8-3 BOGGS, James The Culture Concept As Theory in Context

The Culture Concept as Theory, in Context
Author(s): JamesP.Boggs
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, No. 2 (April 2004), pp. 187-209
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4502-0003$3.00
The Culture Concept

as Theory, in Context
by James P. Boggs
This essay presents anthropologys culture concept (hereafter culture) asformally, precisely, definablya scientific theory. Representing new knowledge, an emerging theory challenges, reconfigures, existing knowledge. It has a starting place, a context. To
advance anthropologys idea of culture as theory is to place it in
time, in relation to ideas it reconfigures or replaces. So situated,
culture is seen to replace the existing theory of human order, inherited from the Enlightenment, that underlies the doctrine political theorists call liberalism: as theory, culture supplants no
less than the currently dominant social/political theory of Western modernity. In this light the present essay reconsiders the
contention, with its attending sense of malaise, that is now
swirling around the idea of culture in anthropology. While critics
blame cultures difficulties on its inherent flaws, this essay suggests that its troubles follow first from its very success as theory.
Significantly disturbing the conceptual groundwork for the liberal polity, culture sparks reactions within that polity aimed in
part against its credentials as theory. Anthropologys discovery of
culture thus places ititself a discipline within the liberal tradition, an institution within the liberal polityin a position in relation to current affairs that is at once difficult, paradoxical, and
strategic.
j a m e s p . b o g g s is owner of James P. Boggs Research, which
has conducted contract research and prepares expert-witness testimony for Indian tribes in the Great Plains and Wisconsin, and
also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Montana and senior associate of the universitys
Public Policy Research Institute (his mailing address: 2705
Highland Drive, Missoula, MT 59802-3153, U.S.A. [jpalm2@
msn.com]). Born in 1939, he was educated at the University of
Oklahoma (B.A., 1963) and the University of Oregon (Ph.D.,
1974). He has taught at San Jose State University (197275) and
has been staff social scientist for the Northern Cheyenne Research Project (197680). His publications include Anthropological Knowledge and Native American Cultural Practice in the
Liberal Polity (American Anthropologist 104:599610), Procedural vs. Substantive in NEPA Law: Cutting the Gordian Knot
(The Environmental Professional 15:2534), and Some Reflections on Implicit Models of Social Knowledge Use (Knowledge:
Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 14:2962). The present paper was
submitted 1 xi 02 and accepted 4 ix 03.
1. This essay has benefited from thoughtful comments by the editor

and (in this and earlier versions) several anonymous referees, whose
engaged and substantive disagreements were themselves a form of
encouragement and whose comments as a whole renewed my appreciation for the forms and processes of anthropological inquiry.
I remain responsible for remaining shortcomings, for any substantive errors, and for good advice ignored.
Through the twentieth century, anthropologists developed the idea of culture into a powerful, sophisticated,
and influential scientific theory, even as the discipline
clung to antiquated notions of science (Latour 1996:
5) that in effect denied this considerable achievement.
This article presents the culture idea as theory. It begins
by sketching a definition of theoryitself an evolving
and contentious questionwith which at least an important contingent of philosophers of science and many
scientists today might agree.
As the anthropological theory of human culture
(herein culture or culture theory) took form in a massive
corpus of empirical findings and reasoned analyses, philosophers were expanding understandings of theory beyond the reductionist physical, organic, or statistical/
mechanical models that held anthropology substantially
in thrall. These new conceptions encompassed the kind
of theory culture was becoming. The ideal of unified
science has receded, observes the philosopher Stephen
Toulmin; the sciences now are seen as a confederation
of enterprises, with methods and patterns of explanation
to meet their own distinct problems (1990:165; cf. Boon
1982:ix; Reyna 1994:557). But if my argument rejects
Cartesian epistemologies, the claim that culture occupies a definable place as theory within contemporary science signals that this will not be a historicist or interpretivist account, either. If theory cannot mirror nature
(Rorty 1979), it rightly aspires to reflect it, however partially and imperfectly.
What, then, is a scientific theory? Granted that the
sciences are diverse, not just any bit of idea or observation can be claimed as theory. A theory may be understood as an abstraction from and representation of
the ordering principles that govern a class of concrete
systems or a realm of systemic order. The sciences are
diverse because the principles of systemic order that they
discover and represent are diverse. This circumstance
requires not epistemological or ontological reductionism
but explanatory pluralism (Lachapelle 2000). Theory can no longer be limited to scientistic models of
theory derived from physical or organic systems.2
Anthropology, then, is the social science discipline
that marks off human social/cultural systems as its
proper domain for study and for theorizing. As a science,
anthropology reflects the empirical realities of the systemic order with which it deals. It thus is properly a
science, just as, say, nuclear physics or evolutionary
biology are sciences. Empirical theories that reveal or
reorder significant domains of experience have had truly
revolutionary import. This is no less true of culture theory today. And if all this brings anthropology to the
2. By scientistic I mean what Rubinstein and Laughlin (1977:
46062) called the received view of scientific theory. Related to
logical positivism, it is perhaps most closely associated in America
with Hempels deductive-nomological account. It is a formalist
and reductionist view of theory that presumes a mechanistic and
reductionist ontology. The colloquial scientistic is apt; inasmuch
as science and accounts of science have advanced, reductionist
models remain within the tradition of science but do not define it
and hence can no longer be equated with the scientific view.
187

188 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
threshold of the humanities and invites approaches developed in the humanities as productive tools for exploring cultural phenomena, then culture theory explains why this may be so.
Anthropology, always a diverse field with its full share
of lively argument, of late is buffeted by deeper currents
of intellectual and ethical unease. The forces behind
these currents surface today in disciplinary critiques of
culture that invoke the issues just mentioned. Excellent
reviews and countercritiques have appeared, and we will
not need to revisit all this ground. Looking at some representative critiques will, however, help display the tone
and parameters of the movement against culture and
raise some key questions.
Commentators note that symptoms of the flagrant disorder evidenced in current critiques of culture became
epidemic in the discipline just as the culture idea gained
wide acceptance and use in the world and anthropologys
prestige within the intellectual community seemed assured.3 Much current disciplinary critique is foundational; it aims not to improve culture theory, correct its
excesses, more finely calibrate inquiry, or ensure that its
public uses remain within the scope of the theorys
claims but to call into question its credibility and social
value. Defining the culture idea as not theory, in some
versions disputing scientific theory itself as a representative knowledge form, the critique rejects culture as
a meaningful term of reference. Similarly, in denying
that a cultural realm of systemic order defined by distinctive organizing principles exists, the critique would
leave culture theory with nothing meaningful to refer
to.
If culture has become widely accepted and influential
and it has recently become possible creditably to claim
culture as scientific theory, why should there now be
such a strong movement against just this possibility?
One might think that anthropologists would, with Latour (1996), hail their disciplines scientific achievements4 instead of falling over one another to repudiate
them. Brightman (1995:528) argues convincingly that the
current critique creates an expendable straw culture
to demolish that has only tangential relation to the range
and scope of cultures meanings (see also Boggs 2002;
Brumann 1999; Greenblatt 1999; Lambek and Boddy
1997:11), but this only intensifies the puzzle: Why?
This puzzle is addressed in the second part of the essay
by looking at culture in its societal context. Early anthropologists developed the first iterations of culture theory in circumstances dominated by well-developed ideas
about those matters that culture addresses. Boass cul3. One of the paradoxes of modern anthropology is that we have
finally succeeded in convincing the public of the importance of
culture at the very moment that as a discipline we have come to
questionor even rejectits usefulness (Winthrop 1999:43; for
similar observations see, e.g., Fox 1999; Keesing 1994:304; Greenblatt 1999).
4. Anthropology is already one of the most advanced, productive
and scientific of all the disciplinesnatural or social. . . . Imagine
a world stripped of all anthropological discoveries. What a desert
it would be without this scientific discipline (Latour 1996:5).
turalist critique of racial theories is well known but represents only a lesser part of the conceptual revolution
that culture set in motion. More broadly, ideas about
science, method, and the extension of then-current scientific principles to realms of human order had been
around long before Durkheim, Tylor, and others and ultimately Boas and his students assembled the strands of
what became culture theory. Part 2 shows how culture
confronts and as theory displaces an existing empirical
theory of human order broadly known as liberalism.
Liberal theory developed as a social scientific theory
of human order based on European natural science in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Copernican
revolution, explains Gledhill (1997:83), which gave
birth to the doctrine of the liberal state as a right-based
state is premised in a fundamental way on individualism. Individuals and their rights, he continues, in the
state of nature precede the establishment of society itself. Thus, liberalism as a political doctrine depends on
a social doctrine, a theory of social order. Liberal theory evolved when modern science was new and compelling, and the available models for theory formation
were those worked out for relatively simple physical systems. Descartes (15961650) extended these principles
to philosophy, just as Hobbes (15881679) and Locke
(16321704) applied them to social theory and politics.
The basic tenets of liberal theory, as it was developed
then, still undergird the institutions and practices of the
modern liberal democratic state.
The limitations of liberal theory have become obvious,
although liberal principles still shape the political ideology of the West and prevail in public life. Culture theory is a major, late unfolding within the movement of
modern science. Unlike liberal theory, which envisaged
a unified science and aimed to extend its principles to
represent and properly govern society, culture theory developed in response to and in direct interaction with the
empirical findings and problems posed by the domain of
systemic order it refers to. Instead of following premises
and principles defined in early physical science by finding the sources of social order in putative universal inherent properties of individuals, culture finds them in
varying systems of symbols. Liberal theory and culture
theory are therefore incommensurable (in the sense that
one or the other must be true) and competing theories
(cf. Kaplan [1975:879, reference omitted]: Until someone can convince me otherwise . . . the earth cannot be
both a flat disc and an oblate spheroid; one of these views
is simply mistaken). Within science, culture theory replaces liberal theory much as, for instance, the Copernican system replaced the Ptolemaic.
In short, culture is proximately responsible for an ongoing profound shift in the West from one frame of reference to another with respect to understanding human
social lifeopening conceptual rifts in public debate as
well as in the foundations of anthropological thought.5
5. Colson (1974:910) points to an early expression of this rift when
she notes Lewis Henry Morgans reliance on individualist rationality models of human behavior and contractarian theories of social

b o g g s The Culture Concept as Theory F 189
Conflicting paradigms cohabit within us, and we switch

between them, not always consciously, much as one
shifts from one view to another of those ambiguous pictures beloved of gestalt psychologists (see Hanson 1965
[1958]:430).
Importantly, however, more is at issue here than a
curiously prolonged transition from one social scientific
paradigm to another. While we now consciously think
about and see human beings as cultural beings, current
versions of the naturalized, individualistic view of human nature that I am calling liberal theory still underwrite Western political and economic institutions.
Against the scientific conceptual shift to culture theory,
the very institutions and values that we live by continually reintroduce liberal views and values into current
discourse.
Moreover, an immense and powerful establishment
basically, the modern Western liberal democratic state
and the capitalist economic systemnow exists that is
premised on and in some sense warranted by liberal theory as a universal theory of human order. The advent of
culture theoryand this is importantdoes not in and
of itself constitute a critique of liberalism as a political
ideal or of liberal society. But it does resituate and
relativize liberal theory: liberalism becomes one cultural
way of life among others. No longer read back to the
state of nature (Macpherson 1962), liberal theory still
describes much about the modern West. Nevertheless,
the decentering effects of culture can be difficult and
disorientingmuch as were the analogous impacts of
heliocentric and Darwinian theories in their times. That
culture theory deeply compromises the legitimacy of rationales for Western hegemony is only one such effect.
Not surprisingly, then, culture theory sparks a reaction
or backlash within the liberal polity. Attacks against culture come from legal and administrative institutions
when culturalist arguments are brought before them
(Boggs 2002, n.d.), but they also arise within anthropology as the discipline whose work produced and warrants
the idea of culture.
Culture Theory and its Anthropological

