A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries

A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural BoundariesAuthor(s): Ira BashkowReviewed work(s):Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 443-458Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3567610 .

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IRA BASHKOW

A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries

ABSTRACT For the past 30 years, anthropology's critics have repeatedly questioned the notion of "cultural boundaries," arguing that concepts of culture inappropriately posit stable and bounded "islands" of cultural distinctiveness in an ever-changing world of transnational cultural "flows." This issue remains an Achilles' heel-or at least a recurring inflamed tendon-of anthropology. However, in the conception of boundaries, we still have much to learn from Boasian anthropologists, who conceived of boundaries not as barriers to outside influence or to historical change, but as cultural distinctions that were irreducibly plural, perspectival, and permeable. In this article, I retheorize and extend the Boasians' open concept of cultural boundaries, emphasizing how people's own ideas of "the

foreign"-and the "own" versus the "other" distinction-give us a way out of the old conundrum in which the boundedness of culture, as conceived in spatial terms, seems to contradict the open-ended nature of cultural experience. [Keywords: boundaries, culture concept, Boasian anthropology, history of anthropology]

N THIS ARTICLE, I develop the outlines of a productive conception of "cultural boundaries" inspired by the an-

thropology of Franz Boas and his students. Cultural boundaries have been a leading target of anthropological criticism for the last 30 years. In the 1970s, for example, Eric Wolf complained that cultures were too often conceptualized as "bounded objects.., .like so many hard and round billiard balls" (Wolf 1972:6, 14). And still today the problem of the. boundedness of culture is repeatedly raised in the field's vanguard literature. A well-known example is the 1997 vol- ume by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson that seeks to un- settle what is claimed to be a pervasive fiction that cultures are territorially located and bounded. The representation of cultures as discrete geographical entities has been criticized for aligning anthropology with the colonial ideology of "indirect rule," as well as with the objectifications of culture promoted by ethnic separatism and nationalism (Asad 1973; Handler 1988; Leclerc 1972). This idea has also been criticized as a prop to inequality and domination, which authenticates-as does the concept of "race"-dominant groups' exclusion of those marked as "other" (Abu-Lughod 1991:142-143; Kahn 1989). Underlying all such critiques of the pernicious functions served by cultural boundaries is the commonly shared understanding that all boundaries are constructed and to some degree artificial. From this perspective, critiques of the idea of bounded cultures are the counterpart of critiques of the idea that cultures can be abstracted from history. Whereas critiques of ahistorical culture focus on the neglect of processes and relation-

ships that extend across time, critiques of bounded culture focus on the neglect of processes and relationships that extend across space. But while the critiques of ahistorical culture have led to important syntheses between historical and anthropological methods, there has been no com- parable resolution in the case of the critiques of cultural boundaries.

In part, this longstanding theoretical impasse over cultural boundaries reflects the recognition-arising around the same time in political economy, philosophy, and anthropology-that the commonsense notion of definite, stable, and natural boundaries is problematic. Instead of seeing cultures as naturally bounded objects that exist in the world for us to discover, more recent scholarship has appreciated that cultural boundaries are constructs created in large part through our own processes of representation- for example, in ethnographic monographs (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Handler 1988; Manganaro 2002; Marcus 1998; Moore 1999; Wagner 1975). This, in turn, has led to a general reconfiguration of our intellectual values. Whereas boundaries were previously taken for granted as useful natural objects to be validated by scientific research, they are now valued primarily for the op- portunity they provide to destabilize and deconstruct hege- monic presuppositions by exposing the cultural work that goes into representing them as natural or authoritative. Boundaries also can be valued in contemporary discourse as the background against which individuals' creative trans- gressions and positively valued, mercurial, hybrid identities

American Anthropologist, Vol. 106, Issue 3, pp. 443-458, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. ? 2004 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.



444 American Anthropologist * Vol. 106, No. 3 * September 2004

can be constructed. In our desire to stress fluidity and the free appropriation of identity categories, the very notion of boundaries has become emblematic of forms of difference that are overly rigid, essentialist, and imposed: merely arbitrary divisions, unasked-for legacies from the past.1

The theoretical impasse over cultural boundaries also reflects the precedence given in discussions of globalization to transnational connections and their novel formations. It is not that scholars have been unmindful of globalization's darker, divisive aspects: the entrenchment of ethnic conflicts, the mass mediation of political and religious ex- tremisms, the enlarged reach of state terror, the global traffic in arms, and the widening inequalities dividing north from south, rich from poor. However, in theorizing what is new and distinctive about the condition of contemporary globalization, scholars in anthropology and cultural studies have tended to stress the breaching of national boundaries by migration, mass communication, and trade, suggesting the emergence of new forms of identity, economy, and community that ostensibly mark a break with the old modernist order organized in terms of nation-states. Scholars typically illustrate the increasing interconnectedness of the world using examples like the dissemination of cultural commodities in cosmopolitan media like world music CDs and TV shows. At the same time, nationalism is often treated as old news, an ineradicable throwback to a problematic primor- dialism that itself manifests outmoded theoretical concepts of bounded culture. For example, when Arjun Appadurai writes that recent critiques have "done much to free us of the shackles of highly localized, boundary-oriented, holis- tic, primordialist images of cultural form and substance," he is tarring previous anthropologists and Sikh secession- ists with the same brush, since both appear guilty of naturalizing the "boundary of a difference" to "articulate group identity" (Appadurai 1996:13, 15, 46).

But there is something altogether remarkable about the staying power of the anthropological critique of bounded culture. For one thing, few current ethnographies are guilty of positing inappropriately bounded cultural "islands." In- deed, most ethnographic studies today address the translocal connections that are entailed by neocolonial economic structures, regional exchange systems, diasporic communities, immigration, borderlands, mass media, evangelism, tourism, environmental activism, cyberspace, and so on. Moreover, as Robert Brightman (1995:520) has pointed out, critics have never made a clear case for why such translocal complexities should, in themselves, be considered an argument for repudiating the concept of cultural boundaries. In fact, boundaries are continually being asserted everywhere by the people we study, even-and, perhaps, especially- in translocal situations, and they do not serve only il- liberal functions like the reinforcement of prejudice and the curtailment of freedom. Boundaries also serve expres- sive, contrastive, constructive functions in culture. They are meaningful even where they are arbitrary, socially con- sequential even where they are crossed. And boundaries remain necessary to our thinking and writing, even our

writing about hybridity. But because recent scholarship has failed to formulate a specifically anthropological concept of boundaries that is distinct from the ethnic nationalist and common-sense naturalized ideas that are so vulnerable to critique, the problem of boundaries remains an Achilles' heel-or at least a recurring inflamed tendon-of the discipline.

THE RELEVANCE OF BOASIAN ANTHROPOLOGY Given this recurring inflammation, I believe it is time for anthropology to revisit the concept of boundaries found in the work of the Boasian cultural anthropologists of the first half of the last century. To embrace the field's intellectual legacy in this way is to stake out a different position toward the past than has been customary in recent anthropological work. Notwithstanding its sustained attack against the metanarrative of progress, postmodern anthropology has tended to emphasize the inadequacies of earlier anthropology while accentuating its own disjuncture from it. In so doing, it covertly perpetuates the very notion of progress that it rightly calls into question. But if we take seriously that the ongoing historical transformation of our discipline in- volves much more than progress (toward what?), we should do more than treat the past as a repository of errors; rather, we should engage with what is worthiest in the genealogy of our ideas.

Boasian cultural anthropology had limitations. For in- stance, the Boasians lacked our current, better understandings of cultural structure and the politics of culture. But they were highly sensitive to cultural hybridities, idiosyncratic identities, and translocal connections-phenomena that are today held to reveal the failure of the concept of "bounded culture" itself. Their awareness of these issues should be no surprise, since many Boasians were first-generation immigrants or early feminist women who were acutely conscious of their own social alienation and marginality (Hegeman 1999:9; cf. Abu-Lughod 1991). In- deed, in reference to languages Boas himself wrote of "hybridization" (Boas 1940[1929]:220), and Alfred Kroeber devoted a section of his anthropology textbook to the topic of "cultural hybridity" (1948[1923]:259). We may feel like we are the first generation to grapple with the complexities of identity, but the Boasians, grappling with them in their time, created a rich ensemble of concepts for characterizing culture, its relation to individual variation, and the ways it is distributed over space and time.

