"Since at least White and Leach ... or Malinowski and Boas for that matter ..."

Marshall Sahlins, "Two or Three Things that I Know about Culture", The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Sep., 1999), pp. 399-421.

Sure enough, Professor Sahlins does know quite a bit more than two or three things about culture. In this article he strongly takes position against the fonctionalist reduction of culture to social forms. More specifically, he criticizes the current trend (is it still current? I feel like I'm totally out of touch sometimes) of deconstructing invented traditions. Perhaps it's the right time for me to return to my much beloved quote from Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity:

"When it was enthusiastically pointed out within memory in our present Academy that race, or gender, or nation ... were so many social constructions, inventions and representations, a window was opened, an invitation to begin the critical project of analysis and cultural reconstruction was offered. And one still feels its power, even though what was nothing more than an invitation, a preamble to investigation has, by and large, been converted instead into a conclusion–eg. "sex is a social construction," "race is a social construction," "the nation is an invention," and so forth, the tradition of invention. The brilliance of the pronouncement was blinding. Nobody was asking what's the next step? What do we do with this old insight? If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable? How come culture appears so natural? If things coarse and subtle, then surely they can be reconstructed as well? To adopt Hegel, the beginnings of knowledge were made to pass for actual knowing.
I think construction deserves more respect; it cannot be name-called out of (or into) existence, ridiculed and shamed into yielding up its powers. And if its very nature seems to prevent us–for are we not also socially constructed?–from peering deeply therein, that very same nature also cries out for something other than analysis as this is usually practiced in our reports to our Academy. For in construction's place–what? No more invention, or more invention? And if the latter, as is assuredly the case, why don't we start inventing?"

What if we stopped treating culture the way functionalists treated society, as the explanation rather than the matter to be explained? We know the culturalist tautological fallacy of "Tribe X do A and B, think C and D, and believe E and F because it's in their culutre." "So what does their culture consist of?" "Well... doing A and B, thinking C and D, believing E and F." So how does Sahlins manages to defend the operationality of the concept of culture?

First, he takes us back to the the first half of the 20th Century, showing us how current arguments between British social anthropologists and American cultural anthropologists are actually nothing new under the sun, "new wines in old bottles". At the heart of Sahlins' point, there is Leslie White's assertion, in 1949, that the symbol is constitutive of human existence, as opposed to the structural-functionalist claim that culture (symbols) reflects social structures or social relations. Nowadays, the epitome of that would perhaps be bourdieusian sociology, but that's another matter. The bone of contention for mid-20th Century social anthropogists seemed to be that the notion of culture, put forward but cultural anthropologists such as Boas, tends to reify a heterogeneous web of representations, practices, social relations, artifacts and so on into an artificial coherent entity accounting for a group's identity. "Misplaced concreteness" Whitehead would have said. But to whom? The definition of culture as a coherent totality embedding the social life of individuals and cementing a collective identity is far for being so straightforward in the works of Boas and Malinowski.

Now, in the context of today's avalanche of claims for cultural recognition from communities around the world–what French Republicans, never in shortage for barren catchwords, would sometimes call "communautarisme"–, the assault on the notion of culture, armed with the arguments that traditions are invinted, communities are imagined, and so on, is back in business. I get the feeling here that Adam Kuper's Invention of the Primitive Society, though not cited in the article, is Sahlins' main target. But, again, nothing too new. As Sahlins puts it: "Critique has been able to perform such magical intellectual feats as changing Malinowski's mythical charters into Hobsbawm's invented traditions without anyone even noticing they are virtually the same thing." And indeed, one of the main problems with contemporary critical gestures of unveiling invented traditions is the moral judgment often associated with it. Aren't we stuck again in that Orientalist outlook when, as Zizek would points it, we wonder at how some people around the world still do take their traditions seriously. Don't they know better?

But Sahlins' main line of argumentation resides in his critique of conflating cultural effects and cultural properties. Analyses that strive at relating cultural objects (examples enumerated are, among others : sumo wrestling, Ojibway fishing, Hawaiian Hula dancing) to power struggles, social structures, etc. too often miss the ontological specificity of the cultural object itself and how it is being entangled in a constant process of reinvention in different situations. Now taken this way around, culture neither appears as a singular overarching explanation for the totality of human existence nor as a cloud of epiphenomena popping out ex nihilo. For Sahlins, culture does not deny agency, historical change or idiosyncrasies, but he asserts strongly that traditional epitomizing signs, classifications, symbolic boundaries do play a fundamental role in defining communities.