Culture: The Anthropologists' AccountSuddenly culture seems to explain everything, from civil wars to financial crises and divorce rates. But when we speak of culture, what, precisely, do we mean? Adam Kuper pursues the concept of culture from the early twentieth century debates to its adoption by American social science under the tutelage of Talcott Parsons. What follows is the story of how the idea fared within American anthropology, the discipline that took on culture as its special subject. Here we see the influence of such prominent thinkers as Clifford Geertz, David Schneider, Marshall Sahlins, and their successors, who represent the mainstream of American cultural anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century--the leading tradition in world anthropology in our day. These anthropologists put the idea of culture to the ultimate test--in detailed, empirical ethnographic studies--and Kuper's account shows how the results raise more questions than they answer about the possibilities and validity of cultural analysis. Written with passion and wit, Culture clarifies a crucial chapter in recent intellectual history. Adam Kuper makes the case against cultural determinism and argues that political and economic forces, social institutions, and biological processes must take their place in any complete explanation of why people think and behave as they do. |
From inside the book
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Page ix
... culture. As early as 1917, Robert Lowie proclaimed that culture “is, indeed, the sole and exclusive subject-matter of ethnology, as consciousness is the ... concept of. Copyright© 1999 The President and Fellows of Harvard College PREFACE.
... culture. As early as 1917, Robert Lowie proclaimed that culture “is, indeed, the sole and exclusive subject-matter of ethnology, as consciousness is the ... concept of. Copyright© 1999 The President and Fellows of Harvard College PREFACE.
Page x
... concept of the anthropologists and sociologists is coming to be re- garded as the foundation stone of the social ... culture, in the technical anthropological sense, is one of the key notions in contemporary American thought.” And they were ...
... concept of the anthropologists and sociologists is coming to be re- garded as the foundation stone of the social ... culture, in the technical anthropological sense, is one of the key notions in contemporary American thought.” And they were ...
Page 5
... conception of culture and puts it to work within a particular theory of history. In the French tradition, civilization is represented as a progressive, cumulative, distinctively human achievement. Human beings are alike, at least in ...
... conception of culture and puts it to work within a particular theory of history. In the French tradition, civilization is represented as a progressive, cumulative, distinctively human achievement. Human beings are alike, at least in ...
Page 11
... theory of human progress and human difference provoked the development of what was in some ways a new conception of culture. Culture was now conceived of in opposition to biology. It was culture that marked human beings off from other ...
... theory of human progress and human difference provoked the development of what was in some ways a new conception of culture. Culture was now conceived of in opposition to biology. It was culture that marked human beings off from other ...
Page 12
... culture and of free desire as two reciprocal, complementary elements of a single pattern of discourse, albeit a conflict-laden and necessarily unstable one.” Perhaps Herbert is right, and this conception of culture first took shape in ...
... culture and of free desire as two reciprocal, complementary elements of a single pattern of discourse, albeit a conflict-laden and necessarily unstable one.” Perhaps Herbert is right, and this conception of culture first took shape in ...
Contents
| 1 | |
Part One GENEALOGIES | 21 |
FRENCH GERMAN AND ENGLISH INTELLECTUALS 1930 | 23 |
TALCOTT PARSONS AND THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGISTS | 47 |
Part Two EXPERIMENTS | 73 |
CULTURE AS RELIGION AND AS GRAND OPERA | 75 |
BIOLOGY AS CULTURE | 122 |
HISTOR AS CULTURE | 159 |
6 BRAVE NEW WORLD | 201 |
7 CULTURE DIFFERENCE IDENTITY | 226 |
NOTES | 249 |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | 289 |
INDEX | 291 |
Common terms and phrases
According action American analysis anthropology appeared argued argument authority believed biology called Cambridge Chicago chiefs civilization claim Clifford Geertz collective common conception construct Cook course critical Critique culture David defined definition described distinctive economic essay established ethnographer EXPERIMENTS expressed fact field first followed French German groups Hawaiian human ibid ideas identity individual insisted intellectual interest interpretation issue kinship Kluckhohn knowledge Kroeber later living London Lono Marxism material matter meaning myth native nature NOTES notion objective observed offered organization Parsons particular perhaps political practice Press progress published question reason refer relations relationship relatives religion religious remarked ritual Sahlins Schneider sense social social science society structure suggested symbolic theory thing tion tradition treated ture University University Press values whole writing York
Popular passages
Page 98 - Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
Page 56 - CIVILIZATION, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Page 72 - The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
Page 38 - Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.
Page 41 - Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds: would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it...
Page 100 - Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action; social structure is the form that action takes, "the actually existing network of social relations. Culture and social structure are then but different abstractions from the same phenomena.
Page 98 - I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.
Page 105 - Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of) a manuscript — foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.
Page 40 - In fact, an inward persuasion has long been diffusing itself, and now and then even comes to utterance, That, except the external, there are no true sciences ; that to the inward world (if there be any) our only conceivable road is through the outward; that, in short, what cannot be investigated and understood mechanically, cannot be investigated and understood at all.
Page 41 - But civilization is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom of health, and a nation so distinguished more fitly to be called a varnished than a polished people, w"here this civilization is not grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity. We must be men in order to be citizens.