What I offer here, then, is a look back to Boasian anthropology that is neither purely historicist (i.e., seeking to understand past anthropology in its own historical context) nor blindly recuperative (i.e., finding that current ideas have past precedents). Instead, the position I take here en- gages Boasian anthropologists as seminal thinkers, offering a selective retheorization of their work that has implications for current culture theory (see also Darnell 2001), especially given the intense concern in the literature over cultural distinctions in the face of globalization. Specifically, I argue



Bashkow * A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries 445

that the Boasians' concepts of cultural boundaries are superior to those perpetuated in recent critiques because (1) they are more precisely defined and, therefore, are of greater analytical value and (2) they do not create absurd con- tradictions with commonplace phenomena of culture and history.

HOW BOASIAN ANTHROPOLOGISTS UNDERSTOOD CULTURAL BOUNDARIES While the Boasians differed sharply from one another in the positions they took on many questions, they shared three guiding principles in their understandings of cultural boundaries.2

First, it was axiomatic to the Boasians that cultural boundaries were porous and permeable. Boasian anthropologists, whatever their differences, did not conceptualize cultural boundaries as walls or barriers to external influence. The central argument of Boas's critique of 19th- century cultural evolutionism was that similarities between cultures-such as shared mythic themes, artistic motifs, rituals, and ideas-is not evidence that all cultures progress according to the same laws, since the similarities are often "much better explained by the well known facts of diffusion of culture; for archaeology as well as ethnography teach us that intercourse between neigh- boring tribes has always existed and has extended over enormous areas" (Boas 1940[1896]:278). Against the evo- lutionist idea that each culture's development is driven by universal, autonomous processes of change, Boas and his students argued that cultural development is contin- gent on the history of a people's interactions with their neighbors.

Thus, as a principled matter, the Boasians were cen- trally concerned with the diffusion-in today's parlance, the "flows"-of people, objects, images, and ideas between localities (Appadurai 1996). Indeed, to a large extent, their purpose in drawing boundaries around cultures was precisely to gauge the historical traffic across them.3 Many of the doctoral dissertations Boas directed were trait distribution studies which showed how a specific cultural trait-such as the "concept of the guardian spirit" (Benedict 1923)-had diffused across a large region, acquiring varied meanings, forms, and functions within different cultures. No anthropologist since has stressed the importance of diffusion in forming culture as emphatically as Robert Lowie (1921:428), who hyperbolized in his oft-quoted sigh that civilization is a "planless hodgepodge," a "thing of shreds and patches," since it develops not according to a fixed law or design but out of a vast set of contin- gent external influences. In Lowie's strongly antiprimor- dialist view of culture as intrinsically syncretic (Brightman 1995:531), cultures may be distinct from one another and, thus, bounded, without this also implying that they are discrete-since, in Lowie's view, there is no qualitative difference between traits that are found "inside" and "outside" them.4

Other Boasians' views on diffusion were complicated by their complementary interest in the psychological processes by which traits imported into a culture were rein- terpreted in a manner consistent with what was already there, thereby producing qualities of coherence or integration within a culture. This integrationist view was expressed most famously by Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Cul- ture (1934:47), in which she suggested that cultures were "more than the sum" of the heterogeneous traits that they borrowed from elsewhere, since those traits were reshaped by and within the pattern of the borrowing culture. No doubt, Benedict focused on culture-internal coherence and integration. But as James Boon (1999:28) has noted, it is unfortunately easy to misremember Benedict's argument in Patterns as one that presents cultures as closed. In part this is because she used three cultures that were "historically as little related as possible" and, thus, maximally discrete in the context in which they were presented; in part it is because each ethnographic sketch was developed primarily within a discrete textual unit, a chapter of its own (Benedict 1934:17; Boon 1999:25). But for Benedict, cultural integration is not antithetical to the diffusionist view that cultural boundaries are porous; to the contrary, it presumes it. Bene- dict's premise is that cultures start with a "diversity" of "disharmonious elements" provided by outside influence, and these are integrated in an ongoing process even as new material is imported (Benedict 1934:226). Where the imported material has been integrated harmoniously, Benedict treats it as a culture's achievement. She also recognizes that integration is lacking "in certain cultures" and coexists in others with conflict and dissonance, which she considers the outcome of integrative processes being outpaced by diffusionist ones (1934:225, 241). Benedict's conception of culture is thus marked by an irreducible tension between the complementary processes of diffusion and integration, reflecting the characteristic duality of Boasian anthropology (Stocking 1974:5-8). In this duality, cultures are seen on the one hand as accidental assemblages of diffused-in material, and on the other hand as the outcomes of processes of "inner development" that tend to mold such material to preexisting patterns (Boas 1940[1920]:286).

Second, the Boasians pluralized cultural boundaries. To be sure, in theoretical statements, Boas often wrote as if the "culture," the "people," the "tribe," and the "society" were equivalent units, and his methodological holism may be interpreted as positing a privileged delimita- tion of cultures as "wholes" (Boas 1940[1887], 1940[1920], 1940[1932]:258, 1974[1889]; Stocking 1974:13). But in his ethnographic studies, Boas was careful to distinguish tribal divisions from the cultures he designated (Boas 1964, 1966), and from his sophisticated "cosmographical" perspective, he recognized that the unity predicated of a culture was a "subjective" one that was constituted necessarily "only in the mind of the observer" (Boas 1940[1987]:645). It is worth remembering, too, that Boas articulated his holism in opposition to the comparativist typologies of the 19th century social evolutionists, who interpreted any cultural




element, such as totemic clanship or fired clay pottery, by grouping it together with elements of apparently similar type found in other cultures, and then ordering the result- ing sets into hypothesized evolutionary sequences that represented hierarchies of progress within artificially discrete domains such as kinship systems or food containers. Boas urged instead that such elements be interpreted in light of the cultural wholes within which they are embedded-- not to set boundaries that would delimit cultural entities as such but to provide an appropriate context for their interpretation. And since there was no a priori limit on what aspects of a culture might be most illuminating, cultures in Boas's conception were necessarily eclectic and expan- sive, embracing not only a people's present-day ecological conditions, livelihood, arts, social relations, and so on but also "the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact" (Boas 1974[1887]:64). In Boas's conception, cultures appeared to have different boundaries when looked at from different viewpoints, and it was just this theme that became increasingly central to Boas's thinking over his career. In George Stocking's words, the "consistent tendency" in Boas's thought was toward "growing skepticism" of blanket classifications and toward insistence on the discrimination between "distinct classificatory points of view" (Stocking 1974:13-14). The thrust of Boas's early fieldwork was to show that culture could not be correlated with environmental determinants, thus effectively decoupling cultural boundaries from geographical ones (Boas 1940[1896]:278, 1964[1888]). Later on, in his critique of racial assumptions, Boas showed that the corre- lation of body form with hereditary lines was complicated in the case of migration further, he demonstrated that in general it was wrong to assume a coincidence of racial, cultural, and linguistic groupings, since there were abundant cases in which the application of different criteria of classification produced different groupings (Boas 1940[1912], 1938[1911], 1966a [1911]).

Boas's pluralization of boundaries is apparent in his students' work as a basic assumption of method, and it informs the Boasian interpretation of the controversial concept of "culture areas." Although the term itself has sometimes been assumed to refer to discrete, territorially bounded entities, the "culture area" concept was embraced by Boasian anthropologists like Edward Sapir and Kroeber primarily as a means of making historical inferences from the geographical distribution of similar traits across localities, and it was based on the critical assumption that it is "a normal, per- manent tendency of culture to diffuse" (Kroeber 1931:264). Culture areas were conceived not as individual cultures but as aggregations of cultures-what we might today call "regions"-with the emphasis on past, rather than present, zones of cultural interaction (Boas 194011896]:277). The Boasians recognized that the geographical bounding of areas was invariably arbitrary, but as Kroeber observed, "areal limitation" was "only one aspect" of a "culture aggrega- tion." According to Kroeber, theoretically the "ultimate

emphasis" was "on culture centers instead of culture areas," since in practice what the method identified was partially overlapping zones of trait distribution implying sequences of development and the radiation of influence from historically dominant centers (Kroeber 1931:251, 261). It was for this reason that in Clark Wissler's (1917) study of American Indian areas, boundary locations were pur- posefully deemphasized-only drawn schematically on a coarse-scaled map using straight lines that highlighted their artificiality. Like Wissler's, the culture area schemes proposed by Sapir and Kroeber broadly resembled the classifications which previous ethnographers of the Americas had accepted as empirically obvious, but the Boasians' schemes went further in that they explicitly distinguished multiple kinds of areas constructed on the basis of different sets of criteria: for example, traits found in present cultures, ar- chaeological findings, foods, technology, language, phys- ical indices, kinship, and the environment. In short, even when proposing geographically based culture areas, Boasian anthropologists were careful to draw multiple boundaries reflecting diverse classificatory points of view (Herskovits 1924; Kroeber 1948; Sapir 1949[1916]; Stocking 1992:136; Wissler 1917).s

