SOURCE: “Distributive Models of Culture: A Sapirian Alternative to Essentialism,” in American Anthropologist, Vol. 100, No. 1, March, 1998, pp. 55-69.

In the following essay, Rodseth argues in favor of Sapir's notion of culture as a collection of organic and infinitely variable meanings rather than abstract and static concepts.

Culture has been described as an organism, a spirit, a superstructure, a collective consciousness, a tapestry, a system, and a text. Yet all of these models have been roundly criticized and some anthropologists have recently threatened to abandon the concept of culture altogether (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991; Fox 1985). Culture, according to the critics, is tainted by essentialism, by holism, by ahistoricity; the concept inevitably suggests that human variation comes packaged in neatly bounded systems of unchanging forms: primordial, homogeneous, and overly coherent (for an exhaustive review, see Brightman 1995). An especially interesting critique is presented by Joel Kahn (1989), who points out the resemblance between...