8-3 BOGGS, James the Culture Concept as Theory in Context

The Culture Concept as Theory, in ContextAuthor(s): JamesP.BoggsSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, No. 2 (April 2004), pp. 187-209Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/381048 .Accessed: 04/07/2013 22:53

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187

C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4502-0003$3.00

The Culture Conceptas Theory, in Context1

by James P. Boggs

This essay presents anthropologys culture concept (hereafter cul-ture) asformally, precisely, definablya scientific theory. Rep-resenting new knowledge, an emerging theory challenges, recon-figures, existing knowledge. It has a starting place, a context. Toadvance anthropologys idea of culture as theory is to place it intime, in relation to ideas it reconfigures or replaces. So situated,culture is seen to replace the existing theory of human order, in-herited from the Enlightenment, that underlies the doctrine po-litical theorists call liberalism: as theory, culture supplants noless than the currently dominant social/political theory of West-ern modernity. In this light the present essay reconsiders thecontention, with its attending sense of malaise, that is nowswirling around the idea of culture in anthropology. While criticsblame cultures difficulties on its inherent flaws, this essay sug-gests that its troubles follow first from its very success as theory.Significantly disturbing the conceptual groundwork for the lib-eral polity, culture sparks reactions within that polity aimed inpart against its credentials as theory. Anthropologys discovery ofculture thus places ititself a discipline within the liberal tradi-tion, an institution within the liberal polityin a position in re-lation to current affairs that is at once difficult, paradoxical, andstrategic.

j a m e s p . b o g g s is owner of James P. Boggs Research, whichhas conducted contract research and prepares expert-witness tes-timony for Indian tribes in the Great Plains and Wisconsin, andalso a faculty affiliate of the Department of Anthropology at theUniversity of Montana and senior associate of the universitysPublic Policy Research Institute (his mailing address: 2705Highland Drive, Missoula, MT 59802-3153, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Born in 1939, he was educated at the University ofOklahoma (B.A., 1963) and the University of Oregon (Ph.D.,1974). He has taught at San Jose State University (197275) andhas been staff social scientist for the Northern Cheyenne Re-search Project (197680). His publications include Anthropologi-cal Knowledge and Native American Cultural Practice in theLiberal Polity (American Anthropologist 104:599610), Proce-dural vs. Substantive in NEPA Law: Cutting the Gordian Knot(The Environmental Professional 15:2534), and Some Reflec-tions on Implicit Models of Social Knowledge Use (Knowledge:Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 14:2962). The present paper wassubmitted 1 xi 02 and accepted 4 ix 03.

1. This essay has benefited from thoughtful comments by the editorand (in this and earlier versions) several anonymous referees, whoseengaged and substantive disagreements were themselves a form ofencouragement and whose comments as a whole renewed my ap-preciation for the forms and processes of anthropological inquiry.I remain responsible for remaining shortcomings, for any substan-tive errors, and for good advice ignored.

Through the twentieth century, anthropologists devel-oped the idea of culture into a powerful, sophisticated,and influential scientific theory, even as the disciplineclung to antiquated notions of science (Latour 1996:5) that in effect denied this considerable achievement.This article presents the culture idea as theory. It beginsby sketching a definition of theoryitself an evolvingand contentious questionwith which at least an im-portant contingent of philosophers of science and manyscientists today might agree.

As the anthropological theory of human culture(herein culture or culture theory) took form in a massivecorpus of empirical findings and reasoned analyses, phi-losophers were expanding understandings of theory be-yond the reductionist physical, organic, or statistical/mechanical models that held anthropology substantiallyin thrall. These new conceptions encompassed the kindof theory culture was becoming. The ideal of unifiedscience has receded, observes the philosopher StephenToulmin; the sciences now are seen as a confederationof enterprises, with methods and patterns of explanationto meet their own distinct problems (1990:165; cf. Boon1982:ix; Reyna 1994:557). But if my argument rejectsCartesian epistemologies, the claim that culture occu-pies a definable place as theory within contemporary sci-ence signals that this will not be a historicist or inter-pretivist account, either. If theory cannot mirror nature(Rorty 1979), it rightly aspires to reflect it, however par-tially and imperfectly.

What, then, is a scientific theory? Granted that thesciences are diverse, not just any bit of idea or obser-vation can be claimed as theory. A theory may be un-derstood as an abstraction from and representation ofthe ordering principles that govern a class of concretesystems or a realm of systemic order. The sciences arediverse because the principles of systemic order that theydiscover and represent are diverse. This circumstancerequires not epistemological or ontological reductionismbut explanatory pluralism (Lachapelle 2000). The-ory can no longer be limited to scientistic models oftheory derived from physical or organic systems.2

Anthropology, then, is the social science disciplinethat marks off human social/cultural systems as itsproper domain for study and for theorizing. As a science,anthropology reflects the empirical realities of the sys-temic order with which it deals. It thus is properly ascience, just as, say, nuclear physics or evolutionarybiology are sciences. Empirical theories that reveal orreorder significant domains of experience have had trulyrevolutionary import. This is no less true of culture the-ory today. And if all this brings anthropology to the

2. By scientistic I mean what Rubinstein and Laughlin (1977:46062) called the received view of scientific theory. Related tological positivism, it is perhaps most closely associated in Americawith Hempels deductive-nomological account. It is a formalistand reductionist view of theory that presumes a mechanistic andreductionist ontology. The colloquial scientistic is apt; inasmuchas science and accounts of science have advanced, reductionistmodels remain within the tradition of science but do not define itand hence can no longer be equated with the scientific view.


188 F current anthropology Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

threshold of the humanities and invites approaches de-veloped in the humanities as productive tools for ex-ploring cultural phenomena, then culture theory ex-plains why this may be so.

Anthropology, always a diverse field with its full shareof lively argument, of late is buffeted by deeper currentsof intellectual and ethical unease. The forces behindthese currents surface today in disciplinary critiques ofculture that invoke the issues just mentioned. Excellentreviews and countercritiques have appeared, and we willnot need to revisit all this ground. Looking at some rep-resentative critiques will, however, help display the toneand parameters of the movement against culture andraise some key questions.

Commentators note that symptoms of the flagrant dis-order evidenced in current critiques of culture becameepidemic in the discipline just as the culture idea gainedwide acceptance and use in the world and anthropologysprestige within the intellectual community seemed as-sured.3 Much current disciplinary critique is founda-tional; it aims not to improve culture theory, correct itsexcesses, more finely calibrate inquiry, or ensure that itspublic uses remain within the scope of the theorysclaims but to call into question its credibility and socialvalue. Defining the culture idea as not theory, in someversions disputing scientific theory itself as a represen-tative knowledge form, the critique rejects culture asa meaningful term of reference. Similarly, in denyingthat a cultural realm of systemic order defined by dis-tinctive organizing principles exists, the critique wouldleave culture theory with nothing meaningful to referto.

If culture has become widely accepted and influentialand it has recently become possible creditably to claimculture as scientific theory, why should there now besuch a strong movement against just this possibility?One might think that anthropologists would, with La-tour (1996), hail their disciplines scientific achieve-ments4 instead of falling over one another to repudiatethem. Brightman (1995:528) argues convincingly that thecurrent critique creates an expendable straw cultureto demolish that has only tangential relation to the rangeand scope of cultures meanings (see also Boggs 2002;Brumann 1999; Greenblatt 1999; Lambek and Boddy1997:11), but this only intensifies the puzzle: Why?

This puzzle is addressed in the second part of the essayby looking at culture in its societal context. Early an-thropologists developed the first iterations of culture the-ory in circumstances dominated by well-developed ideasabout those matters that culture addresses. Boass cul-

3. One of the paradoxes of modern anthropology is that we havefinally succeeded in convincing the public of the importance ofculture at the very moment that as a discipline we have come toquestionor even rejectits usefulness (Winthrop 1999:43; forsimilar observations see, e.g., Fox 1999; Keesing 1994:304; Green-blatt 1999).4. Anthropology is already one of the most advanced, productiveand scientific of all the disciplinesnatural or social. . . . Imaginea world stripped of all anthropological discoveries. What a desertit would be without this scientific discipline (Latour 1996:5).

turalist critique of racial theories is well known but rep-resents only a lesser part of the conceptual revolutionthat culture set in motion. More broadly, ideas aboutscience, method, and the extension of then-current sci-entific principles to realms of human order had beenaround long before Durkheim, Tylor, and others and ul-timately Boas and his students assembled the strands ofwhat became culture theory. Part 2 shows how cultureconfronts and as theory displaces an existing empiricaltheory of human order broadly known as liberalism.

Liberal theory developed as a social scientific theoryof human order based on European natural science in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Copernicanrevolution, explains Gledhill (1997:83), which gavebirth to the doctrine of the liberal state as a right-basedstate is premised in a fundamental way on individual-ism. Individuals and their rights, he continues, in thestate of nature precede the establishment of society it-self. Thus, liberalism as a political doctrine depends ona social doctrine, a theory of social order. Liberal the-ory evolved when modern science was new and com-pelling, and the available models for theory formationwere those worked out for relatively simple physical sys-tems. Descartes (15961650) extended these principlesto philosophy, just as Hobbes (15881679) and Locke(16321704) applied them to social theory and politics.The basic tenets of liberal theory, as it was developedthen, still undergird the institutions and practices of themodern liberal democratic state.