The plurality of cultural boundaries was used by Boasians as a point of contention against the French soci- ologist Durkheim and the English functionalists Radcliffe- Brown and Malinowski, for whom it was axiomatic that the social whole comprised a system of functionally in- terdependent elements.6 Little concerned with the chance historical events that caused societies to change in un- predictable ways, the Durkheimians and the functionalists tended to discuss the past in terms of culture-internal evolutionary processes. For the Boasians, by contrast, cultural integration was an ongoing process that could never be fully completed and that was not necessarily unidirec- tional; it was not teleological. In Benedict's writings especially, integration is something that, in the long view of a culture's history, ebbs and flows, more or less intensely at various times. So while the Zufii pueblos of two decades earlier represented for Benedict a nearly perfect integration (Stocking 1992), such a climax could only be tempo- rary, whether long or short lived. For Sapir (1949[1924]), genuine or harmonious culture similarly had the capacity to degenerate, for example into the alienation and inorganic disintegration of modern U.S. life. Moreover, the Boasians conceived of cultural integration eclectically in terms that were partial, suggestive, and metaphoric, rather than functional and systematic. Integration was to be found, for example, in aesthetic and thematic coherence in an analogy to styles of art and architecture; in the patterning of symbolism and motivation, in an analogy to gestalt psychology; in selective perception and valuation, in an analogy to phonological apperception; and in distinctive characterological qualities, in an analogy to Herderian ideas of the unique spirit, genius, or geist of a nation or people (Stocking 1974:8). From the perspective of Lowie, who launched a sharp attack on Malinowski's "avowedly




antidistributional, antihistorical" functionalism, any position that "treats each culture as a closed system" implies "absurdities" in demanding logically that there is a single, definitive demarcation:

Social tradition varies demonstrably from village to village, even from family to family. Are we to treat as the bearers of such a closed system the chief's family in Omarakana, his village, the district of Kiriwina, the Island of Boyowa, the Trobriand archipelago, the North Massim province, New Guinea, or perchance Melanesia?

In defiance of the dogma that any one culture forms a closed system, we must insist that such a culture is invariably an artificial unit segregated for purposes of expediency. [Lowie 1935:235]

Third, in contrast with recent anthropological writers who have treated analytic concepts of cultural boundaries as susceptible to the same critiques as are people's folk ideas, the Boasians recognized that the boundaries they drew as analysts were not equivalent to the boundaries that people drew for themselves. Whereas the former were understood to be theoretical propositions, created-as Lowie put it, "for purposes of expediency" in analysis, ethnographic description, and museum displays-the latter were themselves elements of culture that reflected the ways people distinguished "between 'my own' closed group and the outsider" (Benedict 1934:7). Indeed, the Boasians frequently criticized such distinctions as politically motivated and sci- entifically incorrect. For example, Benedict was in effect criticizing the naturalization of Western cultural boundaries by insisting that such commonsense notions as "human nature" and "racial inheritance" were but modern repack- agings of a primal insider/outsider, us/them folk distinction: Both notions, she argued, are folk concepts, even if at times cloaked in scientific garb. Ideas of human nature, she suggested, wrongly elevate "our own socialized habits" to the status of the universally human, in much the same way that the members of "primitive tribes" see their own groups as the only true humans and regard out- siders as nonhuman "in spite of the fact that from an objective point of view each tribe is surrounded by peoples sharing in its arts and... in elaborate practices that have grown up by a mutual give-and-take of behaviour from one people to another" (Benedict 1934:7). Similarly Benedict argued that scientific ideas of "racial inheritance" are no more than "mythology" when applied outside the narrow scope of "family lines" and "small and static communities," since scientific analysis of large and dispersed groups always shows "overlapping"-what is often nowadays termed hybridity. According to Benedict, "when 'racial heredity' is in- voked, as it usually is, to rally a group of persons of about the same economic status, graduating from much the same schools, and reading the same weeklies, such a category is merely another version of the in- and the out-group" (1934:15-16).7 As a cultural critic, then, she belittled folk boundaries as chauvinistic and parochial, in contrast to a scientific perspective that would be inclusively humanistic

and cosmopolitan. It was thus clear to Benedict that anthropology cannot uncritically accept the folk boundaries posited by a culture or nation and, indeed, that we ought to be skeptical of them as a basic methodological stance.

So axiomatic was the distinction between folk and analytic cultural boundaries that Sapir even felt it necessary to point out that in certain cases it was possible for them to coincide. So while the analytic "culture area concept" was a "mere description of cultural flow," one sometimes found that it also described "assemblages of people who understand each other's culture and feel themselves as a unity" (Sapir 1994:100). This potential for cultural comprehension was a "very real thing... in the psychological sense," and it provided the "psychological ground" for a "kind of commonality of feeling which transcends local and political differences" (Sapir 1994:100-101). This was not a primordialist notion, since mutual understanding was found by no means solely among groups that shared common origins but, rather, arose wherever "in the course of time the cross-fertilization of traits has developed a common pattern of culture" (Sapir 1994:100-101). Nor was it a notion that depended on geographical contiguity, since "geographically contiguous groups are merely a first order approxima- tion to the infinitely variable groupings of human beings to whom culture in its various aspects is actually to be cred- ited as a matter of realistic psychology" (1949[1932a]:519). As an example, Sapir described how a Sioux Indian who was captured by the Blackfoot would understand his situation and, though among "deadly enemies," would "feel at home in the culture" of his captors, unlike "a Pueblo Indian captured by a Plains tribe [who] would not feel at home-he would not know what [his situation] was about"-because the cultures were too different to allow for a "communal- ity of understanding" (Sapir 1994:101). Sapir thought that the movement from mutual comprehension to "a feeling of unity" had the power to produce nations. According to Sapir, "the true psychological meaning of [the folk notion of] culture area" is therefore "a nascent nation, and many nations probably arose in this way"-though he cautioned that "this notion of the culture area should never be confused with the notion of the state" (1994:100). It was only a "cultural unity, the psychological ground" for a state, yet it lacked the state's institutionalized apparatus for en- compassing and reconciling diverse points of view (1994: 100).8

What is especially interesting about the distinction Boasian anthropologists drew between analytic and folk cultural boundaries is that they allow for a kind of medi- ating border zone of culture, a zone of things that, from the perspective of the people's folk boundary concepts, are regarded as foreign but that, from the perspective of the analyst, might nonetheless be interpreted as internal to their culture.9 The Boasians conceived of this as a kind of foyer or vestibule of culture, in which newly imported elements of culture "waited,'" so to speak, as part of the process of becoming assimilated. Kroeber's position was that the waiting period was characteristically short, and that




once an element was integrated, its foreignness was quickly lost to native awareness. He liked to cite the example of modern Anglo-Americans who were unaware that items like tobacco, paper, potatoes, and the alphabet were really cultural imports. In his textbook he wrote: "As soon as a culture has accepted a new item, it tends to lose interest in the foreignness of origin of this item, as against the fact that the item is now functioning within the culture. One might say that once acceptance is made, the source is played down and forgotten as soon as possible" (1948[1923]:257). Sim- ilarly, Boas, in his studies of folklore and art, emphasized the forgetting of the foreign origin of borrowed material, in line with his argument that people's current explana- tions of folktale elements and art motifs are "secondary rationalizations" that interpret them in terms of contemporary cultural interests and themes, obscuring or eclipsing prior knowledge of true historical sources (Boas 1940[1996], 1938[1911]:214-219, 1966a:66).

But it was also possible for the foreign origins of assimilated material to be institutionalized in memory and even valued as such, and some Boasians found great theoretical interest in this fact. Mead, for example, portrayed the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea as valuing certain cult complexes, dances, and fashions precisely because they were borrowed. Indeed, in this specifically "importing culture," the foreignness of objects was actively remembered, since distance of origin in the direction of the seacoast was associated with increasing refinement and sophistica- tion. To the Arapesh, foreignness as such did not necessarily mean nonhumanity but could instead mean greater worldliness and civilization. From Mead's analytic perspective, the fact that an item was imported did not make it external to Arapesh culture. To the contrary, it was precisely in being categorized as an import from the beach or beyond that an element could represent a positive value within the distinctively Arapesh scheme of meanings, thus showing that the zone of the foreign can itself play a central symbolic role in the life of a people (Mead 1935, 1938).