Critique
culture theory as theory
My claim that culture is current theory confronts critics
insistence that it is not theory but merely a categorizing
concept. Is culture theory a legitimate theory or, as many
critics claim, a reified abstraction or a device for classifying people? Is it, as Kuper (1999:3), for example, puts
it, simply a way of talking about collective identities?
A category or class of items has one or several defining
attributes. Defined by common attributes rather than
ordered process, the members of a class need not be in
order while Maine and Tylor emphasized custom, Boas was developing the idea of culture, and Durkheim posited supraindividual
social systems (see also Sahlins 1976).
proximity and need not interact. The attributes defining

a class are subject to empirical verification, but the class
itself is arbitrary in that an observer (or culture) abstracts
the attributes that define it. Race (racial identity) is a
categorizing concept whose essential arbitrariness (despite other complications) is well understoodbut so
also are national, cultural, ethnic, or any other identities in and of themselves classifying concepts. Is the
anthropological idea of culture, then, as its critics claim
(see below), also no more than a glorified classifying
concept?
A theory, let us say, is also an abstraction, but theory
abstracts systemic relationships rather than selected attributes. Interactive relationships between entities may
define higher-level entities or processes that are, if you
will, realthat are not arbitrary in the sense in which
a class of objects is arbitraryas, for instance, gravitational relationships between the sun and planets form
the solar system. Some natural systems are mechanical,
determinative, closed, while others are open, with fluid
boundaries, complexly and multiply ordered, emergent,
or (what has become a term of art) chaotic. Examples
of open systems include a gene pool or species (e.g.,
Gould 2002:595744; Hull 1978, 1998), a culture, or an
ordered field of interactions. Clifford Geertz (1965:106),
the preeminent antiscience interpretivist(?), put it precisely: It is not whether phenomena are empirically
common that is critical in science . . . but whether they
can be made to reveal the enduring natural processes that
underlie them. . . . We need to look for systematic relationships among diverse phenomena, not for substantive identities among similar ones.
The physical properties of their constituents govern
the ordering principles of such physical systems as the
solar system and chemical interactions. But other systems cannot be derived solely from the physical properties of their constituents because their principles of
organization involve coded information as well as physical causality. The organization of biological systems, for
example, depends on chemical or behavioral codes, while
differing systems of symbols constitute a key ordering
principle for diverse human cultural systems. Such systems still feature exchanges of matter or energy among
their parts. These are governed, however, by more than
constituent physical properties alone, interactions between their constituents need not be mechanical or determinative (see, e.g., Miller 1978 on complexion entropy; see also Levy 1952, Simon 1969), and the system
itself may be responsive, adaptive, open, protean, or even
self-directing. In sum, then, the anthropological idea of
culture is theory because it abstracts and represents the
ordering principle (systems of symbols) of organized human collectivities. That cultural systems are open and
fluid is a given of the theory rather than evidence against
its status as theory.
One commits the essentialist fallacy by attributing
to cultural systems the kinds of bounded, determinate,
or essential properties that characterize exemplary
physical systems or by treating cultural properties as if
they were like more fixed biological properties. One

commits the idealist fallacy by failing to recognize

that cultural systems have physical and empirically ascertainable dimensions, even while the principles by
which the system is organized do not derive solely from
physical or biological properties of its component parts.
Abstracting the empirical relationships that define a
type of system, a theory becomes a gestalt, a paradigm,
a way of seeing the domain of experience that it represents. Classes may be formed in new and interesting
ways, but they remain just classescategories of things
or of people. They do not become things themselves; they
do not form higher-level entities; they may reflect but
do not instigate gestalt experiences or paradigm shifts.
They may express new insights but cannot on their own
spark radically new ways of seeing the world. A classificatory schema associated with a theory becomes subordinate to that theory, as todays biological taxonomy,
for instance, reflects synthetic evolutionary theory (contrast this with Foucaults famous recounting of the dramatically exotic [to us, because it relates to no theory
we recognize] animal taxonomy with which he begins
The Order of Things [1973 (1970):xvxxiv]).6
While the matters being explored here can hardly be
regarded as settled, it would be difficult not to concede
that in some meaningful sense large conceptual shifts
have occurred and that over the past 500 years scientific
theory has been involved. One need only point to Copernicus in the sixteenth, Darwin in the nineteenth, and
Einstein in the twentieth century to carry that argument.
Becoming far more than just theory but only as theory,
such forms of knowledge unsettle and shift the foundations of the cosmologies of their respective eras. Today
culture theory is similarly consequential.
Major new theories make political waves, but this does
not make them primarily products of political strategizing. Much as Copernican theory differentiated and
decentered the human world within the cosmos or Lyell
and Darwin situated Homo sapiens within evolutionary
time and the great order of species, culture theory similarly reorients and relativizes the West within the vast
range of human cultural differentiation. Here the relevant ordering principle is varying systems of symbols
rather than universal laws derived from inherent attributes of matter, natural selection, or chemical codes (see,
e.g., Aberle 1987, Geertz 1965). Western culture shifts
into place as one symbolically mediated system of ordering among others rather than the center and apex of
a fixed course of human development (e.g., Sahlins 1976).
The Western view of reality becomes a local view rather
6. Gould (2002:5035) has an account of the modern synthetic
theory of evolution. The definitions advanced here also come
from, among others, Aberle (1987), Bertalanffy (1968), Caws (1974),
Gould (2002:595744), Hacking (1999), Hanson (1965 [1958]), Heylighen (1999), Hull (1978, 1998), Kuhn (1962), Lachapelle (2000),
Levy (1952), Miller (1978), Pattee (1973), Prigogine and Sanglier
(1988), Quine (1973), Simon (1969), and Suppe (1977). Not all of
these thinkers, of course, agree with all that I have just written.
Hacking, for instance, following other game and other philosophers
(e.g., Quine, Goodman), regards classes or kinds as objects,
confounding the distinction between class and system that I here
regard as primary (see Hacking 1999:22, 104).
than the self-evident transparent view of naked reality

just as it is; Western man becomes a cultural human
like all the others rather than natural man or, better
perhaps, final man who has ascended through the dark
stages of ignorance to enlightenment by shedding the
illusions of culture, custom, and superstition.
In sum, the system that culture theory refers to derives
its order not directly from inherent properties of human
beings, which are variable in relevant respects from one
cultural tradition to another, but from varying systems
of symbols and meaning that give form to the real and
similarly varying systems of language, kinship, economic exchange, and political order that anthropological
inquiry reveals. I should be meticulously clear here. I am
saying that the order of cultural systems is a cultural
order not derivable directly from presumed universal attributes of individuals; I am not saying that culture exists
apart from its various embodiments in human beings,
whose physical, organic, and psychic nature is its necessary condition (cf. Kroeber 1917). I am not saying that
culture theory is a finished theory. I am saying that it is
currently valid (if still evolving), that its basic tenets
make good sense in relation to theory in adjacent domains, and that, in any event, all indications are that
much current criticism of culture theory has less to do
withindeed, diverts attention fromits strengths and
weaknesses than with its perceived troubling implications for modernist thought and social institutions.
the anthropological critique of culture
Striking contrasts are what make the anthropologist
recognize and come to terms with his own assumptions. [Colson 1974:21]
Culture operates . . . to enforce separations that
inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy. [Abu-Lughod
1991:13738]
On both sides of the Atlantic, one runs up against
the same topoi of the counter-Enlightenment: criticism of the seeming inevitable terrorist consequences
of global interpretations of history; critique of the
role of the general intellectual intervening in the
name of human reason, and also of the transposition
of theoretically pretentious human sciences into a
practice contemptuous of humans. . . . The figure of
thought is always the same: There is a narrowminded will to power ingrained in the very universalism of the Enlightenment, in the humanism of
emancipatory ideals, and in the rational pretension
of systematic thought; as soon as the theory is ready
to become practical, it throws off its mask . . . [Habermas 1994:76 n. 26].
The debate over culture theory in anthropology revolves
around three more or less distinct critiques: (1) Critics
on the left view culture as a tool of modernist hegemonya malignant development of scientistic rationalism

that wields truth as power in order to distance, control,

and oppress others. Discounting the integrity of scientific inquiry and its process, left critics relinquish the
emancipatory potential of knowledge. The positive expression of this critique is defense of the subaltern
against oppression. (2) Critics on the right view culture
as an outgrowth of romantic nationalism, now clothed
in the stylish language of postmodernism, that subverts
rational universalism and science. Protecting truth, they
inadequately confront its complicities with power. The
positive expression here is defense of science, democracy,
and human rights. (3) A third critique is more a residual
class of arguments that do not fit easily on the left/right
continuum. The present essay falls here, finding elements from each side to accept and to reject.
The left critiqueillustrated by the above selection
from Abu-Lughods frequently cited Writing Against Culture (1991:13738)well exemplifies Habermass accompanying depiction of the counter-Enlightenment (1983:
76). When Abu-Lughod urges that one powerful tool for
unsettling the culture concept and subverting the process
of othering it entails is to write ethnographies of the
particular (1991:149), she joins the epigrammatic postmodernist aversion to abstract reason, universalism, and
metanarrative that Habermas describes.
A rough sequence, an almost tidal ebb and flow, characterizes the culture debates beginning with the Enlightenment itself. Franz Boas, a late Enlightenment figure,
presumed that the culture theory he was assembling was
immanently democratic, antiracist, and emancipatory.
It seemed self-evident to Boas that the truth of his position would bring with it social enlightenment (Rabinow 1991:60). Two reactions to Boasian culture theory
followed.
The first and virtually immediate opposition from cognate disciplines was scientisticwhat Kuhn would identify as the normal reaction of normal science to a new
paradigm (cf. Stocking 1968). Culture theory prevailed,
however, establishing American anthropology as a social
science discipline with this new theory as its flagship
concept. But the scientistic critique (or, depending on its
inflection, what would become the right or liberalist critique) of culture also became internalized within the new
discipline.
Meanwhile, as synthetic culture theory became more
mature and more sophisticated and grew in acceptance
and influence, a left critique arose equating culture theory with the very scientism that it in fact challenged.
Opposing cultures hard-won legitimacy as a scientific
conceptand often science altogetherthis critique also
opposed cultures naively presumed social beneficence.
Left critics after the middle of the century argued thatculture, far from representing an inherently enlightening
scientific idea, was rather, but equally immanently, an
effect and a servant of Western hegemony. Marxist theorists in the 1970s, for instance, explains Ortner, converted culture to ideology, and considered [it] from
the point of view of its role in social reproduction: legitimating the existing order, mediating contradictions
in the base, and mystifying the sources of exploitation
and inequality in the system (1984:140, references

omitted). In the wake of such critiques, according to Rabinow (1991:6061), Boas now is thought to have been
naive in his typical overvaluation of the socially beneficent power of science.
But left arguments, through their mirror-image reversals, still presume that culture theory somehow has
immanent sociopolitical consequences. Critiques of culture from both right and left broadly depend on this relict
idea, which I will call, for want of a more graceful term,
the presumption of immanence in knowledge. When
Keesing says that culture almost irresistibly leads us
into reification and essentialism (1994:302) he attributes to it an immanent almost irresistible force. When
Abu-Lughod asserts that culture operates . . . to enforce separations that inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy or that it entails othering, she clearly means
that culture as theory or idea inevitably, immanently,
does these things. Because it is this kind of thing it must
be opposedwe must write against culture (1991:
13738). But now the properties being attributed to culture are not emancipatory or enlightening but hidden,
dark, politically ominous. Culture theory is not so much
wrong as it is bad (cf. DAndrade 1995).
The next tidal wave of criticism rolls in again from
the right (for varying expressions see, e.g., Appell 1992;
Bennett 1987; DAndrade 1995; Kuper 1994, 1999; Reyna
1994, 1999; Spiro 1996). Opposing the left critique of the
1960s and 70s, this wave aims to defend modernist science as science. In doing so it picks up threads from the
earlier and now internalized scientistic reaction against
Boasian culture theory (cf., e.g., Stocking 1968: chap. 11;
Lewis 2001:38182). But even as it opposes the left critique, it also follows it in focusing not on truth or validity
but on cultures putative ideological and social dangers.
Todays right critics see in culture a malevolent outgrowth of German romantic idealism and reaction that,
however, now legitimates postmodernist antiscience and
harnesses anthropology to left-liberal politics. Thus for
Kuper it is the relativist cultural-pluralist tradition of
U.S. culture theory, with roots in German idealism and
affinities with Nazism (1994:545), that Franz Boas
brought from Berlin to Columbia University at the turn
of the century (p. 539). This Americanist culture theory,
originally linked to Nazism but now associated with leftliberal concerns from the 1960s and 1970s (p. 543), is what
the postmoderniststhose inward-looking, self-referential writers who have captured the Boasian tradition
(p. 551)have taken up. Though he will not concede that
it is theory, seeing it rather as a project in the humanities (p. 551), it nevertheless is precisely culture theory,
conflated with postmodernism, against which Kuper directs his ire (cf. Kuper 1994; 1999:21925).7
7. Several perceptive social commentators, like Kuper, similarly
identify rightist origins or strains in postmodernism (e.g., Callinicos
1990, Foster 1983, Habermas 1983). Edward Said notes that deconstruction bears its own form of complicity with recent neo-conservatism (quoted in Bernstein 1992:188). Anthropologists like
DAndrade (1995), Spiro (1996), and Kuper (1994), however, criticizing culture theory from rightist perspectives, most dislike its

