Cultural Anthropology

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Cultural anthropology Summary

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The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition

cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology is the study of the social practices, expressive forms, and language use through which meanings are constituted, invoked and often contested in human societies. The term cultural anthropology is generally associated with the American tradition of anthropological research and writing. In the early part of the twentieth century, Franz Boas (1940) was critical of the assumptions of evolutionary anthropology and of its racial implications; in developing his critique, he focused on the particularities of different ways of life rather than upon broad comparison and generalization, and on demonstrating that race and culture were not coterminous. Boasian anthropology, as George Stocking (1974:19) has suggested, elaborated a concept of culture as a ‘relativistic, pluralistic, holistic, integrated, and historically conditioned framework for the study of the determination of human behavior’, a concept that involved an emphasis on language as an embodiment of culturally significant classificatory systems.

The Boasian emphasis on culture as a particularized, patterned and shared set of categories and assumptions that often did not rise into conscious awareness directed anthropologists working in this tradition to focus upon the meanings rather than the functions of social and cultural practices, and upon the specificities of these meanings rather than upon the construction of cross-cultural sociological laws and principles.

This way of thinking about culture is a significant and enduring paradigm that continues to inform American anthropology, and it was influential in the development of French structural anthropology as well. Edward Sapir, a student of Boas, adumbrated later critiques of some Boasian assumptions with his stress on individual creativity in culture and in language, and with his writings on the diversity of perspectives within societies (1949). Since at least the late 1970s cultural anthropologists, while retaining the emphasis on culture as a set of signs and meanings, have been further challenging some Boasian assumptions about culture as a shared, integrated and taken-for-granted unified whole; as a result, they are experimenting with a variety of novel interpretive and writing strategies.

Broadly speaking, these challenges have resulted from a rethinking of the idea of culture on four interrelated fronts: considerations of the politics of representing other cultures and societies; considerations of the power relations in which cultural meanings are always situated; reconsiderations of the relation of language to culture; and considerations of person, self and emotion in relation to cultural meanings. Together these frame a broad spectrum of research and writing in cultural anthropology.

The politics of representation

Edward Said’s enormously influential argument in Orientalism (1978) was that western descriptions of other (usually formerly colonized) cultures typically represent them as static, mired in an unchanging and unchallengeable tradition, and as exercising such control over behaviour and attitudes that people are unable consciously to critique or transform their own societies or to exercise agency with respect to them. Said views this as a dehumanizing mode of writing that not only serves the political interests of the colonizing and formerly colonizing west, but also allows the west to define itself as advancing rather than static, and as scientific and rational rather than traditional. Cultural anthropologists have considered the implications of these and other critiques of western writing about other societies, and the way that older conceptions of culture reinforced such representations. As a result they have transformed their modes of writing and analysis to highlight the historically changing nature of all societies, the active construction and deployment of tradition in the cultures they study, and to reflect on the inevitably political nature of all anthropological writing and to make this explicit in their writing.

Culture and power

Boasian and structural definitions of culture typically involve assumptions about the degree to which culture is shared within a given community, and the degree to which cultural propositions are part of everyday taken-for-granted and unquestioned common sense. Cultural anthropology, often drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), has come to emphasize instead the tactical uses of cultural discourses in everyday social practice, and influenced as well by the writings of Michel Foucault (1977; 1978), the ways that cultural propositions are upheld by and serve the interests of certain segments of a society. Feminist anthropology and research on the politics of class and race have been of critical importance in this move to interpret culture as an arena characterized as much by struggle and contestation as by consensus. Thus, for example, many feminist anthropologists have turned their attention to the poetics and politics of ritual, story, song and other expressive traditions that offer implicit or explicit critiques of authoritative cultural discourses concerning gender, kinship, and economic and political institutions. Ethnographic writing has come to focus upon the relationship of culture to power and, reflecting upon the work of James C. Scott (1985; 1990) and others on the nature of resistance, to emphasize the fact that cultural discourses may be challenged, contested or negotiated by those whom they disadvantage. Cultural anthropologists have also analysed the deployment of cultural traditions as responses to power relations on a global scale, to specific colonial and postcolonial political and economic situations, belying earlier assumptions about the fixity and timelessness of ‘tradition’.

Language in cultural anthropology

The shift in anthropology from a definition of culture stressing stasis, internal consistency and homogeneity to one stressing heterogeneous meanings deployed for different persuasive purposes is paralleled and in some ways foreshadowed by the shift away from the Boasian and structuralist concern with language as a formal system of abstract cultural categories to a concern with the linguistic strategies through which speakers rhetorically construct and reconstruct status, identity and social relationships in varied situations of everyday life. Speech, these anthropologists argue, is always produced in specific historical and micropolitical contexts, and it both reflects and is constitutive of the power relationships implicit in the speech situation. Cultural anthropologists frequently use the term discourse to characterize language envisioned as a set of resources that speakers draw upon to construct and negotiate their social worlds in specific contexts. The word is intended to evoke the idea of language and culture as implicated in a universe of power relationships, and to focus analytic attention on the pragmatic uses of linguistic forms rather than on language as a fixed and formal set of features or cultural categories that somehow transcend the actual social circumstances of the speech community.

Person, self and emotion

In veering away from styles of ethnographic writing that view cultures as monolithic and homogeneous and moving towards modes of writing that see human subjectivity as both social and individual, and culture as both shared and contested, cultural anthropologists have been increasingly concerned with the role that emotions and talk about emotions play in social life, and with the possibility of an anthropology of experience that would convey the distinctive qualities of life in another culture while at the same time portraying an individual’s complex and often contradictory experiences within that culture. Earlier work, beginning with that of Ruth Benedict (1934), for example, saw both personality and culture as consistent unified wholes. More recent analyses of the language of personal narrative, of cultural discourses of emotion, of life history, of the micropolitics of everyday life, and psychoanalytic modes of analysis have all contributed to the effort to write convincingly of the fluidity and contextuality of the self and of culture.

Gloria Goodwin Raheja

University of Minnesota

References

Benedict, R. (1934) Patterns of Culture, Boston.

Boas, F. (1940) Race, Language and Culture, New York.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, UK.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York.

——(1978) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, New York .

Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York.

Sapir, E. (1949) Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London.

Scott, J. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT.

——(1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT.

Stocking, G. (1974) The Shaping of American Anthropology: 1883–1911, New York.