Content area
Full text
In September 1997, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a press release on the concept of "race." Arguing that the concept of race is social rather than biological, AAA issued a series of recommendations that attempt to disentangle common misperceptions of racial categories. At the annual meetings that followed in December, a plenary session was held in which subdisciplines explored the scenario of what happens "if race doesn't exist." With the sustained onslaught on the concept of "culture" in the wake of postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theory, can the death knell of "culture" be far behind? How soon will it be before culture does not exist (if that has not already happened)?
The emergence of the concept of "culture" at the end of the last century was a welcome counter discourse to then-existing notions of inherited, and therefore immutable, racial differences (see Wax 1993 for an overview of the culture concept). The idea that something external to the human organism, something called "culture," could contribute to perceived human diversity was at the time a pivotal shift in paradigm. However, the initial power and potential of the culture concept seem to have been detoured through a reductionistic abuse of the term. Lila Abu-Lughod states in her essay "Writing against Culture" that "the notion of culture (especially as it functions to distinguish 'cultures'), despite a long usefulness, may now have become something anthropologists would want to work against in their theories, their ethnographic practice, and their ethnographic writing" (1991:138).
This is hardly news to anthropologists. For the last 15 years or so, we have been writing "against" culture, researching "beyond" culture (Gupta and Ferguson 1992), "critiquing" culture (Marcus and Fischer 1986), "revisiting" culture (Keesing 1994), putting "culture in motion" (Rosaldo 1989), and examining the interstitial space for "locating" culture (Bhabha 1995), the "breakdown" of culture (Fox 1995), and the "demise" of the culture concept (Yengoyan 1986). Yet, while anthropologists may bemoan the essentialization and reification of bounded and shared cultural traits, the reality is that academic critical discourses have been slow to penetrate curricular practices in schools. As we preach to each other and to the already converted, schools continue to operate on texts that emphasize the norms and customs that shape individual behavior and learning.
As...