Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://ptx.sagepub.com
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
Additional services and information for Political Theory can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://ptx.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://ptx.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
POLITICAL
10.1177/0090591702239440
Scott
/ CULTURE
THEORY
IN POLITICAL
/ February 2003
THEORY
DAVID SCOTT
Columbia University
To see the Other as culturally different is no cause for applause and self-congratulation. . . .
This marks not a moral nor an intellectual victory but a great trivialization of the encounter with
the Other. . . . To say then that since we now see the non-European Other democratically as
merely having a different culture, as being fundamentally onlyculturally different, we have a
more just idea of her, a less prejudiced and truer idea of her than did the nineteenth century who
saw her on the horizon of historical evolutionary development, the Enlightenment who saw her
on the horizon of ignorance, or the Renaissance who saw her on the horizon of the demonical,
would be merely to reaffirm the Eurocentric idea of the progress of knowledge; i.e., it would be
to instantaneously, retroactively, and totally transform this work from being an archaeology of
the different conceptions of difference into being, once again, a history of the progress of
anthropological knowledge and an affirmation and celebration of the teleology of truth.
Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other, by Bernard McGrane, 1989 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
92
93
shorthand here) were made and adjudicated in the rarefied name of this universalistic view-from-everywhere Reason. Today this is easily recognizableand rightly deploredas Eurocentrism, and therefore ruled inadmissible in any sophisticated discussion. Things have considerably changed in
our historical and epistemic worlds and now culture has recommended itself
as the conceptual site both of the critique of Enlightenment Reason, and of
the assertion and security of the epistemological privilege of local knowledge. I am, needless to say, the last person to deny the virtues of this displacement. Indeed I can hardly not-inhabit it myself. But I have been concerned to
offer a doubt that what culture-as-constructed-meaning (in either its more
standard Geertzian edition, or that of the postmodernists) has inaugurated is
really a new egalitarian era of knowledge-relations between the West and its
Others. I have offered the contrary view and urged that the new democratic
culture is as complicit with the assumption of the moral and epistemological
privilege of the West as Reason was. In my view, it too, if in altered historical
circumstances, underwrites a liberal conception of how differences are to be
viewed and regulated.1
In what follows I want to extend this argument somewhat. Here I am
interested in the way in which, in recent years, this concept of culture-asconstructed-meaning has assumed a special, even vital, place in AngloAmerican political theory. A large and growing number of Western political
theorists now seem to feel compelled to take account of culture in order to
pursue and sustain a critical reflection on liberalism and democracy. It now
appears that fairness demands more than the neutrality offered by Rawlss A
Theory of Justice, and that considerations of justice, freedom, citizenship,
equality, and political community require respect for difference understood
as cultural identity. Such concepts as cultural rights, multiculturalism,
the claims of diversity, the politics of difference, the politics of recognition, and so on, mark the new preoccupation with culture among political
theorists. A little belatedly, some might think, nevertheless culture has now
virtually become a term of art in the science of politics.
Consider, for example, one expression of this new awareness of the relevance of culture for liberal-democratic theorizingthat of Amy Gutmann,
someone close enough to the middle in the contemporary debate about multiculturalism. Gutmann suggests that liberal democracies have become, as she
puts it, sites of
controversy over whether and how its public institutions should recognize the identities
2
of cultural and disadvantaged minorities.
94
There may be much in these remarks to comment on, but for my purposes
here I want to note just two features of Gutmanns appreciation of the relevance of culture for liberal political theory. The first has to do with the role
culture is to play as a conceptual index. In the view offered by Gutmann there
is a conjunction between culture and disadvantage. For her (as indeed for
others), culture marks an area of damage or injury or marginalization, and
signals simultaneously the idiom of a politics of repair or redress. In a recuperative move that has become familiar in the human sciences a variety of
putatively harmed communitiesdefined in terms of race, gender, sexual
orientation, ethnicity, and so onare thus enabled to find an affirmative shelter within the capacious ambit of culture.
The second notable feature has to do with the site of Gutmanns anxiety,
namely, the public institutions of the North Atlantic liberal democracies.
There is a very interesting way in which the crisis that brings culture to the
attention of Anglo-American political theory has less to do with the geographical and moral elsewheres that anthropologists have conventionally
studied,4 and more with the civic and moral centers that give point and sustaining substance to the forms of life of liberal democracy. To put it another
way, something of a displacement has occurred such that the contemporary
problem about culture derives less from anthropologists going to non-Western
places (where after all she or he is more an observer of, than a participant in,
someone elses way of life), and more from non-Western peoples coming to
the West in large numbers and making material claims on its institutions and
resources. This displacement of the site of the problem of culture may be
what Clifford Geertz (in so many ways the great signifier of the contemporary
age of culture-as-constructed-meaning) is alluding to when he says that today
difference begins not at the waters edge, but at the skins.5 Indeed, this shift
in the locus of where culture matters may be one reason why anthropolo-
95
96
97
This is the central aspiration that governs James Tullys Strange Multiplicity.
