinkered were Western and ploy that tended to remain undeveloped in non-Western rationalities, Americans, for British anthropology, even as many of the their part, stressed that people of different most famous social anthropologists undertook cultures experienced even basic perceptions fieldwork in several societies. While such (as in the case of color, for example) in juxtapositions were, for example, central to radically different ways. As such, despite the arguments about the cultural construction the practical similarities of their fieldwork of personhood that Mead made when she traditions,American and British anthropology compared three Melanesian societies in Sex split (quite self-consciously) along a culture- and Temperament (1935); and to Benedict’s society fault line. The British tradition argument about culture as ‘personality writ defined itself as a branch of sociology and large’in Patterns of Culture (1934); and much its practitioners often eschewed the word later in Geertz’s deployments of ‘Bali’, ‘Java’ ‘culture’ in favor of ‘society’. As sociologists and ‘Morocco’to illustrate the proposition that of ‘primitive societies’, or of ‘small-scale’ to be human is to experience a world through or ‘rural’, or ‘non-modern’, or ‘pre-literate’, the lens of a particular culture (Geertz, 1968, ‘pre-capitalist’, or ‘non-Western’ societies, 1980, 1983), Evans-Pritchard did not develop they were always defining their terrain in

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relationship to the societies of the colonizers, places’ – continued to reflect and draw the modern world, capitalist society and from the sociological canon, with that canon the like. As sociologists they inherited not coming to include not only Durkheim and only the dichotomizing vision of classical Marx, but also Foucault, Bourdieu and de sociology, but also its tendency to divide Certeau. human imaginative actions into the social French social theorists have had a large and the cultural, with the social defined as impact on Anglo-American anthropology. pertaining to interests and goals, and the Lévi-Strauss is a crucial example, not to human propensity to organize to obtain them, mention a seminal figure in anthropology and and the cultural defined as all those activities human studies more generally. Lévi-Strauss that might be lumped together under the applied structuralist theories of linguistic category ‘not obviously useful’. Thus, for communication to a variety of cultural prac- example, marriage practices and rules or tices that combine literal language with ritu- political institutions and the ideas that were alized performance. He argued that kinship, implicated in them were social, while games, for example, could be understood not merely art, myths, beliefs in spirits and the practices as a way to organize persons and groups, but such as ritual and ceremony associated with as a communicative system. He subsumed those were cultural. In general, the social took more sociologically oriented questions about precedence over the cultural. marriage as a form of economic exchange to If, for American cultural anthropologists, the exchange of signs and the production of the focus was on how particularly situated codes. He also applied the structuralist method people comprising ‘a culture’ projected their to studying myth and ritual, extending the imagination, through action, onto the world project of social anthropology to the problem they made, British social anthropologists of human rationality. In The Savage Mind tended to be concerned with how particular (1966), he argued (in a sense, pace Durkheim) forms of imagination arose out of or justified that all human beings created structures particular kinds of social order, or how of thought by recognizing and deploying imaginative forms were used to critique or sensory contrasts available to them in nature, subvert particular kinds of order. It was, and that recognizing and elaborating upon in a word, a discipline characterized by structure was a basic human desire and source discourses of functionalism. By looking at of pleasure. Lévi-Strauss, like the Boasian how people in societies subverted as much anthropologists whose works supplied him the as maintained order, anthropologists such as raw materials he used for his analyses, argued Frederik Barth, Max Gluckman and Edmund against utilitarian views of human nature. Leach focused on people ‘competing with one Humans created myths and rituals because another to enhance their means and status, symbolic contrasts, metaphor and metonymy, within the framework set by often conflicting are ‘good to think’. Neolithic humans, like rules’ (Kuper, 1973: p. 177). In focusing on modern scientists, enjoyed classifying for the political activity, they and the anthropologists pleasures it afforded. They created cultural who followed them (e.g., Arjun Appadurai values out of natural phenomena and mapped and John and Jean Comaroff) tended to be those values back onto nature, naturalizing interested in the utility of the cultural. The them, albeit in arbitrary ways. goal became to show why such things had American anthropologists, most famously a political significance – why, for example, Marshal Sahlins, used Lévi-Straussian struc- witchcraft beliefs could be read as a warped turalism to argue against inevitable or critique of the cannibalism of capitalism, or universal categories of value, thus using why Indian enthusiasm for cricket makes structuralism to further the project of cul- Indian nationalism as much as reflects it. As tural constructivism inaugurated and enacted such the British tradition of anthropology – by Boas, Malinowski, Benedict, Mead and sociology, as it were, in ‘out of the way Geertz (Sahlins, 1976). Like his British

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counterparts (e.g., Douglas, 1966, 1970; transformed by historical events. This became Leach, 1976; Needham, 1973), Sahlins was the major theme in his interpretation of especially eager to borrow from Lévi-Strauss Hawaiian responses to the arrival of Captain a method for unpacking how cultural systems Cook and their eventual murder of him of meaning could be de-coded and revealed to (Sahlins, 1981, 1985, 1995). Cook’s arrival be social products. In Culture and Practical enacted a mythical scenario of the arrival Reason (1976) and How “Natives” Think of a god, Lono. His inappropriate return (1995), he uses a structuralist reading of required that he be killed. But the events American and Polynesian culture to mount of British contact with the Hawaiians also a ‘an anthropological critique of the idea promoted the transformation of mythologi- that human cultures are formulated out of cally naturalized codes of conduct between the practical activity and, behind that, utilitarian Hawaiian aristocracy and their commoners. interest’ (1976: p. vii). By stressing that ‘the For Sahlins, structure plus history yielded distinctive quality of man is not that he must transformation. live in a material world, circumstances that he Like Sahlins, British anthropologists were shares with all organisms, but that he does so interested in tracing how particular cul- according to a meaningful scheme of his own tural codes (embodied in myth and ritual) devising’ (viii), Sahlins argued that culture is naturalized particular ideologies and served not ‘precipitated’from ‘rational activity’(vii). particular interests. This was the lesson Rather, it is ‘culture which constitutes utility’ they took from Lévi-Strauss as they used (viii). Sahlins liked Lévi-Strauss for offering a structuralism for their purposes. A case in corrective to Marx – for developing a science point is the way social anthropologists read of signs as systems to develop a ‘theory of Lévi-Strauss’s seminal essay on the structural superstructures ( Lévi-Strauss, 1966: p. 130). analysis of myth, ‘The story of Asdiwal’. In Read anthropologically, that is, through the this essay Lévi-Strauss attempted to reveal lens of Lévi-Strauss, Marx was redefined as a the complex confluence of ‘codes’, at once cultural anthropologist who recognized early geographical and ecological, contained in a that the West was itself a culture, and that Tsimshian story about the birth and death mid-nineteenth-century appraisals of nature of a mythological hero known as Asdiwal. were ‘the re-presentation of culture to itself Lévi-Strauss argued that the myth highlights in the form of nature’ (Sahlins, 1976: p. 53). or reveals contradictions in life as lived Sahlins also emphasized that such a critique and then resolves them, thereby erasing the of the ideological underpinnings of science destructive effect of contradiction, at least is hard to demonstrate from the perspective in terms of the imagination, or thought. The of one society. It requires comparison. This ultimate ‘function’ of myth is a kind of is what cultural anthropology can provide: naturalizing mediation of life as it is – a ‘other cultures, other rationalities’ (Sahlins, way of revealing contradictions while coming 1995: p. 14). to terms with them. As Mary Douglas put In Culture and Practical Reason, Sahlins it in a famous summary of his work: ‘The offers a succinct definition of culture: myth is a contemplation of the unsatisfactory ‘Cultures are meaningful orders of persons compromises which, after all, compose