Culture in International Relations: What Is It Good for?

Abstract

Culture and International Relations: Narratives, Natives, and Tourists. By Julie Reeves. London: Routledge, 2004. 240 pp., $115.00 (ISBN: 0-415-31857-2). The past decade has seen a proliferation of scholarly literature analyzing the role of culture in international relations. Although Samuel Huntington's (1993)“The Clash of Civilizations” has provided the most notorious and controversial portrayal of the role of culture in world affairs recently, countless other works—including edited volumes by Jongsuk Chay (1990), Lapid and Kratochwil (1996), Gienow-Hecht and Schumacher (2003), along with the works of many constructivists—have also contributed to this growing body of literature. In Culture and International Relations: Narratives, Natives and Tourists , Julie Reeves follows a path that is slightly different from this mainstream literature. She traces the evolution of the concept of “culture” in international relations from its Italian etymological origins up to the present. Moreover, she looks at both the intellectual context and the corresponding practice of culture at the international level. Her argument is that, since the establishment of the discipline, students of international relations have variously employed two competing versions of culture in their narratives: humanist and anthropological. According to Reeves, the scholars of international relations first based their analysis on the humanist understanding of culture, which was slowly replaced by an anthropological understanding. Reeves defines the humanist understanding of culture mainly in terms of artistic productions—such as literature, visual arts, and so on—that can be found in any community. The anthropological definition of culture, on the other hand, is the notion of culture based on Margaret Mead's dictum: “we are our culture.” Reeves finds the anthropological version of culture quite troubling because, according to Reeves, it creates …