Over the last months, I have been devouring audiobooks, given their easy accessibility through my formerly-local public library. Since I am still working on the 'culture' section of my research, these books mostly deal with what I think of culture and notions of its contours – or, rather, the lack of such contours. In particular, I have been reading/listening to books about the histories of Islam and Muslims, largely focused on the Middle East.
A departure from that is the book that I am currently reading: Gods of the Upper Air (Charles King, 2019). It dovetails perfectly with the idea of culture's contested contours. Essentially, the point that I raised in the previous post – Indiscrete Culture – can be illustrated by the work of Franz Boas, one of the central figures of early cultural anthropology. It is, however, illustrated by doing to his discipline's subject what he did to physical anthropology and eugenics in his day.
Below the fold I take ideas from my current reading – about Boas, from Ruth Benedict (whose Patterns of Culture I read last November), and drawing on my readings about the history of Islam – to continue building the case against cultures on behalf of culture. In short, I argue that culture is too multi-faceted, and those facets are too poorly aligned with one another, to make any typological sense. It should therefore not be used as a concept that can be divided into particular groups. Doing so is only a latter-day reification of physical anthropology's race theories. That's not to say that making distinctions cannot be useful, but it should be done carefully.
