I agree with Michael that "culture" is overused to a point of harm in many ways, such as "corporate culture" and "Antebellum South" culture, McDonald's culture. I agree that it is currently being used to subvert racism back into a lot of "discourses". On the other , hand terms such as "custom" or "tradition" might be used to theorize social facts that exist in these situations. "Culture" might be reserved for more comprehensive systems of tradition, language and symbols.
In cultural anthropology, Clyde Klukhoun (spelling) had one of the famous definitions of "culture"
"Although there is no standard definition of culture, most alternatives incorporate the Boasian postulates as in the case of Bates and Plog's offering, which we shall accept as a working version:
Culture: The system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning (p7). "
http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/courses/122/module1/cult ure.html
It's original ethnological usage is still valuable. See Sahlins' _The Sadness of Sweetness_
CB
MA , BA ethnology
^^^^^^^^^
Michael Dawson *
Yeah, I overstated the point. But I still think 9 out of 10 attempts to deploy the culture concept are stillborn. As you say, it's important to understand how a particular culture works, but so many cultural theorists forget to explain where the cultures they think they see come from.
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> On Behalf Of Miles Jackson
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> Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Culture? was How Americans...
>
>
>
> On Sat, 30 Apr 2005, Michael Dawson wrote:
>
> > Sure, fine, but why preserve the culture concept at all? I would say
> that
> > it played a role 100 years ago, when whiteys needed to be shown that
> Adam
> > Smith and Social Darwinist presumptions were BS.
> >
> > I don't know of a single instance where the culture concept has helped,
> by
> > the standards of the 21st century. It's a non-scientific concept, a
> modern
> > morph of "race."
>
> Cultural psychology is a subfield in psychology that has generated
> a lot of interesting theories verified by research. If you buy
> the idea that scientific investigation is a good thing, culture is
> every bit as helpful as other empirically supported abstract
> concepts (e.g., gravity).
>
> Miles
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