Queering the Culture Cult

Abstract

In this paper I want to trace how and why The Invention of Culture (IOC) has resonated strongly throughout my encounters with anthropological the ory and fieldsite experiences in the Caribbean. I briefly outline how some of its key analytical arguments about the meanings and applications of the 'culture' concept can be productively compared and applied to what at first glance might appear to be quite unrelated 'new' theoretical models about gender and sexuality, particularly Judith Butler's 'performative' approach, more than twenty-five years after its initial publication. As I began to write this paper I had two serendipitous moments which, for me, clearly signaled IOC's ongoing influence and relevance in contem porary anthropology. The first occurred while reading Marshall Sahlin's recent contribution to the Annual Review of Anthropology where he argues, in effect, that reports on the death of culture have been greatly exaggerated during the postmodern panic (1999). In the closing paragraphs of his crit ical review on the current usages and meanings of culture, Sahlins observes how cultures disappear just as we learn how to perceive them, then re appear in ways we had never imagined—although I doubt that Sahlins had Wagner's work in mind (it is not mentioned in the bibliography), it seems to me that this passage encapsulates much of what IOC is all about, and demonstrates its ongoing theoretical acuity, a point which I will elaborate below (Sahlins 1999: xxi). The second meaningful moment occurred when, after finishing my Chinese take-out dinner, I broke open a fortune cookie above my copy of IOC that lay on the table. The message that fell out of the cookie and floated down to rest on page nineteen read: You are a person of culture. Here was another key point of IOC! Clearly, when fortune cookie writers appear to have been influenced by IOC we cannot deny its widespread impact!