social and things. Since these orders are systematic, life. In the devious statements of myth, they cannot be free inventions of the mind’. people can recognize indirectly what would Sahlins realizes that saying it does not make be difficult to admit openly and yet what it so. For him, ‘anthropology must consist is patently clear to all and sundry, that the in the discovery of the system’ (1976: p. x). ideal is not attainable’ (1967: p. 59). Myth, If there is a system, then our job is to in short, is a kind of propaganda. But the best find it and reveal its workings to others. He myth is artful propaganda. And myth, as the was also interested in how such systems of social anthropologists pointed out, always, in codes acted as interpretive grids that were Lévi-Strauss’s scheme, supports the status quo

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because it is a story a people collectively make eventually prompted anthropologists to assert and collectively consume. the authority of fieldwork against yet another In ‘The story of Asdiwal’, Lévi-Strauss’s all-encompassing theoretical apparatus. Like central concern was the contradiction in the practitioners of cultural studies who residence and marriage patterns in a society reacted to the excesses of textual analysis that has matrilineal clans. But social anthro- by resorting to ethnographies of textual pologists who engaged with Lévi-Strauss reception, so, too, did anthropologists argue pointed out other perhaps far more important for looking at audiences, at polysemy, at contradictions. Douglas, for example, stressed conflict and context at the local level, thus the contradiction between the gendered value anticipating, through a faith in fieldwork- of labor (female gathering was less esteemed based ethnography, post-structuralism avant than male hunting) and the subsistence value le lettre (Ortner, 1984). of different kinds of food in the Northwest Coast region (gathered foods such as salmon and candlefish were more central to the diet THE REBIRTH OF BOASIAN (BY WAY than hunted foods). Thus for Douglas, the OF SYMBOLIC) ANTHROPOLOGY central contradiction of the myth of Asdiwal was Marxian: while hunting took precedence As British and French structuralism were in the region in terms of prestige and general gaining coherence and prominence, Boasian ethos, gathering (women’s work) was the cultural anthropology in NorthAmerica began foundation of the economy and society. to lose its, diversifying as it expanded within Hence her remark: ‘the myth could well be the fast-growing university system, while interpreted as playing on the paradox of male also capitalizing on the increasing availability dominance and male dependence on female of government and foundation grant monies help’ (1967: p. 52). She went on to argue that during and afterWorldWar II. In the 1950s and the ‘general effect’ of the myth is to convey 1960s there was (yet another – see Stocking, the message that ‘women are necessary but 1968: pp. 270–307) scientific reaction against inferior beings, and men are superior’. For Boasian historical particularism, and various social anthropologists, the cultural, again, neo-evolutionisms flourished, in the work was yoked to the social. Yet Lévi-Strauss, of such people as Julian Steward (1955), because he soon abandoned the kinds of Leslie White (1949), Eleanor Leacock (1954), sociologically oriented analyses of myth (the early) Marshall Sahlins (Sahlins and associated with the myth of Asdiwal in favor Service, 1960) and (the later) Irving Hallowell of analyses of mythological transformation (1960; see Stocking, 2004). Evolutionary and chiefly concerned with the properties of ecological approaches to culture and cultural human thought to the exclusion of the social, development ranged across a political and was taken to task by them. intellectual spectrum, from the work of the Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism opened up new politically liberal Steward, whose interest terrain for anthropology. It made myth and in the interaction between humans and the ritual useful again – good to think. And natural environment stemmed from a long because social anthropology had always American tradition of scientific exploration, to been concerned with action, many social that of a generation trained after World War II anthropologists became especially creative (including Sahlins, Service, Robert Murphy in theorizing about the centrality of ritual and Sidney Mintz), who studied with Steward in human experience, among these Victor but also drew theoretical inspiration from Turner, whose analyses of the ‘dramaturgical’ various European social theorists, especially became foundational texts in a soon to Marx (Kerns, 2003: pp. 235–262). emerge cross-disciplinary interest in ‘perfor- The post-war opposition between science mance’ (Turner, 1966, 1967, 1974, 1982; and history, evolutionism and cultural par- also Schechner, 1985). But structuralism ticularism, was mediated by Talcott Parsons,

