anthropology

invention of culture

obviation

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

anthropologist

university professor

University of Virginia

innovator in the field of

The Invention of Culture

is the study of man 'as if' there were culture, or the study of culture which is in fact the study of our culture.

Wagner, for example, not long after Hymes, considers how anthropology actually invents culture, in two senses, as the general idea of culture and as the particular individual social units or cultures to be described. What this invention consist of, for Wagner, is the assumption and then the construction of 'a concrete entity, a 'thing' that has rules, 'works' in a certain way, and can be learned' (1975: 8): that is, as the anthropologist tries to account for, understand, and represent the behavior of others, he or she creates a cultural 'object' out of the data and experience. Anthropology, in this interpretation, is 'the study of man 'as if' there were culture (10). 'The study of culture is in fact our culture' (16). He even likens anthropology to a culture cult. (From Culture to Ethnicity to Conflict: An Anthropological Perspective on . . . By Jack David Eller)

is the idea that we are not so much passive recipients of culture but instead, people (so too with those scholars who study people) are constantly at work shaping culture by manipulating conventional symbols to create new meanings.

The Invention of Culture, one of the most important works in symbolic anthropology in recent years, argues that culture is not a given that shapes the lives of the people who share it. Rather, it is people who shape their culture by constantly manipulating conventional symbols taken from a variety of everchanging codes to create new meanings. Wagner sees culture arising from the dialectic between the individual and the social world... his analysis is situated in the relation between invention and convention, innovation and control, meaning and context. Finally, the author points out that the symbolization processes that generate the construction of meaning in culture are the same as those that anthropologist use to 'invent' the cultures they study.

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Roy Wagner

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Roy Wagner