Although cultural boundedness has been targeted as problematic in recent critiques of the culture concept, the critiques are not really applicable to cultural boundaries as they were conceived in Boasian anthropology. According to Michael Kearney, for example, the culture concept is flawed because it presupposes boundedness on the model of the modern nation-state with its binary logic of territorial and corporate membership: An individual is either inside the boundary-as a citizen or a member-or is not (Kearney 1995). But for Boas and his students, culture was neither modeled on the state nor confused with a polity. Indeed, Kroeber and Sapir explicitly opposed conceiving of cultures on the model of nations, their provinces, and other political or sociological units (Kroeber 1948[1923]:226; Sapir 1949[1924]:329, 1994:100). Cultures, unlike nation-states, tend to merge or blend into one another; in Kroeber's terms, they "intergrade" (1948[1923]:261). In general, the Boasians were interested in classifying not persons but ele-

ments according to culture: They wrote of cultural "traits." And they were by no means uncomfortable with construing elements-or, for that matter, persons-ambiguously, as being either in or out of a culture depending on the point of view.

The critiques of bounded culture have primarily focused on the spatialized units that form the province of area studies and the autonomous tribal worlds conjured by Radcliffe-Brownian structural-functionalism.10 While Boasian scholars did work in these veins, it was after the mid-1930s when the Boasian paradigm had already be- gun to dissipate (Silverstein 2004). As Stocking argues, it is clear enough that the Boasians constituted a distinctive "school" of anthropology in the 1910s, when Boas and his students were united in their radical critiques of evolutionism and racialism, and in opposing the influence of eugeni- cists and racialist anthropologists in the scientific establish- ment. Two decades later, however, Boas's students were no longer a unified current within anthropology, as intellectu- ally they were in fact diversifying and diverging from one another (Stocking 1992:125). Many of the Boasians published their most enduring works during this time, but in retrospect it may be seen as the twilight of Boasian anthropology. Already during this decade, many of Boas's students (Mead especially) were becoming attracted to such apparently more "scientific" approaches as Radcliffe-Brown's comparative sociology, and the dilution of their collective intellectual potency continued and even accelerated through the 1940s and after the war. During World War II, as scientists of every stripe sought to apply their talents to the war effort: Mead and Benedict compiled studies of Japanese, Russian, and other "national characters," while Ralph Linton was involved in founding wartime programs in "area studies" that ultimately transformed the musty old ethnological "culture area" concept into Cold War institutes for Russian, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies (Bashkow 1991:179; Mintz 1998:29; Yans-McLaughlin 1984). In evaluating this work by current standards, we should remember that Mead and Benedict were then writing primarily for nonspecialist wartime policymakers, and their reliance on national boundaries as a basis for delimit- ing cultural units makes sense given their polemical aims. Indeed, a close reading of their work suggests that they understood the problems inherent in this kind of approach. But in any case, such work marked a departure from clas- sical Boasian anthropology, and the area studies institutes reflected the new political context and intellectual trends (Hegeman 1999:165; Pletsch 1981; Rafael 1994; see Orta this issue). Regardless of their historical and biographical connections, the culture areas of Boasian anthropology were constituted on a different basis from the areas that were institutionalized in postwar area studies. As Rena Lederman has argued, the Boasian culture areas "were not drawn up to fit national borders and were at odds with (if not actively subversive of) the interests and naturalizing claims of nation-states" (Lederman 1998:431). Thus, it is not the permeable, perspectivally relative culture areas of the




Boasians to which recent critiques of cultural boundaries apply.

THE BOASIAN PRINCIPLES ILLUSTRATED BY OROKAIVA ETHNOGRAPHY

To move beyond the theoretical impasse over cultural boundaries, I present a conception of cultural boundaries that builds on the Boasian principles I have described. I emphasize (1) that cultural boundaries are open and permeable, not barriers which block the flow of people, objects, or ideas; (2) that they are plural and interested, always drawn relative to particular contexts, purposes, and points of view; and (3) that the divergence between the anthropologist's analytic boundaries and people's folk boundaries creates a "zone of the foreign" defined in terms of the "own"/"other" distinctions that people themselves draw. All three of these points respond to problems associated with objectifying cultural boundaries, which are in fact symbolic constructs, in terms of spatial metaphors. I will elaborate these points in the next section, but first I illustrate them with ethnographic examples from my own work on Orokaiva people in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

That the boundaries of Orokaiva culture are permeable need not be belabored. It has been more than a century since the Orokaiva region was colonized by Britain and, later, Australia. While the colonial period ended in 1975 with PNG's independence, people's lives have remained profoundly affected by neocolonial economic development, the impress of an imported consumer culture, mission Christianity, and Western schooling and health care-all to such an extent that no credible cultural boundaries reflecting current conditions could be conceived as nonporous. Certainly, there may be reasons for attempting a historical reconstruction of PNG cultures before Western contact, and in doing so we might impose a hard fictional boundary between indigenous and Western cultures, filter- ing out the more obvious imports of later times. But even this questionable procedure results in cultural boundaries that are characterized by porosity to earlier strata of influence, like dance genres, rituals, and linguistic elements imported from other indigenous groups.

The boundaries of Orokaiva culture may be drawn in different ways for different purposes now, and so they were in the past. Although the ethnonym Orokaiva originated as a colonial classification, in present times the Orokaiva designation has become a category of identity employed by people themselves.11 But it is not the only such category. A friend of mine who, in some contexts, called himself "Orokaiva" would, in different contexts, differentiate himself from "those other Orokaiva" and, instead, call himself "Binandere," using the name of his particular dialect area. The boundaries that people assert are sensitive to the context and their own immediate aims; this is so not only in relation to what they call the "big name" (javo peni) Orokaiva but also to the many "smaller names" (javo isapa) that people use to express their identity in terms of dialect,

region, village, hamlet, or clan affiliations. Thus, it is not that the historically imposed cultural category "Orokaiva" represents a merely fictive bounding of culture. Rather, as in so many cases of "ethnogenesis" studied by anthropologists, the colonial category has itself become a real category in people's lives, though not to the exclusion of other demarcations that remain significant.

A revealing example of the divergence between the anthropologist's analytic concepts of cultural boundaries and people's folk concepts is the construction of "whitemen" in Orokaiva culture (Bashkow in press).12 To the Orokaiva I encountered in my fieldwork, it was obvious that the "whiteman" they spoke to me about represents my culture, not theirs. Indeed, for them, the "whiteman" is paradig- matically foreign: It is a cultural other they conventionally contrast with themselves in various contexts of indigenous life. But from my analytic perspective, it was equally clear that the "whiteman" is for many purposes an Orokaiva construct, communicated from one individual to another, from generation to generation, in a way that makes it as authentic a cultural inheritance as the most hallowed tradition. For several generations now, Orokaiva children have been introduced to "whitemen" primarily by hearing about them from other Orokaiva as they have grown up in the village; they have been fed "whitemen's foods" by their mothers and wives; and they have themselves performed the roles of whitemen in community development asso- ciations, church councils, local government committees, smallholder crop growers' boards, and various businesses. Of course, Orokaiva interact with actual whites both in town and in their villages. Indeed, a few Orokaiva have even stayed with whites in their overseas homes. But these cross- cultural experiences are inevitably interpreted from the reference point of their far more intimate acquaintance with the construction of whitemen perpetuated within their own culture at home.

Similarly, with certain imported commodities that are regarded by Orokaiva as the culture of whitemen, it is most analytically powerful to treat them ethnographically as a part of Orokaiva culture, despite their foreign origins and the fact that they are categorized as "foreign" from the Orokaiva folk point of view. For Orokaiva, the paradigmatic "whitemen's foods" are boiled white rice, canned mack- erel, and Spam-like cans of corned beef. Historically, these foods were among the most prominent brought to the region by Australian patrol officers, but they have since become central to a highly conventional construction of racial characteristics that interprets these foods in opposition to local taro and pork in terms of an elaborate set of indigenous contrastive qualities (Bashkow in press). Moreover, foreign "whitemen's foods" have become all but essential in Orokaiva ritual feasts. Thus, even though they are imported, "whitemen's foods" must be viewed ethnographically as a living part of Orokaiva culture. For another example, in their development activities, Orokaiva often try to work according to Western clock time, which they call "whitemen's time," in contrast to a second, more autonomistic pattern




of time use that people see as characteristic of their own culture. But from an analytic point of view this contrast itself is best seen as part of Orokaiva culture, since it is constructed largely in terms of the culturally distinctive virtue of social unity, which is dramatized when different individuals work together in close synchronization. Thus, one can see that the folk boundaries Orokaiva use to distinguish between their culture and the foreign culture of whitemen are in no way to be taken for granted as cultural boundaries in ethnographic analysis; they are rather culture-internal distinctions that organize and give meaning to people's lives.13

This divergence between folk and analytic boundaries shown in the Orokaiva case gives the anthropological culture concept a way out of the old conundrum, in which cultural distinctiveness implies cultural boundaries that would seem to place strict limitations on the kinds of experiences that people can have and on the extensibility of their culture to novel situations. The distinctions that Orokaiva draw between their own and "whitemen's culture" reside in the zone of the foreign: While they are things that Orokaiva themselves consider to be outside their culture, from an analytic point of view they must be considered to be a part of it since they are interpreted in terms of Orokaiva categories, values, assumptions, and interests, and they are assimilated to distinctively Orokaiva forms of practice. This zone of the foreign is an intrinsically flexible and accommodating part of their culture; it is what allows Orokaiva to interpret their novel experiences using their preconceived notions of others that are constructed in a dialectical relationship with their ideas of themselves. Although such a construction of the other is often derided as ethnocentric projection, it is undoubtedly universal. Its value to anthropology lies in the way it releases Appadurai's (1988:37) "incarcerated" native from the bounds of his cultural cell, by allowing us to recognize that cultural boundaries, rather than imprisoning people, can paradoxically serve to extend cultures across them, to the limits of people's experience. There is really no contradiction between the boundedness of culture and the open-ended nature of cultural experience, because culture itself provides a schema for incorporating external elements in the very possibility of constructing an element as foreign.

