Theories Of Culture Revisited

Abstract

If radical alterity did not exist, it would be anthropology's project to invent it. I believe that the radical alterity we have sought has not existed for many millenia. The tribal world in which we have situated that alterity the world of UviStrauss's 'cold societies' was our anthropological invention. We continue to invoke it; and some of us journey even deeper into darkest New Guinea to find it, existing still. The invention and evocation of radical alterity, which has been our project, required a conceptual universe, a mode of discourse. Especially as the idea of 'a culture' was developed in the Boasian tradition, as a bounded universe of shared ideas and customs, and as the idea of 'a society' was developed in functionalist social anthropology, as a bounded universe of self-reproducing structures; these concepts provided a framework for our creation and evocation of radical diversity. 'A culture' had a history, but it was the kind of history that coral reefs have: the cumulated accretion of minute deposits, essentially unknowable, and irrelevant to the shapes they form. The world of timeless, endlessly self-reproducing structures, social and ideational, each representing a unique experiment in cultural possibility, has we now know been fashioned in terms of European philosophical quests and assumptions, superimposed on the peoples encountered and subjugated along colonial frontiers. The diversity and the uniqueness are, of course, partial 'truths': the Tupinamba, the Aranda, the Baganda, the Vedda, the Dayak challenged comprehension, and still do. But I believe we continue to overstate Difference, in the search for the exotic and for the radical Otherness that Western philosophy, and Western cravings for alternatives, demand. I will touch again on this question of radical alterity, as it has been interpreted and created in anthropological discourse. My main concern here is to re-examine the concept of 'culture', particularly our ways of talking and writing about 'a culture'. Hence I return to issues I addressed in a paper on 'Theories of culture' fifteen years ago (Keesing 1974). I will begin by setting out a series of ironies and contradictions. A first irony is that the presently fashionable in some quarters, at least, ascendant symbolisViterpretive modes of anthropology require radical alterity more than ever, in a world where such boundaries as there ever were are dissolving by the day. To show that conceptions of personhood, of emotions, of agency, of gender, of the body are culturally constructed, demands that Difference