Culture: The Anthropologists' Account
Harvard University Press: 1999. 299pp. $29.95, £18.50
English ‘social anthropologists’ between the 1920s and 1970s had broken away from the current perception of their discipline, turning their backs on culture and mythology to become absorbed in the systematic comparison of social organization. In complete contrast, the American anthropologists, every bit as seriously, claimed ‘culture’ to be their special province. Re-establishing the discipline after the Second World War, the professors kept trying to define it, but the task proved difficult because, by itself, the word is empty. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical debates in France, Germany and England, the word ‘culture’ figured prominently, always steeped in political bias and always changing its tinge. With post-structuralist hindsight, it is obvious that, in its old usage, culture was part of a contrast set, sometimes the good part, as in a contrast of civilized/primitive or spiritual/material, sometimes the bad part, as in a contrast of artificial/simple. When the American anthropologists wanted a neutral concept for the focus of an objective intellectual discipline, they innovated by making culture stand on its own. But, true to its history, the term remained apt for polemic. As American anthropology developed, some preferred the cultural approach to interpretation simply because it was untainted by economic determinism.
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