THE BOASIAN CONCEPTION OF CULTURAL BOUNDARIES RETHEORIZED AND EXTENDED

Just because cultural boundaries do not really contain cultures within them does not mean that they are meaningless and of no account; it just means that we have been misled by the spatial images conventionally used to depict them, especially the line (whether "straight" or "curved"). Drawn lines appear to block things from passing across them, and they appear to create discrete domains, when in reality, cultural boundaries are less like barriers than they are like thresh- olds or frontiers that mark the movement across them and even create the motivation for relationships with what lies beyond. Another problem with lines is that the divisions

they represent are continuous and complete. Lines have an uninterrupted extension-in formal geometric terms, the space between any two points on the line is filled by inter- vening points-and they appear to create nonoverlapping entities that are closed to each other. But as we will discuss, cultural boundaries-whether they are conceived in geographical, social, or conceptual space-may be discontin- uous and incomplete. In a provocative passage, Appadurai proposes that we should think of cultures as "possessing no Euclidean boundaries"-and although he does not say very clearly what he has in mind by way of alternatives, suggesting only that we instead use a "fractal metaphor" and recognize that cultural forms overlap (1996:46)-he is right to point out that cultural boundaries are easy to mis- interpret when drawn as lines. To rethink the meanings of the lines we draw to represent boundaries, I now extend Boasian anthropology's three guiding principles about the boundaries of culture.

First, we should recognize that cultural boundaries, in and of themselves, do not exclude or contain. All too often, we tend to confuse the concept of "boundaries" with that of "barriers"-which, by definition, bar, hinder, or block. Ex- amples of barriers are the colonial color line, rugged mountain ranges, barbwire fences, and poverty, all of which can impede or deny persons' access to objects, places, ideas, and resources. Boundaries do not actually separate; they only de- marcate or differentiate; they do not exert force to exclude or contain any aspects of culture. What sociologists call a "hard boundary" is, in our terms, a symbolic boundary that has been fortified by some kind of barrier, which "holds the line," making it hard to cross over, like Jim Crow laws in the segregationist South (Banton 1983:125ff.). Similarly, what the term boundary maintenance really refers to is the shoring up of a boundary with barriers. But many boundaries are not shored up at all.

A nice illustration of the distinction between boundaries and barriers may be found in the borders of nations, states, counties, and so on. Such political boundaries are defined in law in terms of latitudes, longitudes, and the middles of rivers. They are symbolic representations that exist independently of the fences and checkpoints that in some places secure them. This is important, since more often than not there are no markers or barriers on the ground. Because barriers are expensive to construct and maintain, they are usually set up only where cross-border traffic is of political concern. Along major roads, we pass checkpoints marking national boundaries and signposts for the boundaries of states and counties. Similarly, news reports show us pictures of boundaries in conflict zones like Gaza, where as I write this, Israel is building a high concrete wall to keep Palestinians out. But such boundaries are well in the minor- ity. Off the road, amidst fields, and away from the conflict zones, most boundaries are invisible. So although our attention is drawn most often to hard boundaries that are shored up by barriers, barriers are by no means essential to the definition of boundaries, and we need to be careful to distinguish them theoretically.




Moreover, not all cultural boundaries can be represented in maps. Some of the most important ones must be conceived of as abstract typological distinctions. Return- ing to our example of the boundary Orokaiva construct between whitemen and themselves, what we are faced with is a constellation of typified feature contrasts (e.g., dark vs. light skin, eaters of garden-grown foods vs. eaters of store-bought foods, generous and hospitable vs. closefisted and aloof, etc.). The constellation has a core and periphery in that certain highly conventionalized contrasts are salient and often remarked on, while other contrasts are drawn idiosyncrat- ically in particular contexts and are ideologically unelabo- rated. Nevertheless, these culturally salient feature contrasts are distributed over a great deal of empty space, since many aspects of life are assigned no special value in terms of the Orokaiva/whiteman distinction (Bashkow 1999:183-199). For example, personality (as opposed to behavioral) characteristics are not seen by Orokaiva as generalizable, and they are generally not among the dimensions of contrast that Orokaiva elaborate in typifying themselves and whiteman others (Bashkow 2000:295). Thus, the boundary between Orokaiva and whitemen's culture does not create a compre- hensive division but, instead, contrasts certain focal areas only, leaving others untouched. In short, the boundary between Orokaiva and whitemen's culture is not complete and continuous, but partial and fragmentary.

The porosity of cultural boundaries, which seems coun- terintuitive when we objectify boundaries as solid lines, follows easily when we leave hold of spatial metaphors and represent them instead as conceptual structures centered on symbolic contrasts or oppositions. It is a structuralist tru- ism that opposed terms like self and other define one another reciprocally, so that the very opposition which de- fines a boundary serves as a conceptual conduit by which the other gets smuggled into the world of the self. More- over, such conceptual structures, far from precluding trans- gressive feature reversals, seem to invite them, the way a Rubik's Cube invites being turned or mythic symbols invite transformation within the structure of Levi-Straussian matrices. Indeed, it is the reversal of specific features that evokes, casts into relief, and activates the larger structure of relationships within which those features are opposed. For example, when Orokaiva "turn whitemen" in church activities, schooling, and village business, the normal opposition between whitemen and Orokaiva is in no way undone, inasmuch as the activities in which people are engaged are nevertheless understood to be a part of whitemen's culture. To the contrary, the reversal dramatizes and draws attention to the contrast, paradoxically affirming and substantiating the cultural boundary in the very act of transgression.

Second, extending our understanding of the Boasian principle of multiplicity, we should recognize as a cardinal principle that no single way of drawing a cultural boundary can serve every purpose. That cultural boundaries do not mark the edges of discrete social, political, economic, and technological systems is clear enough in the case of conceptually defined typological boundaries like those just

discussed: As is illustrated by the Orokaiva construction of the boundary between themselves and whitemen, such boundaries may distinguish cultures even where they interact closely or interpenetrate socially. But the point is particularly relevant in the complex case of mapped boundaries- that is, boundaries we do locate in geographical or social space. As noted by several critics, social scientists have often tended to speak of cultural boundaries as interchange- able with the edges of integrated social totalities (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Hays 1993). That is to say, a culture's limits are taken from the territorial boundaries of the corre- sponding social collectivity (e.g., the boundaries of latmul culture are given by the limits of the territory occupied by Iatmul people). These cultural boundaries are then legit- imated by bringing to bear as many additional criteria- ethnic, political, linguistic, historical, and so forth-as possible (Handler 1988:7). But as the Boasians knew, a general- purpose compartmentalization of humanity is chimerical. They found no basis for assuming an ideal coincidence of the boundaries of collectivities, cultures, languages, and historical populations or races. Indeed, our knowledge of the possible bases on which human worlds can be segmented has only increased since their time. The old Boasian triad of race, language, and culture ramifies today into a larger set of demarcational viewpoints that include varied constructions of society, polity, economy, geography, interactional fields, collective identities, ethnicity, cultural practice, linguistic codes, communicability and comprehension, and regional networks (see Brightman 1995:519). To come to grips with such complexity, it may be helpful to explore an analogy from the linguistic concept of "isogloss."