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doyen of American sociology, and Alfred bringing that tradition to North America and Kroeber, the most senior and distinguished developing it as four-field anthropology, while surviving student of Boas. In a 1958 two- Weber contributed to professional sociology page manifesto on ‘The concepts of culture in Europe. and of social system’, they tried to clear In any case, the Kroeber-Parsons mandate up confusion about the terms ‘society’ can be seen, retrospectively, to have licensed and ‘culture’ (or, more precisely, about Parsons’s (and Kluckhohn’s) Harvard anthro- the routine conflation of the two). They pology students, Clifford Geertz and David did so by defining both terms as analyti- Schneider, to consider ‘culture’ their special cally distinguishable components of human domain. The two converged in the early 1960s ‘behavior’. ‘Society,’ or ‘social system’, in in the Department of Anthropology at the the scientific terminology they proposed, University of Chicago (although Geertz soon referred to the ‘system of interaction among left for the Institute for Advanced Study at individuals and collectivities’; while ‘culture’ Princeton [see Geertz, 1995: pp. 109–128]). was ‘restrict[ed] … to transmitted and created In different ways, both grappled with the content and patterns of values, ideas, and relationship between culture and the social other symbolic-meaningful systems as factors system, and both eventually lost interest in in the shaping of human behavior and the the second analytic term, as they focused their artifacts produced through behavior’(1958: p. efforts on ‘culture theory’. The flourishing of 583). With these definitions, they attempted to culture theory in the 1970s and 1980s can be mandate the proper division of labor between seen retrospectively (and to some extent was sociology and anthropology. More generally, seen at the time) as a renewal of older Boasian they envisaged a coordinated scientific enter- approaches to culture; the most common prise, to eventuate in ‘a general theory of labels at the time were ‘symbolic anthropol- [human] action’, as the title of a contemporary ogy’(Dolgin, Kemnitzer and Schneider, 1977) work put it (Parsons and Shils, 1961). and ‘interpretive anthropology’(Rabinow and The conceptualization of this unified the- Sullivan, 1979). But symbolic anthropology oretical enterprise drew on the nineteenth- also brought together as a collective reading century German philosophy of science and community Geertz and Schneider and those history that Kroeber had absorbed from Boas: who were inspired by them along with human behavior or action was seen as a European social anthropologists such as ‘level’ of phenomenal reality organized in Edmund Leach, Rodney Needham, Victor terms of principles or forces different from Turner, Mary Douglas and Marilyn Strathern – those that organized the physical, biological most of whom were influenced by Lévi- and psychological levels of reality. Given Strauss’s structuralism and all of whom, like such differences, scientific disciplines and their American counterparts, stressed that concepts had to be established and defined ‘culture communicates’ (Leach, 1976: p. 2). based on the ‘level’ to be studied, or, in Some British social anthropologists con- a related epistemological approach, on the strued this interest in the symbolic as a shift analytic problems of interest to the student away from what Edmund Leach characterized of human action. It is worth noting that as an ‘empiricist’ approach to understanding while Parsons had come to this position ‘ethnographic data’ or ‘customary behavior’ by way of an intellectual trajectory quite and, as such, wrote books which were as separate from that of Kroeber (Parsons’s explicitly critical of Western commonsense reading [1937] of European social theorists, constructions as were the American ‘cultur- particularly Durkheim and Weber), his studies alists’. According to Leach, much of social had led him back to the same sources that anthropology was premised on the empiricist had nourished Boas. Indeed, Boas and Weber notions that humans act to achieve recog- may be envisaged as alternate ‘carriers’ of nizable ends, compete for scarce resources, the same intellectual tradition, with Boas and generally try to control one another.

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The model was economic as economics was covers over an essential human nature. The conceived in the West. Leach argued instead costume is either good, because it shapes and for what he called a “rationalist approach” molds human nature in salutary ways, or it to the study of ethnographic material, one is bad because constraining, imprisoning. But based on the premise that people act to send in either case Enlightenment thought posits and receive recognizable messages; the model ‘a uniformitarian view of man’ in which there is linguistic. In the former, the goal is to is a universal human nature. For Geertz, pace understand the structure of rules that limit Enlightenment thinkers, cultural difference is and channel action; in the latter, structure is ‘not a mere matter of garb and appearance, of the system that limits and channels thought, stage settings and comedic masques’ (1973: meaning, expression. p. 36). Culture, for Geertz, is core, not surface. Some social anthropologists used these In this and other essays Geertz argues insights to make more incisive critiques of that much of twentieth-century social science the structure of anthropological ideas them- is also misguided in its study of ‘man’. selves. Marilyn Strathern (1988), for example, Cognizance of cultural diversity caused the showed how anthropologists usually posited earlier uniformitarian model to morph into as if they were universals contrasting binaries a ‘stratigraphic’ model, one in which the such as nature/culture, society/individual, and posited universals of biology, psychology and male/female and as a result misconstrued society underpin culture, which becomes little native conceptions. Strathern’s critique of more than the icing on the layer cake. Geertz anthropological structures of ideas dovetailed objects that, again, such models treat culture in significant ways with Derrida’s critique of as an outcome of more fundamental facts of structuralism itself, while remaining ethno- human life. graphically grounded in illuminating the If Geertz dislikes both uniformitarian and ways Hageners of New Guinea imagined stratigraphic models, his concept of culture their world through categories of their own also was explicitly framed as an exercise in invention. Strathern is also sometimes read interpretation rather than explanation – an as a part of a pervasive feminist critique of idea he derived from Weber but also from anthropology’s androcentricity, although her Boasian anthropology more generally. The work is also critical of the misapplication of a goal of the ethnographer, in Geertz’s scheme, Western concern for equality among individ- was to understand how people in any given uals in societies where neither the individual society tended to make ‘models of’ reality nor equality exist as indigenous concepts. into ‘models for’ action – both ritual and Similarly, American anthropologists such practical – thereby inscribing a particular as Geertz and Schneider yoked ethnographies worldview into everyday and ceremonial life. of (what Geertz famously called) ‘out of the Interpretation entailed uncovering (or even way places’ to critiques of Western scholarly abstracting) such models. With its emphasis common sense. Geertz has had perhaps the on drama, theatre, text and ritual as metaphors greatest impact of any anthropologist (other for interpreting human action, Geertz’s work than Lévi-Strauss) outside the discipline. Typ- appealed to scholars outside anthropology, ical of Geertz’s attack on common sense via especially in the humanities. Cultural forms the development of a culture theory is his 1966 are (like) art in that their affect is aesthetic. essay, ‘The Impact of the Concept of Culture But unlike so much of the art that Westerners on the Concept of Man’ (reprinted in Geertz, know, the distinction between writer and 1973: pp. 33–54). There he distinguished what reader, artist and viewer, actor and audience, he claims to be cultural anthropology’s contri- producer and consumer (for is it not the bution to an understanding of human beings case that even connoisseurs are primarily from an Enlightenment understanding. In the consumers, educated, and therefore ‘cultured’ Enlightenment view, as Geertz characterizes consumers, but nevertheless not producers?) it, culture is like a costume that hides or is always blurred in the societies Geertz talks

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about. People act in rituals, they perform for kinship ought also to be considered, Schneider themselves, they live the art they make, and argued, independently from biology. The as a result, the meanings dramatized in art ‘scientific facts’ of biology were not the basis forms are internalized – as ‘culture’ in the of kinship in cultures; rather, those scientific sense that American cultural anthropologists facts could never be formulated apart from use the term. culture, and, furthermore, there were many By focusing on the tropes of art to make kinship systems that made no reference to a case for the ‘construction’ of culture what Westerners call ‘biology’ at all. Putting (all those models of becoming models for), the matter generally, Schneider argued: ‘the and for a model of culture as a system notion of a pure, pristine state of biological of meaning that is at once internal to a relationships “out there in reality” which is subject and