And it is especially suggestive of the direction and quality of Tullys preoccu-
98
99
movements, multicultural (or as Tully prefers, intercultural) claims, feminist movements, and the demands of Aboriginal or Indigenous peoples. In
Tullys view, however, the struggles of Aboriginal peoples of the world, and
especially those of the Americas, for cultural survival and recognition are a
special example of the phenomenon of the politics of cultural recognition
(SM, p. 3), and it is these he focuses on.
These varied struggles are distinctive, Tully argues, because of the cultural claim they make on the domain of the political. Prior claims to recognition have been offered in the all-embracing language of universalism. By
contrast, these struggles for cultural recognition constitute, as he says, an
aspiration for appropriate political forms of self-government. It constitutes a
demand, in other words, to govern themselves in ways they deem consonant
with their traditions. From the point of view of these struggles, therefore, culture is not separable from politics but is, on the contrary, an irreducible
aspect of it. Consequently, so far as these struggles are concerned, the institutions of modern constitutional society are unjust precisely to the extent that
they do not enable the political embodiment of cultural traditions. As Tully
phrases it:
The diverse ways in which citizens think about, speak, act and relate to others in participating in a constitutional association (both the abilities they exercise and the practices in
which they exercise them), whether they are making, following or going against the rules
and conventions in any instance, are always to some extent the expression of their different cultures. A constitution can seek to impose one cultural practice, one way of rule following, or it can recognize a diversity of cultural ways of being a citizen, but it cannot
eliminate, overcome or transcend this cultural dimension of politics. (SM, pp. 5-6)
This is the conjuncture for both the new demand and the new possibility of culture for political theory, and it is the story Tully tells about it that interests me.
100
Moreover,
cultures are not internally homogeneous. They are continuously contested, imagined and
re-imagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through their interaction with others. The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is thus aspectival
rather than essential: like many complex human phenomena, such as language and
games, cultural identity changes as it is approached from different paths and a variety of
aspects come into view. (SM, p. 11)
As I have said, I have elsewhere offered my skepticism about this new constructionist conception of cultureboth the version of it associated with
Clifford Geertz as well as the one associated James Clifford. Without
rehearsing the details of that argument here I will simply reiterate that this
101
characterization of culture is open to the question: For whom is culture partial, unbounded, heterogeneous, hybrid, and so on, the anthropologist or the
native? Whose claim is this, theorys or that of the discourse into which theory is inquiring? For surely on the very antifoundationalist grounds established by the new theory itself, the unboundedness or otherwise of culture
cannot be something given but must, rather, be something that gets established in forms of authoritative discourse. So that whereas to stand on the a
priori claim that culture is now partial rather than whole works well as a subversive claim turned against older essentialisms, as part of an ironic undoing
of the meta-narratives of the West, it does less well as a principle upon which
to seek a new positive yield for a politics of difference.22
But I am less interested here in this incoherence than in the rather surprising fact that Tully uncritically adopts the once-upon-a-time story about culture it plays a role in. Where in the old daysbetween Hobbes and Rawls,
lets saypolitical philosophy depended upon a falsethat is, essentialist
conception of culture, now thanks to recent hard-won developments in
anthropology there is a new and correct conception that will at once free
political philosophy of its prejudices and enable it to more adequately reformulate the problem of constitutionalism. The story has about it a curiously
just-so character. Between the seventeenth century inauguration of constitutionalist theory and the late twentieth century revolution in anthropology, so
this story goes, political theorists operated with the fallacious notion that cultures were internally homogeneous, immobile, self-enclosed, seamless, and
so on. On this false conception of culture were built the great constitutional
theories that have defined our political modernity. Indeed these constitutional
theories are themselves false insofar as they have depended upon this erroneous conception of culture. Now at last, however, we know what culture really
is, namely, fluid, heterogeneous, partial, and so on. And therefore we can now
begin to reconstruct a more adequate political theory of community for our
age of multiculturalism.
But what is all the more surprising and telling about this story is that where
the language of constitutionalism is concerned Tully is incisively critical of
these very progressivist assumptions, and employs a form of historical investigation aimed precisely at making visible its ideological history. So that in
turning his attention to the problem of the historicization of constitutionalism, Tully urges the deployment of a form of historical critique developed by
Quentin Skinner and John Dunn at Cambridge:
It consists in the historical application of Wittgensteins method of dissolving philosophical problems not by presenting yet another solution, but by a survey which brings to crit-
102
This, of course, is not only an application of Wittgensteins doctrine regarding the background language game or form of life, but a version of R. G.
