Culture: A Post-Concept?

Explaining Culture Scientifically, edited by Melissa J. Brown, attempts to rehabilitate the concept of culture from the depravations of postmodernism by reestablishing the relevance of evolutionary science. But it does not attempt to explain postmodernism’s phenomenal success in anthropology, history, and other disciplines in which the study of culture is forefront. “Evolutionary science” includes cognitivism, which, like postmodernism and the rest of “the linguistic turn,” has roots in the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Like structuralism (which the authors barely mention) and postmodernism (which they explicitly shun), the “science” deployed in this collection comes across mainly as a brand of creationism unconnected to the legacy of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s revolutionary opus inspired a number of brilliant works that pointed toward a science of culture—those of Sigmund Freud, for example—but the promise of those early years remains largely unfulfilled.