Spiro similarly argues that the postmodernist conception of culture, either directly or through its
metaphysics and epistemology (1996:771), grounds the
subjectivist attack on knowledge. Reyna fears that
Geertz and Sahlins, theorists of culture in the Boasian
tradition, have led American cultural anthropology off
its path as science and thus into its twilight as a discipline and profession (1999:174).8 The postmodernists, says DAndrade, want to transform anthropology
from a discipline based upon an objective model of the
world to a discipline based on a moral model of the
world (1995:399)a left-liberal model of domination
and resistance (pp. 400401).
While critics on the left blame culture for holding anthropology in the thrall of modernist scientism and those
on the right condemn it for leading anthropology down
the garden path of postmodernist antiscience, critics on
both sides of this ideological divide equally target the
alleged essentializing and nominalizing aspects of culture theory (see, e.g., Lambek and Boddy 1997:10; cf. Bidney 1953:3234 on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness). The consistency of this critique across a broad
political spectrum may help explain why it seems so
compelling (though its common feature is merely the
flawed presumption of immanence in knowledge).
John Bennett, long a critic on the right (e.g., 1976),
views not just culture theory but culture itself as an
atavism in the global age: The culture paradigm [in anthropology] prevented [prevented?] consideration of a
most grievous and embarrassing fact: that culturethat
is, the appearance of distinctive styles of thought and
action in particular groupsmight be a generalized behavioral proclivity counter to the best interests of mankind as a whole (Bennett 1987:52). Culture theory is
socially ominous, Bennett says, because it obstructs
the realization that culture itself is a divisive and destructive force in human affairs. This critique rather
astonishingly merges the standard attack on culture theory as an essentializing ideawhat Michaels (1995:6)
calls an identitarian devicewith what human culture is. While few carry their critique of culture so far,
many critics similarly ignore cultures theoretical underpinnings to focus on it as an identitarian principle.
Strathern, for instance, views culture as a device for classifying differences that is invoked wherever people differentiate people (1995:15657) and thus immanently
furthers cultural fundamentalism or nationalism (cf.
Stolcke 1995).
Clausen, an English professor, picking up the right cripresent association with left-liberal causes. Its shifting political
valence alone should be enough to discredit attribution of immanent qualities to culture.
8. Moore (1994) blames the decline in anthropologys fortunes on
precisely the opposite failure: refusal to abandon empirical science altogether and embrace postmodernism. On such logic,
common to right and left critics of culture theory, the theoretical
insights of, say, a Galileo or a Mendel or a Boas (Stocking 1968:
chap. 11) were flawed because the establishments of their eras rejected them. Because scientific theories may challenge deeply instituted perceptions, their acceptance by contemporary publics or
elites serves poorly for assessing their merits.
tique outside the discipline, advances an argument similar to Bennetts in an article titled Welcome to PostCulturalism. Even as anthropologists studied the tiny,
exceptional groups9 from which they derived their ideas
of culture those societies were fast losing their distinctness. . . . The result was the first stage of post-culturalism
in which technology begins the long process of displacing
custom (1996:383). One hears echoes of Tylors famous
characterization of ethnography as the reformers science that must expose and mark . . . out for destruction those ideas, founded on the crudest theories of
the lower culture, that hinder the advance of civilization (1920 (1871):445, 453; Tambiah 1990:44). The old
ideological division between civilization and culture (Kuper 1999:59), between Enlightenment and
counter-Enlightenment (Wolf 1999:2330), becomes
reified as a contemporary real-world event.10
I do not want to make the rough temporal schema
sketched above seem simplistic or sharp-edged. For one
thing, both right and left critiques remain actively debated. Also, the midcentury left critique, even as it contests earlier versions of culture theory, relies, at least
implicitly, on the new culture theory that gained currency at the same time, just as subsequent right critics
claim. With due caution, though, this temporal sketch
remains useful.
The commonalities across the spectrum of critiques
sketched above are important. For critics on both right
and left, skepticism has become stylish: one hesitates to
find beneficent social qualities in any knowledge form.
It is hard to imagine, say Grimshaw and Hart (1995:50),
given the sour pessimism of our own day, that ethnography based on fieldwork once evoked a vision of science
harnessed to social progress. Skeptical, even anti-intellectual (cf. Herzfeld 1997), today we argue about which
ill effects flow from what forms of knowledge.
Similarly, critics on both sides reduce culture from theory to empirical generalizationculture is merely a
flawed classificatory device like race (e.g., Abu-Lughod
1991:14344; Appadurai 1996:12; Kahn 1989; Kuper 1994;
1999:24041; Michaels 1995; Stolcke 1995:2). This sets
culture theory up for radical critics like Bennett and Clausen to label it a relict idea overtaken by the march of
history. And of course, all these critics are rightvarious
interests do use the idea of culture as a classificatory device to further various aimsbut it is precisely my point
here that one must not take this to mean that culture
theory is only a generalizing or essentialist concept.
Now, as important as the issues raised above are in
academic discourse, when we turn to their broader societal implications they acquire even more significance.
The distinction between theory and generalization is especially critical. How people are categorized is hardly
9. Never mind that such groups made up the whole of humankind
throughout its history until the tiny, exceptional, and still localized
era we label modern.
10. For more erudite variations on these themes see, for example,
Appadurai (1996:1215) and Trouillot (1991). For sophisticated critiques of such views see, for example, Boon (1982), Herzfeld (1997),
Fischer (1999), Handler (1997), Sahlins (1976), and Taylor (1999).

socially inconsequential, but theory is infinitely more

powerful than classification or generalization.
Reviewing briefly, a class may be investigated empirically after selection of the initial criterion that defines
it. But any initial attribute will do to define a class; one
can categorize any given universe of things or persons
in infinite ways, depending on ones purpose. In contrast,
the basic terms of a theory consist not of abstract attributes but of empirical systemic interactions. Scientists formulate theory from the start through observation
and insight. Hobbess fear that emerging scientific
knowledge could challenge the Sovereign, the state,
was well-founded (see Shapin and Schaffer 1985): an important empirical theory gains conceptual purchase outside of a given regime or worldview. It becomes a gestalt,
a powerful, ordered conceptual formation, disciplined by
empirical inquiry, that has leverage to refigure or shift
the way we see the domain it represents. Theory,
therefore, once established, remains recalcitrant to challenge or to political domestication in ways that generalizations cannot.
Culture Theory in Context

liberal theory and the paradigm shift to
culture theory
Legal theorists (Horwitz 1992, White 1986), historians
(Sewell 1999, Singer 1996), literary critics (Greenblatt
1991, 1999), and others are noting the revolutionary impact of the culture idea in their respective fields. The
philosopher Stephen Toulmin (1990:189) puts it this way:
In Western Europe and North America, people these
days are deeply influenced by the insights of anthropology. . . . By now there are few branches of philosophy in
which we can afford to turn a blind eye to these insights. The impact of culture is even greater than is
often realized: As it becomes common currency, people come to see themselves and others through the
lens of culture theory without that lenss necessarily
becoming visible. Anthropology and its culture concept
have become powerfully constitutive forces in todays
world.
Critiques of culture like those above must be considered in the context of its decentering and disorienting
impact on the ideas, institutions, and ideologies of Western modernism. One cannot presume, of course, that
every critique expresses a reactive backlash; but neither
should we fail to note a reaction that both develops and
appropriates critique. To understand this reaction, one
needs to appreciate how culture, as theory, represents a
compelling paradigm shift in our view of the human universe and the modern Wests place in it.
The notion of theoretical or paradigm shift is an appropriate trope. A given theory arises in a particular time
and place and in opposition to an established theory. It
rarely if ever fills, as it were, an empty space of blank
ignorance but rather intrudes into spaces already occupied by ideas of the phenomena it refers to, which spaces
it then redefines. A theory comes forward in its particular

historical context and in relation to ideas that it succeeds. This is to say that culture theory does not arise
during the course of the twentieth century in an intellectual vacuum. The matters with which it is concernedthe nature and evolution of humankind and its
varying orders of custom, community, and knowledge
are not questions people had overlooked. Culture theory
develops, rather, in the context of a dense system of ideas
about these matters that it must displace, reconfigure,
or relativize.11 I call the dominant view of human social
order that culture displaces liberal theory, following current usage in political and legal philosophy.12
An outgrowth of Enlightenment science, liberal theory
is rooted in the modernist ethosis indeed the dominant
sociopolitical-economic theory of modernity (see, e.g.,
Beiner 1996:202, for whom allegiance to modernity is
the measure of ones liberalism; see also Hollinger 1994).
Enlightenment philosophers, following Descartes in laying the foundations for subsequent political philosophy
in the West, viewed human beings as atomized individuals whose own natural minds and (with due skepticism)
11. Stocking (1968: esp. chaps. 4, 9, 11) provides one overview of
the origins and initial developments of culture theory in the early
decades of the twentieth century, to which Lewis (2001) adds one
recent footnote. Subsequent anthropological literatures, especially
in the United States, where Franz Boass students became the dominant force in university-based American anthropology, develop and
debate the new theory. Contributions include Kroeber and White
on the superorganic, the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis in anthropological linguistics, the work of Benedict, Bidney, and others, notably Levi-Strauss, and of course Geertz and Sahlins and others later
in the century. Ortner (1984) reviews culture theory in the late midcentury period. Kuper (1999) has a knowledgeable historical review
that elaborates many of the themes critical of the culture concept
reviewed above. Gellner (1998), and Wolf (1999: chap. 1) also explore
aspects of cultures roots in counter-Enlightenment movements.
Helpful recent compendia include Boddy and Lambek (1997), Darnell and Gleach (2002), and Ortner (1999). As culture spread beyond
anthropology, literary theorists (e.g., Greenblatt 1991, 1999), philosophers (Lyotard 1988 [1983], MacIntyre 1988, and, needless to
say, Foucault [see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983]), among others, are
making important contributions. A vast legal literature remains a
largely untapped source for exploring culture theory in context (e.g.,
Horwitz 1992; cf. Boggs 2002). Sewell (1999), a historian, articulates
an especially clear appreciation of culture as contemporary scientific theory.
12. A number of the sources cited herein define, discuss, or provide
insights into liberalism and liberal theory in this sensesee especially Beiner (1990, 1996), Boggs (2002), Dumont (1986), Gellner
(1998), Gledhill (1997), Horwitz (1992), Kemmis (1990), Locke (1952
[1690]), Macpherson (1962), MacIntyre (1988), Michelman (1988),
Rapaczynski (1987), Rawls (1971), Sahlins (1976), Sandel (1982,
1984), Taylor (1999), and Walzer (1984). Here liberalism has a
broader meaning than in everyday political discoursesee, for example, MacIntyre (1988:392), referring to conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. The present essay follows Boggs
(2002) in emphasizing that a theory of human order underlies liberalisms political/moral doctrines and this theory both is subject
to scientific standards of verification and clashes starkly with culture theory. Representative contemporary works that provide insight into the clash between culture theory and liberal theory include Brenkman (1987), Eller (1997), Horwitz (1992), Gellner (1998),
Lambek and Boddy (1997), MacIntyre (1988), McGrane (1989), Ortner (1999), and Singer (1996), with Sahlins (1976) giving important
early direction to this line of inquiry.

sense experience are the only sources of true knowledge.