Collingwoods notion that to properly understand any proposition it is necessary to grasp the question to which it is an answer. Skinner, in the well-known
reply to his critics, has acknowledged how crucial this idea has been for his
historical method.23 Like Foucaults genealogy, this form of historical critique is aimed at disrupting the seeming transparency of the present; it aims,
as Skinner has put it in a more recent formulation, to liberate us from any one
hegemonal account of values, and to enable us to stand back from the intellectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit of
enquiry what we should think of them.24 In the context of his own particular
concern, Tully argues, the application of this method
consists in a survey of the language employed in the current debate over recognition in
order to identify the shared conventions (the distinctions, concepts, assumptions, inferences and assertability warrants that are taken for granted in the course of the debate)
which render recognition problematic and give rise to the range of conflicting solutions.
(SM, p. 35)
This methodological move is then crucial to the story Tully tells about the
languages that constitute contemporary constitutionalism: the story of the
rise of the hegemonic modern language on the one hand, and of the subordinate common language on the other.
But evidently Tully does not think that he is obliged to make the same
historicizing move for anthropologys object, culture, that he deems necessary for political philosophys. Unlike political philosophys object, the constitution, so it appears, culture has an unproblematic history, one is tempted to
say, an almost natural history. It is simply there, unfolding, having already
been revolutionized, having already, perhaps, had its unsettling and revivifying encounter with Wittgenstein. There is apparently no need to inquire into
the shared conventions (the distinctions, concepts, assumptions, and so on) of
the language or the discourse of culture that lend it the enabling or conversely
disabling qualities it is assumed to have. It is enough to affirm (by invoking
the names of a number of distinguished anthropological authorities) that a
positive shift has taken place that has finally and gratifyingly supplied culture
with the conceptual character it should have had all alonga shift apparently
perceived as a matter of progress in intellectual history. Whereas
constitutionalism has its ruses, culture is transparent.
103
104
105
Or again:
Our knowledge lies in the fact that we recognize, not, as in the Enlightenment, our ignorance, but rather our relativity: our relativity and their relativity, whereas their ignorance
lies now in their cultural absolutism. (Beyond Anthropology, p. 121)
106
culture, and that this ignorance had fatal consequences for their conception of
the process of constitution making. For if McGrane is right that culture, as
ground and horizon of difference, is merely the most recent way of conceiving and explaining otherness, of putting otherness in its place, and that, in virtue of this, the past, even the recognizably modern past, cannot be simply read
in terms of its proximity to this distinctive way of organizing and interpreting
difference, then Tullys story of culture in political theory has to be revised. In
other words, if McGrane is right it is by no means clear that the relevant register of difference for Hobbes should have been a cultural one. And consequently there may be nothing (and indeed less than nothing) to be gained
from lamenting the fact that early modern constitutionalists had a narrow or
anyway an unsatisfying conception of it.
THE GEERTZ-EFFECT
I want to reiterate that I am not concerned here to argue the case against
Tullys understanding of culture as such, to deliberate its coherence, and even
less am I concerned here to offer an improvement in its place. I am concerned
merely to explore the conditions of his unreflected-upon assumption that the
new revolution in anthropologys culture will at last free political philosophy
of its imperial voice. Tully is of course not wrong that a new concept of culture has come to animate anthropological discourse in recent decades. This is
why in the story he tells the culture moment that enables his political theory is
not the founding moment of Franz Boas, nor indeed the successive moments
of the great Boasiansfrom Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict to Margaret
Mead and Melville Herskovits and Alfred Kroeberwho have followed
him, but rather a more contemporary, if equally spectacular, moment: the
moment of Clifford Geertz.
