I conclude the paper with some suggestions about how to reconcile liberal nationalism with the more attractive features of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. The suggestion is that race and gender are not real, or at least, they are not what we have thought them to be. This paper undertakes to offer feminist accounts of gender and race that defines them in terms of social positions within broader hierarchical structures. The hope is that by considering them together we can highlight some of their similarities and differences, and can better understand their intersectionality. After years of retirement, a lifetime of teaching aesthetics appears in a changed perspective.
Culture is to be explained in terms of the production and spread of representations.
I charge Sperber with two errors. Firstly, he focuses too much on a certain sort of institution, when in reality to participate in a culture is to do things as much as it is to have thoughts. This requires shifting from propositional knowledge to know-how. Secondly, Sperber's treatment of representations is too individualistic to account properly for cultural skills. Through development of these charges, an alternative way of studying culture naturalistically is developed.