Cultural Studies and the Culture Concept

Abstract

My purpose in this paper is to complicate the genealogies of the concept of culture as a way of life that have held sway within cultural studies. I do so by reviewing key aspects in the development of this concept within the ‘Americanist’ tradition of anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas in the opening decades of the twentieth century and continued by a generation of Boas's students including Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber and Margaret Mead. I focus on three issues: the respects in which the ‘culture concept’ was shaped by aesthetic conceptions of form; its spatial registers; and its functioning as a new surface of government, partially displacing that of race, in the development of American multicultural policies in the 1920s and 1930s. In relating these concerns to Graeme Turner's enduring interest in the processes through which culture is ‘made national’, I indicate how the spatial registers of the culture concept anticipate contemporary approaches to these questions. I also outline what Australian cultural studies has to learn from the American evolution of the culture concept in view of the respects in which the latter was shaped by the racial dynamics of a ‘settler’ society during a period of heightened immigration from new sources. In concluding, I review the broader implications of the fusion of aesthetic and anthropological forms of expertise that informed the development of the culture concept.