The concept(s) of culture

the meaningful aspect of human action out from the flow of concrete interactions. The point of conceptualizing culture as a sys­ tem of symbols and meanings is to disentangle, for the purpose of analysis, the semiotic influences on action from the other sorts of influences-demographic, geographical, biological, technological, economic, and so on-that they are necessarily mixed with in any concrete sequence of behavior. Ceertzs and Schneider's post-Parsonian theorizations of cultural systems were by no means the only available models for symbolic anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s. The works of Victor Turner, whose theoretical origins were in the largely Durkheirnian British school of social anthropology, were also immensely influential. " Claude Levi-Strauss and his many followers provided an entire al­ ternative model of culture as a system of symbols and meanings­ conceptualized, following Saussure, as signifiers and signifieds. Moreover, all these anthropological schools were in a sense manifes­ , tations of a much broader "linguistic turn" in the human sciences­ a diverse but sweeping attempt to specify the structures of human symbol systems and to indicate their profound influence on human behavior. One thinks above all of such French "structuralist" think­ ers as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, or the early Michel Foucault. What all of these approaches had in common was an insistence on the systematic nature of cultural meaning and the autonomy of sym­ bol systems-their distinctness from and irreducibility to other fea­ lures of social life. They all abstracted a realm of pure signification out from the complex messiness of social life and specified its inter­ nal coherence and deep logic. Their practice of cultural analysis con­ sequently tended to be more or less synchronic and formalist. Culture ns practice. The past decade and a half has witnessed a per­ vasive reaction against the concept of culture as a system of symbols and meanings, which has taken place in various disciplinary 10­ cations and intellectual traditions and under many different slo­ gans-for example, "practice," "resistance," "history," "politics," or "culture as tool ki L" Analysts working under all these banners object 10 a portrayal of culture as logical, coherent, shared, uniform, and static. Instead lhey insist that culture is a sphere of practical activity c;hot through by willful action, power relations, struggle, contradic­ lion, and change, Tile COllcepf(s) of Culture In anthropology, Sherry Ortner in 1984 remarked on the turn to politics, history, and agency, suggesting Pierre Bourdieu's key term "practice" as an appropriate label for this emerging sensibility. Two years later the publication of James Clifford and George Marcus's col­ lection Writing Culture announced to the public the crisis of anthro­ pology's culture concept. " Since then, criticisms of the concept of culture as a system of symbols and meanings have flowed . thick and fast. The most notable work in anthropology has argued for the con­ tradictory, politically charged, changeable, and fragmented charac­ ter of meanings-both meanings produced in the societies being studied and meanings rendered in anthropological texts. Recent work in anthropology has in effect recast culture as aperforms­ tive term. Not surprisingly, this emphasis on the performative aspect of cul­ ture is compatible with the work of most cultural historians. Histori­ ans are generally uncomfortable with synchronic concepts. As they took up the study of culture, they subtly-but usually without com­ ment-altered the concept by stressing the contradictoriness and malleability of cultural meanings and by seeking out the mecha­ nisms by which meanings were transformed. The battles in history have been over a different issue, pitting those who claim that histori­ cal change should be understood as a purely cultural or discursive process against those who argue for the significance of economic and social determinations or for the centrality of concrete "experience" in understanding it.22 Sociologists, for rather different reasons, have also favored a more performative conception of culture. Given the hegemony of a strongly causalist methodology and philosophy of science in con­ temporary sociology, cultural sociologists have felt a need to demon­ strate that culture has causal efficacy in order to gain recognition for ,~, their fledgling subfield. This has led many of them to construct cul­ ture as a collection of variables whose influence on behavior can be rigorously compared to that of such standard sociological variables as class, etlmicity, gender, level of education, economic interest, and the like. As a result, they have moved away from earlier Weberian, Durkheimian, or Parsonian conceptions of culture as rather vague and global value orientations to what Ann Swidler has termed a "tool kit" composed of a "repertoire" of "strategies of action. " 21 For 47 46 William H. Setrcll, Jr. many cultural sociologists, then, culture is not a coherent system of symbols and meanings but a diverse collection of "tools" that, as the metaphor indicates, are to be understood as means for the perfor­ mance of action. Because these tools are discrete, local, and intended for specific purposes, they can be deployed as explanatory variables in a way that culture conceived as a translocal, generalized system of