people in that society view the world.
It’s not for us to tell them what to think.
Our ways are not better, only different.
What it all boils down to (to paraphrase
Montaigne) is: We wear pants; they do
not. That would be relativism.
But to say that a belief or a practice
is culture-relative is not to place it be-
yond judgment. The whole force of Bo-
asian anthropology is the demonstration
that racial prejudice is cultural. The be-
lief that some races are superior and some
inferior is learned; it has no basis in bi-
ology. It is therefore subject to criticism.
Boas spent his entire life telling peo-
ple that intolerance is wrong. King says
that cultural anthropology pushes us to
expand our notion of the human. That
may be so, but it has nothing to do with
relativism. King’s anthropologists are
prescriptivists. They are constantly tell-
ing us to unlearn one way of living in
order to learn a way that is better by our
own standards.
Mead argued, for instance, that
American families are too insular and
put too much pressure on growing chil-
dren. The example of Samoa, where
families are extended and children can
move around among the adult mem-
bers, suggested that American teen-
agers could be healthier and happier if
we relaxed our notions of how families
ought to function. There was nothing
natural and inevitable about American
social structures.
But there were also changes within
the field of anthropology itself. Soon
after Mead’s death, the concept of cul-
ture began to be targeted. The arrows
flew from multiple directions, and some
of the criticisms exposed tensions within
the Boasian tradition. Although the con-
cept had been given an enormous amount
of work to do, the meaning of “culture”
was never settled on. In 1952, two an-
thropologists, Alfred Kroeber (who was
Boas’s first Ph.D. student) and Clyde
Kluckhohn, published “Culture: A Crit-
ical Review of Concepts and Defini-
tions.” They list a hundred and sixty-four
definitions from the literature.
As an instrument of analysis, the
term is impossibly broad. If we mean
by “culture” something like the lens
through which a group of people in-
eluctably see the world, then “culture”
becomes synonymous with “conscious-
ness,” and it seems absurd to generalize
about “Navajo consciousness” or “West-
ern consciousness.” All distinctions are
lost. On the other hand, if we do dis-
tinguish a group’s culture from, say, its
social structure, then we dilute the term’s
explanatory power. Culture becomes
epiphenomenal, a reflection of under-
lying social relations.
And there are ethical issues, which,
as King acknowledges, Boas and his
students were mostly oblivious of. Mead
spent nine months, interrupted by a
hurricane, in Samoa; she interviewed
fifty girls in three small villages on one
of the five inhabited American Samoan
islands; she never returned. Yet she wrote
things like “High up in our list of ex-
planations we must place the lack of
deep feeling which the Samoans have
conventionalised until it is the very
framework of all their attitudes toward
life.” She presumed to understand not
only Samoan practices but the Samoan
way of being in the world. She was
speaking for Samoans.
Benedict had done field work with
only one of the three groups she wrote
about in “Patterns of Culture,” and she
never set foot in Japan. Lévi-Strauss,
after his time in Brazil, did hardly any
field work. He got his facts from pub-
lished books and articles. This kind ofethnography began to look like crypto-
colonialism, the Western scientist tell-
ing the “native’s” own story, sometimes
without even talking to a native.
There was also the question of how
deep cultural difference really runs, an
issue aired in the nineteen-nineties in
a dispute between two anthropologists,
Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeye-
sekere, over how to interpret the death
of Captain Cook, in the Hawaiian Is-
lands, in 1779. Were the islanders who
killed Cook inside their own percep-
tual fishbowl, operating with a com-
pletely different understanding of how
the world works from that of Cook and
his crew? Or, underneath the cultural ap-
purtenances of Hawaiian life, were the is-
landers behaving rationally and pragmat-
ically, much as any other people might?
And there was the complaint, directed
at Mead and Benedict, but also at Lévi-
Strauss and Geertz, that the cultural ap-
proach is ahistorical. The cultural an-
thropologist freezes a way of life in order
to analyze it as a meaningful pattern.
But ways of life are in continual flux.
Boas was a firm believer in this: he
was interested in what he called “diffu-
sion,” the spread of forms and practices
across space and time. Deloria, too,
thought that the notion of recapturing“Here in the Midwest, Hurricane Julia was caught having an affair
with Tropical Storm Antonio, who may or may not have murdered
Julia’s long-lost sister Grace, a strong wind heading south.”