The Strange Career of the Concept of Culture

Tylor himself did not pursue the idea of diffusion, since like most 19^th century anthropologists he was primarily concerned with evolutionary explanations — always with the proviso that what evolved was the practical life and organizational structure of the group, not the genetic structure of individual organisms. However, his immediate successors split into the diffusionist and evolutionist camps, whose respective metaphors were the spatial picture of ever-wider concentric circles (change as geographical movement) and the temporal picture of ever-greater organic complexity (change as historical growth). In either case, though, cultural change was described at the surface level, with little or no reference to the underlying social or cognitive structures specific to those groups. True, Tylor proposed that cultures be studied in terms of "general principles" of social development that fashion stages according to "the laws of thought and action"; however, the form and content of these stages were by no means culture-specific. On the contrary: cultural stages were rungs on a universal ladder. Tylor did not think all social groups had passed through every stage or rung, but he did think they were all are moving upward more or less quickly on the same ladder. Hence he conceived of the task of anthropology as the search for the general principles ( "the uniform action of uniform causes") according to which societies moved up the ladder.

We see here the same attitude toward other cultures that was to resurface almost a century later as what multiculturalists now call the cultural deficit model. Just as reform-minded educators of the 1960s believed that minority children have trouble in school not because of their racial constitution but rather because their home cultures do not properly prepare them for academic challenges, so Tylor believed that the "lower races" are lower only because their ways of life were not (yet) suited for the technological, religious, and other sorts of practices associated with "more civilized" peoples. The main differences between Tylor's view and the cultural deficit model were that (1) the latter focused on individuals (schoolchildren) rather than on the group and still more significantly, (2) its purpose was to intervene — to speed up the children's developmental clock, so to speak. Tylor had no such focus or purpose: he considered himself a scientist, not an educator or social engineer (like most anthropologists then and now, he had profound misgivings about missionaries in the field). Consequently, he was interested in understanding the march of civilization, not changing it.

Anticipating the reflexive turn of so-called postmodern ethnographers such as Geertz and Clifford, he recognized that changes are introduced into a group's cultural style when any outsider, even an observing ethnographer, comes on the scene. ⁽³⁾ To his great credit, Tylor also realized that the history of a people is full of such intrusions: investigation always revealed that many words, tools, artifacts, and practices of the people under investigation were imported rather than invented, and so in making sense of their data the ethnographers' first theoretical challenge — after confirming that the observation activities in the field had not significantly distorted the way of life they were studying — was to separate the imports (cultural diffusion) from the inventions (cultural evolution in its strict sense). Having done this, their next challenge was to catalog and compare these inventions with the multitudinous inventions of other peoples in the world, in hopes of establishing which products and practices were not only invented but also universal and, even more to the point, whether these products and practices evolve in the same way everywhere.

However, although Tylor thought of himself as an objective scholar, not a social reformer, one finds in his scholarly work a moralistic concern that less civilized people not be written off as terminally barbaric. In this respect he sounds much like the early advocates of the Head Start program, who insisted that every child has the same educational potential, and the same right to the environmental conditions for realizing that potential. Like Tylor, they disconnected race and culture, but they also — again like Tylor — assumed that both race and culture were "facts." From our current perspective, in which race and culture are both understood as social constructions, this assumption seems naive (and it was), but we must not shortchange either Tylor or the educators I have just mentioned. In both cases they saw through the pretensions of the biological explanation of human behavior that was then firmly in place notwithstanding its manifest and vicious racist implications. It is for this reason that I ascribe to Tylor a moralistic concern that he probably would disown if he were alive to read these pages. Consider, for instance, how he dealt with this question in one of his earliest scientific works, which bears the formidable title Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865). In a chapter entitled "Growth and Decline of Culture," Tylor sharply criticized "the late Archbishop Whately," who had claimed that self-improvement (i.e., cultural evolution, understood at this point exclusively as invention) was impossible for "the lower races." (How, one might ask in passing, did Whately think civilization got started in the first place? The answer is simple: by "supernatural revelation." Remember, he was an archbishop.)

