Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Not all anthropologists of the day were as enthusiastic about the concept of culture as the Boasians. *Radcliffe-Brown’s dismissal of culture as a ‘vague abstraction’ ([1940] 1952:190) was echoed elsewhere in British social anthropology, where ‘culturalism’ and ‘culturalist’ were employed as damning epithets for any analysis which sought above all to explicate a culture in its own terms. The usual antonym to ‘culturalist’ was ‘structuralist’ which, before the 1960s, usually referred to the study of *social structure. The advantage of studying social structure, it was argued, was its tangibility, its unambiguous and bounded properties. This position was, of course, already under threat from the explicitly abstract ideas of structure put forward by †Evans-Pritchard in the 1940s. It was further challenged by †Edmund Leach in the opening pages of Political Systems of Highland Burma ([1954] 1964). Leach’s ‘social structure’ is an ideal model constructed by the anthropologist: what makes the world work socially is precisely the fact that it never completely corresponds to anyone’s ideal of how it ought to be. Leach’s argument about culture derives from the fact that his book concerned an area of extraordinary ethnic diversity and mobility, a situation which would challenge any believer in cultures as discrete, bounded systems. In this context, members of different cultures may nevertheless be viewed as components of a single ‘social system’, and the visible markers of cultural difference (clothing, language, religion) may themselves be political tokens in this wider system. When Leach talks about culture providing ‘the “dress” of the social situation’ ([1954] 1964:17), he is very literally illustrating a more pervasive position in British anthropology. As †David Schneider put it just before he died: ‘culture for them [British anthropologists of the 1950s] was ornaments, different hat styles, things like that’ (Schneider 1995:131).
To some extent this British suspicion of anthropological notions of culture might be related to a broader British anxiety about the humanistic sense of culture.
This may be even truer in France, where civilization predominated over culture in general intellectual discourse, and as late as 1980 †Marshall Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason—a book which explicitly argued against the reduction of cultural difference to sociological causes—was retitled for its French translation as Au coeur des sociétés.
The exception to this French suspicion was *Lévi-Strauss, whose view of culture was heavily influenced by his close relationship with Boas. Like the evolutionists, Lévi-Strauss saw culture as based on universal principles, but like the Boasians he sought a special recognition for the details which distinguish one culture from another. This problem is what led him to define the *incest taboo as the bridge between *nature and culture: natural because it was inherent in all human society, and cultural since the definition of forbidden sexpartners varied enormously from society to society (Lévi-Strauss [1949] 1969:3–25). Although Lévi-Strauss has written at length on the issue of cultural differences, his own analyses have rarely been confined to the study of a particular culture. Instead the myths and rituals of neighbouring cultures may be treated as transformations of each other, with the final goal in some sense an elucidation of the human mind as a medium of culture. Cultures-in-particular, for Lévi-Strauss, are illustrations of the logical possibilities of the pan-human capacity for culture-in-general.
Radcliffe-Brown’s hostility to the American concern with culture was most forcefully challenged by †Leslie White. As Radcliffe-Brown sought a ‘natural science of society’, so White envisaged anthropology as a ‘science of culture’. For Radcliffe-Brown, this was a contradiction in terms, precisely because culture, for him, was intangible and abstract, whereas social relations were real and observable. White (1949) turned Radcliffe-Brown’s argument around, seeing culture as cumulative both for individuals and for humanity as a whole, and as inclusive of social structure. White’s position was a curious, and not entirely resolved, combination of radically disparate intellectual elements. Culture, for him, is above all a matter of symbols and meanings, exemplified by the human capacity for language. But this argument, anticipating as it does the claims of the *symbolic anthropologists of the 1960s and 1970s, sat uneasily in an unfashionably materialist and evolutionist intellectual framework.
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