Culture, Political Culture, and Communist Society

Abstract

Among the less noticea centenaries of 1971 was that of Edward Tylor's Primitive Culture, the book that launched the anthropological concept of culture on its remarkable career.' Like most important events in intellectual history, it was not so much a beginning as a further advance. Tylor's definition of culture-that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, Custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society-derived in part from Gustav Klemm, whose Allgemeine Culturgeschichte der Menschheit (1843-52) had in tum stated that it was Voltaire who first put aside dynasties, king lists, and battles, and sought what is essential in history, namely culture, as it is manifest in customs, in beliefs, and in forms of government.2 The century since Primitive Cil4ture's appearance has seen both a prodigious effort in the empirical study of cultures and, along with