To refute Whately, Tylor marshalled ethnographic data, not moral arguments. In the course of doing so he considered an anthropological remark made by none other than Charles Darwin, to the effect that the practical skills of the Fuegians (people of Tierra del Fuego) had apparently stopped evolving, since even their most ingenious work, the canoe, had not changed over the last 250 years. Commenting on Darwin, Tylor offered the following ethnographical account (hereafter marked as EA) to show that it is environmental conditions, not limitations inherent in the people themselves, that account for this arrested development:

EA1: But it must be noticed, that neither is the wretched hand-to-mouth life of the Fuegians favourable to progress, nor can a bark canoe ten feet long, holding four or five grown persons, beside children, dogs, implements, and weapons, and in which a fire can be kept burning on a hearth in the rough sea off Tierra del Fuego, be without tolerable sea-going qualities. As to workmanship, the modern Fuegian bark canoes are intermediate between the very rude ones of the Australian coast and the highly finished ones of North America, and it does not appear that their build may not be considerably better (or worse) than at the time of the visit of Sarmiento de Gamboa, in the sixteenth century. But the most remarkable thing in the whole matter, is the fact that the Fuegians should have had canoes at all, while coast-tribes across the straits made shift with rafts. This was of course a fact familiar to Mr. Darwin, and in the very next sentence after that quoted above, he actually goes on to ascribe to the Fuegian race the invention of their art of boat-building. "Whilst beholding these savages, one asks, whence have they come? What could have tempted, or what change compelled a tribe of men to leave the fine regions of the north, to travel down the Cordillera or backbone of America, to invent and build canoes, and then to enter on one of the most inhospitable countries within the limits of the globe?" Of this part of Mr. Darwin's remarks, however, Archbishop Whately did not think it necessary to take notice. (Ibid., p. 162)

I have called this description by Tylor an "ethnographic account" because that is what it is. However, it was not exactly his account, since like most of his anthropological data it was derived from other people's field experiences. Though he had traveled extensively, Tylor was mainly an armchair ethnologist, if only because his comparative method involved information about literally hundreds of different peoples, including those of antiquity, pre-modern Europe, and the newly "discovered" New World. In the tradition of British empiricism, Tylor understood his task to be one of comparing and correlating data that, quite literally, were "givens" (recall that datum and data are substantives of the past participles of the Latin verb do, dare, and mean "that which is given"). Travelers, missionaries, occasionally an itinerant anthropologist would send him reports of what they had seen, and Tylor would order this information in hopes of establishing patterns whereby certain features of social evolution such as the practical skills of the Fuegians would emerge. These reports, it hardly needs to be said, did not include what Clifford Geertz (1973), following the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, would later recommend as "thick description" of a culture. ⁽⁴⁾

The Boasians

Looking back from today's multicultural perspective, it is not surprising that after Tylor the next major shift in anthropological theory was, in its first phase, the rejection of the implications of the 19^th century views concerning ranking and, in its second phase, the winding down of the whole diffusion vs. (cultural) evolution debate in favor of discussions of patterns vs. functions. In the United States, the reaction first came from Franz Boas and his students, which took place from around the turn of the century through the postwar years (Boas himself died in 1943). The influence of Boas on anthropology in this country was profound, which is why he is regarded as the founder of American anthropology. For our purposes, his most important contribution was the way he revised the notion of culture held by Tylor and other British scholars, a revision which can be traced back to his ground-breaking The Mind of Primitive Man, published in 1911 (on Boas's own development in this matter, see Stocking, 1966). Unlike these scholars, Boas understood culture not as civilization but rather as local context, within which a specific group's social life was meaningful. It was

CC2: the set of beliefs, customs, and social institutions that characterize and individuate different societies. (see Stocking, 1966; probably the one created by Boas in 1930, which seems to be cited in the Kroeber and Kluckhohn list [1952:151])

Boas did not construct a formal definition of the term "culture" until 1930, well after he had established the concept by simply using the word with increasing frequency in contexts that left no doubt of his semantic intentions — which certainly did not include any desire to represent culture as synonymous with civilization. Not only did he regularly use the word "culture" in the plural (whereas Tylor never did), but he wrote highly detailed ethnographic studies of individual groups, always describing their customs in the concrete historical contexts rather than as moments in an abstract evolutionary process.