Such individuals form societies based on self-interested
assessment of their condition (Hobbes). Or, in later
mechanistic versions, individuals each pursuing their
own separate advantage incidentally give rise to the optimally organized society (Adam Smith; but cf. Becker
1959 [1932]).
The atomized, individualistic view of humankind is
also a universalist and essentialist view, since all persons
everywhere are in these respects the same. The model
of man engendered by the empiricist/individualist tradition, says Gellner, is very distinctive. The solitary
Crusoe-like individual faces the world or, rather, assembles the world out of the accumulated bits of experience.
. . . So impartiality and symmetry . . . human universality
rather than cultural specificity, is the basic message
(1998:17).
Humans became integrated into the Wests evolving
modernist worldview from the sixteenth century forward in this naturalized, acultural, individualistic form.
The tradition of philosophic liberalism, explains
White (1986:1373), views society as comprised of a set
of atomistic individuals . . . who are related to one another through contractual relations and through the operation of the State. In liberal theory this is how people
naturally and universally are; the apparent deviations
encountered around the world can only reflect error, retardation, blind custom, or irrational superstition (cf.
Bennett 1987, Clausen 1996, as sketched above). The just
polity must protect this individualistic nature, and that,
of course, is only the Western liberal polity (cf. Rawls
1971).13 Gellner sums up a late expression of the liberal
view in Wittgensteins Tractatus: There is no such thing
as culture (1998:68). (The famous transition to the
later Wittgenstein arguably centers on the philosophers conversion to a culturalist perspective.)
There simply is no place for culture, no way to think
it in current anthropological senses, in modernist views
of humankind. Culture theory displaces or relativizes
this notion of the singular, rational, self-interested
man whose selfhood is given outside of tradition and
community, who owes nothing to society for his identity,
and whose social wants reflect only these principles
(Macpherson 1962; cf. Dumont 1986; Singer 1996:
31416). At base, then, underneath all the issues of value,
ideology, and social order that grab attention in the cul-
ture wars, of which the question of human rights is

among the thorniest (e.g., Turner and Nagengast 1997,
Wilson 1997), what we have is a movement within sciencethe displacement of one theory by another.14 The
peculiar awkwardness here is that the displaced theory
underwrites the hegemonic social order of the modern
West. Horwitz (1992:viiviii, 36), for instance, notes
culture as one factor driving a deep crisis, a transformation in American law. Anthropology, says Geertz,
is responsible for a widespread disturbance of the general intellectual peace in the Western world (1984:264;
see also Geertz 1995:128). Thus, for liberals, and presuming immanence, culture theory may seem to have,
as Kuper (1999:237) puts it, unattractive . . . even repugnant social implications (cf. Eller 1997).
Culture theory, however, repositions rather than
wholly refutes liberal theory. Once again there are natural science analogues. Although the formal part of Einsteins theory, explains David Layzer, differs profoundly from the formal part of Newtons theory, it
nevertheless contains it as a limiting case, approximately valid under specific conditions. . . . These remarks apply to other physical theoriesand, indeed, to
the whole tightly interwoven theoretical fabric of natural
science (2000:12). Indeed, the same principle extends
beyond physical science to the increasingly interwoven
theoretical fabric of science generally. In much the same
way, synthetic evolutionary theory incorporates Darwins theory of natural selection. Displacing liberal theory as a universal account of human order, culture theory
similarly swallows it whole as a limiting instance.15
Like all analogies, these are not perfect, merely useful,
but they do illustrate clear and significant parallels between the rise of culture theory in its domain and the
rise of theory in other domains of science.
The second foundational idea that culture theory, with
other developments, displaces is that of unitary, universal science based on early physics. The monadic human
being of liberal theory, we have seen, is the creature of
this particular view of scienceof efforts to frame the
tasks of understanding and governing human beings
within the persistently compelling view of science exemplified in Galileo and Newton. The machine metaphor dominated the early modern mind, explain Best
and Kellner (1997:200), such that not only the physical
universe but also society, animals, and even human be-
13. It is, however, not hard to see how liberal concepts of justice
since Hobbes (individualistic, universalist) have been in bed with
concentrated economic and state poweralbeit, after Hobbes, perhaps with embarrassment. For the moderns, says Dumont (1986:
73), . . . natural law . . . does not involve social beings but individuals, i.e., men each of whom is self-sufficient, as made in the
image of God and as the repository of reason. The state thus becomes a union of individuals, in obedience to the dictates of Natural Law, to form a society armed with supreme power. As Trouillot (1991:3132) puts it, order had become universal, absolute.
. . . The symbolic process through which the West created itself
thus involved the universal legitimacy of powerand order became,
in that process, the answer to the question of legitimacy (cf. Elvin
1986; Horwitz 1992; Shapin and Schaffer 1985: chaps. 3 and 4; Toulmin 1990).
14. Although the issues are somewhat differently aligned, one finds
clear parallels in the antecedent debate over evolution. The vivid
and popular features of the anti-Darwinian row tended to leave the
impression that the issue was between science . . . and theology.
. . . Such was not the casethe issue lay primarily within science
itself . . . (Deely and Nogar 1973:256; cf. Fujimura 1998).
15. This latter comparison can profitably be taken further. Both
pure Darwinian theory and liberal theory rest on assumptions of
individuals as primary causal agents of order; indeed, Darwin
studied Adam Smith as he stitched together his theory of natural
selection in 1838 (Gould 2002:59596; see also Lachapelle 2000:
331). Both Darwins and Smiths theories have subsequently been
repositioned as universal accounts by theories that postulate ordering principles at more inclusive system levels (see e.g., Heylighen 1999:2728).

ings were seen as different kinds of machines. . . . The

modern world thus became the first civilization to be
organized around mechanistic science. . . .16
A social order premised on a machine metaphor presumed to be universal and God-givenit is not culture
theory alone that displaces this notion. Even as it became
broadly established, the ideal of universal or reductionist
science began to unravel within science. Culture theory
contributes importantly, if lately, to this broader development. Over the past couple of centuries or so the concept of science irresistibly evolved from one modeled on
early physical theory to pluralist conceptions encompassing findings from biology, sociology, and, most recently and even more disturbingly, anthropology. More
immediately, after the mid-twentieth century a new philosophy of science persuasively challenged the reigning
positivism (Hanson 1965 [1958], Kuhn 1962, Polanyi
1964 [1958], Toulmin 1960; cf. McNeill 1998). Integrating ideas from, among others, gestalt psychology and,
prominently, culture theory, this work developed postpositivist views of science. At about the same time general systems theory opened up new ways of looking at
organization that, rather than emphasizing the reductive,
mechanistic, flattened perspective of early Enlightenment science, put information in place of mechanical
forces as the organizing principle for complex, hierarchically organized entities (Aberle 1987, Bateson 1972,
Bertalanffy 1968, Heylighen 1999, Levy 1952, Pattee
1973, Simon 1969).
Franz Boas (originally trained as a physicist and geographer) did the most to give form to the idea of culture
and cultures in American anthropology in the early years
(see, e.g., Briggs 2002, Lewis 2001, Stocking 1968). Successive generations of American anthropologists developed and contested the culture concept until, by roughly
the same time as the other developments being noted,
culture had become an established and influential force
in the academy and in public life generally. Moving beyond earlier concerns focused on artifacts and configurations, evolution and distribution, culture theory in
this era framed cultures as dynamic systems of symbols
that become manifest in distinctive cosmologies, social
orderings, (cultural) behaviors, and material forms. This
new synthetic theory of culture (bringing together its
original meaning as, roughly, way of life with the new
insights into the importance of symboling as an ordering
principle) became integrated within and importantly influenced other late-mid-century developments, shaping
the conceptual space in which science itself is becoming
16. Similarly: Nineteenth-century social theory sought to find general laws of society modeled on the natural sciences . . . (Horwitz
1992:vii); see also, for example, Boggs (2002), Gordon (1991:7073),
and Rapaczynski (1987:616). Dumont traces elements of this
modern turn of mind back to William of Occam in the first half
of the fourteenth century (1986:6364).
better understood (see, e.g., Aberle 1987, Latour 1993,

Rabinow 1996).17
A strong moral element, however, buttresses the ideal
of unitary science no less than that of universal individualism, based in part on the same fearindeed, in some
sense, the experiencethat a diversity of knowledge
forms inscribed in different groups results in anarchy and
war (see Latour 1993, Shapin and Schaffer 1985, Toulmin
1990; cf. Bennett 1987). Culture enshrines as theory just
that concept of an essentially pluralized humankind that
liberal theorists see as dangerously immoral and validates an expanded and, from universalist perspectives, a
disorienting view of science. As theory, culture challenges key premises of the overarching worldview in
which liberal individualism and unitary science are complementary visions. Thus, no less than culture theorys
decentering of liberal individualism, its contributions to
the recent pluralizing movement within science also
meet resistance.
In sum, culture theory emerged through systematic
study of human societies around the globe, including
Western society. Anthropology, Colson (1976:263) reminds us, was never primarily a study of exotic other
peoples. It was about all of us. . . . Anthropology,
affirms Goodenough (2002:435), covers virtually all facets of human existence and human history from its very
beginnings. Culture theory is a general theory of the
human order, as is liberal theory. The domain of each is
inclusive of and bounded by the order(s) of human collective existence; they are alternative theories of the
same universe, the same phenomena. They are thus, on
one level, ineluctably contending theories. A major advance in the progressive scientific understanding of our
world and ourselves as human beings within it, culture
theory refutes liberal theory as a universal theory, containing and repositioning it as a limiting instance.18
the liberal reaction against culture
American anthropologys founding idea, displacing liberal theory, precipitated a vertiginous conceptual shift
from modernist social thought. But why, then, does liberal theory remain so patently present, so often determinative, if its scientific foundations have indeed been
swept away by the very movements of science itself?
17. For just one example, Kuhns (1962) famous notion of theory
as paradigm, perhaps the most influential work of the new philosophy of science, in part extends culture-theoretical insights to
the workings of science: Paradigms, like cultures, are self-validating
symbol systems, shape the perceptions and worldviews of those
who inhabit them, and are passed down intergenerationally. According to Stocking (1992:344), Kuhns argument seemed much in
the tradition of American cultural anthropology.
18. See, for example, Singer (1996:31415): Indeed, the whole of
the modern social sciences suggests, in one form or another, that
society precedes the individual. . . . The contractual position [i.e.,
liberal theory] cedes the empirical basis of the culturalist critique.
. . . As a result, the [social] contract loses all relation to the developing social sciences, but remains significant as a sort of technical fable required to uphold . . . the normative dimensions of
[Western liberal] political life.

Why does it not go quietly to rest in the historical dustbin of failed theories rather than continue to spark debate
and reaction?
The first answer is that liberal theory persists because
hegemonic Western institutions embody it; their daily
practices continuously legitimate and renew it. Sandel
says it concisely: Our practices and institutions are embodiments of theory (1984:81). Within the Western
world liberalism became much more than an idea. Western modernity created, legitimated, and naturalized itself
on conceptual foundations of which evolving liberal theory has become the dominant expression. Over the past
four centuries or so, institutions, revolutions, constitutions, nations, and an expansive and rapidly globalizing
economic order have been launched or configured in its
name. With the complex of ideas of science and nature
in which it evolved, liberal theory entered definitively
into the cultures and worldviews of modern Western Europe and America. We need not choose between
traditions and liberalism, says Fleischacker (1998:
xixii). Our liberalism is itself deeply rooted in tradition. Modernist practices, values, and beliefs express
and constitute the psyches of those through whose lives
these cultural forms are maintained. It is, of course, not
universal invariant human nature but the cultural flexibility of the human system, invisible in universalist liberal theory, that makes the liberal tradition itself
possible.
By the same token, then, the second answer is that
culture sparks reaction because, in the liberal polity, cultures scientific theoretical challenge to liberal theory
can only be deeply troubling. In situating and relativizing
Western modernity, culture makes questionable key tenets that many see as necessary to support it. A central
project of modern liberal, individualist society, emancipation from tradition through reason, for instance, is
now regularly challenged (MacIntyre 1988:335; cf. Fleischacker 1998:22); the legitimating rationales of its colonizing ventures (including the settling of the New
World) lose credibility; a whole network of valued rights
premised on individualism may seem threatened. Commensurately, culture sparks reactionsfrom studied neglect to direct critique, exquisitely reasoned or wildly
emotionalthat currently crosscut many sectors of U.S.
public life (see, e.g., Clausen 1996, Clifton 1990, Michaels 1995; cf. Boggs 2002, Fischer 1999, Handler 1997).
This reaction might (fairly, if somewhat clumsily and
perhaps provocatively) be termed a backlash against
culture.
As early as 1976 Sahlins explored cultures difficulties
in late-twentieth-century anthropology in relation to liberal social theory (pp. 9596):
The general idea of social life here advanced [in
utilitarian, i.e., liberal, social theory] is the particular behavior of the parties in the marketplace. . . .
Social science elevates to a statement of theoretical
principle what bourgeois society puts out as an operative ideology. Culture is then threatened with a ne-
glect in anthropology that is matched only by the

consciousness of it in society.
Within anthropology, says Yengoyan similarly, the
peculiar combination of a positivistic scientism combined with a behaviorism that stresses the individual has
virtually bankrupted the concept of culture as an explanatory framework (1986:368, 371). In a related vein
Handler finds that anthropologists today do very little
culture theory; rather, like their colleagues in cultural
studies, they theorize race/class/gender, power, the state,
the body, the gaze, hegemony, resistance, and so on
(1997:77; cf. Howell 1997). Symptomatic of the uneven
conceptual shift to culture theory, laments like these
variously reflect (taking liberties with James Cliffords
phrase) the predicament of culture in a liberal polity.
The predicament, in a nutshell, is that we live uncomfortably with two intersecting caesurae: first, the persistent disjunction between liberal and cultural theories as
contending paradigms of social order and, second (since
culture now prevails as theory while the polity remains
largely governed by liberal principles), between thought
and practice in public life.19 Because these intersecting
disjunctions implicate not just abstract ideas but social
life, selves, cherished values, and entrenched institutions, they hold more than the tension of cognitive dissonance and are less easily resolved. The resulting
space is so difficult precisely because the intersection
of these disjunctions defines an area at once contested
and lacking a common ground of contestation: Even as
culture theory prevails, liberalism maintains itself as
praxis and as a field of value that many who appreciate
its positive aspects are rightfully unwilling to relinquish.
Anthropology as both discipline and profession remains
subject to this conundrum.
Of necessity ceding liberal theorys empirical claims,
liberal commentators cannot oppose culture theory on
theoretical grounds. Alternatively, the liberal reaction
opposes culture, then, by moving debate into territory
that it controlsin significant part by managing or appropriating the meanings of key terms. Control of the
grounds of debate consists in the management of meanings. Liberal commentators therefore appropriate, augment, or shape intellectual movements in which key
terms assume sympathetic meanings. Thus, culture, we
have seen, becomes not scientific theory but an identitarian device at the hands of its critics. Even the more
general term theory similarly shifts its locus. Postmodernism (itself a problematic if evocative term), explains Scott, is distinctively characterized by its affiliation with theory (1992:374), but this is not scientific
theory: By theory . . . is meant that diverse combination of textual or interpretive (or reading) strategies
among them, deconstruction, feminism, genealogy, psychoanalysis, post-marxismthat . . . initiated a challenge to the protocols of a general hermeneutics. Re19. Boggs (2002, n.d.) explores these intersecting gaps in recent public events and legal cases that illustrate the paradigmatic contest
between liberal theory and culture theory and the backlash against
culture in U.S. Indian law and policy.