The explicit assimilation or appropriation of the concept of culture by
political theory has been made possible, as Tully rightly argues, by transformations within the discourse of culture itself. These transformations are now
often referred to as the cultural turn. The cultural turn is at once a turn to
culture in a range of disciplines outside of anthropology (such as political
theory) that hitherto did not think of culture as their object-domain, and a turn
in the concept itself (both inside and outside of anthropology) and in its place
in the understanding of human life. The story of this turn is perhaps an
already familiar one to many (the rise of such subdisciplinary formations as
cultural history, cultural studies, cultural geography, and so on, indicate it),29
and therefore there will be little need for me to do more here than rehearse its
outline in such a way as to bring into view the epistemological, but more
107
108
109
110
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword grew out of one such profile, and was
one of the early postwar texts to advance a comprehensive argument for cultural diversity. Beginning with the claim that the Japanese were the most
alien enemy the United States had ever engaged militarily, Benedict set out
a plea for an intercultural understanding with many resonances in Geertz. She
criticized the cultural imperialism of early twentieth century assimilationism, advocating a more reflexive self-consciousness about culture that
would enable more rational choices to be made concerning the peace and
prosperity of the globe. As Shannon remarks, Benedict demanded, not that
Japanese become Americans (as the old imperialism demands), but that they
become anthropologists. That is, her book urged that the Japanese cultivate
the kind of detachment from their cultural values that enables appraisal and
flexibility in relation to it:
It demands that the Japanese learn to view their culture with a certain scientific detachment and to see their received values as relative and therefore open to revision in the service of consciously chosen ends. Ultimately, the imperial vision of Benedicts world
made safe for differences lies not in any covert imposition of American values on the
Japanese but in the overt and uncompromising call for the subordination of all cultures to
42
the demands of individual choice.
At the same time, however, even though Americans and Japanese were being
held to the same (anthropological) standard, it was nevertheless clear that
they did not inhabit the same proximity to it. Whereas Japanese cultural values were, in fundamental ways, antipathetic to the standard of individual
autonomy required for detached appraisal, and thus required fundamental
reform, Americans only had a few superficial adjustments to make in order to
live up to what was already a basic value.
In short, for cold war liberal anthropologists like Benedict the conception
as well as the promotion of cultural diversity was fundamentally shaped by
the ideological antagonism of a world polarized around totalitarianism and
democracy, and the duty to advance the interests of the latter over the former.
Making the world safe for differences depended both upon a greater openness
to diversity and on conformity to certain metavalues (relativism and the
autonomous self needed to secure its vantage) that were constitutive of
American individualism. For Benedict, in other words, making the world
safe for differences depended upon the reinscription of a cultural hierarchy
that assigned tacit priority to American values. By contrast, the end of the
cold war and the end of the ideological antagonisms that constituted its moral
geography have released liberals from the old defensive attitude to the priority of American values and enabled a more permissive openness to the otherness of the Wests Others, and a more cosmopolitan rehabilitation or recon-
111
112
NOTES
1. This argument was set out some years ago in David Scott, Criticism and Culture: Theory
and Post-Colonial Claims on Anthropological Disciplinarity, Critique of Anthropology 12
(1992): 371-94.
2. Amy Gutmann, ed., Introduction, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Arjun Appadurai, Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 28 (1986): 356-57. Appadurai puts it nicely when he writes: At
least since the latter part of the nineteenth century, anthropological theory has always been based
on the practice of going somewhere, preferably somewhere geographically, morally, and
socially distant from the theoretical and cultural metropolis of the anthropologist. The science of
the other has inescapably been tied to the journey elsewhere.
5. Clifford Geertz, The Uses of Diversity, Tanner Lectures on Human Values 7 (1986):
261. The puzzles about cultural diversity, Geertz is saying, are no longer merely to be found
at the boundary of our society, but at the boundaries of ourselves. Foreignness does not start at
the waters but at the skins.
6. Two exceptions are two Marxist anthropologists: William Roseberry, Multiculturalism
and the Challenge of Anthropology, Social Research 59 (1992): 841-58; and Terence Turner,
Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What Is Anthropology That Multiculturalists Should Be
Mindful of It? Cultural Anthropology 8 (1993): 411-29. Their Marxism may not be irrelevant to
their discontent.
7. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995) (originally the inaugural John Robert Seeley Lectures
delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1994). Seeley, it is useful to remember, was a scholar
of English history who wrote a famous book called The Expansion of England.
8. I have in mind here work such as, Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic
Books, 1983); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995); Chandran Kukathas, Cultural Toleration, Ethnicity and Group Rights: NOMOS XXXIX,
ed. Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 69-104;
Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
2000); and Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Guttman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25-73.
9. Unlike political theorists such as Will Kymlicka and Chandran Kukathas, both of whom
(whatever their differences) seek a resolution to the culture/politics conundrum within explicitly
liberal terms. See Chandran Kukathas, Are There Any Cultural Rights? Political Theory 20
(1992): 105-39; Will Kymlicka, The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas, Political
Theory 20 (1992): 140-46; and Chandran Kukathas, Cultural Rights Again: Rejoinder to
Kukathas Political Theory 20 (1992): 674-80. I have commented on aspects of this exchange in
a preliminary way in David Scott, Toleration and Historical Traditions of Difference, Subaltern Studies, vol. 11, Community, Gender and Violence, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep
Jeganathan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000), 283-304.
