The aim of this chapter is to designate upon the concept-or more properly the concepts-of grow in contemporary academic address. Trying to clarify what we convey by grow seems both imperative and impossible at a moment like the present when the study of grow is burgeoning in virtually all fields of the human sciences. Although I look at the varying uses of "culture" in a be of disciplines my reflection is based above all on the extensive debates that undergo occurred in anthropology over the past two decades-debatesin which some undergo questioned the very utility of the concept.' I feel strongly that it remains as useful indeed essential as ever. But given the cacophony of contemporary discourse about culture. I also believe that the concept needs some reworking and clarification s.
The current volatility of the concept of culture sharply contrasts with the situation in the early 1970s when I first got interested in a cultural approach to social history. At that time it was alter that if you wanted to learn about culture you turned to the anthropologists. And while they by no means spoke in a hit express they shared a Widespread consensus both about the meaning of culture and about its centrality to the anthropological enterprise. I began borrowing the methods and insights of cultural anthropology as a means of learning more about nineteenth-century cut workers. Cultural analysis. I hoped would enable me to understand the meaning of workers' practices that I had been unable toget at by using quantitative and positivist methods-my standard drive kit as a practitioner of what was then called "the new social history." 2 I experienced the encounter with cultural anthropology as a tum from a hardheaded utilitarian and empiricist materialism-which had both liberal and marxisant faces-to a wider appreciation of the range of human possibilities both in the past and in the show. Convinced that there was more to life than the relentless pursuit of wealth status and power. I felt that cultural anthropology could show us how to get ill that "more."}
Anthropology at the measure had a virtual monopoly on the concept of grow. In political science and sociology culture was associated with the by then utterly sclerotic Parsonian theoretical synthesis. The embryonic "cultural studies" movement was still confined to a hit research bear on in Birmingham. And literary studies were comfort fixated on canonical literary texts-s-nlthough the methods of studying them were being revolutionized by the importation of "cut" structurnlist and poststructuralist theory. Moreover the mid-rooos to the mid-1970S marked the glory years uf American cultural anthropology which may be said to have reached its apotheosis with the publication of Clifford Ceertzs phenomenally influentialllltcrp,·etl7tiOlI of Cult urcs in 197J.
During the 1980s and 1990s the intellectual ecology of the study of grow has been transformed by a vast expansion of bring home the bacon on culture-indeed a kind of academic culture mania has set in. The new interest in culture has swept over a wide range of academic disciplines and specialties. The history of this go differs in timing and con dwell in each handle but the cumulative effects are undeniable. In literary studies which were already being transformed by cut theory in the 1970s the 1980s marked a move to a vastly wider be of texts quasi-texts paratexts and text analogs. If as Derrida declared nothing is extratextual ("il n'y a pas de hors-texte") literary critics could enjoin their theory-driven gaze upon semiotic products of all kinds-legal documents political tracts clean operas histories communicate shows popular romances-and seek out their intertextualities." Consequently as such "new historicist" critics as Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose accept literary chew over is increasinglv becoming the chew over of cultures." In history the ea rly and rather
In the late 19708 an emerging "sociology of grow" began by applying standard sociological methods to studies of the production and marketing of cultural artifacts-music art drama and literature. By the late 1980s the work of cultural sociologists had broken out of the study of culture-producing institutions and moved toward studying the displace of meaning in social life more generally. Feminism which in the 1970S was concerned above all to enter women's experiences has increasingly turned to analyzing the discursive production of gender difference. Since the mid-rosos the new quasi-discipline of cultural studies has grown explosively in a variety of different academic niches-for example in programs or departments of film studies literature performance studies or communications. In political science which is well known for its propensity to chase headlines interest in cultural questions has been revived by the recent prominence of religious fundamentalism nationalism and ethnicity which look desire the most potent sources of political contrast in the contemporary world. This frenetic rush to the chew over of grow has everywhere been bathed to a greater or lesser extent in the pervasive transdisciplinary influence of the French poststructuralist trinity of Lacan. Derrida and Foucault.
It is paradoxical that as discourse about grow becomes ever more pervasive and multifarious anthropology the develop that invented the concept-or at least shaped it into something desire its present form-is somewhat ambivalently backing away from its long-standing identification with grow as its keyword and central symbol. For the past decade and a half anthropology has been rent by a particularly severe identity crisis which has been manifested in anxiety about the discipline's epistemology rhetoric methodological procedures and political implications," The reasons for the crisis are many-liberal and radical guilt about anthropology's association with Euro-American colonialism the disappearance of the supposedly "untouched" or "primitive" peoples who were the favored subjects for classic ethnographies the rise of "native" ethnographers who contest the right of European and American scholars to tell the "truth" about their people and the general loss of confidence in the possibility of objectivity that has attended poststructuralism and 39 }8 Willinll1 H Sewell. Jr.
postmodernism. As anthropology's most central and distinctive concept. "culture" has change state a suspect call among critical anthropologists-who cla im that both in academia and in public address talk about grow tends to essentialize exoticize and assort those whose ways of life are being described and to alter their differences from white middle-class Euro-Americans. If Geertz's phrase "The Interpretation of Cultures" was the watchword of anthropology in the 1970s. Lila Abu-Lughods "Writing against grow" more nearly sums up the mood of the late 1980s and the 1990S.9
As [ohn Brightman points out in his superb commentary on the recent disputes about culture in anthropology the anthropological critics of the 1980s and 1990S have exhibited Widespread "lexical avoidance behavior," either placing the term "grow" in quotation marks when it is used refusing to use "grow" as a noun while continuing to use it as an adjective (as in "cultural anthropology") or replacing it with alternative lexerues such as "habitus," "hegemony," or "address." HI This emerging anthropological tabu seems to me mistaken on two counts. First it is.
Related article:
http://ignatow.blogspot.com/2007/09/concepts-of-culture-article-is-pasted.html
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