The limitations of liberal theory have become obvious,although liberal principles still shape the political ide-ology of the West and prevail in public life. Culture the-ory is a major, late unfolding within the movement ofmodern science. Unlike liberal theory, which envisageda unified science and aimed to extend its principles torepresent and properly govern society, culture theory de-veloped in response to and in direct interaction with theempirical findings and problems posed by the domain ofsystemic order it refers to. Instead of following premisesand principles defined in early physical science by find-ing the sources of social order in putative universal in-herent properties of individuals, culture finds them invarying systems of symbols. Liberal theory and culturetheory are therefore incommensurable (in the sense thatone or the other must be true) and competing theories(cf. Kaplan [1975:879, reference omitted]: Until some-one can convince me otherwise . . . the earth cannot beboth a flat disc and an oblate spheroid; one of these viewsis simply mistaken). Within science, culture theory re-places liberal theory much as, for instance, the Coper-nican system replaced the Ptolemaic.

In short, culture is proximately responsible for an on-going profound shift in the West from one frame of ref-erence to another with respect to understanding humansocial lifeopening conceptual rifts in public debate aswell as in the foundations of anthropological thought.5

5. Colson (1974:910) points to an early expression of this rift whenshe notes Lewis Henry Morgans reliance on individualist ration-ality models of human behavior and contractarian theories of social


boggs The Culture Concept as Theory F 189

Conflicting paradigms cohabit within us, and we switchbetween them, not always consciously, much as oneshifts from one view to another of those ambiguous pic-tures beloved of gestalt psychologists (see Hanson 1965[1958]:430).

Importantly, however, more is at issue here than acuriously prolonged transition from one social scientificparadigm to another. While we now consciously thinkabout and see human beings as cultural beings, currentversions of the naturalized, individualistic view of hu-man nature that I am calling liberal theory still under-write Western political and economic institutions.Against the scientific conceptual shift to culture theory,the very institutions and values that we live by contin-ually reintroduce liberal views and values into currentdiscourse.

Moreover, an immense and powerful establishmentbasically, the modern Western liberal democratic stateand the capitalist economic systemnow exists that ispremised on and in some sense warranted by liberal the-ory as a universal theory of human order. The advent ofculture theoryand this is importantdoes not in andof itself constitute a critique of liberalism as a politicalideal or of liberal society. But it does resituate andrelativize liberal theory: liberalism becomes one culturalway of life among others. No longer read back to thestate of nature (Macpherson 1962), liberal theory stilldescribes much about the modern West. Nevertheless,the decentering effects of culture can be difficult anddisorientingmuch as were the analogous impacts ofheliocentric and Darwinian theories in their times. Thatculture theory deeply compromises the legitimacy of ra-tionales for Western hegemony is only one such effect.

Not surprisingly, then, culture theory sparks a reactionor backlash within the liberal polity. Attacks against cul-ture come from legal and administrative institutionswhen culturalist arguments are brought before them(Boggs 2002, n.d.), but they also arise within anthropol-ogy as the discipline whose work produced and warrantsthe idea of culture.

Culture Theory and its AnthropologicalCritique

culture theory as theory

My claim that culture is current theory confronts criticsinsistence that it is not theory but merely a categorizingconcept. Is culture theory a legitimate theory or, as manycritics claim, a reified abstraction or a device for clas-sifying people? Is it, as Kuper (1999:3), for example, putsit, simply a way of talking about collective identities?

A category or class of items has one or several definingattributes. Defined by common attributes rather thanordered process, the members of a class need not be in

order while Maine and Tylor emphasized custom, Boas was devel-oping the idea of culture, and Durkheim posited supraindividualsocial systems (see also Sahlins 1976).

proximity and need not interact. The attributes defininga class are subject to empirical verification, but the classitself is arbitrary in that an observer (or culture) abstractsthe attributes that define it. Race (racial identity) is acategorizing concept whose essential arbitrariness (de-spite other complications) is well understoodbut soalso are national, cultural, ethnic, or any other identi-ties in and of themselves classifying concepts. Is theanthropological idea of culture, then, as its critics claim(see below), also no more than a glorified classifyingconcept?

A theory, let us say, is also an abstraction, but theoryabstracts systemic relationships rather than selected at-tributes. Interactive relationships between entities maydefine higher-level entities or processes that are, if youwill, realthat are not arbitrary in the sense in whicha class of objects is arbitraryas, for instance, gravita-tional relationships between the sun and planets formthe solar system. Some natural systems are mechanical,determinative, closed, while others are open, with fluidboundaries, complexly and multiply ordered, emergent,or (what has become a term of art) chaotic. Examplesof open systems include a gene pool or species (e.g.,Gould 2002:595744; Hull 1978, 1998), a culture, or anordered field of interactions. Clifford Geertz (1965:106),the preeminent antiscience interpretivist(?), put it pre-cisely: It is not whether phenomena are empiricallycommon that is critical in science . . . but whether theycan be made to reveal the enduring natural processes thatunderlie them. . . . We need to look for systematic re-lationships among diverse phenomena, not for substan-tive identities among similar ones.

The physical properties of their constituents governthe ordering principles of such physical systems as thesolar system and chemical interactions. But other sys-tems cannot be derived solely from the physical prop-erties of their constituents because their principles oforganization involve coded information as well as phys-ical causality. The organization of biological systems, forexample, depends on chemical or behavioral codes, whilediffering systems of symbols constitute a key orderingprinciple for diverse human cultural systems. Such sys-tems still feature exchanges of matter or energy amongtheir parts. These are governed, however, by more thanconstituent physical properties alone, interactions be-tween their constituents need not be mechanical or de-terminative (see, e.g., Miller 1978 on complexion en-tropy; see also Levy 1952, Simon 1969), and the systemitself may be responsive, adaptive, open, protean, or evenself-directing. In sum, then, the anthropological idea ofculture is theory because it abstracts and represents theordering principle (systems of symbols) of organized hu-man collectivities. That cultural systems are open andfluid is a given of the theory rather than evidence againstits status as theory.

One commits the essentialist fallacy by attributingto cultural systems the kinds of bounded, determinate,or essential properties that characterize exemplaryphysical systems or by treating cultural properties as ifthey were like more fixed biological properties. One



commits the idealist fallacy by failing to recognizethat cultural systems have physical and empirically as-certainable dimensions, even while the principles bywhich the system is organized do not derive solely fromphysical or biological properties of its component parts.

Abstracting the empirical relationships that define atype of system, a theory becomes a gestalt, a paradigm,a way of seeing the domain of experience that it rep-resents. Classes may be formed in new and interestingways, but they remain just classescategories of thingsor of people. They do not become things themselves; theydo not form higher-level entities; they may reflect butdo not instigate gestalt experiences or paradigm shifts.They may express new insights but cannot on their ownspark radically new ways of seeing the world. A classi-ficatory schema associated with a theory becomes sub-ordinate to that theory, as todays biological taxonomy,for instance, reflects synthetic evolutionary theory (con-trast this with Foucaults famous recounting of the dra-matically exotic [to us, because it relates to no theorywe recognize] animal taxonomy with which he beginsThe Order of Things [1973 (1970):xvxxiv]).6

While the matters being explored here can hardly beregarded as settled, it would be difficult not to concedethat in some meaningful sense large conceptual shiftshave occurred and that over the past 500 years scientifictheory has been involved. One need only point to Co-pernicus in the sixteenth, Darwin in the nineteenth, andEinstein in the twentieth century to carry that argument.Becoming far more than just theory but only as theory,such forms of knowledge unsettle and shift the foun-dations of the cosmologies of their respective eras. Todayculture theory is similarly consequential.

Major new theories make political waves, but this doesnot make them primarily products of political strate-gizing. Much as Copernican theory differentiated anddecentered the human world within the cosmos or Lyelland Darwin situated Homo sapiens within evolutionarytime and the great order of species, culture theory sim-ilarly reorients and relativizes the West within the vastrange of human cultural differentiation. Here the rele-vant ordering principle is varying systems of symbolsrather than universal laws derived from inherent attrib-utes of matter, natural selection, or chemical codes (see,e.g., Aberle 1987, Geertz 1965). Western culture shiftsinto place as one symbolically mediated system of or-dering among others rather than the center and apex ofa fixed course of human development (e.g., Sahlins 1976).The Western view of reality becomes a local view rather

6. Gould (2002:5035) has an account of the modern synthetictheory of evolution. The definitions advanced here also comefrom, among others, Aberle (1987), Bertalanffy (1968), Caws (1974),Gould (2002:595744), Hacking (1999), Hanson (1965 [1958]), Hey-lighen (1999), Hull (1978, 1998), Kuhn (1962), Lachapelle (2000),Levy (1952), Miller (1978), Pattee (1973), Prigogine and Sanglier(1988), Quine (1973), Simon (1969), and Suppe (1977). Not all ofthese thinkers, of course, agree with all that I have just written.Hacking, for instance, following other game and other philosophers(e.g., Quine, Goodman), regards classes or kinds as objects,confounding the distinction between class and system that I hereregard as primary (see Hacking 1999:22, 104).

than the self-evident transparent view of naked realityjust as it is; Western man becomes a cultural humanlike all the others rather than natural man or, betterperhaps, final man who has ascended through the darkstages of ignorance to enlightenment by shedding theillusions of culture, custom, and superstition.