The linguistic concept of "isoglosses" represents an alternative to the more familiar idea of language boundaries. An isogloss is a line drawn by dialect mappers to mark the extent of a particular linguistic feature. The feature may be a lexical item, like the use of "hoagie" for a type of sand- wich that U.S. citizens elsewhere call a "sub" or "hero," or it might be a feature of pronunciation (phonology), word form (morphology), semantics, or syntax. Contrary to our naive view of dialects as discrete entities, the isoglosses of distinct features often fail to coincide; instead, they form tangled patterns of crisscrosses and loops, making it impossible to establish a definitive line of demarcation between dialects. Indeed, isoglosses rarely coincide even at the boundaries of languages, in which the patterns they form resemble stretched-out bundles or tangled skeins more than they do thick redrawn lines. Isoglosses crisscross language boundaries because features can be shared across geneti- cally distinct languages, such as with click sounds borrowed from Khoisan by Bantu-speaking people as they moved into southern Africa. The nonconvergence of isoglosses is central to the basic dialectological phenomenon of dialect chain- ing, whereby adjacent communities readily understand one another's speech, while those at a greater remove find comprehension more difficult, until at a certain distance mutual understanding becomes all but impossible. In this well- attested phenomenon, the boundaries between languages




cannot be uniquely fixed: Given a chain of partial mutual intelligibility, it is never clear where to draw the line. Where dialect chains span conventional language divisions like Spanish and French, the boundaries they cross are drawn in only one of many ways supportable by linguistic evidence, though they may have dense historical and political motivation (Crystal 1987:25-33). The lesson dialectologists draw from this is not that distinguishable languages do not exist, but that the way one draws their boundaries depends on the particular language features one chooses to emphasize, and that ultimately one must keep in mind multiple isoglosses and one's purpose in drawing the boundaries in order to create an accurate picture. Cultural boundaries are thus similar to isoglosses in that they are irreducibly multiple and reflect different criteria, and also in that even where they coincide with conventional political and social divisions, they should not be identified with them theoretically.14

Third, and finally, extending our understanding of the Boasian distinction between analytic and folk boundaries, we should recognize the importance of a generative conception of culture, in which culture is not only the product of but also the precondition for meaningful action, thought, and expression (see Rosenblatt this issue). To be sure, such a conception may not be necessary to every project that ap- peals to a distinction between analytic and folk boundaries. For example, when we engage in what Richard Handler has called the "destructive analysis" of assumptions underlying identity politics in ethnic nationalist movements, the important function of our analytic boundary concept is to provide critical distance from the folk concepts of interest; it is the standpoint from which we are at sufficient remove from the folk concepts that we can refute false primordialist claims, such as that multiple boundaries of national identity, culture, language, ancestry, and so on converge (Han- dler 1985). But it would be wrong to let such a critique take over our anthropological culture concept entirely, as Ap- padurai does when he suggests that we "regard as cultural" only those differences that people use to express or sub- stantiate the boundaries of group identities (1996:13). The problem with the culture-as-identity view is that it effectively eliminates any basis for distinguishing between analytic and folk views except insofar as they imply different evaluative stances toward the same substantive claim. Most crucially, in order to understand how boundaries can themselves be a creative part of culture, we need to move beyond the notion that cultural boundaries are motivated by sharedness, whether it is conceived of in objective terms (shared language, ancestry, territory, social habits, or other traits) or in subjective terms (shared feelings of belonging). What we need to appreciate is that boundaries can be productively defined in terms of a relationship of mutual comprehension.

Such appreciation is evident in Sapir's writings on culture and the individual. For Sapir, it was plainly inadequate to conceptualize culture purely in terms of sharedness, since individuals differ so markedly from one another in every imaginable respect. Underlying Sapir's conception of cul-

ture is the idea that people's perception of a commonality of culture is founded more on relations of mutual comprehension than on actual sameness or identity. What is required is only that people can understand one another, if only partially and imperfectly; indeed, Sapir remarks on how forgiving and elastic such perceptions of mutual intelligibility can be, given people's tendency to try to make sense of things by attending to that which is intelligible in their experience and disregarding that which is incomprehen- sible. He gives the example of two individuals who live as neighbors within the same town: "The cultures of these two individuals" may be "significantly different, as significantly different, on the given level and scale, as though one were the representative of Italian culture and the other of Turkish culture," and, yet, "such differences of culture never seem as significant [to people] as they really are... partly because the economy of interpersonal relations and the friendly am- biguities of language conspire to reinterpret for each individual all behavior which he has under observation in the terms of those meanings which are relevant to his own life" (Sapir 1949[1932a]:516). The possibility of negotiating differences to arrive at what may be an exaggerated impression of mutual understanding is, for Sapir, what allows individuals of diverse backgrounds to feel themselves participants in a shared or "generalized culture" even as they each "uncon- sciously abstract" for themselves from it some idiosyncratic "world of meanings" (1949[1932a]:515). Mutual intelligibility is also the aspect of culture that enables people to express meanings that are previously unknown within their culture but that can nonetheless be readily grasped by others and, thus, must be considered a legitimate part of the culture out of which they arise." So, for example, when Sapir describes Two Crows' rejection of a conventional Omaha pattern, this cultural rebel's distinctive response commands our attention: Again, it is the capacity of his distinctive response to be intelligible to or "communicat[ed] to other individuals" that provides the psychological basis for his idiosyncrasy to someday become orthodoxy-by means of "some kind of 'social infection' " through which it might "lose its purely personal quality" (1949[1938]:571, 573). From Sapir's perspective, it is thus not only things that conform to a shared norm that should be construed as a part of a culture but also things that deviate from the norm in recognizable ways: In- deed, culture is the symbolic field within which deviations can be meaningfully interpreted (Handler 1983:211; Sahlins 1985). And it is in just this way that people's frameworks for interpreting the differences between "their own" and "foreign" cultures are themselves paradoxically an authentic part of their culture; the foreign itself is incorporated within the very cultural perspective from which it is seen as external. Indeed, what Sapir wrote of fashion and culture could as well be said of the foreign and culture: Ideas of the foreign are culture in the guise of departure from culture (Sapir 1949[1931]:374).

Viewing culture solely in terms of identity relations is inadequate for understanding this paradoxical aspect of boundaries: that in separating cultures, boundaries actually



Bashkow 9 A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries 453

facilitate the interpretation and integration of cultural difference within a culture. Whatever the forms it takes, the experience of foreignness is part of everyone's world, and cultural boundaries, in serving to map, evaluate, and delimit culture, simultaneously project it onto the foreign other, eth- nocentrically, in the form of the projecting culture's values and self-conceptions. In effect, cultural boundaries are cru- cial symbolic divisions that enable people's action, thought, and expression relating to, as with other things, the foreign. And, for this reason, it is inadequate for the analytic culture concept to portray boundaries functioning solely to confine and exclude, such as has been the tendency in our field's most elite theoretical discourse in recent years. Instead, our culture concept must be a generative one that provides the basis for meaningfulness and creative expression and action.

WHY A THEORY OF CULTURAL BOUNDARIES IS NECESSARY If boundaries were barrier-like walls that separate cultures from one another, as some critics have depicted them, it would seem obvious that they are theoretical constructs anthropology would do well to be rid of; after all, globalization processes disrupt, diasporize, and hybridize cultures and communities, making boundaries at best irrelevant and at worst patently wrong. Moreover, when we think of the pernicious colonialist, nationalist, and discriminatory purposes that the idea of boundaries has served, we find further support for rejecting them in the harm they may cause. However, this critical position is too limited. It assumes and perpetuates a common-sense conception of "natural boundaries" that is analytically flawed, and it generalizes about boundaries' harmful functions based on a biased and narrow set of examples. In the remainder of the article, I suggest that (1) cultural boundaries are necessary for our thinking and writing, so it is not realistic to repudiate the general concept of "bounded culture" as such; (2) cultural boundaries remain important phenomena in the worlds that we study even under circumstances of interconnection and globalization; and (3) cultural boundaries do not exclu- sively serve harmful or discriminatory purposes, but a mix of undesirable and desirable ones, so that a pan-situational moral critique of boundaries as an analytical concept is un- founded.

First, cultural boundaries are necessary for thinking and writing about human cultural worlds. As we know from the teachings of both Saussurian and Boasian structuralisms (see Hymes and Fought 1981), symbolic value derives from systems of contrast, making the very possibility of meaning dependent on representations of categorical difference. In this way thinking about culture is no different from other kinds of symbolic processes that human beings engage in. Comparison is also inevitable if we are to acknowledge the particularity of human cultural worlds. To avoid all formula- tion of comparative perspective in our ethnography would be untenable; all it would do is leave the implicit contrast

for readers to supply, which they would do from their own cultural frames of reference. Once again, we see that the symbolic distinctions we draw need not map onto spatially discrete units. Indeed, it is where different cultures meet that people feel the distinctions of culture most acutely, since these are so often relevant to navigating their complex social landscape. So it is as well with identity: The complexities of contact between people of different identities only intensify people's awareness of identity distinctions-all the more so when multiple or ambiguous identifications are at play.