In short, the best way to understand Boas's concept of culture ⁽⁵⁾ is in terms of its opposition to Tylor's evolutionary concept. For this reason alone (there are others too), Boas's concept can be thought of as a template for the educational agenda of Cultural Pluralism as conceived by multicultural reformers in the early 1970s. Their agenda, like that of Boas and his ethnologist followers, had so much internal diversity (or less kindly, was so full of contradictions) that it is virtually impossible to make a general statement about what its adherents all assert. But it is quite easy to say what they all deny. Culture is not a biological (racial) phenomenon, there is no absolute form of culture (civilization) that sets a standard for ranking and "improving" the way other people live, and it is impossible to understand any component of a culture without understanding its relationship to the culture as a whole. Positive assertions about just how one goes about identifying these components and tracking these relationships, not to mention how one apprehends the cultural "whole," are harder to come by. These questions have no single answer, as is evident from the internal debates among Boasians in the early 20^th century and among multicultural educators in the late 20^th century. Even so, it is important for today's multiculturalists to see what sorts of answers have been proposed, not only in their own literature but that of cultural anthropology. Let us return, then, to the story of how Franz Boas transformed the concept of culture.

His critique of evolutionism began in the 1890s with a series of critical articles, and by 1904 it had developed into the positive — though still quite general — assertion that "in place of a single line of evolution there appears a multiplicity of converging and diverging lines which it is difficult to bring under one system" (Boas, 1904, pp. 522; cited in Stocking, 1966, p. 871). These "converging and diverging lines" were what he investigated in his ethnographic studies, and can be categorized here as geographical and historical lines: geographical in that Boas subscribed to the diffusionist view of cultural change as borrowings from other (usually neighboring) peoples, and historical in that he regarded cultural practices, i.e., custom, as rooted in a largely forgotten historical past (see Stocking, 1968, pp. 876-877). Let us briefly consider each of these two "lines."

Geographical lines of cultural formation. Boas never developed a technical logic to explain how in the course of diffusion certain cultural traits clustered together and others did not, but he clearly believed that diffusion was not an arbitrary process. Quite to the contrary: a given trait or artifact could only be understood in its cultural context, which is to say in terms of the relationships it had to the other main traits of that culture. Conversely, it was only because the context was as it was at the time of diffusion that the trait in question could be incorporated into the culture. There may not be any general nomothetic (law-like) schemes for predicting the patterns of definition, but patterns there are nonetheless, and they can be made intelligible by careful ethnographic fieldwork and analysis. These abstract principles are illustrated in a little story about the young Boas that on the surface looks like a fussy local academic squabble but in reality affected the way generations of museumgoers would encounter other cultures.

Shortly after taking up permanent residence in the United States, Boas rather audaciously published two articles in the prestigious journal Science, strongly criticizing the prominent curator of ethnology at the United States National Museum for the way certain artifacts in its Northwest Coast collection were exhibited (Boas, 1887a, 1887b). The museum used a Tylorean classificatory system to group together certain kinds of artifacts from various regions, such as tools or musical instruments, and then subgroup them according to the level of civilization they represented. In this way, the curator thought, museum visitors could see how generic human needs such as the need for music were satisfied, first by the lower and then by the higher societies. Boas, in contrast, said that no museum specimen could be understood apart from its history. A rattle was not simply a noisemaker. It also was (or maybe it wasn't — that would be an important fact too) something people with a certain history used according to their customs and religious conceptions, such as how to invoke or drive away spirits. Like any artifact or specimen, a musical instrument could have a number of different inner meanings, which varied from region to region, tribe to tribe, age to age, and so should be exhibited accordingly. This holds equally for the instruments of primitive tribes and those of modern orchestras, he insisted: "The character of their music, the only object worth studying, which determines the form of the instruments, cannot be understood from the single instrument, but requires a complete collection of the single tribe" (Boas, 1887, p. 586; reprinted as Boas, 1974, p. 63 [Stocking's collection]).