In sum, the system that culture theory refers to derivesits order not directly from inherent properties of humanbeings, which are variable in relevant respects from onecultural tradition to another, but from varying systemsof symbols and meaning that give form to the real andsimilarly varying systems of language, kinship, eco-nomic exchange, and political order that anthropologicalinquiry reveals. I should be meticulously clear here. I amsaying that the order of cultural systems is a culturalorder not derivable directly from presumed universal at-tributes of individuals; I am not saying that culture existsapart from its various embodiments in human beings,whose physical, organic, and psychic nature is its nec-essary condition (cf. Kroeber 1917). I am not saying thatculture theory is a finished theory. I am saying that it iscurrently valid (if still evolving), that its basic tenetsmake good sense in relation to theory in adjacent do-mains, and that, in any event, all indications are thatmuch current criticism of culture theory has less to dowithindeed, diverts attention fromits strengths andweaknesses than with its perceived troubling implica-tions for modernist thought and social institutions.

the anthropological critique of culture

Striking contrasts are what make the anthropologistrecognize and come to terms with his own assump-tions. [Colson 1974:21]

Culture operates . . . to enforce separations thatinevitably carry a sense of hierarchy. [Abu-Lughod1991:13738]

On both sides of the Atlantic, one runs up againstthe same topoi of the counter-Enlightenment: criti-cism of the seeming inevitable terrorist consequencesof global interpretations of history; critique of therole of the general intellectual intervening in thename of human reason, and also of the transpositionof theoretically pretentious human sciences into apractice contemptuous of humans. . . . The figure ofthought is always the same: There is a narrow-minded will to power ingrained in the very univer-salism of the Enlightenment, in the humanism ofemancipatory ideals, and in the rational pretensionof systematic thought; as soon as the theory is readyto become practical, it throws off its mask . . . [Ha-bermas 1994:76 n. 26].

The debate over culture theory in anthropology revolvesaround three more or less distinct critiques: (1) Criticson the left view culture as a tool of modernist hegem-onya malignant development of scientistic rationalism



that wields truth as power in order to distance, control,and oppress others. Discounting the integrity of scien-tific inquiry and its process, left critics relinquish theemancipatory potential of knowledge. The positive ex-pression of this critique is defense of the subalternagainst oppression. (2) Critics on the right view cultureas an outgrowth of romantic nationalism, now clothedin the stylish language of postmodernism, that subvertsrational universalism and science. Protecting truth, theyinadequately confront its complicities with power. Thepositive expression here is defense of science, democracy,and human rights. (3) A third critique is more a residualclass of arguments that do not fit easily on the left/rightcontinuum. The present essay falls here, finding ele-ments from each side to accept and to reject.

The left critiqueillustrated by the above selectionfrom Abu-Lughods frequently cited Writing Against Cul-ture (1991:13738)well exemplifies Habermass accom-panying depiction of the counter-Enlightenment (1983:76). When Abu-Lughod urges that one powerful tool forunsettling the culture concept and subverting the processof othering it entails is to write ethnographies of theparticular (1991:149), she joins the epigrammatic post-modernist aversion to abstract reason, universalism, andmetanarrative that Habermas describes.

A rough sequence, an almost tidal ebb and flow, char-acterizes the culture debates beginning with the Enlight-enment itself. Franz Boas, a late Enlightenment figure,presumed that the culture theory he was assembling wasimmanently democratic, antiracist, and emancipatory.It seemed self-evident to Boas that the truth of his po-sition would bring with it social enlightenment (Ra-binow 1991:60). Two reactions to Boasian culture theoryfollowed.

The first and virtually immediate opposition from cog-nate disciplines was scientisticwhat Kuhn would iden-tify as the normal reaction of normal science to a newparadigm (cf. Stocking 1968). Culture theory prevailed,however, establishing American anthropology as a socialscience discipline with this new theory as its flagshipconcept. But the scientistic critique (or, depending on itsinflection, what would become the right or liberalist cri-tique) of culture also became internalized within the newdiscipline.

Meanwhile, as synthetic culture theory became moremature and more sophisticated and grew in acceptanceand influence, a left critique arose equating culture the-ory with the very scientism that it in fact challenged.Opposing cultures hard-won legitimacy as a scientificconceptand often science altogetherthis critique alsoopposed cultures naively presumed social beneficence.Left critics after the middle of the century argued that-culture, far from representing an inherently enlighteningscientific idea, was rather, but equally immanently, aneffect and a servant of Western hegemony. Marxist the-orists in the 1970s, for instance, explains Ortner, con-verted culture to ideology, and considered [it] fromthe point of view of its role in social reproduction: le-gitimating the existing order, mediating contradictionsin the base, and mystifying the sources of exploitation

and inequality in the system (1984:140, referencesomitted). In the wake of such critiques, according to Ra-binow (1991:6061), Boas now is thought to have beennaive in his typical overvaluation of the socially be-neficent power of science.

But left arguments, through their mirror-image rever-sals, still presume that culture theory somehow hasimmanent sociopolitical consequences. Critiques of cul-ture from both right and left broadly depend on this relictidea, which I will call, for want of a more graceful term,the presumption of immanence in knowledge. WhenKeesing says that culture almost irresistibly leads usinto reification and essentialism (1994:302) he attrib-utes to it an immanent almost irresistible force. WhenAbu-Lughod asserts that culture operates . . . to en-force separations that inevitably carry a sense of hier-archy or that it entails othering, she clearly meansthat culture as theory or idea inevitably, immanently,does these things. Because it is this kind of thing it mustbe opposedwe must write against culture (1991:13738). But now the properties being attributed to cul-ture are not emancipatory or enlightening but hidden,dark, politically ominous. Culture theory is not so muchwrong as it is bad (cf. DAndrade 1995).

The next tidal wave of criticism rolls in again fromthe right (for varying expressions see, e.g., Appell 1992;Bennett 1987; DAndrade 1995; Kuper 1994, 1999; Reyna1994, 1999; Spiro 1996). Opposing the left critique of the1960s and 70s, this wave aims to defend modernist sci-ence as science. In doing so it picks up threads from theearlier and now internalized scientistic reaction againstBoasian culture theory (cf., e.g., Stocking 1968: chap. 11;Lewis 2001:38182). But even as it opposes the left cri-tique, it also follows it in focusing not on truth or validitybut on cultures putative ideological and social dangers.

Todays right critics see in culture a malevolent out-growth of German romantic idealism and reaction that,however, now legitimates postmodernist antiscience andharnesses anthropology to left-liberal politics. Thus forKuper it is the relativist cultural-pluralist tradition ofU.S. culture theory, with roots in German idealism andaffinities with Nazism (1994:545), that Franz Boasbrought from Berlin to Columbia University at the turnof the century (p. 539). This Americanist culture theory,originally linked to Nazism but now associated with left-liberal concerns from the 1960s and 1970s (p. 543), is whatthe postmoderniststhose inward-looking, self-refer-ential writers who have captured the Boasian tradition(p. 551)have taken up. Though he will not concede thatit is theory, seeing it rather as a project in the humani-ties (p. 551), it nevertheless is precisely culture theory,conflated with postmodernism, against which Kuper di-rects his ire (cf. Kuper 1994; 1999:21925).7

7. Several perceptive social commentators, like Kuper, similarlyidentify rightist origins or strains in postmodernism (e.g., Callinicos1990, Foster 1983, Habermas 1983). Edward Said notes that decon-struction bears its own form of complicity with recent neo-con-servatism (quoted in Bernstein 1992:188). Anthropologists likeDAndrade (1995), Spiro (1996), and Kuper (1994), however, criti-cizing culture theory from rightist perspectives, most dislike its



Spiro similarly argues that the postmodernist con-ception of culture, either directly or through itsmetaphysics and epistemology (1996:771), grounds thesubjectivist attack on knowledge. Reyna fears thatGeertz and Sahlins, theorists of culture in the Boasiantradition, have led American cultural anthropology offits path as science and thus into its twilight as a dis-cipline and profession (1999:174).8 The postmodern-ists, says DAndrade, want to transform anthropologyfrom a discipline based upon an objective model of theworld to a discipline based on a moral model of theworld (1995:399)a left-liberal model of dominationand resistance (pp. 400401).

