Economia

In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susannc Laager remarks that certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptualcenter-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. "Die sudden vogue of such a grande idee, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she says, "to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generaliza¬tions and derivatives."After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expec-

4 THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
tations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its exces¬sive popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-uni-verse view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while tothe problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist where it docs not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring pari of our intellectual arrnqry. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-prom¬ising scope, the infiniteversatility of apparent application, it once had. The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selec¬tion, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production docs not explain everything, not even everything (human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolat-' ing just what thai something is, to disentangling ourselves from alot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.
Whether or not this is, in fact, the way all centrally important scien¬tific concepts develop, I don't know. But certainly this pattern fits the concept of culture, around which the whole discipline of anthropology arose, and whose domination that discipline has been increasingly con¬cerned to limit,specify, focus, and contain. It is to this cutting of the culture concept down to size, therefore actually insuring its continued importance rather than undermining it, that the essays below are all, in their several ways and from their several directions, dedicated. They all argue, sometimes explicitly, more often merely through the particular analysis they develop, for a narrowed, specialized, and,so 1 imagine, theoretically more powerful concept of culture to replace E. B. Tylor's famous "most complex whole," which, its originative power not denied, seems to me to have reached the point where it obscures a good deal more than it reveals.
The conceptual morass into which the Tylorean kind of pot-au-feu theorizing about culture can lead, is evident in what is still one of the better generalintroductions to anthropology, Clyde Kluckhohn's Mirror for Man. In some twenty-seven pages of his chapter on the concept, Kiuckhohn managed to define culture in turn as: (1) "the total way of life of a people"; (2) "the social legacy the individual acquires from his group"; (3) "a way of thinking, feeling, and believing"; (4) "an abstrac¬tion from behavior"; (5) a theory on the part of theanthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a "store-

Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 5
house of pooled learning"; (7) "a set of standardized orientations to re¬current problems"; (8) "learned behavior"; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) "a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and...