Historical lines of cultural formation. As noted above, Boas regarded customs as rooted in a largely forgotten past. Unlike Tylor, who thought early societies consciously constructed their specific beliefs and practices to match their elemental understanding of the natural world (it was the inadequacy of this proto-cosmology that made their beliefs and practices so quaint or "savage"), Boas thought that traditional beliefs and practices arose unconsciously from the concrete situation in which a group found itself, and that the reasons for their origin became even more unconscious as time went on. Furthermore, as those reasons became more unconscious they also became more emotionally laden, since — according to Freud and other psychologists whom Boas had read — to break with a habitual way of acting or thinking generates negative affect. For later members of the group to justify this essentially noncognitive reaction to the prospect of cultural innovation, rationalizations and romanticization had to be constructed for the custom in question. ⁽⁶⁾

It was for this reason that Boas spent so much time examining the origins of languages and myths. Unlike his Victorian predecessors, he had little use for armchair ethnology, and insisted that anthropologists must go into the field themselves to gather as much concrete information as possible about the so-called primitive societies that he, like every anthropologist in the first half of the twentieth century, took to be the primary subject matter of his discipline. However, instead of the more common method of participant observation, his preferred style of data collection was gathering and reporting texts. For instance, in his report on the mythology of the Bella Coola Indians of the Northwest Coast, Boas established that certain myths were passed on (diffused) from one tribe to the other, but were associated with tribal rituals in quite different ways, depending on the unique history of each tribe. One of the more interesting cases concerned the k'siut, a practice used by the secret societies of the Bella Coola and a few other tribes. The k'siut, which included a ceremonial ritual of mock cannibalism, was enacted in the respective tribe's secret Cannibal Society. The meaning of this ceremonial (which was itself borrowed) is explained differently in the Bella Coola tribe than in two other tribes having virtually the same ritual. That is, each of the three tribes had its own story associated with the k'siut ritual. The Bella Coola had a story involving the sun, whereas the Tsimshian told of a forest spirit who initiates new members into that tribe's Cannibal Society, and the Kwakiutl said that a white bear took a hunter into a cliff and revealed to him the existence and ceremonies of this and other secret societies of the tribe. Boas provided the following ethnographic account of these stories:

EA2: It appears, therefore, that the same ritual which is practised by three distinct tribes is explained by three fundamentally distinct myths; and we must conclude that in this case the ritual is older than the myth, — that the latter has been invented in order to explain customs that were borrowed from foreign tribes, so that the ritual is the primary phenomenon, while the myth is secondary.... After they [the Bella Coola] removed to their new home, a mass of foreign ideas had come into their possession through contact with their new neighbors. While these new ideas were being remodelled and assimilated, they stimulated the minds of the people, or of a few members of the tribe, who were thus led to the formation of an elaborate concept of the world. The concept which they have developed agrees in all its main features with those created by men of other zones and of other races. The mind of the Bella Coola philosopher, operating with the class of knowledge common to the earlier strata of culture, has reached conclusions similar to those that have been formed by man the world over, when operating with the same class of knowledge. On the other hand, the Bella Coola has also adopted ready-made the thoughts of his neighbors, and has adapted them to his environment.(Boas, 1898?)

In spite of his dissatisfaction with cultural evolutionism, Boas felt that this case illustrated the close relation between the comparative and the historic methods of ethnology, as his reference to "the same class of knowledge" suggests. But he was even more interested in what it showed about the need to analyze the whole culture. "The growth of the myths of the Bella Coola can be understood only when we consider the culture of the tribe as a whole," he concluded. "And so it is with other phenomena. All traits of culture can be fully understood only in connection with the whole culture of a tribe. When we confine ourselves to comparing isolated traits of culture, we open the door to misinterpretations without number" (Boas, 1898?).

Boas and most of his students were sometimes criticized by their British counterparts (such as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown; see below) for not providing comprehensive frames for the data they discovered. That criticism was not entirely groundless, since the American research practice ⁽⁷⁾ was to collect first and try to explain later. Explanations, when they were given, were often ad hoc. Cultural traits were seen not as reflections of differences in collective mental development (as Tylor thought) but rather as by-products of differences in physical environments and other "accidents of history." Nevertheless, Boas insisted on the importance of reconstructing the unwritten historical record of the peoples he studied, gathering folk tales as well as bits of oral history in order to tap into their collective sense of who they are as a people, what they have borrowed, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors.