While critics on the left blame culture for holding an-thropology in the thrall of modernist scientism and thoseon the right condemn it for leading anthropology downthe garden path of postmodernist antiscience, critics onboth sides of this ideological divide equally target thealleged essentializing and nominalizing aspects of cul-ture theory (see, e.g., Lambek and Boddy 1997:10; cf. Bid-ney 1953:3234 on the fallacy of misplaced concrete-ness). The consistency of this critique across a broadpolitical spectrum may help explain why it seems socompelling (though its common feature is merely theflawed presumption of immanence in knowledge).

John Bennett, long a critic on the right (e.g., 1976),views not just culture theory but culture itself as anatavism in the global age: The culture paradigm [in an-thropology] prevented [prevented?] consideration of amost grievous and embarrassing fact: that culturethatis, the appearance of distinctive styles of thought andaction in particular groupsmight be a generalized be-havioral proclivity counter to the best interests of man-kind as a whole (Bennett 1987:52). Culture theory issocially ominous, Bennett says, because it obstructsthe realization that culture itself is a divisive and de-structive force in human affairs. This critique ratherastonishingly merges the standard attack on culture the-ory as an essentializing ideawhat Michaels (1995:6)calls an identitarian devicewith what human cul-ture is. While few carry their critique of culture so far,many critics similarly ignore cultures theoretical un-derpinnings to focus on it as an identitarian principle.Strathern, for instance, views culture as a device for clas-sifying differences that is invoked wherever people dif-ferentiate people (1995:15657) and thus immanentlyfurthers cultural fundamentalism or nationalism (cf.Stolcke 1995).

Clausen, an English professor, picking up the right cri-

present association with left-liberal causes. Its shifting politicalvalence alone should be enough to discredit attribution of imma-nent qualities to culture.8. Moore (1994) blames the decline in anthropologys fortunes onprecisely the opposite failure: refusal to abandon empirical sci-ence altogether and embrace postmodernism. On such logic,common to right and left critics of culture theory, the theoreticalinsights of, say, a Galileo or a Mendel or a Boas (Stocking 1968:chap. 11) were flawed because the establishments of their eras re-jected them. Because scientific theories may challenge deeply in-stituted perceptions, their acceptance by contemporary publics orelites serves poorly for assessing their merits.

tique outside the discipline, advances an argument sim-ilar to Bennetts in an article titled Welcome to Post-Culturalism. Even as anthropologists studied the tiny,exceptional groups9 from which they derived their ideasof culture those societies were fast losing their distinct-ness. . . . The result was the first stage of post-culturalismin which technology begins the long process of displacingcustom (1996:383). One hears echoes of Tylors famouscharacterization of ethnography as the reformers sci-ence that must expose and mark . . . out for destruc-tion those ideas, founded on the crudest theories ofthe lower culture, that hinder the advance of civiliza-tion (1920 (1871):445, 453; Tambiah 1990:44). The oldideological division between civilization and cul-ture (Kuper 1999:59), between Enlightenment andcounter-Enlightenment (Wolf 1999:2330), becomesreified as a contemporary real-world event.10

I do not want to make the rough temporal schemasketched above seem simplistic or sharp-edged. For onething, both right and left critiques remain actively de-bated. Also, the midcentury left critique, even as it con-tests earlier versions of culture theory, relies, at leastimplicitly, on the new culture theory that gained cur-rency at the same time, just as subsequent right criticsclaim. With due caution, though, this temporal sketchremains useful.

The commonalities across the spectrum of critiquessketched above are important. For critics on both rightand left, skepticism has become stylish: one hesitates tofind beneficent social qualities in any knowledge form.It is hard to imagine, say Grimshaw and Hart (1995:50),given the sour pessimism of our own day, that ethnog-raphy based on fieldwork once evoked a vision of scienceharnessed to social progress. Skeptical, even anti-intel-lectual (cf. Herzfeld 1997), today we argue about whichill effects flow from what forms of knowledge.

Similarly, critics on both sides reduce culture from the-ory to empirical generalizationculture is merely aflawed classificatory device like race (e.g., Abu-Lughod1991:14344; Appadurai 1996:12; Kahn 1989; Kuper 1994;1999:24041; Michaels 1995; Stolcke 1995:2). This setsculture theory up for radical critics like Bennett and Clau-sen to label it a relict idea overtaken by the march ofhistory. And of course, all these critics are rightvariousinterests do use the idea of culture as a classificatory de-vice to further various aimsbut it is precisely my pointhere that one must not take this to mean that culturetheory is only a generalizing or essentialist concept.

Now, as important as the issues raised above are inacademic discourse, when we turn to their broader so-cietal implications they acquire even more significance.The distinction between theory and generalization is es-pecially critical. How people are categorized is hardly

9. Never mind that such groups made up the whole of humankindthroughout its history until the tiny, exceptional, and still localizedera we label modern.10. For more erudite variations on these themes see, for example,Appadurai (1996:1215) and Trouillot (1991). For sophisticated cri-tiques of such views see, for example, Boon (1982), Herzfeld (1997),Fischer (1999), Handler (1997), Sahlins (1976), and Taylor (1999).



socially inconsequential, but theory is infinitely morepowerful than classification or generalization.

Reviewing briefly, a class may be investigated empir-ically after selection of the initial criterion that definesit. But any initial attribute will do to define a class; onecan categorize any given universe of things or personsin infinite ways, depending on ones purpose. In contrast,the basic terms of a theory consist not of abstract at-tributes but of empirical systemic interactions. Scien-tists formulate theory from the start through observationand insight. Hobbess fear that emerging scientificknowledge could challenge the Sovereign, the state,was well-founded (see Shapin and Schaffer 1985): an im-portant empirical theory gains conceptual purchase out-side of a given regime or worldview. It becomes a gestalt,a powerful, ordered conceptual formation, disciplined byempirical inquiry, that has leverage to refigure or shiftthe way we see the domain it represents. Theory,therefore, once established, remains recalcitrant to chal-lenge or to political domestication in ways that gener-alizations cannot.

Culture Theory in Context

liberal theory and the paradigm shift toculture theory

Legal theorists (Horwitz 1992, White 1986), historians(Sewell 1999, Singer 1996), literary critics (Greenblatt1991, 1999), and others are noting the revolutionary im-pact of the culture idea in their respective fields. Thephilosopher Stephen Toulmin (1990:189) puts it this way:In Western Europe and North America, people thesedays are deeply influenced by the insights of anthropol-ogy. . . . By now there are few branches of philosophy inwhich we can afford to turn a blind eye to these in-sights. The impact of culture is even greater than isoften realized: As it becomes common currency, peo-ple come to see themselves and others through thelens of culture theory without that lenss necessarilybecoming visible. Anthropology and its culture concepthave become powerfully constitutive forces in todaysworld.

Critiques of culture like those above must be consid-ered in the context of its decentering and disorientingimpact on the ideas, institutions, and ideologies of West-ern modernism. One cannot presume, of course, thatevery critique expresses a reactive backlash; but neithershould we fail to note a reaction that both develops andappropriates critique. To understand this reaction, oneneeds to appreciate how culture, as theory, represents acompelling paradigm shift in our view of the human uni-verse and the modern Wests place in it.

The notion of theoretical or paradigm shift is an ap-propriate trope. A given theory arises in a particular timeand place and in opposition to an established theory. Itrarely if ever fills, as it were, an empty space of blankignorance but rather intrudes into spaces already occu-pied by ideas of the phenomena it refers to, which spaces

it then redefines. A theory comes forward in its particularhistorical context and in relation to ideas that it suc-ceeds. This is to say that culture theory does not ariseduring the course of the twentieth century in an intel-lectual vacuum. The matters with which it is con-cernedthe nature and evolution of humankind and itsvarying orders of custom, community, and knowledgeare not questions people had overlooked. Culture theorydevelops, rather, in the context of a dense system of ideasabout these matters that it must displace, reconfigure,or relativize.11 I call the dominant view of human socialorder that culture displaces liberal theory, following cur-rent usage in political and legal philosophy.12

An outgrowth of Enlightenment science, liberal theoryis rooted in the modernist ethosis indeed the dominantsociopolitical-economic theory of modernity (see, e.g.,Beiner 1996:202, for whom allegiance to modernity isthe measure of ones liberalism; see also Hollinger 1994).Enlightenment philosophers, following Descartes in lay-ing the foundations for subsequent political philosophyin the West, viewed human beings as atomized individ-uals whose own natural minds and (with due skepticism)