Indeed, so necessary are cultural boundaries to our thinking and writing about human cultural worlds that they are invariably presupposed by the very arguments offered against them. The classic argument that cultures cannot be thought of as bounded because they are connected to one another through relations of politics, trade, migration, and influence presupposes that we can think of the cultures as distinct from one another and, thus, connectable (Wolf 1982:6). Another example is the poststructuralist argument that cultural boundaries are absurd given that individuals' identities may be culturally hybrid, "in-between," or impure (Abu-Lughod 1991; Bhabha 1994:219). Here, too, the argument presupposes the idea of boundaries even as it chal- lenges it, since it presumes an ability to recognize the terms that are hybridized (Robbins 2004:327-333). No doubt it is true, as Kirin Narayan observes, that "we all belong to several communities simultaneously," and we participate in different cultures and different identities in different contexts (1993:676). But this realization, far from rendering cultural boundaries moot or inapplicable, makes it all the more necessary to have them constructively theorized, since it illustrates that the boundaries of cultures, identities, and communities cannot be drawn simply in terms of groups of individuals.

Second, cultural boundaries are not made irrelevant by globalization, since they do not depend on an absence of interaction across them (see Barth 1998[1969]:10). It is thus wrong to depict the concept of bounded culture as ir- reconcilable with translocal connections. In the world of globalization, old tribal distinctions like Nuer versus Dinka and Tlingit versus Haida have not become obsolete but, instead, are refashioned in contexts like tourism, media representation, and political and legal action. Moreover, globalization itself produces new forms of distinctiveness and identity politics. As Benjamin Barber has argued, even as globalization is bringing the world together "pop culturally and commercially," it is fostering the proliferation of localist movements and identity politics, and intensifying people's awareness of them through possibilities of mass mediation and diasporic communities (Barber 1995:9). Global communication and commerce oblige people to operate in increasingly multicultural environments, in which they become ever more aware of cultural differences and the complexities of identity. Advertisers and marketers objectify cultural boundaries in their niche marketing of culturally cus- tomized advertisements and products; promoters of tourism




emphasize local cultural distinctiveness to attract visitors from outside; and parochialist demagogues, ethnic nation- alists, and religious extremists broadcast their opposition to the amorality and uniformity associated with Western cultural imperialism and with globalization itself. Thus, instead of rendering cultural boundaries obsolete, globalization has amplified certain boundaries and multiplied the contexts in which people deal with them-a situation not of boundlessness but, rather, of boundary "superabundance" (Brightman 1995:519).

Third, it is of course true that cultural boundaries are often drawn xenophobically and used in ways that are harm- fully exclusivist, hierarchizing, and racist. But from that it does not follow that boundaries qua boundaries are pernicious; to argue so would be no more valid than to cite the use of missiles as a condemnation of gravitation. Cul- tural boundaries are also often drawn and used for positive purposes. They are what permit the recognition of style, allowing items of clothing, music, and so on to be connected to genres. And they enable people to criticize what is un- satisfactory in a prevailing cultural order, by pointing to the plausibility of better alternatives. Anthropology itself has often served productively as a voice of cultural critique, and the same might also be said of our own controversial discourses of primitivism, exoticism, surrealism, and orientalism (Clifford 1988; Hegeman 1999; Marcus and Fisher 1986). And the construction of "otherness" as a platform for self-critique is by no means unique to the West (Chen 1992). For example, Orokaiva, too, criticize themselves and their society using others as foils. During my stay with them, I often heard Orokaiva discuss problems such as jealousy and violence that concerned them in their own society by positing an exotic alternative world of whitemen in which such problems are absent. Indeed, the more widely we cast our net in studying actual contexts of boundary making, the less boundary politics seem reducible to inherently negative functions like exclusivist dominance. Certainly, in New Guinea societies, people readily seize on all manner of contrasts in linguistic and cultural practice in order to position themselves within regional worlds that they construct as fields of recognized differences-a form of boundary making that may be compared to distinctions of class and style in our own lives. It might even be shown that boundaries serve in general to facilitate communication across social and cultural difference. Even a nation-state boundary that is fortified with a border fence to exclude "flow" facili- tates communication, if only by giving the message that "you cannot pass here with impunity" (Handler and Segal 1990:147).

WHY CULTURAL BOUNDARIES SO TROUBLE US: COMING TO TERMS WITH OUR ANXIETY OVER DIFFERENCE

I expect that in the long view of history, the intense prob- lematization of cultural boundaries in anthropological theory will appear to reflect a deeper anxiety surrounding issues

of difference in the late 20th century. Whereas the Boasians took cultural difference as given and emphasized people's ability to overcome it through acculturation and transcul- tural insight, anthropologists in our time have become skeptical of the concept of "cultural difference" in general and wary of specifying cultural contrasts in particular cases for fear of overstating them. Our anxiety stems from our height- ened awareness of the negative dimension of essentialized otherness and exoticism, as made plain in the pioneering work of Edward Said (1978) and anthropology's critics. It is, moreover, nurtured by laudably progressive humanistic and egalitarian impulses, like our wish to represent the other in ways undistorted by the dialectical relation with our concepts of ourselves, as well as in ways that preserve the other's "coevalness" with ourselves, so that the possibility is left open for the other to participate fully in all parts of our reality (Fabian 1983). But the anxiety over cultural difference may also be seen as a historical peculiarity of the late 20th century, reflecting the fact that we are acutely self-conscious of our prodigious power and wealth. Indeed, so troubled are we by our dominant position that the mere identification of an other has come to be equated with deprecation: It is as if labeling another as different from us must surely be some kind of put-down, a pejorative, at least implicitly (see Obeyesekere 1992). Hence the paralyzing contradiction of contemporary multicultural discourse: While diversity in the abstract is celebrated, to objectify particular differences has become unacceptable.16

There is certainly reason not to fetishize difference. When channeled with restraint as methodological caution, our anxiety can prevent facile exoticism. But we should not perpetuate an aversion to boundary making as a govern- ing principle of anthropological theory. In the first place, to identify othering with inferiorization is to reassert, al- beit unintentionally, the universalist Enlightenment con- ceit that the Western scholarly elite is a global cultural apex, denying the possibility of the kind of relativist understanding anthropology has long valued. Second, by devaluing difference, we are led again to overemphasize relations of identity or sharedness as the basis for culture, and to dis- count the role of meaningful differences in the constitution of social life (Handler and Segal 1990:136ff.; Segal 2001). Third, when we one-sidedly emphasize negative attitudes toward the other such as deprecation and contempt (see Said 1978), we overlook the fact that people feel not only a fear of the alien but also the lure of the foreign. In failing to acknowledge that comparison can be affirmative of an other as well as negative, we underestimate the significance of people's ambivalence toward the other and toward the self as well (Sax 1998). Indeed, even at the level of practical politics, our shyness of difference does not serve us well. We do not practice true pluralism when we soft-pedal differences, thus pretending that we are all the same: A viable pluralism demands the acknowledgement of significant differences, and the recognition that difference can be the basis of productive relationships of mutual understanding, reciprocity, and respect."17 As several writers have noted, the "embrace




of hybridity and liminality," which is often put forward as a displacement of difference, does not offer a politics that is necessarily more egalitarian, forgiving, or liberatory; we know that hybridity, too, can cause conflict and serve as a basis for dominance (Kapchan and Strong 1999:247). In short, the postmodern idealization of a world without shib- boleths is a red herring.

It is a sign of the peculiar intellectual ethos of our times that merely sophistic arguments have become so influen- tial. The pervasive notion that boundaries could be inval- idated by their artificiality, instability, fuzziness, and lim-

inality should be no more convincing than a claim that the transitional periods of dusk and dawn render invalid the distinction between night and day (Ian Fraser, e-mail to asaonet listserv, September 3, 2002; cf. Hays 1993). And we readily equate bounded culture with problematic es- sentialism, even though boundaries offer the sole basis for

constructing entities in a nonessentialist way. As Andrew Abbott (2001:277) has shown, viable sociocultural entities can be created entirely through a process of bounding, by yoking together particular sites of difference to form an apparently enclosing frontier. Drawing boundaries and

positing essences are really alternative ways of construct-

ing cultural entities. And while our strongly antiessentialist commitment should be leading us to focus on the distinctions which create boundaries, the unease over difference that characterizes the anthropology of our times has pre- vented us from doing so.

