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In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, "culture" achieved the status of a truly global concept. We find discourses of "culture" emerging to prominence in the German-speaking world during the second half of the eighteenth century (with the closely associated linguistic arenas of the Netherlands and Scandinavia rapidly following suit); in the English-speaking world starting in the first half of the nineteenth century; in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and South Asia starting in the second half of the nineteenth century; and just about everywhere else in the course of the twentieth century. "Culture" began to circulate far beyond the European sites of its modern genesis, sometimes through the direct transfer of lexical items from Western European languages (e.g., Russian kulHtura; the use of kalcar in various South Asian languages); and more often through the construction of new translative equivalencies with preexisting words or concepts most often signifying purification, refinement, or improvement (e.g., Japanese bun-ka; Chinese wen-hua; Bangla and Hindi sanskriti; Urdu tamaddun). 1 However creatively deployed in however divergent a range of contexts, the power, resonance, and usefulness of any conceptual vocabulary must surely derive from the denotative and connotative baggage accumulated in the course of the history of its prior deployment. Any attempt to understand the global dimensions of the dissemination and circulation of modern cultural discourses must proceed, then, from some initial understanding of what was being disseminated and circulated. Without for a moment thinking that a global concept-676 0010-4175/05/676-699 $9.50