11. Stocking (1968: esp. chaps. 4, 9, 11) provides one overview ofthe origins and initial developments of culture theory in the earlydecades of the twentieth century, to which Lewis (2001) adds onerecent footnote. Subsequent anthropological literatures, especiallyin the United States, where Franz Boass students became the dom-inant force in university-based American anthropology, develop anddebate the new theory. Contributions include Kroeber and Whiteon the superorganic, the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis in anthro-pological linguistics, the work of Benedict, Bidney, and others, no-tably Levi-Strauss, and of course Geertz and Sahlins and others laterin the century. Ortner (1984) reviews culture theory in the late mid-century period. Kuper (1999) has a knowledgeable historical reviewthat elaborates many of the themes critical of the culture conceptreviewed above. Gellner (1998), and Wolf (1999: chap. 1) also exploreaspects of cultures roots in counter-Enlightenment movements.Helpful recent compendia include Boddy and Lambek (1997), Dar-nell and Gleach (2002), and Ortner (1999). As culture spread beyondanthropology, literary theorists (e.g., Greenblatt 1991, 1999), phi-losophers (Lyotard 1988 [1983], MacIntyre 1988, and, needless tosay, Foucault [see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983]), among others, aremaking important contributions. A vast legal literature remains alargely untapped source for exploring culture theory in context (e.g.,Horwitz 1992; cf. Boggs 2002). Sewell (1999), a historian, articulatesan especially clear appreciation of culture as contemporary scien-tific theory.12. A number of the sources cited herein define, discuss, or provideinsights into liberalism and liberal theory in this sensesee es-pecially Beiner (1990, 1996), Boggs (2002), Dumont (1986), Gellner(1998), Gledhill (1997), Horwitz (1992), Kemmis (1990), Locke (1952[1690]), Macpherson (1962), MacIntyre (1988), Michelman (1988),Rapaczynski (1987), Rawls (1971), Sahlins (1976), Sandel (1982,1984), Taylor (1999), and Walzer (1984). Here liberalism has abroader meaning than in everyday political discoursesee, for ex-ample, MacIntyre (1988:392), referring to conservative liberals, lib-eral liberals, and radical liberals. The present essay follows Boggs(2002) in emphasizing that a theory of human order underlies lib-eralisms political/moral doctrines and this theory both is subjectto scientific standards of verification and clashes starkly with cul-ture theory. Representative contemporary works that provide in-sight into the clash between culture theory and liberal theory in-clude Brenkman (1987), Eller (1997), Horwitz (1992), Gellner (1998),Lambek and Boddy (1997), MacIntyre (1988), McGrane (1989), Ort-ner (1999), and Singer (1996), with Sahlins (1976) giving importantearly direction to this line of inquiry.



sense experience are the only sources of true knowledge.Such individuals form societies based on self-interestedassessment of their condition (Hobbes). Or, in latermechanistic versions, individuals each pursuing theirown separate advantage incidentally give rise to the op-timally organized society (Adam Smith; but cf. Becker1959 [1932]).

The atomized, individualistic view of humankind isalso a universalist and essentialist view, since all personseverywhere are in these respects the same. The modelof man engendered by the empiricist/individualist tra-dition, says Gellner, is very distinctive. The solitaryCrusoe-like individual faces the world or, rather, assem-bles the world out of the accumulated bits of experience.. . . So impartiality and symmetry . . . human universalityrather than cultural specificity, is the basic message(1998:17).

Humans became integrated into the Wests evolvingmodernist worldview from the sixteenth century for-ward in this naturalized, acultural, individualistic form.The tradition of philosophic liberalism, explainsWhite (1986:1373), views society as comprised of a setof atomistic individuals . . . who are related to one an-other through contractual relations and through the op-eration of the State. In liberal theory this is how peoplenaturally and universally are; the apparent deviationsencountered around the world can only reflect error, re-tardation, blind custom, or irrational superstition (cf.Bennett 1987, Clausen 1996, as sketched above). The justpolity must protect this individualistic nature, and that,of course, is only the Western liberal polity (cf. Rawls1971).13 Gellner sums up a late expression of the liberalview in Wittgensteins Tractatus: There is no such thingas culture (1998:68). (The famous transition to thelater Wittgenstein arguably centers on the philoso-phers conversion to a culturalist perspective.)

There simply is no place for culture, no way to thinkit in current anthropological senses, in modernist viewsof humankind. Culture theory displaces or relativizesthis notion of the singular, rational, self-interestedman whose selfhood is given outside of tradition andcommunity, who owes nothing to society for his identity,and whose social wants reflect only these principles(Macpherson 1962; cf. Dumont 1986; Singer 1996:31416). At base, then, underneath all the issues of value,ideology, and social order that grab attention in the cul-

13. It is, however, not hard to see how liberal concepts of justicesince Hobbes (individualistic, universalist) have been in bed withconcentrated economic and state poweralbeit, after Hobbes, per-haps with embarrassment. For the moderns, says Dumont (1986:73), . . . natural law . . . does not involve social beings but indi-viduals, i.e., men each of whom is self-sufficient, as made in theimage of God and as the repository of reason. The state thus be-comes a union of individuals, in obedience to the dictates of Nat-ural Law, to form a society armed with supreme power. As Trouil-lot (1991:3132) puts it, order had become universal, absolute.. . . The symbolic process through which the West created itselfthus involved the universal legitimacy of powerand order became,in that process, the answer to the question of legitimacy (cf. Elvin1986; Horwitz 1992; Shapin and Schaffer 1985: chaps. 3 and 4; Toul-min 1990).

ture wars, of which the question of human rights isamong the thorniest (e.g., Turner and Nagengast 1997,Wilson 1997), what we have is a movement within sci-encethe displacement of one theory by another.14 Thepeculiar awkwardness here is that the displaced theoryunderwrites the hegemonic social order of the modernWest. Horwitz (1992:viiviii, 36), for instance, notesculture as one factor driving a deep crisis, a trans-formation in American law. Anthropology, says Geertz,is responsible for a widespread disturbance of the gen-eral intellectual peace in the Western world (1984:264;see also Geertz 1995:128). Thus, for liberals, and pre-suming immanence, culture theory may seem to have,as Kuper (1999:237) puts it, unattractive . . . even re-pugnant social implications (cf. Eller 1997).

Culture theory, however, repositions rather thanwholly refutes liberal theory. Once again there are nat-ural science analogues. Although the formal part of Ein-steins theory, explains David Layzer, differs pro-foundly from the formal part of Newtons theory, itnevertheless contains it as a limiting case, approxi-mately valid under specific conditions. . . . These re-marks apply to other physical theoriesand, indeed, tothe whole tightly interwoven theoretical fabric of naturalscience (2000:12). Indeed, the same principle extendsbeyond physical science to the increasingly interwoventheoretical fabric of science generally. In much the sameway, synthetic evolutionary theory incorporates Dar-wins theory of natural selection. Displacing liberal the-ory as a universal account of human order, culture theorysimilarly swallows it whole as a limiting instance.15

Like all analogies, these are not perfect, merely useful,but they do illustrate clear and significant parallels be-tween the rise of culture theory in its domain and therise of theory in other domains of science.

The second foundational idea that culture theory, withother developments, displaces is that of unitary, univer-sal science based on early physics. The monadic humanbeing of liberal theory, we have seen, is the creature ofthis particular view of scienceof efforts to frame thetasks of understanding and governing human beingswithin the persistently compelling view of science ex-emplified in Galileo and Newton. The machine meta-phor dominated the early modern mind, explain Bestand Kellner (1997:200), such that not only the physicaluniverse but also society, animals, and even human be-

14. Although the issues are somewhat differently aligned, one findsclear parallels in the antecedent debate over evolution. The vividand popular features of the anti-Darwinian row tended to leave theimpression that the issue was between science . . . and theology.. . . Such was not the casethe issue lay primarily within scienceitself . . . (Deely and Nogar 1973:256; cf. Fujimura 1998).15. This latter comparison can profitably be taken further. Bothpure Darwinian theory and liberal theory rest on assumptions ofindividuals as primary causal agents of order; indeed, Darwinstudied Adam Smith as he stitched together his theory of naturalselection in 1838 (Gould 2002:59596; see also Lachapelle 2000:331). Both Darwins and Smiths theories have subsequently beenrepositioned as universal accounts by theories that postulate or-dering principles at more inclusive system levels (see e.g., Hey-lighen 1999:2728).



ings were seen as different kinds of machines. . . . Themodern world thus became the first civilization to beorganized around mechanistic science. . . .16

A social order premised on a machine metaphor pre-sumed to be universal and God-givenit is not culturetheory alone that displaces this notion. Even as it becamebroadly established, the ideal of universal or reductionistscience began to unravel within science. Culture theorycontributes importantly, if lately, to this broader devel-opment. Over the past couple of centuries or so the con-cept of science irresistibly evolved from one modeled onearly physical theory to pluralist conceptions encom-passing findings from biology, sociology, and, most re-cently and even more disturbingly, anthropology. Moreimmediately, after the mid-twentieth century a new phi-losophy of science persuasively challenged the reigningpositivism (Hanson 1965 [1958], Kuhn 1962, Polanyi1964 [1958], Toulmin 1960; cf. McNeill 1998). Integrat-ing ideas from, among others, gestalt psychology and,prominently, culture theory, this work developed post-positivist views of science. At about the same time gen-eral systems theory opened up new ways of looking atorganization that, rather than emphasizing the reductive,mechanistic, flattened perspective of early Enlighten-ment science, put information in place of mechanicalforces as the organizing principle for complex, hierar-chically organized entities (Aberle 1987, Bateson 1972,Bertalanffy 1968, Heylighen 1999, Levy 1952, Pattee1973, Simon 1969).

