Session 2: Culture and Community - Class Discussion

Session 2: Culture and Community

The session focused on debates, which started in the 1980s and maybe a bit earlier on certain dominant ideas of culture. These debates were a response to how North American anthropology in particular defined or even used culture as a category. Such an understanding of culture as a stable discrete entity or ‘ways of life of a particular group of people’ can be traced to Franz Boas.  He in turn borrowed from the German philosophers Herder and Klum who argued that individuals are part of society (and so defined by their culture).

The 1986 volume Writing Culture provoked further debates in anthropology on ethnography and ethnographic knowledge. The rise of feminist thought, sub-cultures and multiculturalism as epitomised by the readings began to destabilise the idea of culture as a long lasting stable entity. Each of the readings question this hegemonic understanding of culture through different lenses – Lughod links it to the feminist movement, Gupta & Ferguson question the notion of culture as tied to a particular territory or place, Appadurai questions culture in the context of globalisation, Taylor uses multiculturalism as his entry point.

The pieces mark an interesting moment when anthropologists were attempting to look at other analytical frameworks like discourses, practices, ideology instead of culture. However around the same time politics of identity start coming to the fore – community groups start articulating claims of belonging to discrete cultures that are different / unique compared to the cultures of other groups or even sub-groups. In this context certain classic texts like Durkheim are useful to understand the persistence of culture as a concept that defines a community or group. 

Krupa & Rashmi