Culture: The Anthropologists' Account (review)

Culture: The Anthropologists' Account. By Adam Kuper (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999) 299 pp. $29.95

Elegant, learned, and persuasive, Kuper's account of how major anthropologists have treated the notion of culture in the twentieth century is also a counsel of despair. He concludes bluntly that the study of culture has reached such a hopeless dead end that the very concept should be dropped.

After a good review of how early anthropologists came to define culture, Kuper explains Parsons' ambitious attempt to place it in a specific analytic niche. ¹ For Parsons, culture consisted of values, ideas, and other symbolic expressions of meaning, which are what he wanted anthropologists to study, just as economists were to study production, political scientists decision making, and sociologists integrative social institutions. Even though Parsons was on the right track, and the core of anthropology really should be the study of meaning--that is, of cultures--anthropologists continued to claim a broader subject. In doing so, they fell into the same trap as other social scientists. Each discipline defined its specialty as the most important, sometimes the only crucial aspect of social life. For anthropology, therefore, culture--ideas and meanings--came to define society, just as markets and prices were all that mattered to economists and decision making became the essence of humanity for political scientists. Parsons' grand scholarly division of labor never caught on, because no discipline fully recognized the legitimacy of the others' concerns. Even in sociology Parsons was relegated to footnotes after the 1960s.

Unfortunately, the anthropologists' concentration on culture to the exclusion of other aspects of social life has produced a series of brilliant emperors with no clothes. Kuper is polite but devastating in his criticism. Geertz could produce no explanation for the violence in Indonesia in 1965, and offers not the slightest clue for understanding contemporary Indonesian politics or cultural change. His discussions about Islam missed the incipient rise of Islamic fundamentalism. His masterpiece about Negara, the theater state, is a beautifully written fraud that somehow persuaded its readers that Southeast Asian states are not involved in real competition for power and resources. ² As Kuper shows, Geertz's greatest accomplishment has been to reassure humanists that they need not take social science seriously.

Schneider tried to argue that there were people in the Pacific who did not know about the father's role in reproduction. He also failed to understand the nature of social change and kinship in the societies he studied, including the United States. ³

Sahlins made a promising start, so long as he was a Marxist who believed in social evolution, except for his belief that socialism and the Soviet Union were the next logical level on the evolutionary social scale. Later, he was seduced by French structuralism, which led him into an extreme anti-evolutionary form of idealism and blind cultural determinism. His last big idea led to a sterile, ad hominen public debate with Gananath Obeyesekere about why Captain James Cook was killed in Hawaii. ⁴

Finally, in the 1980s the radicalism of a new generation of anthropologists led to literary deconstruction and postmodernism. Solipsism replaced actual examination of how societies behaved and what they thought, and the endless denigration of a few classical texts obviated any need for theoretical thought. As long as one sounded suitably radical, especially if one could claim to represent some persecuted group, there was no need to be coherent about what culture means, about the fact that cultural differences can be compared, and that sociocultural evolution actually occurs.

Kuper ends by showing that Anglo-American anthropology's worship of "diversity" has come to mean the celebration of race. This standpoint, he shows, negates the hard work of generations of anthropologists who tried to prove that culture is not genetically determined. Since, no matter how hard they try, anthropologists will never convince the literate public that race is not genetic, by tying culture to race, they have defeated themselves and made themselves irrelevant...