Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems

Abstract

Arguing that without a differentiated and relational notion of the cultural, the social sciences would be crippled, reducing social action to notions of pure instrumentality, in this article, I trace the growth of cultural analysis from the beginnings of modern anthropology to the present as a layered set of experimental systems whose differential lenses create epistemic objects with increasing precision and differential focus and resolution. Arguing that culture is not a variable—culture is relational, it is elsewhere or in passage, it is where meaning is woven and renewed, often through gaps and silences, and forces beyond the conscious control of individuals, and yet the space where individual and institutional social responsibility and ethical struggle take place—I name culture as a set of central anthropological forms of knowledge grounding human beings' self‐understandings. The challenge of cultural analysis is to develop translation and mediation tools for helping make visible the differences of interests, access, power, needs, desires, and philosophical perspective. In particular, as we begin to face new kinds of ethical dilemmas stemming from developments in biotechnologies, expansive information and image databases, and ecological interactions, we are challenged to develop differentiated cultural analyses that can help articulate new social institutions for an evolving civil society.

A culture theory commentary on Meyer and Peng’s theoretical probe into Central and Eastern Europe

“…Toolbox views in sociology and anthropology are often deliberately used to contrast with the kind of value dimension views of culture that prevail in IB (Fischer, 2007), but the two can be integrated. Toolbox views emphasize the varied tools that a society's members can voluntarily choose for their own purposes, whereas value views emphasize societal consistencies that have normative force (Leung & Morris, 2014;Peterson & Barreto, 2014).…”

The “power” of value-added thinking: Exploring the implementation of high-stakes teacher accountability policies in Rio de Janeiro

“…In this article, I draw on Anderson-Levitt's (2012) definition of culture as the "making of meaning" (Anderson-Levitt, 2012, p. 442), with meaning retaining a very broad definition that can include behavioral norms, common understandings, or any other type of shared knowledge or belief (see Anderson-Levitt, 2002;Fischer, 2007;Strauss & Quinn, 1998). While previous thinkers have emphasized behavior as the primary measure of culture (Erickson, 2011), others like Spradley (1979) include the thinking processes that lead to and inform behavior as important factors in the development of culture.…”

Organizational Culture in a Wider Field: Is There a Post Post-Culture?

“…Nevertheless, as Michael Fischer (2007) recently demonstrated, over the past century and a half, anthropologists have sequentially laid the foundations for cultural understanding that is increasingly sophisticated and more responsive to rapid and occasionally dramatic social and technological changes in contemporary contexts:…”

“…Martin (2002) in several cumulative works, sought to integrate functional, interpretive, and postmodern perspectives in a tripartite (integration-differentiation-fragmentation) framework that ultimately, the more it was elaborated, revealed its inability to escape from an essential functionalist formulation of the problem, one that seems crude when put beside anthropological contributions to thinking the problem through (Fischer, 2007). Other writers-ones most closely related to postmodernism in organization studies (see Cooper & Burrell, 1987, for a seminal text or more pertinently those working on the insights of the new anthropology (Clifford & Marcus, 1986;Marcus & Fischer, 1986;Linstead, 1993)-connect the cultural approach to philosophical and social thought more broadly, keeping in mind that placing boundaries on cultural processes-writing culture-was traditionally an arbitrary and introspective strategy.…”