From Diffusion to Pattern: Ruth Benedict

The question that originally preoccupied Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and the younger group of Boasians such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, was how beliefs and social practices spread from one culture to the next. They painstakingly investigated cultural distribution mechanisms such as diffusion, trade, and conquest, and yet — perhaps because they discovered so much — they blithely assumed that individual cultures were aggregations, mere collections of "shreds and patches." ⁽⁸⁾ They hypothesized that the spread of mythologies, taboos, hunting and fishing methods, and other cultural traits was largely regulated by the antecedent living conditions of the tribes who, upon encountering these traits, adopted them, but for the early Boasians this was enough supposition. To establish their hypothesis that cultural traits were learned through interaction with other people, and were not biologically inherited, they sought only to trace the lineage of cultures and their traits. They did not yet feel a need to provide comprehensive or systematic accounts of why any given set of cultural traits came together in the way that they did. But as their research agenda matured, Boas and his followers came to realize that their non-hereditary hypothesis had an important corollary: that the content of each culture could be thought of as a single reality ("a way of life," said Kroeber) and that this reality was best regarded as a property of the society as a whole rather than of its individual members.

It fell to Kroeber to develop this corollary formally and technically, using the idea of culture as a "superorganic entity. " Though he introduced this idea as early as 1915?, its impact was not felt until several other students of Boas, including Benedict and Mead, became dissatisfied with the diffusionist views which assumed each culture was a happy but essentially ad hoc combination of disparate elements. For this and other reasons (such as their respect for the dignity and intelligence of their subjects), they reconsidered the question of just how contingent these configurations of cultural traits really are, coming eventually to regard cultures as integrated wholes rather than jumbles of features that happened to be mutually compatible. With this seemingly slight change in the attitude of the ethnologists toward the people they studied, the concept of culture was transformed. Culture was now an organic or aesthetic unity that could not be graded as better or worse than other cultures (though it could be evaluated as more or less well integrated, and so in that sense could be ranked against itself). The classic statement of this view is found in Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934, p. 53):

CC3: A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. Within each culture there come into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society. In obedience to these purposes, each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogeneous items of behaviour take more and more congruous shape. Taken up by a well- integrated culture, the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its peculiar goals, often by the most unlikely metamorphoses. The form that these acts take we can understand only by understanding first the emotional and intellectual mainsprings of that society.

EA3: A chief of the Digger Indians, as the Californians call them, talked to me a great deal about the ways of his people in the old days. He was a Christian and a leader among his people in the planting of peaches and apricots on irrigated land, but when he talked of the shamans who had transformed themselves into bears before his eyes in the bear dance, his hands trembled and his voice broke with excitement. It was an incomparable thing, the power his people had had in the old days. He liked best to talk of the desert foods they had eaten. He brought each uprooted plant lovingly and with an unfailing sense of its importance. In those days his people had eaten "the health of the desert," he said, and knew nothing of the insides of tin cans and the things for sale at butcher shops. It was such innovations that had degraded them in these latter days.

One day, without transition, Ramon broke in upon his descriptions of grinding mesquite and preparing acorn soup. "In the beginning," he said, "God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life." I do not know whether the figure occurred in some traditional ritual of his people that I never found, or whether it was his own imagery. It is hard to imagine that he had heard it from the whites he had known at Banning; they were not given to discussing the ethos of different peoples. At any rate, in the mind of this humble Indian the figure of speech was clear and full of meaning. "They all dipped in the water," he continued, "but their cups were different. Our cup is broken now. It has passed away. (Benedict, 1934, p. 33)

The richness of Benedict's description reveals as much if not more of her own narrative skills as it does those of Ramon. Indeed, it is easy to criticize her for mixing her own views in with Ramon's. (Did he actually say that he "liked best"to talk of desert foods, or did she infer that preference from the way he spoke? Was it he or Benedict who said canned food "degraded" his people? Whose idea was it that Ramon was a "humble Indian"?) But perhaps some mixing of this sort is inevitable when cultures meet, and not just in formal ethnography. More significant, though, is what happens in her account when the interview stops and the commentary starts. First Benedict applies to Ramon's narrative her general point about cultural integrity, telling us: "These things that had given significance to the life of his people... were gone, and with them the shape and meaning of their life." The cup was broken, and could not be repaired, since it "was somehow all of a piece. It had been their own." Then she reconstructs Ramon's personal situation in terms of that general point: the values and ways of thought of the two cultures he must straddle are incommensurable. "It is a hard fate," she concludes (p. 34).

