Cultural Studies and the Culture Concept

Abstract

My purpose in this paper is to complicate the genealogies of the concept of cultureas a way of life that have held sway within cultural studies. I do so by reviewingkey aspects in the development of this concept within the ‘Americanist’ tradition ofanthropology pioneered by Franz Boas in the opening decades of the twentiethcentury and continued by a generation of Boas’s students including Ruth Benedict,Alfred Kroeber and Margaret Mead. I focus on three issues: the respects in whichthe ‘culture concept’ was shaped by aesthetic conceptions of form; its spatialregisters; and its functioning as a new surface of government, partially displacingthat of race, in the development of American multicultural policies in the 1920sand 1930s. In relating these concerns to Graeme Turner’s enduring interest in theprocesses through which culture is ‘made national’, I indicate how the spatialregisters of the culture concept anticipate ontemporary approaches to thesequestions. I also outline what Australian cultural studies has to learn from theAmerican evolution of the culture concept in view of the respects in which the latterwas shaped by the racial dynamics of a ‘settler’ society during a period ofheightened immigration from new sources. In concluding, I review the broaderimplications of the fusion of aesthetic and anthropological forms of expertise thatinformed the development of the culture concept.