Franz Boas (originally trained as a physicist and ge-ographer) did the most to give form to the idea of cultureand cultures in American anthropology in the early years(see, e.g., Briggs 2002, Lewis 2001, Stocking 1968). Suc-cessive generations of American anthropologists devel-oped and contested the culture concept until, by roughlythe same time as the other developments being noted,culture had become an established and influential forcein the academy and in public life generally. Moving be-yond earlier concerns focused on artifacts and config-urations, evolution and distribution, culture theory inthis era framed cultures as dynamic systems of symbolsthat become manifest in distinctive cosmologies, socialorderings, (cultural) behaviors, and material forms. Thisnew synthetic theory of culture (bringing together itsoriginal meaning as, roughly, way of life with the newinsights into the importance of symboling as an orderingprinciple) became integrated within and importantly in-fluenced other late-mid-century developments, shapingthe conceptual space in which science itself is becoming

16. Similarly: Nineteenth-century social theory sought to find gen-eral laws of society modeled on the natural sciences . . . (Horwitz1992:vii); see also, for example, Boggs (2002), Gordon (1991:7073),and Rapaczynski (1987:616). Dumont traces elements of thismodern turn of mind back to William of Occam in the first halfof the fourteenth century (1986:6364).

better understood (see, e.g., Aberle 1987, Latour 1993,Rabinow 1996).17

A strong moral element, however, buttresses the idealof unitary science no less than that of universal individ-ualism, based in part on the same fearindeed, in somesense, the experiencethat a diversity of knowledgeforms inscribed in different groups results in anarchy andwar (see Latour 1993, Shapin and Schaffer 1985, Toulmin1990; cf. Bennett 1987). Culture enshrines as theory justthat concept of an essentially pluralized humankind thatliberal theorists see as dangerously immoral and vali-dates an expanded and, from universalist perspectives, adisorienting view of science. As theory, culture chal-lenges key premises of the overarching worldview inwhich liberal individualism and unitary science are com-plementary visions. Thus, no less than culture theorysdecentering of liberal individualism, its contributions tothe recent pluralizing movement within science alsomeet resistance.

In sum, culture theory emerged through systematicstudy of human societies around the globe, includingWestern society. Anthropology, Colson (1976:263) re-minds us, was never primarily a study of exotic otherpeoples. It was about all of us. . . . Anthropology,affirms Goodenough (2002:435), covers virtually all fac-ets of human existence and human history from its verybeginnings. Culture theory is a general theory of thehuman order, as is liberal theory. The domain of each isinclusive of and bounded by the order(s) of human col-lective existence; they are alternative theories of thesame universe, the same phenomena. They are thus, onone level, ineluctably contending theories. A major ad-vance in the progressive scientific understanding of ourworld and ourselves as human beings within it, culturetheory refutes liberal theory as a universal theory, con-taining and repositioning it as a limiting instance.18

the liberal reaction against culture

American anthropologys founding idea, displacing lib-eral theory, precipitated a vertiginous conceptual shiftfrom modernist social thought. But why, then, does lib-eral theory remain so patently present, so often deter-minative, if its scientific foundations have indeed beenswept away by the very movements of science itself?

17. For just one example, Kuhns (1962) famous notion of theoryas paradigm, perhaps the most influential work of the new phi-losophy of science, in part extends culture-theoretical insights tothe workings of science: Paradigms, like cultures, are self-validatingsymbol systems, shape the perceptions and worldviews of thosewho inhabit them, and are passed down intergenerationally. Ac-cording to Stocking (1992:344), Kuhns argument seemed much inthe tradition of American cultural anthropology.18. See, for example, Singer (1996:31415): Indeed, the whole ofthe modern social sciences suggests, in one form or another, thatsociety precedes the individual. . . . The contractual position [i.e.,liberal theory] cedes the empirical basis of the culturalist critique.. . . As a result, the [social] contract loses all relation to the de-veloping social sciences, but remains significant as a sort of tech-nical fable required to uphold . . . the normative dimensions of[Western liberal] political life.



Why does it not go quietly to rest in the historical dust-bin of failed theories rather than continue to spark debateand reaction?

The first answer is that liberal theory persists becausehegemonic Western institutions embody it; their dailypractices continuously legitimate and renew it. Sandelsays it concisely: Our practices and institutions are em-bodiments of theory (1984:81). Within the Westernworld liberalism became much more than an idea. West-ern modernity created, legitimated, and naturalized itselfon conceptual foundations of which evolving liberal the-ory has become the dominant expression. Over the pastfour centuries or so, institutions, revolutions, constitu-tions, nations, and an expansive and rapidly globalizingeconomic order have been launched or configured in itsname. With the complex of ideas of science and naturein which it evolved, liberal theory entered definitivelyinto the cultures and worldviews of modern Western Eu-rope and America. We need not choose betweentraditions and liberalism, says Fleischacker (1998:xixii). Our liberalism is itself deeply rooted in tradi-tion. Modernist practices, values, and beliefs expressand constitute the psyches of those through whose livesthese cultural forms are maintained. It is, of course, notuniversal invariant human nature but the cultural flex-ibility of the human system, invisible in universalist lib-eral theory, that makes the liberal tradition itselfpossible.

By the same token, then, the second answer is thatculture sparks reaction because, in the liberal polity, cul-tures scientific theoretical challenge to liberal theorycan only be deeply troubling. In situating and relativizingWestern modernity, culture makes questionable key ten-ets that many see as necessary to support it. A centralproject of modern liberal, individualist society, eman-cipation from tradition through reason, for instance, isnow regularly challenged (MacIntyre 1988:335; cf. Flei-schacker 1998:22); the legitimating rationales of its col-onizing ventures (including the settling of the NewWorld) lose credibility; a whole network of valued rightspremised on individualism may seem threatened. Com-mensurately, culture sparks reactionsfrom studied ne-glect to direct critique, exquisitely reasoned or wildlyemotionalthat currently crosscut many sectors of U.S.public life (see, e.g., Clausen 1996, Clifton 1990, Mi-chaels 1995; cf. Boggs 2002, Fischer 1999, Handler 1997).This reaction might (fairly, if somewhat clumsily andperhaps provocatively) be termed a backlash againstculture.

As early as 1976 Sahlins explored cultures difficultiesin late-twentieth-century anthropology in relation to lib-eral social theory (pp. 9596):

The general idea of social life here advanced [inutilitarian, i.e., liberal, social theory] is the partic-ular behavior of the parties in the marketplace. . . .Social science elevates to a statement of theoreticalprinciple what bourgeois society puts out as an oper-ative ideology. Culture is then threatened with a ne-

glect in anthropology that is matched only by theconsciousness of it in society.

Within anthropology, says Yengoyan similarly, thepeculiar combination of a positivistic scientism com-bined with a behaviorism that stresses the individual hasvirtually bankrupted the concept of culture as an ex-planatory framework (1986:368, 371). In a related veinHandler finds that anthropologists today do very littleculture theory; rather, like their colleagues in culturalstudies, they theorize race/class/gender, power, the state,the body, the gaze, hegemony, resistance, and so on(1997:77; cf. Howell 1997). Symptomatic of the unevenconceptual shift to culture theory, laments like thesevariously reflect (taking liberties with James Cliffordsphrase) the predicament of culture in a liberal polity.

The predicament, in a nutshell, is that we live uncom-fortably with two intersecting caesurae: first, the persis-tent disjunction between liberal and cultural theories ascontending paradigms of social order and, second (sinceculture now prevails as theory while the polity remainslargely governed by liberal principles), between thoughtand practice in public life.19 Because these intersectingdisjunctions implicate not just abstract ideas but sociallife, selves, cherished values, and entrenched institu-tions, they hold more than the tension of cognitive dis-sonance and are less easily resolved. The resultingspace is so difficult precisely because the intersectionof these disjunctions defines an area at once contestedand lacking a common ground of contestation: Even asculture theory prevails, liberalism maintains itself aspraxis and as a field of value that many who appreciateits positive aspects are rightfully unwilling to relinquish.Anthropology as both discipline and profession remainssubject to this conundrum.