ducing culture to a mere generalizing idea, shifting the

meaning of theory itself from its usual meaning in
empirical science to interpretive strategies associated
with social movements, politicizes both culture and
theory, and thus the ground of debate becomes not
empirical theory but politics. Hirschkop (1997:132)
views this politicization as a consequence of an attack
which he sees as emanating from cultural studieson
the very epistemology of science itself: Having dismissed out of hand the possibility of a critique based on
the principle that some knowledges are better than others, [the critics] have to make their stand on far more
dangerous groundthe principle that some knowledge
makes better politics than others.
But more lies behind this argument that some knowledge makes better (or worse) politicswhich argument
is implicitly premised on the notion that forms of knowledge have immanent social propertiesthan an effort by
a few postmodernist critics to escape from a logical corner into which they have painted themselves. Going
hand-in-hand with the persistent glossing of culture as
a classificatory device, it is a cornerstone of the current
critique of culture theory and of the backlash against
culture generally. The politicization of both culture and
theory effectively neutralizes in a very direct way cultures perceived challenge, as theory, to liberalist establishments or principles. This is not to say that cultural
studies or all critiques of culture theory or postmodernism (whatever one takes it to be) immanently embody
rightist strains or necessarily serve the purposes of
liberalist reaction. To argue so would be to rehearse yet
again the presumption of immanence in knowledge that
I am criticizing. But neither should we be so naive as to
ignore the broad liberalist reaction against anthropological culture or its appropriation of the critique of culture
and of various terms in which the critique is advanced.
But how, exactly, does politicizing culture theory or
any other knowledge form serve as a liberalist stratagem?
While liberal theory cedes empirical and theoretical
ground to culture, perceptive students of the liberal order
note that as political praxis liberalism thrives on public
contestations that pit interest and identity groups
against each other (e.g., MacIntyre 1988; Michelman
1988; Sandel 1982, 1984; cf. Wallerstein 197480:80). Liberal theory underwrites or readily warrants what Kemmis (1990) calls a politics of radical disengagement.
The liberal order predicates contests between interest
groups that revolve around just such issues as race/
class/gender, power, the state, the body (Handler 1997:
77). Its strength is not to suppress difference or compel
uniformity or conformance; rather, it proliferates groups
and interests in endlessly adversarial interaction while
imposing hegemonic (in Gramscis sense) regimesuniversal procedural frameworkswithin which the resulting conflict is by and large safely managed. Administering social controversy procedurally, liberal praxis
converts values to preferences (Sunstein 1990), appropriates or contests empirical findings, points of established social theory, and commitments to basic principles as self-interested points of view, and resolves
substantive issues by procedural mechanisms (see Boggs

2002, n.d.). It is, then, just by diverting public and disciplinary discourse away from the dangerous, hard, rocky
shoals of current empirical theory and into the turbulent,
endlessly shifting and depthless waters of interest-group
debate that the current attacks on culture theory, shifting the grounds of debate, assimilate cultures challenge
to the liberal order as an argument within that order,
effectively neutralizing it.20
In other words, overtly politicizing culture theory by
reducing it from theory to merely a currently fashionable
way to classify people, to an identitarian device, domesticates and trivializes its political effect. Culture theorys
challenges to liberal theory and to positivist science follow from what it is as theoryfrom the ontological
claims it makes and empirically supports. Viewed as theory in the most pristinely scientific sense, it refutes liberal theory. Presuming immanence in knowledge diverts
and domesticates this foundational challenge. It is as
theory that culture, in its present context, has deeper
and more integral political implications and carries an
immense political chargeand this in substantial part
is why anthropologys situation as a social science is so
complex.
Conclusion
American anthropology developed within and as an institution of a modern Western liberal polity. Elaborating
its Boasian roots, its core mission arguably remains the
empirically grounded holistic study of humankind. The
painstaking development through the twentieth century
of its flagship concept, culture theory, carries forward
this mission. Culture theory also, as it happens, challenges key conceptual underpinnings of the historically
situated local polity within which anthropology as both
discipline and profession subsists. Challenge and paradox
are built into this circumstance and largely account for
our current travails. Complicating things further, even
as anthropologys mission challenges liberal ontology it
also advances and realizes important values and practices
nourished in liberal society. We can appeal to these values, as well as to a remarkable corpus of disciplinary
knowledge, to rebut the current liberalist critique of culture, expose the presumption of immanence in knowledge, and reclaim culture as theory, but pursuit of this
agenda must remain nuanced and precise.
Disputing foundational precepts on which much of
Western modernity has been constructed, culture theory
not surprisingly encounters resistance, even reaction. In
legal arguments, public debate, administrative hearings,
20. This effect nicely exemplifies MacIntyres perceptive observation that liberalism generally exhibits an uncanny ability to reformulate challenges to its basic premises as debates within it. Liberalism, he explains, is often successful in preempting the debate
by reformulating quarrels and conflicts with liberalism, so that they
appear to have become debates within liberalism, while its fundamental tenets remain unchallenged (1988:392). Conversely, culture theory remains recalcitrant in its challenge to liberal premises.

and other venues including anthropology itself, cultures

scientific credentials are put at issue. Culture theory and
cultural claims by minorities are said to represent neither science nor, as the case may be, genuine cultural
difference but rather self-interested political maneuvering, mere inventions. What makes the current liberalist
critique of culture wrong is not, obviously, that it criticizes culture; critiqueor, as Popper memorably put it,
conjecture and refutationis integrally part of the engine of science. What makes it wrong is that it reinscribes science fully as politicsalthough doing so, interestingly, violates liberal principles: Putting politics
in the driving seat of science makes both for bad science
(the historical record speaks for itself) and for bad politics (Hirschkop 1997:132). If the critique of culture theory fails, it fails on this account, not because it is critique
or because it is liberalist.
At the same time, neither can we today too sharply
demarcate science from society or otherwise retreat
into crumbling ivy-covered positivisms of the past. Nor
is it sufficient merely to advance a countercritique of
liberal theory or of modernity without paying heed to
legitimate concerns over some contemporary uses of culture theory and to concerns for core liberal values such
as personal freedoms and human rights that many people
care deeply about.
In one sense, the presumption of immanence is easily
disposed ofit needs only to be exposed. In a nutshell,
its two most obvious failings are these: (1) Attributing
immanent qualities to knowledge implicitly naturalizes
the social/cultural context in which it is deployedhere,
that of Western culture. (2) Doing so overlooks human
agency within that context, forgetting that persons appropriate and use a given form of knowledge for diverse
ends in particular social and cultural contexts. Rejecting
immanence, then, one avoids claiming that culture theory is essentializing, for example, or that it inevitably enforces hierarchic separations or is totalizing or
prevents diachronic or contextual analysis or is socially ominous, and so on. Such descriptors properly
refer not to culture theory but to how particular interests
appropriate, deploy, or distort it within actual contexts
to advance the effects they want or impede those they
resist. The notion that culture has immanent social properties, reinscribing culture as politics, denies or elides
the key distinction between theory and the social or political uses that are made of it. It is just this elision that
misdirects socially or ethically concerned critique directly toward culture theory itself.
But if the notion that forms of knowledge have immanent social qualities fails, it would be equally mistaken to deny that one may draw from a social theory
implications for a given social order or to claim that
these are unrelated to what the theory says about the
phenomena to which it refers. The issue is not whether
culture theory does or should enter the public arena
that it does so is a given. The issue, rather, is how and
by whom it is framed and positioned as it enters legal,
political, or administrative discourse. Politicizing culture effectively shifts control of this valuable intellectual
property from anthropology to dominant liberal institutions. Conversely, distinguishing culture theory from
its uses facilitates shifting at least some of the hard-won
skepticism now directed toward culture theory to the
liberal institutions and contexts in which cultural
knowledge is deployedpossibly an uncomfortable shift
for some neoliberalists.
Insisting on culture as theory, however, while not denying it political import, does imply a degree of separation between science and politics, and I close with a
final word on this observation as it relates to anthropologys predicament in the liberal polity. The above may
read as a counterattack on liberalism, but that would be
a misunderstanding. If I find liberalism wanting as general theory, it must still be accommodated as a limited
instance, albeit one of great importance; liberal praxis
falls well within the range of human cultural possibility.
If misuse of the culture concept cannot discredit culture
theory, neither does cultures displacement of liberal theory necessarily discredit all liberal practice. Nor can excesses committed under liberalisms banner be construed
as inevitable consequences of liberal beliefs.
We are social beings and cultural beings, observes Colson (1974), and must identify (by way of culture) some
form or other of social order within which to interact.
Looking at available options, doctrines nurtured under
traditional liberal premises have much to recommend
them (Walzer 1984). Anthropology, let us not forget,
arose and flourished within liberal polities.
Michael Walzer characterizes liberalism as defined by
the political art of separationthe art of providing
within a polity protected spheres of activities . . . protected space within which meaningful choices can be
made (1984:319). An important protected space is that
of science, and it is just this limited separation that the
presumption of immanence, certain strains of what is
called postmodernism, and elements of current attacks
on culture noted above elide. Attacking culture as current empirical theory that was developed under the liberal umbrella, critics abandon key traditional liberal
principles. This, it seems to me, is in part what Habermas is arguing. We see here, again, the topography of the
counter-Enlightenment, the rage against reason, noted
above: Liberal freedoms are, all of them, unreal (p.
319). But this view, Walzer counters, doesnt connect
in any plausible way with the actual experience of contemporary politics; it has a quality of abstraction and
theoretical willfulness. No one who has lived in an illiberal state is going to accept this devaluation of the
range of liberal freedoms. The achievement of liberalism
is real even if it is incomplete (pp. 31920).
If the proper defense of culture is as theory, then the
proper defense of liberalism is in terms of enlightened
practices nurtured under liberalist doctrines. Defending
culture as theory and anthropologys disciplinary integrity as social science requires and in turn supports the
liberal practice of separation: if culture threatens liberal
ontology, defending it supports liberal praxis.
There is no protection immanently within any form
of knowledgeand this includes the postmodernist in-

credulity towards metanarratives (Lyotard 1984 [1979]:

xxiv), blanket skepticism of any generalizing knowledgeagainst its political appropriation and use. Social
scientists today have no good alternatives to defending
the integrity of their science within the liberal polity,
while forcefully engaging the political implications of
their disciplinary knowledge.
Comments
c h r i s t o p h b ru m a n n
Institut fur Volkerkunde, Universitat zu Koln, 50923
Koln, Germany (christoph.brumann@uni-koeln.de).
14 xi 03
Although curious as to why exactly Abu-Lughod is left
and Kuper, Spiro, and DAndrade are right, I will concentrate on my major point of contention. The real counterconcept/phenomenon to culture is not the free, sovereign individual; it is biological heredityrace and
genes. This is true in a historical sense: Boas and students
popularized the concept of culture to overcome scientific
racism, not liberal theory. More important, however, it
is true in an evolutionary sense: the empirical reality of
culture arose among humans, their ancestors, and arguably some primates because it had a crucial adaptive
advantage over genes. With culture, successful individual innovationsfairly widespread in the animal kingdomno longer perish with the innovative individual or
have to wait for genetic embedding and biological reproduction before they can spread. Instead, other individuals
adopt them quickly. Every hedgehog that still curls up
when car lights approach attests to the disadvantages of
not having culture, given that there are hedgehogs that
run for their lives instead. The advantage of culture, social transmission, does not consist in its reliability: here
there is no way to beat genetic transmission. Rather
and this is often overlookedit lies in what is being
transmitted, namely, innovations. Every cultural feature
starts out as an individual innovation, and therefore
those who define culture as the set of effects of innovations (Menge der Effekte von Innovationen [Rudolph and Tschohl 1977:111]) have a point. Much of the
time, culture makes us think, feel, and act like others,
but if this were all then genes would have sufficed. It is
only because culture is sufficiently indeterminate to allow us to be unlike others at times but then allows others
to become like us in the next step that it could ever have
come into being. Once this is acknowledged, the polarity
between liberal theory and the concept of culture (culture theory) evaporates: were human individuals completely different from the way liberal theory imagines
them, culture could not exist. Yet humans are innovative
and unwilling to follow the beaten path all the time
qualities that are the hallmark of the individual according to liberal thought. Culture, then, is liberalism
embodied.
Culture theory and liberal theory are contradictory

