This
book project addresses a significant recent theoretical development
that crosses disciplinary boundaries and philosophical
orientations: the rejection of the concept of culture as a
critical term. It traces the history of the “cultural turn” of the
1980s and 1990s to offer an account of “culture’s” ascendancy as a
central interdisciplinary concept, the reasons for its more recent
failing fortunes, and ultimately argues for the term’s continued—indeed
renewed—relevance in the context of globalization.
In
1998, I concluded my book on modernism and the concept of culture
with the observation that there was a perceptibly emerging discontent
with “culture,” coming from some of the very places where you might
imagine it would be most at home: cultural anthropology and a
culturally-oriented literary studies. What had then seemed like a set
of interesting but hardly mainstream critiques has now proliferated to
include book-length entries by literary scholar Terry Eagleton and
anthropologist Adam Kuper, among others. A collection of essays was
recently published called Beyond the Cultural Turn. In another,
Anthropology Beyond Culture, its editors therapeutically counsel
anthropologists not only to dispense with “culture” but with “culture
worry” as well, as if all that’s left, after a now played-out debate
about “culture,” is an unhealthy sense of guilt over dumping a concept
that was once deemed central to anthropological practice (note).
In
these and a host of other works, the concept of “culture” has been
characterized as lacking explanatory power on a number of grounds. When
“culture” is used to talk about the particular culture of a group of
people—as in the phrases “American culture” or “Chinese culture”—it
seems a-historical, reifying, and reductive. It also seems to some
commentators hopelessly embedded in nineteenth-century European
nationalisms and in the tastes of Western elites. For others, it
suggests frames of analysis that exclude important considerations of
the social, political, and economic. For still others, it is simply
vague to the point of meaninglessness. The complaint against “culture”
also has a disciplinary component in that some of its energy and
vehemence of the complaints against “culture” are really directed at
the various scholarly projects—cultural studies, new cultural history,
new historicism, “reflexive” anthropology—that in the last few decades
had called for a “cultural turn.” The resistance to “culture” is, in
other words, in many cases motivated by a resistance to certain
scholarly schools or movements.
The
project of this book is quite simply to interrogate the turn away from
culture, and to propose ways that culture may still be of use to us in
our global present. After introducing the different criticisms
of “culture” and offering an account of some of their
shortcomings, I show how it was that culture emerged as a key
interdisciplinary concept in the context of the sometimes antithetical
pressures of identity politics and the moment of poststructuralist
theory. I then discuss culture as a term of disciplinary formation and
maintenance, especially in relation to anthropology and American
Studies, and take up culture as a key term for understanding
globalization. Finally, I describe some new conceptual uses of culture,
like cultural property and cultural rights, that suggest that
culture continues to be a useful and important term for coming to grips
with our world and humanity’s place within it.
(note:
See Adam Kuper, Culture: The
Anthropologists' Account (1999); Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (2000);
Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt ed. Beyond
the Cultural Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999); Richard G. Fox and Barbara J. King, eds. Anthropology Beyond Culture (New
York: Berg) 2002; and Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the
Concept of Culture (1999) 193-213.)