Theories of Culture

"Yanomamo culture," "Japanese culture," "the evolution of culture," "nature vs culture"; we anthropologists are still using that word, and we stili think it means something. But looking across at our primate relatives learning local traditions, using tools, and manipulating symbols, we can no longer say comfortably that "culture" is the heritage of learned symbolic behavior that makes humans human. And standing amid the swirling tides of change and individual diversity, we can no longer say comfortably that "a cuiture" is the heritage people in a particular society share. Moreover, we increasingly realize that the holistic, humanistic view of culture synthesized by Kroeber and Kluckhohn includes too much and is too diffuse either to separate analytically the twisted threads of human experience or to interpret the designs into which they are woven. The challenge in recent years has been to narrow the concept of "culture" so that it includes less and reveals more. As Geertz argues, "cutting the culture concept down to size . . . [into] a narrowed, specialized, and . . . theoretically more powerful concept" (30, p. 4) has been a major theme in modem anthropological theorizing.^ And predictably, modem anthropologists have not agreed on the best way to narrow and sharpen the central conceptual tool they have inherited from tiieir elders. In the pages that follow, I wili summarize recent rethinkings of "culture" as