only if culture is taken to entail the enshrinement of
ethnicity or collective identity (often confounded with
culture but distinct [see Brumann 1999:S1112]) or if the
complete determination of the individual by culture is
assumed. When an entire society is believed to think,
feel, and act Dionysian or Apollonian all the time, there
is indeed no place for the freely choosing individual. Exaggerating the importance of culture was perhaps understandable, given the political agenda of Boas, Benedict, and his other students, and it may be a more general
professional failing of anthropologists, just as economists
tend to exaggerate the importance of the economy. Anthropologists have always been aware of the invariably
and inevitably differential distribution of culture, however, even if ethnographic practice has fallen short of
programmatic clear-sightedness (Brumann 1999:S36).
Current approaches such as Bourdieus habitus theory
also give the individual its due.
Every human being is an individual with unique features, and every human being, by belonging to Homo
sapiens sapiens, is like all others in some respects. The
former can be taken to justify seeing ourselves as atomistic monads; the latter can be taken to justify searching for and striving to realize things that may be good
for all of us, such as basic human rights, democracy, or
minimum standards of living. In between the individual
and the universal sits culture, the sharing of socially
transmitted symbols andat least according to most
American anthropological textbook and encyclopedia definitions (Brumann 2002)patterns of behavior within
groups of people. Anthropologists should engage in researching (rather than writing) against culture, meaning that the cultural level should be resorted to for explanation only when individual specifics and panhuman
commonalities fail us (1999:S23). The cultural level goes
a long way toward explaining what we do, particularly
the routine parts. Our individual and universal features,
however, preclude any cultural determination, and,
given the way culture emerged, there can be no such
thing. Therefore, accepting culture does not force us to
forgo the concept of personal responsibility; the individual always has a choice, however constrained. Nor does
it force us to give culture sanctity, since culture only
goes so far among humans, changes all the time, and is
therefore a flimsy foundation for denouncing the idea of
human rights as an imposition of Western culture or
gaining recognition for indigenous claims. In public discourse and occasionally in anthropology, culture is essentialized, reified, and overhomogenized. A moments
thought about what it actually is and how it has come
into being, however, shows that this is because the
largely unconscious borrowing of intellectual models
from other disciplines (such as the biological concept of
species) clouds peoples reasoning. It is here that culture,
the liberalist concept, should be spread.

michael herzfeld
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University,
Peabody Museum, 11 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA
02138, U.S.A. (herzfeld@wjh.harvard.edu). 1 xii 03
The position that Boggs has laid out, demanding scientific (but not scientistic) and theoretical status for the
concept of culture, falls within the epistemological range
that I identify as the valuable militant middle ground
of anthropological theory (Herzfeld 1997b:25, 172).
Strongly resistant to the extremes of both positivism and
postmodernism in their most rejectionist modes, his position ultimately rests on the concept of agency and the
demand that we recognize the political deployment of
culture theory without taking this as a reason for either
rejecting it out of hand or uncritically embracing it.
The anti-intellectualism of the neoliberal spaces in
which we live (and this would in any case be less true
of virtually everywhere outside the English-speaking
world) has nevertheless not actually had the effect of
reducing us to asking only how the culture concept is
politically employed. That is always a pertinent ethnographic question, and it directly concerns agency. But
anthropologists can agree to adopt a political position
that combines insistence on critical inquiry (this a product of the liberal tradition, as Boggs rightly and deconstructively calls it) with a recognition that the ethnographers agency also calls for a degree of moral
accountability. By this I do not mean the sort of auditing
to which the various para-academic bureaucracies now
threaten to reduce our range of action (see Strathern
2000) but a deliberately more uncomfortable self-positioning in which we must not only accept a measure of
responsibility for the consequences of our interventions
but alsoand this is the difficult partfor deciding (and
never ceasing to decide) what for us and for our informants is in fact an appropriate ethical position to take.
The uncertainty of such a perspective may render anthropology suspect in the age of sound bites. But modernity is not so much about the suppression of risk as
about its control (Malaby 2002); what we do is not unprincipled cliffhanging or infinite regress but a serious
attempt, which Boggss essay exemplifies, to secure some
space for mediation across the increasingly evident tensions that he identifies in the liberal worldview.
Such resistance to closure accords with Boggss observation that if culture threatens liberal ontology, defending it supports liberal praxis. That observation also
sustains the refusal to reduce knowledge to pure (that is,
inert) classification. Exponents of the high-modernist
project (but this is not the only modernism in town) aim
at simplicityScotts (1998) legibility. They thus underwrite the prevailing anti-intellectualism: dumbing
down is part and parcel of a politics of significance in
which the political right, especially, has hijacked much
of the language of liberalism (hence neoliberalism itself). Anthropologists can help show how selective such
usages are.
This fits existing practices and commitments. Anthropologists are now carefully selective in criticizing
cultural essentialism, knowing that their analyses, no

less than attributions of savagery, may serve as excuses
for repression (see, notably, Jackson 1995). But they may
also still cry foul when dominant essentialisms are
used to buttress ethnic violence. Culture, like religion,
is a floating signifier the moral status of which is historically contingent and unpredictable (see Kapferer
1988), but that still does not justify texualist arguments,
as irresponsible as those of scientistic determinism, for
denying its material consequences.
Thus, we always return to our own agency, and so to
accountability. If this has always been the liberal dilemmahow much responsibility do we take for suppressing or permitting hate speech in a democratic polity?it is certainly a serious consequence for anthropology of Boggss characterization of the discipline as
quintessentially liberal. This is not methodologicalor
even Thatcheriteindividualism. It is an acceptance and
confrontation of perplexity.
Boggs clearly recognizes the importance of such specificity, but one therefore wants to see how his position
works out in practice. His isolation of culture theory
from specific ethnographic cases (unless we count his
historiography) has the paradoxical effect of blocking
what logically should be the next step: recognizing as
theory (though not necessarily as liberal theory and certainly not as as professional theory) the numerous richly
perceptive generalizations about the human condition
that our informants offer us and that arguably are the
source of far more of our theoretical frameworks than
we have been willing to acknowledge. That recognition,
too, would be a consequence of liberalism and would
offer a more generous and empirically accessible response than we have hitherto made to postcolonial critiques of the disciplines colonial past.
eric hirsch
Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University,
Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, U.K. 14 xi 03
Recent work in the history and social study of science
emphasizes that different sciences produce distinct classifications and kinds. It is difficult nowadays to sustain
the image of a single, unified science: historical analysis has revealed, for instance, the existence of numerous
scientific styles of reasoning. Moreover, new sciences
periodically emerge from the trading zones created between established sciences (see Galison 1996). Nonetheless, there is a clear divide between the natural and physical sciences and social sciences such as anthropology.
Boggs is only partly correct when he writes, As a science, anthropology reflects the empirical realities of the
systematic order with which it deals. It thus is properly
a science, just as, say nuclear physics or evolutionary
biology are sciences. Anthropology is like nuclear
physics in having its own style of reasoning, its own
classifications and kinds (such as culture) peculiar to
its objects of study, but there is an important difference.
Whereas classifications used by nuclear physics do not

affect the objects of its study (e.g., protons, neutrons, or

the like), the same cannot be said of those used by anthropology. People are moral, reflexive agents and are
affected by the ways in which they are described and
classified and in turn affect the classifications used. The
category of culture is a case in point. Although its use
extends far beyond anthropology, it is anthropology that
has done much to shape its meaning and descriptive
power. This is what Hacking (1995) refers to as a looping
effect, and it is a process that does not occur in the
natural and physical sciences. Rather, the social sciences, anthropology included, have been transformed
hand in hand with their objects of study, either indirectly
or directly, as a consequence of the effects of these styles
of reasoning. The concept of culture has been transformed through this interactive process, as advocates of
culture theory such as Sahlins (1999) point out.
The pursuits of the social sciences are an outgrowth
of the ascent of liberal polities and theory. Liberal
projects of political and economic governance and reform
required knowledge about their populations and the
means to understand and intervene in their conduct. In
fact, the notion of liberalism became common currency
during the same period as the modern culture concept
(Williams 1990 [1958]). The rise and successful establishment of social science and the culture concept were
both inextricably linked to the overriding power of liberalism in Euro-American societies and beyond.
According to the knowledge conventions promoted by
liberal theory, understanding arises from putting things
in their separate contexts. This is Walzers (1984) art of
separation, noted by Boggs. What anthropology (American, especially) emphasized was that knowledge about
a people required specification of the cultural context.
Anthropology highlighted that culture was the ultimate
context in which to understand what liberal theory separated as economics, politics, religion, and so forth. It
routinely showed that all of these contexts were inseparablethat economics, politics, and religion were inextricably linked.
Anthropological critiques of the concept of culture and
culture theory more generally are directed at its analytical usefulness and the claim that culture is the ultimateessentialcontext. However, it is not so much
that culture theory is displacing liberal theory, as argued
by Boggs, as that culture theory reveals the limits of
liberal theorys knowledge conventions. This is perhaps
an outcome of the success of social sciences like anthropology and the fact that its classifications have become everyday categories. Everyone has culture and everything is potentially culturethat is, everyone and
everything are potentially inseparable. This is where I
think Boggs confuses critiques of culture theory in terms
of its analytical poweras an outgrowth of liberal theorys knowledge conventionsand critiques of culture
theory as critiques of liberal theory per se.
One of the real strengths of the ethnographic method
used by anthropology is its interest in disclosing the
knowledge conventions at work in or outside liberal polities in order to critique their limited, taken-for-granted
assumptions. This allows an enlargement of the perspective of those outside the academy as much as those
inside it. If culture theory has outlived its usefulness in
this regard, what is required is new anthropological theory, not the abandonment of liberal theorywhich, in
one way or another, as Boggs suggests, is the basis of
anthropological conduct itself.
stephen p. reyna
Anthropology Department, 311 Huddleston Hall,
University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824,
U.S.A (spreyna@cisunix.unh.edu). 17 x 03
Boggss essay addresses the contention . . . swirling
around the idea of culture in anthropology. He argues
that culture is a scientific theory that replaces the
existing theory of human order . . . that underlies the
doctrine political theorists call liberalism. To establish
this position, he makes assertions about the nature of
theory, the views of certain culture critics, and the relationship between culture and liberal theory. I shall consider the credibility of these assertions.
Boggs defines a theory as an abstraction from and
representation of the ordering principles that govern a
class of concrete systems or a realm of systemic order.
This definition depends upon four dense terms: abstraction, representation, ordering principles, and concrete systems, all of which are undefined. The first two
termsabstraction and representationhave multiple, contested understandings, none of which are identified. I have no idea what ordering principles or concrete systems might be. Perhaps ordering principles
are generalizations? The notion of a concrete system
seems especially obscure. What is a system that is in
cement? Perhaps a concrete system is reality?
One aspect of Boggsian theory does seem clearly erroneous. Ordering principles are said to govern concrete systems. Govern generally means control. If
ordering principles are generalizations and if concrete
systems have to do with reality, then Boggs is asserting
that the generalizations that make up theory control
what goes on in the world. This is like saying that the
generalization Increased pro-war propaganda helps
cause war is a cause of war. Wrong! The generalization
did not cause the Second Gulf War. The actions of President Bushs propaganda machine whipped up popular
opinion in favor of it that helped do the trick. It is what
happens in reality that controls what happens in reality;
generalizations are statements that explain why what
happens transpires.
Discussing critiques of culture theory, Boggs refers to
a wave of criticism rolling in from the right and cites
Reyna (1994) as part of this wave. Reyna, however, is on
the left, and the 1994 article is not about culture. Its
topics are Have literary anthropologists offered telling
critiques of science, and have they proposed another,
more powerful, mode of knowing? (Reyna 1994:555).
He also asserts that Reyna fears that Geertz and Sahlins
. . . have led American cultural anthropology off its path