IRA BASHKOW Department of Anthropology, University of

Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4120

NOTES Acknowledgments. The writing of this article was supported in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and from a Richard Carley Hunt Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. It incor- porates material from my fieldwork in the 1990s that was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re- search and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. I thank Matti Bunzl for inspiring the article, Richard Handler for help in editing it, and the American Anthropologist edi- tors and reviewers for many helpful suggestions. Thanks also go to Matthew Meyer, Daniel Rosenblatt, Daniel Segal, and Rupert Stasch for reading drafts of the manuscript, and to the students in my fall 2000 graduate seminar on Boasian Anthropology at the Univer- sity of Virginia particularly Sevil Baltali and Suzanne Menair, for their contribution to my general understanding of the writings of Boasian anthropologists. I am grateful to George Stocking for his encouragement of my work over many years. My wife, Lise Dobrin, helped me develop ideas of this article in numerous conversations and provided invaluable help in strengthening the final version with her careful editing; my debt to her extends well beyond this article and knows no bounds. 1. In the culture of academia, the current discomfort with boundaries is reflected in a trend of devaluing disciplinarity. The traditional boundaries of scholarly fields have become associated with intellectual stuffiness and narrowness of perspective, as opposed to the pathbreaking departures and exciting unconventionality associated with scholarly work that is valorized as interdisciplinary. Particularly in the humanities, hewing to scholarly boundaries implies a lack of originality, independence, and spunk. To avoid the humdrum staidness of work conducted within the boundaries of

traditional fields, scholarship is routinely evaluated (in grant com- petitions, job descriptions, etc.) on the basis of how successful it is in creatively transgressing or, best of all, reconfiguring disciplinary demarcations. 2. In what follows, I focus on the views of Boas, Kroeber, Sapir, Lowie, and Benedict, neglecting other students of Boas- such as Ruth Bunzel, Cora DuBois, Manuel Gamio, Alexander Goldenweiser, Esther Goldfrank, Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Alexander Lesser, Elsie Clews Parsons, Paul Radin, Gladys Reichard, and Leslie Spier-whose work is surely entitled to a fuller share of our attention. In my incomplete readings of these authors, I have not found significant exceptions to the arguments developed here. 3. Obviously, this was not their only purpose. So, for example, Boas was interested early on in showing that many cultural boundaries did not coincide with topographical or ecological ones, and Kroeber revisited this issue later on by mapping where cultural and ecological boundaries did coincide, in order to explain the edges of culture areas in terms of subsistence resources. 4. Thus, Lowie is emphatic on the point that cultural boundaries cannot serve as boundaries of the ethnographer's inquiry. He urges, dauntingly: "A science of culture must, in principle, register every item of social tradition, correlating it significantly with any other aspect of reality, whether that lies within the same culture or outside" (1935:235). 5. An additional point raised by Sapir was that not all areas are of "equal weight and cogency" and that "not all people can be fitted into such a scheme" (1994:99). Although he himself had offered what was perhaps the subtlest analysis of culture areas (Sapir 1949[1916]), Sapir felt that "too much of a fetish has been made of the culture area concept" (1994:99; see also Benedict 1934: 230). 6. While it is true that the French and the English distinguished their concept of "society" from "culture," this distinction was not clear-cut, and the British concept of "society" was treated by the Boasians in effect as just another classificatory point of view from which "cultural" boundaries could be drawn. 7. The presupposition that racial boundaries were natural and, thus, truly scientific was deeply entrenched at the time that Benedict was writing. Prior to the mid-1920s, when the validity of racial distinctions could no longer be upheld with scientific testi- mony and U.S. courts began relying instead on "the understanding of the common man," the kinds of justification used in decisions about who was "white by law" depended on the scientific corrob- oration of racial categories (L6pez 1996:90). In the landmark rul- ing Plessy v. Ferguson, which proclaimed the constitutionality of "separate but equal" facilities, the Supreme Court decided that the very light-skinned, racially mixed Homer Plessy was black on the grounds that "racial differences lay outside the law, beyond and before any act of human agency" (Hale 1998:23). 8. Kroeber's conception of "nationality" as distinct from nation or state is similar to Sapir's: "Whereas languages and cultures are objectively alike or unlike, unitary or distinct," the nationality, Kroeber wrote, "is fundamentally subjective" in that it is "es- sentially a feeling of distinctness or unity, of sense of demarcation between in-group and out-group" (1948[1923]:226). For more on Sapir's distinction between analytic and folk boundaries, see 1949[1932b]:360, 1949[1927]:343. 9. The converse is, of course, also possible: Things that people consider their own may be regarded as foreign from some analytic perspective. This, too, was a point that the Boasians made to confront U.S. chauvinism, most famously in Ralph Linton's chestnut "One Hundred Percent American" (1937). It was one of Boas's standard arguments against Eurocentric racism that Western achievements in no way implied a racially superior aptitude on the part of West- erners, since so many of them were products of others' "genius" that had been borrowed (Boas 1938[1911], 1974[1894]). 10. Brightman notes that critics have tended to characterize past scholarship in terms that are questionable as intellectual history. Their rhetorical strategy has often been to depict past work selec- tively in a way that identifies its most essential features as precisely those aspects which are most "uncongenial to contemporary




disciplinary beliefs," while overlooking those aspects which are consistent with such beliefs and continuous with the present (Brightman 1995:527). It should be noted that structural- functionalism is not even the best example to criticize for the reifi- cation of cultural boundaries. That honor may go instead to Marvin Harris's "cultural materialism" and other neoevolutionist, cultural ecological, and materialist anthropologies that posit bounded "sociocultural systems" to be analyzed independently of one another as natural entities (Harris 1979:47). 11. The boundaries of the Orokaiva were proposed and refined by colonial officers and colonial anthropologists who worked out similarities and genetic relationships among varied Papuan "tribes" in the early 1900s. Although these boundaries had a basis in cultural and linguistic similarities, they used them in large part for their own administrative convenience; nonetheless, they also recognized that this classification collapsed cultural distinctions that were important to the people themselves and that remained politically meaningful. So even while the term Orokaiva was naturalized to some extent as covering a "group of tribes who are considered to belong to one stock and speak affiliated languages," colonial officers continued to express a working knowledge of multiple kinds and scales of cultural demarcation by routinely using locality, tribe, subtribe, and dialect names to refer to specific "Orokaiva" groups with their own political interests and cultural peculiarities (Williams 1930:2, see also Patrol Reports 1909-74). 12. In PNG English, black and white are common terms that are used to talk about race. They correspond to a range of other ex- pressions in English (e.g., national and European), Tok Pisin (e.g., blakskin and waitskin), and local vernaculars (e.g., Orokaiva hamo mume and hamo agena). Orokaiva refer to whites most frequently using the term taupa, borrowed from Police Motu. I use whitemen, my gloss for taupa, specifically to refer to whitemen as Orokaiva constructions. I do not mark distinctions among different national- ities (Australian, German, Chinese, etc.); interestingly, in Orokaiva construction, Chinese are categorized as "white," instead of being seen as "people of color" as they are in the United States. While Orokaiva do distinguish among such categories for certain purposes, they are most often ideologically backgrounded within a polarized black/white scheme that (as in racial constructions elsewhere) tends to subsume many other dimensions of meaningful difference among persons. 13. Just as analytic boundaries are plural and interested, so too are Orokaiva folk boundaries. Orokaiva themselves do not always agree about what is "their own" versus "whitemen's" culture, and an individual may draw boundaries differently in different contexts. 14. Linguists' recognition that language boundaries are shaped by politics is expressed neatly in the aphorism that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." By and large, linguists seem less troubled than are anthropologists by the fact that their objects of study are not naturally bounded entities. Similarly, though Western folk ideology often assumes monolingualism to be the natural human state of affairs (Dorian 1998), sociolinguists have no expecta- tion that there should be a one-to-one mapping between languages and speakers. To my knowledge, the existence of multilingualism has never been advanced as an argument for the fictive nature of linguistic boundaries. 15. A concept that might be useful here is the continuum between productive and passive cultural competence. In the case of the former, people have the cultural mastery necessary to act creatively within a culture, whether in ways that produce ordinary appropriate responses, or in ways that innovate, as Sapir describes. In the case of the latter, although people may have a relatively good understanding of the meanings of others' acts, their own cultural abilities are limited primarily to routine interchange and highly standardized functions. Greg Urban (2001) distinguishes between replication and dissemination along similar lines, but with the focus on cultural items that may be produced or consumed rather than on the producers or consumers themselves. 16. Hence, too, the strategy of superficial de-exoticization common in recent ethnography, a strategy that stresses the ways in which "exotic" others are like us (e.g., Balinese priests use cell phones), in contrast to the more profoundly relativist de- exoticization predicated on rendering others comprehensible to us

by showing their reasonability in relation to other particularities of their own world. 17. I am indebted to conversations with Drew Alexander for help- ing me appreciate the practical requirements for pluralism in the face of key social differences.

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A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries