Lecture Four - The Meaning of Culture

Summary

We began this series by reviewing the way comparison set up the beginnings – and perhaps the limits – of our discipline, anthropology. We then moved to the history, and indeed the myth, of ethnography, our mainstay method. In the last lecture we considered the importance of historical diachronism as a key element in the production of social – we might bravely say “cultural” – forms, and what I like to call cultural flows. But where are we with regard to culture itself, that contested term? Can we recuperate the concept of culture from its embattled terrain? And if so, how might we productively define it in such a way that we avoid the pitfalls that led many in our discipline to challenge – even discard – the word in the first place?

Over the past half-century, we have encountered a series of critiques of the concept of culture that explains why we have tried to leave it behind. For starters, it sounds fixed; it sounds narrow; it sounds bounded. Lila Abu-Lughod has eloquently argued that the concept “tend[s] to overemphasise coherence” (1991: 146); Sherry Ortner points to “the problem of essentialism” in the attribution of qualities attached to human collectives (2006: 12). Kuper worries not only that we have “endow[ed] it with explanatory power,” but also that the conflation of the concept of culture with ideas of identity, especially in a political climate where nationalism is on the rise, makes it unsuitable for anthropological use at all (1999: xi). Together these constitute a good set of reasons for why anthropology might consider being a post-culture discipline altogether.

And yet I am suggesting that we reject the idea of culture at our peril. My argument in this book is that we bring culture back into our disciplinary conversation, not in the form that we knew it – singular cultures attached to singular places – but as the living, active process through which we as humans, invariably as part of collectives, come to see and act in the world. The process of human perception means that that which we see (or experience, or feel, or understand) is always and only through such a lens: there is no other way to perceive. That is why we need to continue to grapple with culture as part of the human condition: it is integral to what makes us human.