Hard for whom, we might ask: Ramon the straddler, or Benedict the exegete? In discussing this question sixty years after Benedict wrote Patterns of Culture, Michael Carrithers (1992) suggests that it was Benedict, not her informant, who was distressed. On the whole, I agree. But before we leave Benedict, let us do a little reconstructive ethnography of our own: what is she really saying, and what is there in her "cultural situation" (as a member of the Boasian tribe) that leads her to say it this way?

My own answer to these questions is as follows. Although Benedict was theoretically committed to the idea that cultures are "incommensurable," she could not sustain that commitment and do serious ethnography at the same time. Obviously, she thought there were some commensurabilities between cultures, or she would not have gone out into the field in the first place. Presumably it is on these assumed pockets of commensurability that ethnographers base their hope to understand other cultures — be it by empathy, analogical thinking, or projection. On the other hand, everything in her professional training and previous field experience made her keenly aware that serious ethnography is hard work, and that failure is always possible because the cultures under investigation are so different from the ethnographer's home culture (though fieldwork in one's own back yard is not easy either). Like Ramon, the Christian Digger Indian, she too had to "straddle," and knew that this was her own "hard fate." In order to carry out her mission as an ethnographer, she not only accumulated information but also projected her own feelings of discomfort and inadequacy onto Ramon — who for all we know may not have shared her view that his was a hard fate. Whether this is really a productive strategy for any ethnographer is, of course, another question altogether.

Are there similarities between the kind of straddling that must be done in anthropological fieldwork and that done in multicultural education, and if so, can they help us understand the motives underlying Benedict's ethnographic discourse? The answer to both questions is "yes," if I am correct in correlating her latter-day Boasian view of culture as pattern with the strong, difference-oriented version of Cultural Pluralism found in many schools. Consider the actual case of a beginning music teacher (a white female) in an all-black high school, who tried to tell her African American teenagers something about the relationship between rap and other forms of music. The normally placid students loudly and rudely resisted her efforts to tell them about "their music," eventually reducing her to tears. Later the principal (a strong cultural pluralist) criticized her — again, more tears — for having failed to respect the cultural uniqueness of rap: "It's their thing," she was told, in a way that implied her music lesson was an invasion of privacy.

Echoing Benedict, the principal and students believed the values and ways of thought embodied in black and white music to be incommensurable, and felt that the only respectful way to acknowledge the incommensurability was simply to avoid discussing a genre not of one's own culture. But as the instructional literature of multicultural education shows over and over again (e.g., Purves, 1997), there are many effective ways for teachers to present other cultures to a class, though simply "telling" about those cultures is probably not one of them. A more experienced white teacher could have asked her black students to share their understanding of what rap is all about, and then worked with them to compare their musical insights with her own insights about "white" music. Incommensurability would have been reduced, though perhaps not completely eliminated, as teacher and students "straddled" their respective cultures. Then, perhaps, being a white music teacher in a school would not be such "a hard fate." We may hope that as our tear-stained music teacher gained experience and self-knowledge about her own cultural situation, she became more successful in treating topics from other cultures. Similarly, we may conjecture that as Benedict grew in her own professional role of participant-observer, she became less anxious about the cultural differences between her and her informants, and hence less likely to ascribe to them problems they did not actually have. The latter conjecture is supported by her later book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), written to help the American people understand Japanese culture. But let us return to our main theme, which is the evolution of the very concept of "culture."

From Pattern to the Superorganic: Alfred Kroeber and Leslie White

Benedict's conception of culture has probably had a greater influence on the general public, and in consequence on educators concerned with multiculturalism, than have the theories of any other anthropologist, living or dead (her Patterns of Culture was the first anthropology book to be published in paperback). However, she was only one of many in her generation of anthropologists to insist on the internal unity of cultures. Other students of Boas also held that cultures had distinct "patterns," though they differed as to whether the pattern in question was primarily "phenomenal" (observable features of a culture such as its customs, social institutions, and artifacts) or "ideational" (the beliefs, motives, and other attitudes of the people of that culture). One of these was Kroeber, whose view of culture as a "superorganic entity" was mentioned above. He originally developed this idea as a corrective to the tendency shared by ordinary people and intellectuals (but interestingly enough, not by biologists of the time) to regard culture and society as governed by biology — or better, by tendencies that individuals inherited in the full biological sense of that term. The term "superorganic" was actually coined several years earlier by Herbert Spencer, who conceived society entirely in biological organic terms. ⁽⁹⁾ Even so, it was from Spencer that Kroeber took the distinction between the social organization of ants and humans, the latter being distinguished by conscious objectives.

