Culture is both a key concept and a contested concept in anthropology. Discuss
Question 4: Culture is both a key concept and a contested concept in anthropology. Discuss.
I will be discussing how culture is used in anthropology, how it has seeped out into other fields of research and also its uses in normal everyday life. I will be looking at why this key concept has been and is still contested by some anthropologists. How it has created problems in the field and how we perceive people through the concept of culture. This done through the understanding of the definition of the word culture. Then I will show others who defend its uses and its importance to the creation and development of anthropology. That it is not a matter of the concept of culture but a matter of how it is interpreted and misused throughout the "classic" interpretation of the word. That it is merely a word to convey a set of abstract ideas together and to discard its use is not pragmatic as the word is unbounded.
Culture is essentially how humans adapt to survive. That is the very root of the concept of culture. From there it has developed at a pace that far exceeds biological change. It is something that is learned socially through knowledge and actions and most of it is implicit and invisible (Busse, 2013). The word in everyday life has taken on to mean the way a certain group of people live. The word has also become a status holder, as now it has come to mean that someone with Culture is someone who is of higher class and lives a more refined, quality lifestyle. This is one of the reasons that will be touched upon why anthropologists wish to remove the word. When the word is taken into the realm of anthropology, it starts to get complicated. Multiple definitions are used and it is not universally agreed upon on which definition is to be used. The use in anthropology has become a democratisation of elitist using it. This has become a problem for some anthropologists who say it starts to resemble essentialism in the sense that it is creating a clear cut comparisons
I will be discussing how culture is used in anthropology, how it has seeped out into other fields of research and also its uses in normal everyday life. I will be looking at why this key concept has been and is still contested by some anthropologists. How it has created problems in the field and how we perceive people through the concept of culture. This done through the understanding of the definition of the word culture. Then I will show others who defend its uses and its importance to the creation and development of anthropology. That it is not a matter of the concept of culture but a matter of how it is interpreted and misused throughout the "classic" interpretation of the word. That it is merely a word to convey a set of abstract ideas together and to discard its use is not pragmatic as the word is unbounded.
Culture is essentially how humans adapt to survive. That is the very root of the concept of culture. From there it has developed at a pace that far exceeds biological change. It is something that is learned socially through knowledge and actions and most of it is implicit and invisible (Busse, 2013). The word in everyday life has taken on to mean the way a certain group of people live. The word has also become a status holder, as now it has come to mean that someone with Culture is someone who is of higher class and lives a more refined, quality lifestyle. This is one of the reasons that will be touched upon why anthropologists wish to remove the word. When the word is taken into the realm of anthropology, it starts to get complicated. Multiple definitions are used and it is not universally agreed upon on which definition is to be used. The use in anthropology has become a democratisation of elitist using it. This has become a problem for some anthropologists who say it starts to resemble essentialism in the sense that it is creating a clear cut comparisons
References: Abu-Lughod, Lila, ed. 1991. Writing against Culture. Edited by R. G. Fox, Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the present. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Brumann, Christoph. 1999. Writing for culture: why a successful concept should not be discarded. Current Anthropology 40. Busse, Mark. 2013. Anthropology 203 Lectures. University of Auckland. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twenthieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Boston: Harvard College. Keita, Kittles. 1997. The persistance of racial thinking and the myth of racial divergence. American Anthropologist 99:534-44. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. Michigan: Pantheon Books.