constitutive of the public domain, the same for all mankind is sheer nonsense’ Geertz is a lot like Victor Turner, his British (1965: p. 97). These arguments deconstructed counterpart. Turner offered the humanities a (in the sense of ‘did away with’) what had been social science of the dramaturgical (1982). a core subject for anthropologists (kinship, His emphasis was on performance – on considered, in social-evolutionary terms, to be stages, dramas, denouements – and their the central organizing principle of ‘primitive’ transformative powers (1966, 1967). He, too, societies) and, for a while, anthropologists became a favorite among the literary critics lost interest in the topic. But over the longer of the late twentieth century, especially those run, Schneider’s cultural approach to kinship carving out that new discipline, performance stimulated revitalized kinship studies, freed to studies. But unlike Geertz, Turner remained consider such ‘non-natural’ forms of kinship squarely within the traditions of social as gay and lesbian families (Lewin, 1993; anthropology. Turner’s goal was to search Weston, 1991), adoptive children (Modell, for human universals in how theater worked 1994) and the ‘new reproductive technologies’ its magic. He used examples from a number (for an overview of these new kinship studies, of societies – juxtaposing, say, an essay see Franklin and McKinnon, 2001). More on Hidalgo’s march on Mexico City with generally, Schneider’s cultural approach to Becket’s murder by knights loyal to Henry – to the Western analytic categories that medi- show how the dramaturgical worked (1974). ated anthropologists’ interpretations of other By contrast, when Geertz described the cultures dovetailed with other trends in Balinese theatre state it was only in part to the discipline (reflexivity, historicism) that argue for the theatricality of politics; it was were prompting a renewed understanding of also (inevitably) to assert a certain cultural anthropology itself as a culturally distinctive quality (revealed in politics) that was typically phenomenon. and quintessentially Balinese. The Javanese Geertz’s work had a similar effect, both proverb, ‘Other fields, other grasshoppers’, within anthropology and (as Schneider’s did served as a reminder that human nature is not) beyond it. Geertz never saw the need plural because cultural (Geertz, 1973: p. 53). to rule out social action as an object of David Schneider is less well-known outside cultural analysis. Indeed, his earlier work anthropology than Geertz, but took what (1960, 1963a, 1963b) grappled explicitly with was considered within anthropology to be the relationship between social change and the more radical position concerning the cultural change. But his interests eventually cultural. In American Kinship: A Cultural settled on a conception of culture as ‘an Account (1968), he proposed a study of acted document’, and of the study of culture, cultural symbols in and of themselves (in anthropology, as ‘an interpretive [science] this case, the symbols that defined kinship in search of meaning’, not ‘an experimental in American culture), irrespective of their science in search of law’ (1973: pp. 10, 7). connections to the social system and to their To see anthropology as an interpretive science realization in social action. The symbols of is, of course, a Boasian or Weberian position.

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What was new in Geertz’s approach, however, and the results of that work were open was the consequence he drew from that for literary-critical analysis, with an eye for orientation: if culture is an ‘acted document’, both its ‘poetics’ (the relationship between then the anthropologist who studies it is a the literary conventions of ethnography and reader, a literary critic. ‘Doing ethnography is the knowledge conveyed in the genre) and like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a its ‘politics’ (the relationship between the reading of”) a manuscript – foreign, faded, scientific authority of anthropologists and the full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious social position of those about whom they had emendations, and tendentious commentaries, the power to write). but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior’ (1973: p. 10). Moreover, the people THE POLITICS OF CULTURE that anthropologists study are doing the same thing: ‘what we call our data are really our own Although it sometimes seems that scholars constructions of other people’s constructions have only recently discovered that anthro- of what they and their compatriots are up to’ pological writing is a form of politics, (1973: p. 9). it is worth recalling that anthropologists Taken together, Schneider’s injunction to have consistently imagined that their work study cultural symbols apart from social would have a transformative impact on their action and Geertz’s assertion that to ‘do’ own society, that it would be political in anthropology is to ‘interpret’ culture (itself that sense. So, to speak of the politics of construed as publicly acted texts) prompted anthropological writing is to speak of two a generation of younger anthropologists to (at least analytically separable) perspectives conceive of their ethnographic work (both about this politics – a celebratory perspective the fieldwork itself and the written results) and a critical perspective.Arguably texts