Distributional Instability and the Units of Culture

Abstract

The analytical approach is familiar, powerful, and compelling, but not all scientific understanding builds upon discrete elemental units and their combinatorics. The question this essay addresses is whether the analytical approach is appropriate for the study of human culture. Does culture have clearly identifiable, distributionally stable parts sufficient to justify the particulate mode of understanding? Is culture comprised of elemental units, or is it merely convenient to think of it this way? The essay suggests that the quest for natural units of culture is a doomed undertaking. will be no periodic chart for culture grounded in stable, essential properties, whether at the level of culture traits and complexes or at the cognitive level of ideas and schemata. On the other hand, various methods of data elicitation can produce replicable and superficially discrete results, which gives some hope for the possibility of a methodological particulatism. (Units of culture, cultural boundaries, traits, methodological particulatism) Description presupposes comparative categories, just as comparison presupposes adequate descriptions. When anthropologists assess cultural similarities and differences in an overtly comparative study, the relatively few underlying categories and units of analysis become a focus of attention, such that studies of this sort often begin with operational definitions of the traits, institutions, or cultures to be compared. When caught up in the ethnographic mode, descriptive accounts likewise rest on underlying categories and units, but perhaps because these are so numerous and wide ranging, they mostly remain implicit and not subject to conscious reflection or definition. Nonetheless, all anthropological accounts rest on some conceptualization of the units of culture in terms of which descriptions and comparisons are made. Rather than siding with the ethnographic impulse over the ethnologic, or vice versa, this essay reflects on something anthropologists of all persuasions have been struggling with (or, all too often, taking for granted) for at least a century. The issue of cultural partibility--the units of culture--remains an unsolved problem lying at the core of anthropology. Does culture have parts, and if so, what are they? More specifically, how is culture distributed through space and time? are two main ways of construing this question of units of culture: 1) human culture is distributed in cultures (whole cultures are the units); and 2) human culture is distributed in trait complexes (trait complexes are the units). With either, the initial impression is that human culture is distributed in neat and tidy packages. Cultures sound like well-bounded entities, as do traits, but I argue that these impressions are false and misleading. Neither cultures nor traits are well-bounded, well-defined units. Rather, they are distributionally unstable, and their identification as units involves arbitrary judgments. In short, Lowie (1936) was correct when he wrote, There is only one cultural reality that is not artificial, to wit: the culture of all humanity at all periods and in all places (Lowie 1936:305). In proceeding, this article quickly reviews problems with the notion that whole cultures are discrete entities, then concentrates on the trait-complex mode of thinking, because it is more fundamental. My conclusion is that human culture is not really particulate. Thus, while methodological particulatism enables making some headway in the short term, eventually we will need to develop nontypological, nondiscrete modes of describing cultural phenomena. THE FUZZINESS OF CULTURES How many cultures are there? This familiar rephrasing of Galton's question, first asked in 1888, concisely cuts to the heart of the matter, for if cultures are well-bounded entities, then they must at least be enumerable. (Whether cultures in a list can be regarded as independent events, in the sense of probability theory, is a secondary issue; one that has received much more attention. …