The terminology is tricky here. Following the usual practice, Spencer and Kroeber both used the term "society" in a broad sense that did not set it off from culture. A similar conflation is found in their use of the term "organism," which could refer to the biological organism or the psychological organism, depending on the context. In his later works, Kroeber was more precise when he employed these terms, but he never quite sorted out the difference between psychological and cultural processes, or the relationship between them. As he grew less interested in diffusionist accounts of how cultures spread, he became more critical of the psychologism that accompanied those accounts. For instance, he felt his mentor Boas tended to explain the movement of cultural traits in terms of how people thought about them, as when a tribe adopted the long bow or some other weapon because it satisfied a felt need on the part of its members for aggressive activity, or when a myth took hold because it corresponded to the awe people felt toward their environment or to ideas they already had about the right way to live. Kroeber allied himself with Benedict when she described cultures as patterns, but could not accept her view that culture was personality writ large. And yet he demurred when Leslie White argued for his own strongly anti-psychologist version of culture as "superorganic," saying that

[Quote to be inserted]

Kroeber's view of culture as a superorganic entity is relevant to multicultural education in at least three ways, all indirect. The first is that it enhanced the holistic notion of culture propounded by Benedict, whose own theorizing in this area (like that of her friend Margaret Mead) asserted that cultures were more than the sum of their parts but did not go on to claim that the concept of a cultural whole was irreducible. Today's cultural pluralists do not usually cite Kroeber on this point — even Benedict and Mead are usually mentioned only in passing, though their influence on this literature is clear — but the discourse of multicultural education typically reifies cultures, especially the home cultures of the children in the classroom. That is, cultures are discussed at various levels of multicultural discourse as though they were "things" one has, objects of affection, causes that affect other things in the world.

The second way in which Kroeber's notion of the superorganic is relevant to multicultural education is that, for all his ambivalence about the relationship between mental processes and cultural forms, Kroeber's view emphasizes the influence of culture on psychology rather than the other way around. Unlike White, he was not prepared to abandon the notion of personal agency altogether, but he believed that one's personality is shaped by one's culture, a shaping process that is discussed by cultural pluralists under the headings of cultural identity and self-esteem. The third way that Kroeber's notion is relevant concerns history. A culture exists before and after individuals are born, grow up, live, and die "in it." Its history is not a chronicle of events ("one damned thing after another") but a story. And it is our story, not because it is about you and me, but because is it is about something greater than us, something that has made us what we are and which culturally sensitive educators teach the next generation to cherish.

A scholarly biography of Alfred Kroeber would reveal that he had a very wide sphere of influence during his long career. He shaped the thought of many social scientists (especially sociologists such as Talcott Parsons) as well as that of his fellow anthropologists. He is still influential, mainly because of the careful definition of culture that appears in a book that he and sociologist Clyde Kluckhohn wrote a half century ago, entitled Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952). This elegant work, which actually lives up to its ambitious title, is often cited today but alas, seldom read and used with profit, mainly because it is only now coming back into print. Kroeber & Kluckhohn's now-classic definition describes culture as pattern, but not as a single pattern. For them and the other researchers whose work they are summarizing,

Back to Britain: Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown

At the same time — roughly the interwar years — that the Boasians were discovering that cultures had the formal unity characteristic of aesthetic patterns, British anthropologists were discovering for themselves the systematicity, or as they preferred to call it, "functionality" of culture. Actually, two competing notions of function were operating in the literature of that time. The first was launched by Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish emigré who was as powerful a personality in England as the German-born Boas was in the United States (and who was generally sympathetic to Boas's work). He understood the functionality of cultures as the way cultural practices shaped and satisfied basic human needs such as hunger and sex, as well as more complex ones like the need to deal with death. Thus he defined culture as

CC4: the vast instrumentality through which man achieves his ends, both as an animal that must eat, rest, and reproduce; and as the spiritual being who desires to extend his mental horizons, produce works of art, and develop systems of faith. Thus, culture is at the same time the minimum mechanism or the satisfaction of the most elementary needs of man's animal nature, and also an ever-developing, ever-increasing system of new ends, new values, and new creative possibilities. (Malinowski, 1941-2/1962, p. 196)