as science and thus into its twilight as a discipline and

profession (1999:174). This again misrepresents my
work. I do not lump Geertz and Sahlins together, and
the 1999 article contains no criticism of the concept of
culture. One hopes that Boggss presentation of other
critiques of culture is more accurate than it is in my
case.
The heart of Boggss position is that culture theory
displaces liberal theory but that the displaced theory
underwrites the hegemonic social order of the modern
West. There are problems here. Boggsian culture theory
is about system, and the system that culture theory
refers to derives its order . . . from varying systems of
symbols and meanings that give form to the real and
similarly varying systems of language, kinship, economic exchange, and political order. Culture theory is
contested. We need substantiation that Boggss theory is
the theory, and no such warrant is provided. This is argument by assertion. And how is it that a displaced
theory underwrites the hegemonic social order of the
modern West? Again, liberal theory is never formally
specified.
U.S. government propagandists, prior to the 2003 Gulf
War, announced a shock-and-awe bombing campaign
that they said guaranteed victory. Boggss argument in
this paper depends upon rhetorical shock and awe, and
the effect is an epistemological fog in which dazed readers wander blinded, muttering What is he trying to
say? Culture is an important concept, and any theory
of it would benefit from the epistemological programs
outlined in Reyna (2001) for validating the approximate
truth of generalizations. Further, such theory needs to
concentrate upon explaining how culture causes action
that creates and/or reproduces social forms. Connections
(Reyna 2002) offers a theoretical framework that explains
how this might occur.
william h. sewell jr.
Departments of Political Science and History,
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 (w-sewell@
uchicago.edu). 14 xi 03
I agree with Boggs that anthropologys culture concept
can usefully be understood as a scientific theory. More
precisely, I would say that culture theory is what Imre
Lakatos (1978) called a progressive scientific research
programa coherent and dynamically developing ensemble of theories, methods, and empirical data. I also
agree that what he labels the left critique of culture
seriously misconstrues the stakes of culture theory. As
I have argued elsewhere (Sewell 1999), the term culture has two quite distinct but seldom distinguished
meanings in academic usage: (1) a pluralizable usage
(cultures) designating concrete and bounded worlds of
beliefs and practices and (2) an always singular usage
(culture) that designates a theoretically defined semiotics of social life. I believe that the left attacks on
the culture concept are in fact aimed at the former meaning. They are, for example, critical of the tendency for
cultures as empirical objects to be incorrectly seen as

unified, neatly bounded, and inseparably linked to a
people or incorrectly placed in an implicit hierarchy
of value. What the critics fail to see is that their own
critiques are in fact carried out within the very scientific
research program (that is, culture theory) that they claim
to reject. They are confused in part because they elide
these two distinct meanings of culture. Thus, as Brightman (1995) wryly points out, the left critics have
placed the term culture under taboo but cannot really
do without it, commonly either using substitute terms
such as hegemony or practice or using the adjective
cultural while eschewing the noun culture. They
are not in fact rejecting the research program of developing a semiotics of social life (culture theory) but
merely arguing that certain theories or methodologies
within that research program are erroneous. Taking
Boggss argument seriously might keep the left critics
from making this common and seriously counterproductive mistake. It should make them realize that they,
too, have an important stake in and are in fact busily
carrying out a progressive theoretical and empirical refinement of the culture concept.
Although I think it is correct to say that culture theory
remains a progressive (that is, continually developing)
research program, Boggss claims about culture theory
seem far too triumphalist. It may be true that culture
theory has displaced liberal theory in anthropology, but
it surely has not done so in the social sciences as a whole.
Indeed, in the contemporary period of globalizing neoliberalism, various forms of liberal social-scientific theories are not just surviving but thriving. Over the past
quarter-century, ultra-individualist neoclassical microeconomics has decisively triumphed over Keynesian
macroeconomics, and the equally ultra-individualist rational-choice theoretical movement has made important inroads into sociology and threatens to take over
political science lock, stock, and barrel.
It is surely true, as Boggs claims, that liberalisms
deeply embedded place in Western institutions and culture helps to explain why it has not succumbed to the
apparently intellectually superior culture theory. But I
think that there is something about the nature of the
human sciences that makes its paradigm shifts much
less decisive than those in the natural sciences. Supposedly displaced research programs in the human sciences
commonly not only persist but continue to thrive for
decades, even centuries. Liberal or utilitarian research
programs of various descriptions continued to be progressive in the Lakatosian sense long after Boas or Benedict or Geertz or Levi-Strauss or Derrida demonstrated
their inferiority to one or another form of culture theory.
But so do Freudianism and Marxism, in spite of the repeated announcements of their deaths. Indeed, even that
form of human science (if the anachronism may be excused) supposedly displaced by liberalismreligious or
theological thoughtis still very much with us after
some 300 years. It is also true that supposedly incompatible theories commonly get combined in the human
sciences in a way that is far rarer in the natural sciences.

Thus we have the Marxist-Freudianism of the Frankfurt

School, the rational-choice Marxism of Jon Elster (1985),
the Marxist theology of liberation theology, the religious Freudianism of Karl Jung, anda rather common
combination in the presentthe liberal culturalism of
such political theorists as Will Kymlicka (1989). In the
space available to me here, I can only signal, not explain,
either the un-dead persistence of defeated paradigms
or the commonness of unnatural marriages in the human sciences. Both phenomena suggest that there is
something about the extraordinary complexity of human
social life and the fact that it is shaped by the very theories we use to explain it that makes the landscape of
scientific theories in the human sciences rather less tidy
than in the natural sciences.
m a r t i n s o k e f e l d
Institut fur Ethnologie, Universitat Hamburg,
Rothenbaumchaussee 67, 20148 Hamburg, Germany
(martin.soekefeld@uni-hamburg.de). 10 xi 03
Boggss paper is a defense of culture as theory (culture)
against the various kinds of critique that have been directed against it both within and outside of the discipline. Because many of these critiques are concerned
with the political implications of the culture concept,
his main strategy is to elevate culture to the status of
theory (specifically, empirical theory), which in his
view remains recalcitrant to challenge or to political
domestication. In a paradigmatic shift, Boggs suggests,
culture as theory has displaced liberalism as the dominant view of human social order, and, a few voices
labeled leftist apart, the critique of culture is a backlash of liberal theory.
Boggss position has to be challenged on at least two
points. First, given his strong critique of liberalism, it
seems strange and contradictory that his defense of culture is based on a fundamentally liberal tenet, namely,
the unequivocal separation of theory or science from politics. This separation rests on the very concept of the
autonomous and rational individual which is given ontological primacy over society in liberalism and rejected
by culture. Although Boggs seems to feel a certain unease
about this separation, it is the way he exculpates culture
as theory from politically oriented critique. According
to him it is only a lesser form of culture as a categorizing
device which is put into political practice and therefore
has to bear the responsibility for political faults committed in the name of culture. To think that culture has
political consequences is to commit the sin of the presumption of immanence in knowledge. However, other
critical theories have shown convincinglyagainst liberalismthat theory and knowledge are political (just
think of Foucault). Historically it can be shown that even
the idea of culture is eminently political. After all, the
theory that human collectivities are inherently different
from one another (which, since Herder, has been attributed to culture) is the basis for the still hegemonic political form of our world, the nation. The rejection of the
idea of immanence is also strange because the particular

version of culture professed by Boggsculture as a system of symbolsincludes the idea of quite immediate
effects. Culture in this sense is, in Geertzs famous phrasing, not only a model of but also a model for. In defining
culture as the ordering principle of organized human
collectivities, Boggs himself expresses what this culture
is expected to do. This is certainly also a political issue.
Second, this conceptualization of culture has been
called into question because it does not (and cannot) explain how the effect attributed to culture is achieved.
One important line of critique and reconceptualization
of culture is conspicuously omitted in Boggss discussion: the notion of culture as an outcome of practice.
Practice theory points out, among other things, that symbols are indeterminate and have to be interpreted and
therefore it has to be asked who has the power to disseminate certain interpretations and to silence others.
Thus we are again in the realm of the political. Liberalism is rightly taken to task for its postulation of the
autonomous, presocial (or precultural) individual. Culture theory as conceived by Boggs is prone to the opposite
fault of giving culture ontological primacy. Practice theory, in contrast, develops a perspective that brings the
two into focus as mutually dependent, mutually structuring, and ultimately inseparable.
Boggs also refers to the political effects of culture,
which he sees in a decentering of the West. I am not so
sure about this effect. First, culture is again a Western
hegemonic theory, even if it is eagerly adopted by people
all around the world. Second, we can detect its effects
in certain contemporary political developments. The
idea of a clash of civilizations, based on culture, seems
to serve as a kind of blueprint for recent U.S. policy, but
far from engendering a decentering of U.S. hegemony it
results in even more resolute efforts towards hegemony.
This makes me doubt that in practice an idea of culture
derived from anthropological notions has taken over as
new paradigm. I cannot see any idea of the basic equality
of cultureswhich in my understanding is basic to the
anthropological approachin this paradigm. Rather, it
seems to be founded upon the unshakable belief that
our (i.e. Western) culture is best, and there is a hierarchy based on difference that also went very well with
liberalism. Liberals of earlier ages did not necessarily
subscribe to the idea that all human beings were individuals with equal rights; in most cases rights were restricted to individuals of the liberals own race or civilization. Just as liberalism could easily be reconciled
with the idea of basic differences among humans, the
idea of culture does not necessarily go hand in hand with
relativism and equality.
Finally, as a totalizing theory, culture has to apply to
itself and thereby subverts its (universal?) claim to validity. Culture, then is only culture. Boggs writes correctly that culture, like any theory, is a way of seeing.
It has to be added that any way of seeing is also a particular configuration of blind spots.

Reply
james p. boggs
Missoula, Mont., U.S.A. 8 xii 03
The one thing that most respondents find something to
quarrel with is my argument that culture theory has replaced liberal theory as valid social science theory. What
I said was that culture theory displaces and relativizes
liberal theory as the universal social science theory of
human nature and human order. That we now inhabit
a conceptual world in which human beings must be cultural (and cultured) beings rather than inherently individual, isolated, self-interested rationalists repositions
liberal theory but does not make all aspects of it wrong
or invalid insofar as they apply to Western liberal society.
It certainly does not obviate individual creativity and
influence. Personal identity and individual agency come
to be seen in new ways, but they remain central both to
theory and to experience. Similarly, my argument should
not be taken to say that all of the conceptual and theoretical challenges that culture theorys displacement of
liberal theory entails have been resolved, even within
science.
Sewell, who with Herzfeld perhaps most sympathetically grasps my argument, still finds the assertion that
culture theory has replaced liberal theory far too triumphalist and points to ultra-individualist theories as evidence. I think that what I have just said largely addresses
this objection. Additionally, as I indicated, the transition
to culture theory has opened up gaps within scientific
thought and between thought and practice that are far
from resolved; we still frequently think, often quite appropriately, within liberalist frames. Nevertheless, I believe that liberal theory can no longer be taken seriously
as an adequate empirically grounded universal theory of
what and who human beings are or as presenting an ordering principle that sufficiently accounts for what they
do.
Brumann argues that the real counter concept to culture, both in biology and history, is biological heredity.
First, because individual innovation and variety were
critical to the rise and evolution of culture, the polarity
between liberal theory and the concept of culture (culture theory) evaporates. Culture theory as I use the
term, however, comfortably encompasses everything
substantive that he says about culture and about the
individual in relation to culture. He is here thinking
within the gestalt frame of culture theory and drawing
upon its empirical knowledge base. This said, that culture theory posits cultures arising, as it were, in human
evolution as an adaptive overlay on human genetics cannot be an argument against culture theorys displacing
liberal theory within Western science.
Second, Brumann says that historically culture theory
was developed to counter not liberal theory but racial
theories. I would argue, in contrast, that Boas developed
culture theory because it made better sense of the em-
pirical phenomena he observed than the available theories and that he was well aware that it potentially challenged racialist and evolutionary theories and marshaled
it to this effect. True, Boas himself did not directly target
liberal theory; cultures displacement of liberal theory
came later.
Finally, culture theory is necessary precisely to support
a broader, less homogenizing view of human rights that
might accommodate the reality of culturally distinct
peoples within liberal polities. That some aspects or implications of culture theory also may be hijacked, as
Herzfeld says, to buttress ethnic violence or, as Sokefeld notes, as the basis for a new blueprint for Western hegemony does not obviate its potential to require
and inform the crafting of more enlightened and genuinely democratic policies. As Herzfeld cogently puts it,
because culture is a floating signifier we cannot escape
accountability for how it is deployed.
Two matters appear in the comments because I did not
sufficiently deal with them in the paper. Hirsch agrees
with me that anthropology is properly a science but highlights ways in which it differs from physics, pointing to
Hackings concept of the looping effect. Human beings
as active, reflective agents respond to theories about
them. Social scientists, in fact, have long noted this phenomenon (e.g., Merton 1936:894 n. 1 and 9023; 1948).
An earlier anonymous reviewer similarly suggested that
I note Hackings (1999) related distinction between indifferent and interactive kinds in relation to the distinction between natural and social sciences. I ignored
this good advice, and I welcome Hirschs calling the phenomenon to our attention.
The difficulty exemplified here illustrates the hold
that the model of Enlightenment science and the positivist assumptions that accompany its extensions into
the social realm still have on the anthropological imagination. Arguing that anthropology is a science conjures
up in many readers minds the specter of unified science based on the model of early modern physics, but
this is precisely what I do not mean. The growing clarity
and strength of the impetus in anthropology to resist this
unified model is to be applauded, but the resulting arguments should not obscure the elegant refutation of the
unified-science model that simply acknowledging culture as theory represents. Thus, for instance, my argument is not a case for unified science based on a natural
science model (as Hirsch at least in part presumes) but
a refutation of it. Culture theory is the product of the
hard empirical work and creative insight of anthropological (and, increasingly, other) investigators who extend (and thereby develop and diversify) the methodological principles and modes of concept formation of
science more deeply into what makes humans human
and human social life what it is. Thus, culture recognized
as theory elegantly exemplifies the necessary diversification of empirical science.
Similarly, Sokefelds two main objections depend on
reading me as saying that culture is science, which he
assumes means that it altogether lacks political implications or consequences. He first objects, then, that of

