Draft3.2.Aug24,2006.Donotdistributewithoutpermission.docVIP

PAGE  PAGE 86 Draft 3.2. Aug 24, 2006. Do not distribute without permission. forthcoming Cultural Anthropology, January 2007. CULTURE AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS AS EXPERIMENTAL SYSTEMS Michael M.J. Fischer Culture is (1) that relational (circa 1848), (2) complex whole… (1870s), (3)whose parts cannot be changed without affecting other parts (circa 1914), (4) mediated through powerful and power-laden symbolic forms (1930s), (5)whose mulitiplicities and performatively negotiated character (1960s), (6) is transformed by alternative positions, organizational forms, and leveraging of symbolic systems (1980s), (7)as well as by emergent new technosciences, media, and biotechnical relations (circa 2005). Introduction Without a differentiated and relational notion of the cultural (the arts, media, styles, religions, value-orientations, ideologies, imaginaries, world views, soul, and the like), the social sciences would be crippled, reducing social action to notions of pure instrumentality. Parts of this and the following introductory paragraphs and parts of sections 5-7 have been excerpted under “Culture and Cultural Analysis” in Problematizing Global Knowledge: Special Issue, of Theory Culture Society, March-May 2006, 23(2-3): 360-64. When singularized, frozen, or nominalized, “culture” can be a dangerous concept, subject to fallacies of pejorative and discriminatory hypostatizations (we have reason, they have culture) or immobilized variables (their culture is composed of x features). There have often been suggestions that the culture concept is exhausted, is used too thinly by non-anthropologists, or is so misused that it should be abandoned by anthropologists. Cultural thinness was an idea proposed by Robert Levy in his study of Tahitian culture (1973) as a way of characterizing certain of its cultural accounting procedures in contrast to cultures that did such accounting in more complicated and detailed ways. This comparative cont