from as an interpretive or literary endeavor. And a celebratory perspective have had a greater that work, in turn, led to a new theoretical impact both on cultural politics within modern interest in fieldwork and anthropology itself as societies and on the shape of knowledge a Western or scientific practice, one in which within the academy. anthropologists ‘invent’ culture (both the In the celebratory perspective, the anthro- anthropological concept and specific exam- pologist sees herself or himself as a spokesper- ples of it). Schneider’s student Roy Wagner son for non-Western others and uses their provided perhaps the earliest discussion of authority to mount a critique of Western ‘the invention of culture’, a process he saw society. Clearly, it has not been anthro- in terms of ‘objectification’: pologists alone who have used the savage as the source of utopian dreams. One has We might actually say that an anthropologist only to think of Montesquieu, Rousseau and ‘invents’ the culture he believes himself to be studying … It is only through ‘invention’ of this kind Thomas Jefferson, the latter who made Indians that the abstract significance of culture … can be into honorary American ancestors, to realize grasped, and only through the experienced contrast how pervasive this practice has been. Yet, that his own culture becomes ‘visible’. In the act anthropologists came to speak with a special of inventing another culture, the anthropologist authority for this kind of perspective. invents his own, and in fact he reinvents the notion of culture itself. (1975: p. 4) Paradigmatic of this kind of cultural critique is Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, published Over the next decade, anthropologists and in 1924 and translated into English thirty years critics of anthropology became especially later. In The Gift, Mauss travelled in time interested in the literary aspects of such and space, from Old Norse to New Caledonia inventions. The work of anthropology came to the Northwest Coast of North America to to be seen as ‘writing culture’ (Clifford and ancient India, in order to argue for the gift’s Marcus, 1986; Behar and Gordon, 1995), ubiquity in ‘archaic’ societies. Gift-exchange

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existed, he wanted to emphasize, as a (Koester, 2006), a global politics has devel- fundamental social fact which created and oped from encounters between European, signaled essential social solidarities even in Asian and African polities and the lands an archipelago of individuals – even, that is, they subjugated; moreover, that politics was in the modern France Mauss lived in and defined in part in terms of objectifying never left. Mauss was writing against what ethnographic practices. Geographers and he felt was an ultimately impoverishing, if ‘explorers’mapped territories, and in doing so increasingly dominant, discourse in Western they described local peoples, often as though economics which equated the individual pur- such people were part of a natural landscape. suit of economic interest via the commodity With the rise of the social sciences, concepts with ‘liberty’. He wanted modern Europeans such as ‘society’, ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, ‘folk- to learn from the long and pervasive precedent lore’ and even ‘history’ became key terms of the archaic world that societies can survive in that practice. Throughout the twentieth and thrive only if their members come to century, and perhaps from the mid-nineteenth recognize their mutual obligations and their century, the politics of decolonization and interdependence. national liberation has been at least in The Gift continues to be widely read part a ‘politics of culture’ (Handler, 1988). inside and outside anthropology (Strathern, Intellectuals of and for subordinated groups 1988; Schrift, 1997; Godelier, 1999), usually worked to provide cultural and historical to endorse as an alternative to neo-liberal legitimacy for liberation movements, creating ideology the social intertwinement that gift- exemplary knowledge (books, monuments, exchange entails. More than Mauss himself, archaeological sites, museum collections) scholars re-reading him today tend to make necessary to establish a group’s claim to dichotomizing comparisons – between gift independent existence, and hence the right to and commodity, between the person who political sovereignty. knows he is the sum of his social relationships The ‘native’ production of cultural- and the individual who suffers – yes, suffers! – historical studies with explicit nationalist the illusion that everyone is an island or liberationist motives has put increasing (e.g., Gregory, 1983; Strathern, 1988). In pressure on anthropological culture theory, such ongoing critiques (which deploy the and on the politics of anthropology. With non-Western other as an alternative) it is respect to culture theory, it has become the commodity, not the gift, that poisons increasingly difficult for anthropologists (Godelier, 1999; cf. Raheja, 1988). to believe they can extract culture as an Thus anthropology has a long-standing role object of study from the cultural practices in Western utopian discourses, and old texts that precipitate such objects. Studying continue to find new readers as Westerners people who are acting like anthropologists – struggle with social and moral contradiction. people who are busy