10. For some sense of my sympathy for the kind of argument Tully advances, see David
Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 7.
11. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 15. See also Christopher Shannons discussion in his A
World Made Safe for Differences: Ruth Benedicts The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ameri-
113
can Quarterly 47 (1995): 659-80. The general argument has been expanded into the book A
World Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (Lanham,
MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001).
12. As close readers of the Antigone are well aware, however, Sophocles does not suggest a
straightforward celebration of Antigone as against Creon. Indeed the tragedy arises in part precisely because of Antigones own unyielding and one-sided attachment to an equally abstract
if differently affiliatedconception of justice. For useful discussions of this aspect of the
Antigone, see Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1981); and Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck
and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1986).
13. Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition.
14. See, for example, James Tully, ed., Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of
Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
15. See James Tully, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, Political Theory 17 (1989):
172-204.
16. See James Tully, Governing Conduct, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in
Contexts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179-241; see also his To Think
and Act Differently: Foucaults Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas Theory, Foucault
Contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed.
Samantha Ashenden and David Owen (London: Sage, 1999), 190-241.
17. See James Tully, The Pen Is a Mighty Sword, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner
and His Critics ed. James Tully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 7-25.
18. See James Tully, The Agonic Freedom of Citizens, Economy and Society 28 (1999):
161-82.
19. Taylors Christianity and Hegelianism are well known. For an interesting comment see
Isaiah Berlins Introduction, Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles
Taylor in Question, ed. James Tully (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1-3.
20. For a sympathetic account see David Owen, Political Philosophy in a Post-Imperial
Voice: James Tully and the Politics of Cultural Recognition, Economy and Society 28 (1999):
520-49.
21. See Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and
Social Diversity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992); Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and James Clifford, The Predicament of
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). With the exception of Carrithersa
curious, almost anomalous, choice in many respects, since this book, and his others as well, are
conventional to a remarkable degreethese thinkers have had an enormous impact on the directions of North American anthropology in the last decade and a half.
22. See Scott, Culture and Criticism, 375-78. Readers of Alasdair MacIntyres Three Rival
Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), will be familiar with his doubts about the posture of subversion.
23. Skinner, Reply to My Critics, Meaning and Context.
24. See Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 117.
25. I agree with Owen, Political Philosophy in a Post-Imperial Voice, that more (and
better) than other works of its kind Tullys teaches political philosophy to speak in a postimperial tone of voice (p. 547). But like Tully himself Owen simply glides over the problem of
culture with which I am concerned.
114
26. Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989).
27. See George W. Stocking Jr., ed., Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 195-233.
28. This is also one of the themes of Shannons A World Made Safe for Differences.
29. For a collection of essays by various authors who have taken the cultural turn and are
now assessing it, see, Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
30. There is, parenthetically, an important converging story to be told here about the vicissitudes of Marxism, still in the 1960s and 1970s the reference point for any oppositional criticism.
In the postwar years, an economistic Marxism gave way to a New Left Marxism more interested
in superstructures, in the meaning-domains of ideology and consciousness. The influence of
the work of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams, for instance, helped
to urge U.S. Marxist anthropologists in the direction of a constructionist conception of culture.
31. For an appreciative discussion of Geertzs contribution see Sherry Ortner, Introduction, The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond, ed. Sherry Ortner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 1-13. For a more general account of the rise of the anthropological concept
of culture, one very critical of Geertz, see Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists Account
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
32. The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), collects essays first published between 1957 and 1972; and Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), collects
essays originally published between 1974 and 1982.
33. Clifford Geertz, Thick Description, Interpretation of Cultures, 9.
34. I am thinking, of course, of Richard Rortys Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), chap. 8, Philosophy without Mirrors, in which he
develops the contrast between systematic and edifying philosophy.
35. Geertz, Thick Description, Interpretation of Cultures, 4.
36. The classic text that defines this moment of criticism is of course, James Clifford and
George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
37. See Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences.
38. Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and
Liveright, 1924). For normative discussions of Kallen, see David Hollinger, Postethnic America
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), 92-93; and Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American
(New York: Marsilio, 1992), 63-64. For a finely polemical discussion see Russell Jacoby, The
End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
39. See Richard Handler, An Interview with Clifford Geertz, Current Anthropology 32
(1991): 609. The image of Boas himself was of someone who collected fish recipes. There was
a feeling that he meant well but that he didnt think much.
40. See Clifford Geertz, Us/Not-Us: Benedicts Travels, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, ed. Clifford Geertz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 102-28.
41. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).
42. Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences, 660.
115