Bringing Culture Back In

Abstract

Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning. By Patrick Chabal, Jean-Pascal Daloz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 362 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-226-10040-5), $29.00 paper (ISBN: 0-226-10041-3). After many years of neglect, political scientists are finally paying attention to the relevance of “culture” to politics (Ross 1997; Bates, de Figueiredo, and Weingast 1998; Eckstein et al. 1998; Kaufman 2001; Wedeen 2002). This theoretical turn raises two important questions: first, why is culture potentially important to the study of politics? Second, if culture matters, how should it be understood and incorporated into political analyses? In Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning , Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz make a strong argument that culture matters. This argument, along with their conceptualization of culture itself, is laudable. However, even readers who are interested in culture and politics may not agree with parts of Chabal and Daloz's vision of what a cultural analysis of politics entails. Chabal and Daloz make a strong case that culture shapes politics in important but often overlooked ways. Moreover, they effectively argue that culture is most usefully understood as a system of meaning, not as a collection of behaviors, values, or beliefs. This position is most clearly associated with anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973). Rather than seeing culture as a set of discrete traits, the Geertzian perspective emphasizes culture as a worldview, or template, that both explains and organizes individual and collective action. As important, Chabal and Daloz point out that a cultural approach is not necessarily “culturalist,” meaning that to contend that culture matters is not to say that only culture matters. Chabal and Daloz argue that to understand how a cultural system of meaning shapes politics, analysts must immerse themselves deeply in a particular cultural milieu, collecting and analyzing context-specific data. Although Chabal and Daloz are not very precise about what “deep immersion” requires with respect to time spent in a …