Of necessity ceding liberal theorys empirical claims,liberal commentators cannot oppose culture theory ontheoretical grounds. Alternatively, the liberal reactionopposes culture, then, by moving debate into territorythat it controlsin significant part by managing or ap-propriating the meanings of key terms. Control of thegrounds of debate consists in the management of mean-ings. Liberal commentators therefore appropriate, aug-ment, or shape intellectual movements in which keyterms assume sympathetic meanings. Thus, culture, wehave seen, becomes not scientific theory but an identi-tarian device at the hands of its critics. Even the moregeneral term theory similarly shifts its locus. Post-modernism (itself a problematic if evocative term), ex-plains Scott, is distinctively characterized by its affili-ation with theory (1992:374), but this is not scientifictheory: By theory . . . is meant that diverse combi-nation of textual or interpretive (or reading) strategiesamong them, deconstruction, feminism, genealogy, psy-choanalysis, post-marxismthat . . . initiated a chal-lenge to the protocols of a general hermeneutics. Re-

19. Boggs (2002, n.d.) explores these intersecting gaps in recent pub-lic events and legal cases that illustrate the paradigmatic contestbetween liberal theory and culture theory and the backlash againstculture in U.S. Indian law and policy.



ducing culture to a mere generalizing idea, shifting themeaning of theory itself from its usual meaning inempirical science to interpretive strategies associatedwith social movements, politicizes both culture andtheory, and thus the ground of debate becomes notempirical theory but politics. Hirschkop (1997:132)views this politicization as a consequence of an attackwhich he sees as emanating from cultural studiesonthe very epistemology of science itself: Having dis-missed out of hand the possibility of a critique based onthe principle that some knowledges are better than oth-ers, [the critics] have to make their stand on far moredangerous groundthe principle that some knowledgemakes better politics than others.

But more lies behind this argument that some knowl-edge makes better (or worse) politicswhich argumentis implicitly premised on the notion that forms of knowl-edge have immanent social propertiesthan an effort bya few postmodernist critics to escape from a logical cor-ner into which they have painted themselves. Goinghand-in-hand with the persistent glossing of culture asa classificatory device, it is a cornerstone of the currentcritique of culture theory and of the backlash againstculture generally. The politicization of both culture andtheory effectively neutralizes in a very direct way cul-tures perceived challenge, as theory, to liberalist estab-lishments or principles. This is not to say that culturalstudies or all critiques of culture theory or postmodern-ism (whatever one takes it to be) immanently embodyrightist strains or necessarily serve the purposes ofliberalist reaction. To argue so would be to rehearse yetagain the presumption of immanence in knowledge thatI am criticizing. But neither should we be so naive as toignore the broad liberalist reaction against anthropolog-ical culture or its appropriation of the critique of cultureand of various terms in which the critique is advanced.

But how, exactly, does politicizing culture theory orany other knowledge form serve as a liberalist stratagem?While liberal theory cedes empirical and theoreticalground to culture, perceptive students of the liberal ordernote that as political praxis liberalism thrives on publiccontestations that pit interest and identity groupsagainst each other (e.g., MacIntyre 1988; Michelman1988; Sandel 1982, 1984; cf. Wallerstein 197480:80). Lib-eral theory underwrites or readily warrants what Kem-mis (1990) calls a politics of radical disengagement.The liberal order predicates contests between interestgroups that revolve around just such issues as race/class/gender, power, the state, the body (Handler 1997:77). Its strength is not to suppress difference or compeluniformity or conformance; rather, it proliferates groupsand interests in endlessly adversarial interaction whileimposing hegemonic (in Gramscis sense) regimesuni-versal procedural frameworkswithin which the result-ing conflict is by and large safely managed. Administer-ing social controversy procedurally, liberal praxisconverts values to preferences (Sunstein 1990), appro-priates or contests empirical findings, points of estab-lished social theory, and commitments to basic princi-ples as self-interested points of view, and resolves

substantive issues by procedural mechanisms (see Boggs2002, n.d.). It is, then, just by diverting public and dis-ciplinary discourse away from the dangerous, hard, rockyshoals of current empirical theory and into the turbulent,endlessly shifting and depthless waters of interest-groupdebate that the current attacks on culture theory, shift-ing the grounds of debate, assimilate cultures challengeto the liberal order as an argument within that order,effectively neutralizing it.20

In other words, overtly politicizing culture theory byreducing it from theory to merely a currently fashionableway to classify people, to an identitarian device, domes-ticates and trivializes its political effect. Culture theoryschallenges to liberal theory and to positivist science fol-low from what it is as theoryfrom the ontologicalclaims it makes and empirically supports. Viewed as the-ory in the most pristinely scientific sense, it refutes lib-eral theory. Presuming immanence in knowledge divertsand domesticates this foundational challenge. It is astheory that culture, in its present context, has deeperand more integral political implications and carries animmense political chargeand this in substantial partis why anthropologys situation as a social science is socomplex.

Conclusion

American anthropology developed within and as an in-stitution of a modern Western liberal polity. Elaboratingits Boasian roots, its core mission arguably remains theempirically grounded holistic study of humankind. Thepainstaking development through the twentieth centuryof its flagship concept, culture theory, carries forwardthis mission. Culture theory also, as it happens, chal-lenges key conceptual underpinnings of the historicallysituated local polity within which anthropology as bothdiscipline and profession subsists. Challenge and paradoxare built into this circumstance and largely account forour current travails. Complicating things further, evenas anthropologys mission challenges liberal ontology italso advances and realizes important values and practicesnourished in liberal society. We can appeal to these val-ues, as well as to a remarkable corpus of disciplinaryknowledge, to rebut the current liberalist critique of cul-ture, expose the presumption of immanence in knowl-edge, and reclaim culture as theory, but pursuit of thisagenda must remain nuanced and precise.

Disputing foundational precepts on which much ofWestern modernity has been constructed, culture theorynot surprisingly encounters resistance, even reaction. Inlegal arguments, public debate, administrative hearings,

20. This effect nicely exemplifies MacIntyres perceptive observa-tion that liberalism generally exhibits an uncanny ability to refor-mulate challenges to its basic premises as debates within it. Lib-eralism, he explains, is often successful in preempting the debateby reformulating quarrels and conflicts with liberalism, so that theyappear to have become debates within liberalism, while its fun-damental tenets remain unchallenged (1988:392). Conversely, cul-ture theory remains recalcitrant in its challenge to liberal premises.



and other venues including anthropology itself, culturesscientific credentials are put at issue. Culture theory andcultural claims by minorities are said to represent nei-ther science nor, as the case may be, genuine culturaldifference but rather self-interested political maneuver-ing, mere inventions. What makes the current liberalistcritique of culture wrong is not, obviously, that it crit-icizes culture; critiqueor, as Popper memorably put it,conjecture and refutationis integrally part of the en-gine of science. What makes it wrong is that it rein-scribes science fully as politicsalthough doing so, in-terestingly, violates liberal principles: Putting politicsin the driving seat of science makes both for bad science(the historical record speaks for itself) and for bad poli-tics (Hirschkop 1997:132). If the critique of culture the-ory fails, it fails on this account, not because it is critiqueor because it is liberalist.

At the same time, neither can we today too sharplydemarcate science from society or otherwise retreatinto crumbling ivy-covered positivisms of the past. Noris it sufficient merely to advance a countercritique ofliberal theory or of modernity without paying heed tolegitimate concerns over some contemporary uses of cul-ture theory and to concerns for core liberal values suchas personal freedoms and human rights that many peoplecare deeply about.

In one sense, the presumption of immanence is easilydisposed ofit needs only to be exposed. In a nutshell,its two most obvious failings are these: (1) Attributingimmanent qualities to knowledge implicitly naturalizesthe social/cultural context in which it is deployedhere,that of Western culture. (2) Doing so overlooks humanagency within that context, forgetting that persons ap-propriate and use a given form of knowledge for diverseends in particular social and cultural contexts. Rejectingimmanence, then, one avoids claiming that culture the-ory is essentializing, for example, or that it inevita-bly enforces hierarchic separations or is totalizing orprevents diachronic or contextual analysis or is so-cially ominous, and so on. Such descriptors properlyrefer not to culture theory but to how particular interestsappropriate, deploy, or distort it within actual contextsto advance the effects they want or impede those theyresist. The notion that culture has immanent social prop-erties, reinscribing culture as politics, denies or elidesthe key distinction between theory and the social or po-litical uses that are made of it. It is just this elision thatmisdirects socially or ethically concerned critique di-rectly toward culture theory itself.

But if the notion that forms of knowledge have im-manent social qualities fails, it would be equally mis-taken to deny that one may draw from a social theoryimplications for a given social order or to claim thatthese are unrelated to what the theory says about thephenomena to which it refers. The issue is not whetherculture theory does or should enter the public arenathat it does so is a given. The issue, rather, is how andby whom it is framed and positioned as it enters legal,political, or administrative discourse. Politicizing cul-ture effectively shifts control of this valuable intellectual

property from anthropology to dominant liberal insti-tutions. Conversely, distinguishing culture theory fromits uses facilitates shifting at least some of the hard-wonskepticism now directed toward culture theory to theliberal institutions and contexts in which culturalknowledge is deployedpossibly an uncomfortable shiftfor some neoliberalists.

Insisting on culture as theory, however, while not de-nying it political import, does imply a degree of sepa-ration between science and politics, and I close with afinal word on this observation as it relates to anthro-pologys predicament in the liberal polity. The above mayread as a counterattack on liberalism, but that would bea misunderstanding. If I find liberalism wanting as gen-eral theory, it must still be accommodated as a limitedinstance, albeit one of great importance; liberal praxisfalls well within the range of human cultural possibility.If misuse of the culture concept cannot discredit culturetheory, neither does cultures displacement of liberal the-ory necessarily discredit all liberal practice. Nor can ex-cesses committed under liberalisms banner be construedas inevitable consequences of liberal beliefs.

