"American academics
are waging culture wars. (Not many dead.) Politicians urge cultural
revolution" (p. 1). Thus begins the introduction to a fascinating
exploration of a recent chapter in the intellectual history that
gave rise and prominence to 'culture' as a professional specialty
and as a taken-for-granted concept in terms of which the citizenship
at large discusses politics, economy, management, industry, media,
and so on. One of the impulses from which this book has been written
is the abuse of culture theory as a source of legitimization for
apartheid in South Africa, where Kuper was an undergraduate in anthropology
in the late 1950's. Culture then superseded race as the objective
fact on the basis of which to argue that those who shared a culture
ought to live and breed together. To this day Kuper is suspicious
of arguments that deny individuals the possibility to associate
with whom they choose and so develop in ways that are not determined
by their ethnicity and ancestry.
To expose the historical
roots of cultural theory the book is divided into two parts. The
first consists of two chapters. The initial chapter presents particular
traditions of thinking about culture as seen in the work of Lucien
Fevre (1878-1956), Norbert Elias (1897-1990) and Raymond Williams
(1921-1988). Whereas German intellectuals advocated Kultur above
the artificial civilization of the cosmopolitan, materialistic French,
British intellectuals tied their notion of culture to the processes
of industrialization and its ensuing socio-economic transformations.
The second chapter focuses on the American tradition. Kroeber and
Kluckhone are credited for constructing a distinctively American
genealogy of the concept of culture. Parson built on this foundation
to divide the intellectual labour between sociologist, psychologist
and anthropologist giving to the latter, as a specialty, the concept
of culture as a system of symbols.
Part II of the book
focuses on the central project in postwar American cultural anthropology
as developed by Geertz (chapter 3), Schneider (chapter 4), Sahlins
(chapter 5), and by Sherry Ortner, Renato Rosaldo, George Marcus
and James Clifford (chapter 6). These scholars who were granted
tenure in the 1980's promote a postmodernist anthropology born out
of the recognition that "the imperial project operated within
the United States itself" (p. 204). In a final chapter Kuper
argues against the value of the concepts of culture and multiculturalism
in discussions of identity. When "difference" becomes
"the basis for a claim to collective rights" of those
who share gender, race, ethnicity or disability (p. 224), Kuper
sees a political agenda that constrains individuals to belong to
the group to which they are assigned a priori..
In his criticism of
the American project, Kuper operates from a number of vantage points.
He chastises Geertz, who hails culture as "the essential element
in the definition of human nature" and produces thick descriptions
of local knowledge in Indonesia and Bali, for failing to understand
local events in the light of what politicians, soldiers, and CIA
operatives did when they not only shaped history but too often tortured
and eliminated their enemies (p. 120). Kuper looks at Schneider
through the psychoanalytical lens and identifies Schneider's choice
of kinship as a subject for deconstruction that becomes a way to
perpetrate not only "parricide" but "a wholesale
slaughter of the ancestors"(p. 132). Kuper presents Sahlins
as "Leslie White reincarnated as Lévi-Strauss"
(p. 198), a view that effectively captures Sahlin's career path
from Michigan to Paris and back to Chicago. In the end Kuper's objection
to the American project as a whole is a moral one, for "It
tends to draw attention away from what we have in common instead
of encouraging us to communicate across national, ethnic, and religious
boundaries, and to venture beyond them" (p. 247).
First published in 1999,
Kuper's book was in its third printing in the year 2000, a clear
indication of its importance. Against American anthropologists,
Kuper argues that we ought to avoid the hyper-referential word culture
altogether. Better, he claims, "to talk more precisely of knowledge,
or belief, or art, or technology, or traditions, or even of ideology
(though similar problems are raised by the multivalent concept)"
(p. 10). This suggestion will not do. In the end, Kuper has not
found a way out of the anthropological intellectual conundrum that
he so elegantly explores. His book will remain, nonetheless, a masterpiece
against which to measure the quality of other contributions in the
enduring intellectual debate about the core business of anthropology.