course culture does have political consequences and second that a too-theoretical definition of culture precludes
agency and practice which if properly noted would
plunge culture into the political world. Again, I do not
wish to be read as saying that because culture is theory
it lacks political consequences; I do say that these consequences are not immanent within culture theory but
follow from how particular people in actual situations
choose to interpret and use it. Thus, I disagree with Sokefeld, for instance, that culture is a Western hegemonic theory. Such claims illustrate precisely the kind
of attribution of immanent social or political qualities
to culture that I dispute. Culture can, however, be said
to have political consequences in a more general sense
just because it challenges and relativizes liberal theory
though, again, what these consequences will be has to
be worked out on the ground.
Reyna correctly notes that the distinction between
concrete and abstract systems was left undefined. In
brief, Levy (1952:8889) defines concrete structures as
units that are at least in theory capable of physical separation (in time and/or space) from other units of the
same sort and analytic structures as patterned aspects of action that are not even theoretically capable of
concrete separation from other patterned aspects of action. Thus, for instance, Levy cites the economic aspect of action and the political aspect of action as
example of analytic structures (p. 89). I use the word
system for Levys structure (see below) and abstract for his analytic but with the same essential
distinction that he so clearly marks. Miller (1965:202)
offers similar definitions specifically in regard to systems: A concrete, real, or veridical system is a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy in a region of physical space-time, which is . . . organized into coacting,
interrelated subsystems or components. In contrast,
the units of abstracted systems are relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his [or
her] interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical
bias (p. 204; see also Miller 1978:1622). Interestingly,
Miller developed these distinctions at least partly in response to conceptual difficulties with which Talcott Parsons, Alexander Leighton, and other social theorists were
grappling as they attempted to articulate more formal
understandings of social and cultural theory. I went beyond these distinctions to suggest that classes or categories are formed conceptually on the basis of abstract
attributes while theories are formed on the basis of abstracted relations. A theory references an abstract systemspecifically, the one whose relations best define
the actual behavior/operation of a concrete system, class
of systems, or realm of systemic order.
All this has implications that I cannot develop here,
but I will briefly note one further point. An economic,
political, or social system can only ever, in principle, be
an abstract system. Each such system is abstracted
from an actual ordering of persons/things that also has
other interactional aspects. A culture, however, as
some anthropologists and others at least some of the
time use the term, can in principle be a concrete system,
whatever definitional or conceptual difficulties doing

this may involve (cf. Sewells comment on culture versus cultures and Hirschs observation that in American anthropology culture became the ultimate context
. . . in which economics, politics, and religion were inextricably linked). Anthropology would seem to be the
only social science, therefore, that marks out a class of
concrete systems or domain of systemic order as its field
of inquiry. Miller (1978:2122) argues cogently that social theorists should focus on concrete rather than abstracted systems. Perhaps the traditional four-field approach to defining anthropology in part grows out of,
expresses, and helps hold this uniquely holistic disciplinary focus.
The idea of ordering principles is also singled out as
needing definition. As i use the term, ordering principles are not generalizations but principles that govern
the organization of phenomena. The ordering principles
of natural systems reside universally and constantly in
the inherent properties of the constituents of those systemsmass, inertia, gravity, chemical valence, electrical
charge, and so on. In contrast, the ordering principle for
human social systems is not inherent in constant properties of human individuals as constituents of social systems; rather, individuals relations with others in social
contexts are shaped and mediated symbolically, by way
of language, ritual, symbolically ordered kin and other
social relations, and so on, all of which, as properties of
the social/cultural system, through socialization, become the resources of persons and selves. Systems of
symbols variously order human social systems. The notion that the order of social/cultural systems can be reduced to universal, constant properties of individuals is
precisely the foundational error of liberal theory that
could become clearly revealed as error only with the advent of culture as an intellectually and empirically superior theory. Similarly, positivist or received views of
science based on the notion of theory as generalization
(see below) cannot accommodate the diversityor even,
because it is not based on constant properties, the kind
of ordering principle that human culture represents.
Reyna says that in the articles of his that I cited he is
not on the right but on the left, that those articles
are not even about culture, and that in saying that he
fears that Geertz and Sahlins have led American cultural
anthropology off its path as science and thus into its
twilight as a profession I mischaracterize his work. One
can only bow to an authors interpretation of his own
writing, but on the latter point I do not find my original
interpretation altogether unreasonable. Let me quote
more fully from the text that I referred to (Reyna 1999:
174):
Current U.S. cultural anthropology does seem to be
in its twilight. Arguably since the 1970s, Geertz and
Sahlins have been the two most influential agents of
this anthropology. Though propounding differing approaches to culture . . . both authored texts provided
new foundations for cultural analyses. If cultural anthropology is indeed in its twilight, then Geertzs

and Sahlins discourses are in some measure the actuality of that gathering dusk.
Reyna does, however, then go on to differentiate Geertz
and Sahlins in terms of his understanding of their respective commitments to empirical validation and truth,
and I can only apologize for not having followed his argument this far.
As an aside, I do not concede that anthropologys current difficulties signal its twilight; rather, at least in large
part, they mark its confrontation with the consequences
(liberalist reaction) of its success. Similarly, if Reynas
arguments are not directly about culture they obviously
bear on key aspects of the culture debates. Underneath
Reynas specific complaints, though, are more fundamental issues. His concern with truth and validity and
his interest in exploring the cross-fertilization of anthropology and philosophy of science resonate with my
own interests. Where we differ sharply is in our respective understandings of theory and thus of science. Reyna
seems to me very much within the Enlightenment-based
positivist view of science. Here is what he says about
theory (1994:556):
Sets of propositions that are high in abstraction and
generality may be said to be theories. It is such
propositions that are generally termed laws. Sets of
propositions that are relatively low in abstraction
and generality may be said to be empirical generalizations or hypotheses. The related concepts in the
sentences of theories, empirical generalizations and
hypotheses are representations of how and why reality is constituted.
Revealingly, this definition of theory does not substantially differ from what is later presented in the same
article as the logical positivist theory of science (p.
568). It is in respect of this received view of science and
Reynas defense of it that I placed him on the right in
the debates over culture in anthropology. One thing I say
in my essay is that theory is not merely a higher level
of generalization. Rather, a theory is most fundamentally
a gestalt, a conceptual abstraction from systemic order,
a way of seeing the phenomena it refers to. Theory
and generalization thus are not merely different levels
of one thing but two quite different things. Theory typically involves generalization, but it may do so at any
level. Generalization is secondary to theorizing, not definitive of it.
This difference between us with respect to our understandings of theory has many consequences. For example, I think that culture theory must be allowed to play
its part in opening up and refreshing the definition of
what constitutes valid scientific theory in general. It was
developed through empirical and critical engagement
with the phenomena that it encompasses; yet, aspects
of culture and what it reflexively reveals about theory
are not encompassed by received views of theory derived
from early natural science. The resulting problems, then,
are less with the idea of culture than with the received,
too-constrained, straitjacketing notions of theory. Now,
Reyna views Geertzs work as nonscience and even antiscience, calling it, for instance, conjectural hermeneutics (1999). Geertz is a complex figure, but from my perspective a reading of his position as one opposed to science
is entirely too shallow. He is better viewed as committed
to some form of recognizably scientific endeavor (Ortner 1999:3), and in being so committed he and other culture theorists extend the range and diversity of science
and of theory. The received view of theory cannot accommodate this extension. When Reyna (1994:57174) quotes
Geertz as being opposed to science, Geertz may have
been referring to the same received and hitherto defining
view of science from which Reyna launches his critique.
Finally, Herzfeld poses a question and a challenge:
How does my theoretical position work out in practice? He apparently means ethnographic practice, or
ethnography, as it is the essays isolation from specific
ethnographic cases that occasions the question. Or, is
practice here not (or not only) ethnography but the
actual usually local circumstances that ethnographies
relate? In any event, the question really is how the ideas
and theoretical issues discussed in the present essay inform (or might inform) what people (including anthropologists) do and how they think in actual diverse life
situations. This centrally important question has two
aspects: (1) Can these ideas help make better sense of
actual events or experiences? And (2), can they beneficially inform what people do? Both questions, as Herzfeld says, return to . . . agency, and so to accountability.
All that we can guarantee in scienceand that only provisionallyis the theoretical and empirical integrity of
our concepts and data. There is nothing inherent in any
theory (any metanarrative) that ensures its beneficial
use or, ultimately, protects it from misuse, but we cannot
avoid theory. Hence, the importance of Herzfelds question. The terrain of anthropological practice in part includes actual legal or public controversies that involve
culture. I have elsewhere (Boggs 2002, n.d.) illustrated in
case examples how the theoretical issues developed here
play out in and shape public controversy in the United
States involving Indian tribes. It becomes clear in each
case that the controversy revolves around the clash between liberal and culture theories. Understanding the
two theories as theory may help illuminate many such
public events.
I feel unease about only one aspect of Herzfelds remarks, and this is the apparent blurring of the distinction
between scientific theory as a form of knowledge and
other knowledge forms (religion, diverse culturally
grounded insights or worldviews). Granted that science
itself begins as a cultural and situated product, its form
and consequences nonetheless mark it as a distinct practice and way of knowing. Theory has, through its source
in the formal and empirically disciplined processes of
scientific inquiry, unique potential to distance itself
from and to challenge or refigure the conceptual ground
out of which it arises. It is therefore important to maintain (and here I again invoke liberal practice) the distinction, for instance, between culture as a scientific theory and its political/moral aspects and usages. Indeed,

Native Americans often remarkably perceptive critical

insights into the workings of the Euroamerican system, coming from other cultural perspectives and experiences, have contributed to my theoretical understanding of that system and of culture and culture theory.
But I still hesitate to call the worldviews or traditions,
however richly elaborated, from which these insights
come theory, just as I would shy from likening culture
theory to religion without noting also how it differs. It
does not necessarily disparage other cultural experiences
or religion or unduly elevate science to mark these distinctions. In short, this line between theory and other
forms of knowledge can be maintained in making the
points that Herzfeld makes here, and I see no advantage
in blurring it to make these points.
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8-3 BOGGS, James The Culture Concept As Theory in Context

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The Culture Concept as Theory, in Context

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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

The Culture Concept

1. This essay has benefited from thoughtful comments by the editor

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188 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

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b o g g s The Culture Concept as Theory F 189

Conflicting paradigms cohabit within us, and we switch

Culture Theory and its Anthropological

proximity and need not interact. The attributes defining

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190 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

commits the idealist fallacy by failing to recognize

than the self-evident transparent view of naked reality

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b o g g s The Culture Concept as Theory F 191

that wields truth as power in order to distance, control,

and inequality in the system (1984:140, references

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192 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

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b o g g s The Culture Concept as Theory F 193

socially inconsequential, but theory is infinitely more

Culture Theory in Context

it then redefines. A theory comes forward in its particular

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194 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

sense experience are the only sources of true knowledge.

ture wars, of which the question of human rights is

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b o g g s The Culture Concept as Theory F 195

ings were seen as different kinds of machines. . . . The

better understood (see, e.g., Aberle 1987, Latour 1993,

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196 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

glect in anthropology that is matched only by the

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b o g g s The Culture Concept as Theory F 197

ducing culture to a mere generalizing idea, shifting the

substantive issues by procedural mechanisms (see Boggs

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198 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

and other venues including anthropology itself, cultures

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b o g g s The Culture Concept as Theory F 199

credulity towards metanarratives (Lyotard 1984 [1979]:

Culture theory and liberal theory are contradictory

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200 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

cultural essentialism, knowing that their analyses, no

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b o g g s The Culture Concept as Theory F 201

affect the objects of its study (e.g., protons, neutrons, or

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202 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004

as science and thus into its twilight as a discipline and

cultures as empirical objects to be incorrectly seen as

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b o g g s The Culture Concept as Theory F 203

Thus we have the Marxist-Freudianism of the Frankfurt

idea of immanence is also strange because the particular