We are social beings and cultural beings, observes Col-son (1974), and must identify (by way of culture) someform or other of social order within which to interact.Looking at available options, doctrines nurtured undertraditional liberal premises have much to recommendthem (Walzer 1984). Anthropology, let us not forget,arose and flourished within liberal polities.

Michael Walzer characterizes liberalism as defined bythe political art of separationthe art of providingwithin a polity protected spheres of activities . . . pro-tected space within which meaningful choices can bemade (1984:319). An important protected space is thatof science, and it is just this limited separation that thepresumption of immanence, certain strains of what iscalled postmodernism, and elements of current attackson culture noted above elide. Attacking culture as cur-rent empirical theory that was developed under the lib-eral umbrella, critics abandon key traditional liberalprinciples. This, it seems to me, is in part what Haber-mas is arguing. We see here, again, the topography of thecounter-Enlightenment, the rage against reason, notedabove: Liberal freedoms are, all of them, unreal (p.319). But this view, Walzer counters, doesnt connectin any plausible way with the actual experience of con-temporary politics; it has a quality of abstraction andtheoretical willfulness. No one who has lived in an il-liberal state is going to accept this devaluation of therange of liberal freedoms. The achievement of liberalismis real even if it is incomplete (pp. 31920).

If the proper defense of culture is as theory, then theproper defense of liberalism is in terms of enlightenedpractices nurtured under liberalist doctrines. Defendingculture as theory and anthropologys disciplinary integ-rity as social science requires and in turn supports theliberal practice of separation: if culture threatens liberalontology, defending it supports liberal praxis.

There is no protection immanently within any formof knowledgeand this includes the postmodernist in-



credulity towards metanarratives (Lyotard 1984 [1979]:xxiv), blanket skepticism of any generalizing knowl-edgeagainst its political appropriation and use. Socialscientists today have no good alternatives to defendingthe integrity of their science within the liberal polity,while forcefully engaging the political implications oftheir disciplinary knowledge.

Comments

christoph brumannInstitut fur Volkerkunde, Universitat zu Koln, 50923Koln, Germany ([email protected]).14 xi 03

Although curious as to why exactly Abu-Lughod is leftand Kuper, Spiro, and DAndrade are right, I will con-centrate on my major point of contention. The real coun-terconcept/phenomenon to culture is not the free, sov-ereign individual; it is biological heredityrace andgenes. This is true in a historical sense: Boas and studentspopularized the concept of culture to overcome scientificracism, not liberal theory. More important, however, itis true in an evolutionary sense: the empirical reality ofculture arose among humans, their ancestors, and ar-guably some primates because it had a crucial adaptiveadvantage over genes. With culture, successful individ-ual innovationsfairly widespread in the animal king-domno longer perish with the innovative individual orhave to wait for genetic embedding and biological repro-duction before they can spread. Instead, other individualsadopt them quickly. Every hedgehog that still curls upwhen car lights approach attests to the disadvantages ofnot having culture, given that there are hedgehogs thatrun for their lives instead. The advantage of culture, so-cial transmission, does not consist in its reliability: herethere is no way to beat genetic transmission. Ratherand this is often overlookedit lies in what is beingtransmitted, namely, innovations. Every cultural featurestarts out as an individual innovation, and thereforethose who define culture as the set of effects of inno-vations (Menge der Effekte von Innovationen [Ru-dolph and Tschohl 1977:111]) have a point. Much of thetime, culture makes us think, feel, and act like others,but if this were all then genes would have sufficed. It isonly because culture is sufficiently indeterminate to al-low us to be unlike others at times but then allows othersto become like us in the next step that it could ever havecome into being. Once this is acknowledged, the polaritybetween liberal theory and the concept of culture (cul-ture theory) evaporates: were human individuals com-pletely different from the way liberal theory imaginesthem, culture could not exist. Yet humans are innovativeand unwilling to follow the beaten path all the timequalities that are the hallmark of the individual accord-ing to liberal thought. Culture, then, is liberalismembodied.

Culture theory and liberal theory are contradictoryonly if culture is taken to entail the enshrinement ofethnicity or collective identity (often confounded withculture but distinct [see Brumann 1999:S1112]) or if thecomplete determination of the individual by culture isassumed. When an entire society is believed to think,feel, and act Dionysian or Apollonian all the time, thereis indeed no place for the freely choosing individual. Ex-aggerating the importance of culture was perhaps un-derstandable, given the political agenda of Boas, Bene-dict, and his other students, and it may be a more generalprofessional failing of anthropologists, just as economiststend to exaggerate the importance of the economy. An-thropologists have always been aware of the invariablyand inevitably differential distribution of culture, how-ever, even if ethnographic practice has fallen short ofprogrammatic clear-sightedness (Brumann 1999:S36).Current approaches such as Bourdieus habitus theoryalso give the individual its due.

Every human being is an individual with unique fea-tures, and every human being, by belonging to Homosapiens sapiens, is like all others in some respects. Theformer can be taken to justify seeing ourselves as at-omistic monads; the latter can be taken to justify search-ing for and striving to realize things that may be goodfor all of us, such as basic human rights, democracy, orminimum standards of living. In between the individualand the universal sits culture, the sharing of sociallytransmitted symbols andat least according to mostAmerican anthropological textbookandencyclopediadef-initions (Brumann 2002)patterns of behavior withingroups of people. Anthropologists should engage in re-searching (rather than writing) against culture, mean-ing that the cultural level should be resorted to for ex-planation only when individual specifics and panhumancommonalities fail us (1999:S23). The cultural level goesa long way toward explaining what we do, particularlythe routine parts. Our individual and universal features,however, preclude any cultural determination, and,given the way culture emerged, there can be no suchthing. Therefore, accepting culture does not force us toforgo the concept of personal responsibility; the individ-ual always has a choice, however constrained. Nor doesit force us to give culture sanctity, since culture onlygoes so far among humans, changes all the time, and istherefore a flimsy foundation for denouncing the idea ofhuman rights as an imposition of Western culture orgaining recognition for indigenous claims. In public dis-course and occasionally in anthropology, culture is es-sentialized, reified, and overhomogenized. A momentsthought about what it actually is and how it has comeinto being, however, shows that this is because thelargely unconscious borrowing of intellectual modelsfrom other disciplines (such as the biological concept ofspecies) clouds peoples reasoning. It is here that culture,the liberalist concept, should be spread.



michael herzfeldDepartment of Anthropology, Harvard University,Peabody Museum, 11 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA02138, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 1 xii 03

The position that Boggs has laid out, demanding scien-tific (but not scientistic) and theoretical status for theconcept of culture, falls within the epistemological rangethat I identify as the valuable militant middle groundof anthropological theory (Herzfeld 1997b:25, 172).Strongly resistant to the extremes of both positivism andpostmodernism in their most rejectionist modes, his po-sition ultimately rests on the concept of agency and thedemand that we recognize the political deployment ofculture theory without taking this as a reason for eitherrejecting it out of hand or uncritically embracing it.

The anti-intellectualism of the neoliberal spaces inwhich we live (and this would in any case be less trueof virtually everywhere outside the English-speakingworld) has nevertheless not actually had the effect ofreducing us to asking only how the culture concept ispolitically employed. That is always a pertinent ethno-graphic question, and it directly concerns agency. Butanthropologists can agree to adopt a political positionthat combines insistence on critical inquiry (this a prod-uct of the liberal tradition, as Boggs rightly and decon-structively calls it) with a recognition that the ethnog-raphers agency also calls for a degree of moralaccountability. By this I do not mean the sort of auditingto which the various para-academic bureaucracies nowthreaten to reduce our range of action (see Strathern2000) but a deliberately more uncomfortable self-posi-tioning in which we must not only accept a measure ofresponsibility for the consequences of our interventionsbut alsoand this is the difficult partfor deciding (andnever ceasing to decide) what for us and for our inform-ants is in fact an appropriate ethical position to take.The uncertainty of such a perspective may render an-thropology suspect in the age of sound bites. But mo-dernity is not so much about the suppression of risk asabout its control (Malaby 2002); what we do is not un-principled cliffhanging or infinite regress but a seriousattempt, which Boggss essay exemplifies, to secure somespace for mediation across the increasingly evident ten-sions that he identifies in the liberal worldview.

Such resistance to closure accords with Boggss obser-vation that if culture threatens liberal ontology, de-fending it supports liberal praxis. That observation alsosustains the refusal to reduce knowledge to pure (that is,inert) classification. Exponents of the high-modernistproject (but this is not the only modernism in town) aimat simplicityScotts (1998) legibility. They thus un-derwrite the prevailing anti-intellectualism: dumbingdown is par

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8-3 BOGGS, James the Culture Concept as Theory in Context