writing, collecting and But more recently anthropologists have also representing culture – anthropologists cannot participated in more critical self-reflection. fail to see that their own disciplinary practices But another motivating factor has been are of the same order or level of social reality postcolonial guilt among anthropologists as the native culture-constructing practices. themselves, who came to see that they were as The conventional anthropological notion of patronizing of ‘natives’(if primarily textually) fieldwork as ‘participant-observation’ was as were their cousins among the ranks of conceived to grapple with a similar problem, colonial administrators and among the run- the awkward positioning of the researcher as of-the-mill tourists who visited the exotic at once a member (temporarily) of the group and the primitive for the pleasures such a under study, and an observer or analyst. visit provided. Since at least the time of But the current widespread, everyday, and the American and French Revolutions, and self-conscious use of the culture concept probably for several centuries before that makes even ‘participant-observation’seem an

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inadequate gloss for anthropological praxis: interpretive or neo-Boasian anthropologists perhaps when one imagined oneself to be concerning the ontological status of culture: studying kinship or ritual, it was possible culture is conceptualized best not as a thing, to keep ‘anthropology’ and ‘native life’ but as a semiotic process. conceptually separate; it seems impossible At the turn of the twentieth century, the to do so today, when those natives are institutionalization of anthropology in the culture theorists. One casualty of the present academy gave the discipline a social unity situation is the concept of ‘authenticity’. It that many anthropologists, at the turn of is no longer possible to imagine a pristine the twenty-first century, fear is increasingly cultural identity, a people who do not reflect fragile. These worried anthropologists, almost upon their culture (and thereby change it) as as postmodern as the Boasians, know all they come routinely into contact with others. cultural phenomena to be historically situated This new politics of culture has complicated symbolic creations and, as such, subject the politics of anthropology. In practical not just to change, but also to radical terms, it is increasingly less easy for anthro- reinterpretation, from multiple points of view. pologists to gain ‘access’ to people who, in One consequence of such a perspective is the the past, would have had no power to exclude understanding that anthropology itself may a researcher from their community. Today, well disappear as a discipline or even as a when subordinated but politically organized concept. ‘Culture’, a longer-lived and socially and self-conscious communities cooperate in more salient term than ‘anthropology’, will anthropological research, it is often at least probably not disappear, but will continue to partially on their terms; indeed, for land- mutate, as it has for centuries in Western claim cases, language preservation and social and more recently in world locales, and it welfare programs, communities hire anthro- will continue to migrate among a variety of pologists to help them. But such political disciplines and institutions, and to come into programs generally require a kind of culture opposition with a contingent set of equally theory that ‘postmodern’ or ‘neo-Boasian’ ‘key’ words. (Bashkow et al., 2004) anthropologists have tried to transcend – one that presupposes cultures as bounded communities in posses- REFERENCES sion of clearly demarcated, and ‘authentic’, culture (Clifford, 1987: pp. 277–346). In a world of nation-states conceptualized as Arnold, M. (1869) Culture and Anarchy. London: Smith, Elder. bounded units, groups within or between Bailey, F.G. (1969) Strategems and Spoils: A Social those units can gain political recognition Anthropology of Politics. New York: Schocken Books. only by presenting themselves as similarly Bashkow, I., Bunzl, M., Handler, R., Orta, A. and delineated and endowed cultural entities. Rosenblatt, D. (2004) ‘A New Boasian Anthropology: The long history of anthropology – with Theory for the 21st Century’, American Anthropolo- its scientific racism and its countervailing gist 106(3): 433–494. cultural relativism, its tradition of living ‘in Bateson, G. (1936) Naven. Cambridge: Cambridge the field’among the people being studied, and University Press. its cultivation of ‘empathy’ as a method of Beattie, J. (1964) Other Cultures: The Aims, Methods, cross-cultural understanding – has bequeathed and Achievements of Social Anthropology. New York: to today’s anthropologists a deep sympathy Free Press. Behar, R. and Gordon, D. (eds) (1995) Women Writing for the struggles of the subordinated peoples Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. they study. There is a romantic tradition of Benedict, R. (1934) Patterns of Culture. Boston: celebrating the cultures of such people, and Houghton Mifflin. there is also, today, good political reason Benedict, R. (1946) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: to do so. But such practices contradict Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton the theoretical consensus among symbolic, Mifflin.

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