Culture as Identity: An Anthropologist's View

Abstract

brief span two frequently abused words. Their abuse angers anthropologists, not because we are lexical purists, but because it threatens to steal our clothes. is our business, the conceptual focus and organizing topic of our discipline. And identity: one of the buzz words of our times. In lay discourse it has become an awful portmanteau, carrying all sorts of murky cargo. I shall attempt to be resolutely empirical. Without any semantic finesse, I shall treat as the way(s) in which a person is, or wishes to be, known by certain others. Culture as identity thus refers to the attempt to represent the person or group in terms of a reified and/or emblematized culture. It is a political exercise, manifest in those processes which we frequently describe as ethnic, the components of which are referred to as symbols. So we cannot avoid a little more definition-just enough to know roughly what we are talking about. First, culture; then symbol; then ethnicity. These are all words which have some currency in ordinary language, and whose academic and anthropological usage is thereby considerably complicated. In anthropology, culture has gone through a succession of paradigm shifts. In the past it was used to suggest a determination of behavior; for example, that you could only think the thoughts which your culture gave you the words to verbalize-the infamous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; or, that environment, technology, economic modality shaped a congruent culture which, in turn, dictated appropriate behavior. There was then a major school of thought which treated culture as the means by which the supposedly discrete processes of social life, such as politics, economics, religion, kinship, were integrated in a manner which made them all logically consistent with each other. In this view, the individual became a mere replicate in miniature of the larger social and cultural entity. The tendency now is to treat culture much more looselyas that which aggregates people and processes, rather than integrates