Culture concept

8/8/2019 Culture concept

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What do anthropologists do?

Part I: The Culture Concept

You’re a what?What do youdo with that?



What is “culture”?

Cultivation, civilization or “high” culture




Popular culture




Total way of life



E B Tylor: Culture

Franz Boas: cultures

Anthropology and “culture”



Edward Burnett Tylor

1832-1917



“Culture…taken in its wideethnographic sense, is that complexwhole which includes knowledge,belief, art, morals, law, customs, andany other capabilities and habits

acquired by man as a member of society.”

Primitive Culture (1871)

Tylor’s definition



“The condition of culture among the various societiesof mankind…is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the

uniformity which so largely pervades civilization maybe ascribed…to the uniform action of uniform causes:while on the other hand its various grades may beregarded as stages of development or evolution, each

the outcome of previous history, and about to do itsproper part in shaping the history of the future.”

Primitive Culture (1871)

Tylor’s definition cont.



French and English enlightenment tradition

Universal human mind

Independent invention

Doctrine of survivals

Global homogenization

Unilineal Evolution



Maximal extent of British empire prior to WWI

British colonies



Maximal extent of French empire18th century colonies in light blue

19th-20thc colonies in navy

French colonies



Map of German colonies prior to WWI

Franz Boas: cultureS



18-19th century German subordination to

French and English political hegemony

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

Cultures instead of culture

German concepts of culture



Jewish Germanimmigrant

Worked in Alaska and onthe Northwest coast

Professor of anthropology

at Columbia University

Taught Ruth Benedict andMargaret Mead

Franz Boas, 1858-1943



Rejected unilineal social evolution by theend of the 19th century

Argued that differences of perceptionwere rooted in different modes of classication

Focused on the practices and experiencesof a single group

Boas’ concept of “culture”



Like causes produce unlike effects;unlike causes can produce like effects

Relevant history is that of the materialand cultural exchanges of a particulargroup

Universal pronouncements about“man” will have to wait for a completeempirical inventory of human practices

Historical Particularism



Tylor’scomparisonamongdecontextualizedobjects

Fighting over museumdisplays



Fighting over museumdisplays

Boas (1885)demonstrating adance pose foran exhibit



“From a collection of string instruments, utes,or drums of ‘savage’ tribes and the modern

orchestra, we cannot derive any conclusion butthat similar means have been applied by allpeoples to make music. The character of theirmusic, the only object worth studying, which

determines the form of the instruments, cannotbe understood from the single instrument, butrequires a complete collection from the entiretribe.” Franz Boas (1887)

Objects in Context



Social Anthropology

Focus on empirically observable socialroles and relationships

Culture as “superstructure”

Greater attention to universals thanparticulars



In 1952, Kluckhohn and Kroeber catalogued167 denitions of culture.

In 1973, Geertz found 11 conceptions of culture in one essay written by Kluckhohn.

Carol Delaney refused to even attempt adenition.

So what is culture?



What it is not…Culture is NOT :

Individual

Biologically determined

A thing out there in the world

Unchanging



Provisional definition“The concept of culture I espouse…is essentiallya semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, thatmans is an animal suspended in webs of signicance he himself has spun, I take culture tobe those webs, and the analysis of it to be

therefore not an experimental science in searchof law but an interpretive one in search of meaning…” (Geertz 1973: 5).

Culture concept

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