Individual and Culturel by Herve' Varenne Les oeuvres individuelles sont toutes des mythes en puissance, mais c'est leur adoption sur le mode collectif qui actualise, le cas echeant, leur "mythisme." CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS, L'homme nu THE INDIVIDUAL AS A SELF-MOTIVATED AGENT is a fundamental category in American culture. It is a central symbol around which social practices in the United States are organized. The symbol of the Promethean individual is at the heart of political representations, religious life, private concerns, popular musings about the fate of society, and the highest expressions of scientific and philosophical quests. I do not offer these generalizations as an adequate description of the characteristically American. I have tried to give such a description elsewhere (1977, 1978, 1982). For present purposes, it is sufficient to mention that an emphasis on the centrality of the individual is commonplace in all the disciplines involved in American studies. There is little doubt in most of the work in these disciplines that the "American way" is a culture that is integrated, systematic, and distinctive. These assertions are intentionally controversial. It was only for a rather short time that assertions of this kind were acceptable to more than a small group of anthropologists in the United States. Since the late '50s, it has been generally accepted that one cannot talk of "cultures" in such holistic terms. The radical critique of the position led to the collapse of a whole subfield-culture and personality-that had been associated with the interest in "cultures as wholes." The recent reawakening of work on personality processes has been accompanied by various attempts at distancing this work from the previous formulations, particularly as it relates to assumptions of "commonality" (Wallace 1961, Schwartz 1978). Indeed, interest in making statements about "American" (or any other) culture has become something of an oddity. Only a few anthropologists seem to find such arguments interesting. Most often loosely associated with "symbolic anthropology," they are comfortable with Geertz's statements on Java, Bali, and Morocco, with Schneider's on America, and with Dumont's on India. These statements provoke others to write reviews criticizing them for "ignoring diversity" (e.g., Feinberg [on Schneider] 1979, Magnarella [on Geertz] 1980). Critics point out that, in any geographical space in which a culture is said to be found, many persons do not act (think, value) as one might expect them to act (.. .) if the cultural account were
