These days, anthropologists get remarkably nervous when they discuss culture—which is surprising, on the free of it, since the anthropology of culture is something of a success story. While other venerable concepts have mostly faded out of the social science discourse, even a postmodernist can talk unselfconsciously about culture. Indeed, culture is now more fashionable than ever. Other disciplines have taker it up, and a new specialty, cultural studies, is devoted entirely to it.

Until very recently, there was also a high level of consensus on the subject. Even today a list of hypotheses about culture could be drawn up which most anthropologists would happily check off. First of all, culture is not a matter of race. It is learned, not carried in our genes. Second, this common human culture has advanced. We are talking here of the very long term, and progress has no doubt been uneven and liable to setbacks, but irreversible technical advances have been logged at an accelerating tempo. Technical progress can be measured, and its effects traced in the spread and growth of the human population, as well as in the development of increasingly large-scale and complex social systems. This point may be more grudgingly conceded, and only with qualification that what some might welcome as a new dawn may be a catastrophe for others. Third, there is general agreement about what culture involves in the sense in which most American cultural anthropologists have used the term, writing about Kwakiutl culture, or even American culture, rather than a global civilization. Culture is here essentially a matter of ideas and values, a collective cast of mind. The ideas and values, the cosmology, morality, and aesthetics, are expressed in symbols, and so—if the medium is the message —culture could be described as a symbolic system. American anthropologist; also tend to emphasize that these symbols, ideas, and values appear in an almost infinitely variable range of forms. At one level, this is an empirical proposition. However, a thoroughgoing philosophical relativism is often adduced from the observation that not only customs but also values are culturally variables. It seems to follow that there are no generally valid standards by which cultural principles and practices can be judged, it is this conception of culture which has become common currency, and not only in America. The anthropologists naturally welcomed the popularization of their ideas, which, they believe, could only foster greater tolerance, but they still expected to be acknowledged as the academic experts on the subject. However, although everyone is now talking about culture, they do not look to the anthropologists for guidance. This can be hard to take. “Anthropologists have been doing a lot of complaining that they are being ignored by the new academic specializations in culture, such as cultural studies, and by both academic and extra-academic manifestations of ‘ multiculturalism’ . Write the anthropologist Terence Turner, “Most of us have been sitting around like so many disconsolate intellectual wallflowers, waiting to be asked to impart our higher wisdom, and more than a little resentful that the invitations never come. ”