bashkow ira.pdf

8/10/2019 BASHKOW IRA.pdf

1/16

IR B SHKOW

A Neo BoasianConception .

of

Cultural

Boundaries

ABSTRACT

For the past 30

years,

anthropology's critics have repeatedly questioned the notion of cultural boundaries, arguing

t

ha

t concepts

of

culture inappropriately posit stable and bo unded islan

ds"

of cultural distinctiveness in an

ever

-changing world o

transnational

cu

ltural flows.

This

issue

remains

an

Achilles'

hee l- or at least a recurring inflamed

tendon-of

anthropology. However

in

the conception of boundaries, we still

have

much to learn from Boasian anthropologists, who conceived

of

boundaries not

as

barrier

to ou ts ide influence or to historical change, but

as cul

tu ral distinctions that were irreducibly plural, perspectiva

l,

and permeable. I

.

this article,

I retheorize and extend the Boasians' open concept of cu ltural boundaries, emphasizing how people's own ideas

of

"th

foreign

"-and t

he

own ve

rsus

the other distinction-give

us

a

way

out of the old conundrum

in which

the boundedness of culture

as

conceived in spatial terms, seems to contradict the open-ended nature of culturalexperience. [Keywords: boundaries, culture concept

Boasian anthropology, history of anthropology)

I

N

THIS

ARTICLE, I develop the outlines of a productive

conception of cultural boundaries inspired by the an

thropology of Franz Boas and his students. Cultural bound

aries have been a leading target of anthropological criticism

for

the

last 30 years. In the 1970s, for example, Eric Wolf

complained that cultures were too often conceptualized

as

"bounded objects .. . like so many

hard and round

billiard

balls (Wolf 1972:6, 14). And still today

the

problem of

the

boundedness of culture

is

repeatedly raised in the field's

vanguard literature. A well-known example is the 1997 vol

ume by Akhil 9J, p.Jaand James Fe.tguson that seeks to un

settle

what is

claimed to

be

a pervasive fiction that cultures

and bounded. _he

represen ation

u l t u r e s as discrete geographical en tities has been criti

cized for aligning ai1tllrOPQ Qgy witb

the

Coloniai ideology

'of indirect rule," as well as with

the

objectifications of cul-

t u r e promoted bz_ separatism and-nationalism (Asad

1973; Handler 1988; Leclerc 1972). This idea has also been

cdticized as a prop to inequality and domination, which

authenticates-as

does the concept of race - dominant

groups' exclusi

on of

those marked as "other" (Abu-Lughod

1991:142-1 43; Kahn 1989). l i l l ~ g all such critiques

of the pernicious functions served by cultural boundaries is

the commonly shared

un

_derstanding that all boundarie-s

are constructed and to some degree artificial From th is

perspective, critiques of the idea of bounded cultures are

th

e counterpart

of

critiques

of

the idea

that

cultures can

be abs

tr

acted from history. Whereas critiques of ahistori

cal culture focus on the neglect of processes and relation-

sh ips that extend across time, critiques of bounded culture

focus on the neglect of processes and relationships tha

extend across space. But while the critiques olahistQrica

culture have led to important synfue

ses

between histori

cal and anthropological methods, there has been

no

c ~ m -

parable resolution in the case of

the

critiques of cultura

bmmctiuies. - - - -

In part,

th i

s longs

tanding the

oretical impasse over cul

tural boundaries reflects

the recognition-arising around

the same time

in

political economy, philosophy, and

anthropology-that the

commonsense

notion

of definite

stable, and natural boundaries is problematic. 1nste


2/16

American

nthropologist

Vol 106 No. 3 September 2004

can

be constructed.

In our

desire to stress fluidity and the

free appropriation of identity categories,

the

very notion of

boundaries has become emblematic of forms of difference

that are overly rigid, essen

ti

alist, and imposed: merely arbi

trary divisions, unasked-for legacies from the past.

1

The theoretical impasse over cultural boundaries also

reflects

the

precedence given

in

discussions

of

globalization

to 'transnational connections

and

their novel formations.

t is not that scholars .have been unmindful of globaliza

tion's darker, divisive aspects: the entrenchment of ethnic

conflicts, the mass mediation of political

and

religious ex

tremisms,

the

enlarged reach of state terror, the global traf

fic

in

.arms,

and the

widening inequalities dividing

north

from south, rich from poor. However, in theorizing what is

new and

distinctive about

th

e

condition

of contemporary

globalization, scholars in anthropologyand cultural studies

have tended to stress

the

breaching of national boundari

es

by migration, mass communication, and trade, suggesting

the emergence of

new

forms of identity, economy, and com

m u n i ~ t e n s i l y

mark a break

with the old

modernist

order

r g ~

terms of nation-states. Scholars typically

- m ~ h e

increasing interconnectedness of the world us

ingexamples like

the

dissemination of cultural commodi

ties in cosmopolitan media like world music CDs and TV

shows. At the same time, nationalism is often treated as old

news, an ineradicable throwback to a problematic primor

dialism that itself manifests outmoded theoretical concepts

of

bounded

culture. For example, when

Ar

jun Apl,lildumL.

writes that recent critiques have "do ne much to free us of

the

shackles

of

highly localized, boundary-oriented, holis

tic, primordialist images of cultural form and substance,"

\

he

is tarring previous anthropologists and Sikh secession

\o

ists with

the

same brush, since

both

appear guilty

of

natu-

ralizing the "boundary

of

a difference" to "articulate group

identity" (Appadurai 1996:13, 15, 46).

But there is

something

altogether remarkable

about the

staying power of

the

anthropological critique of

bounded

culture. For one thing, few current ethnographies are guilty

of positing inappropriately

bound

ed cultural "islands." In

deed, most ethnographic s

tudi

es

today

address

the tran

slo

cal connections that are entailed by neocolonial economic

structures, regional exchange systems, diasporic commu

nities, immigration, borderlands, mass media, evangelism,

tourism, environmental activism, cyberspace, and so on.

Moreover,

as

Robert ,Brightman (1995:520) has pointed out,

critics

ha

ve never made a clear case for

why

such translocal

/ o m J e x i t i should,

in

themselves, be considered an argu-

ment

for repudiating the conceptof cultural o u n d a r i e

. _ . ~

n

fact, boundaries are con_ rrl aJLy being asse

rt

ed everywhere

b the

~

we s

tudy

, even

nd

, perhaps, especially

. 1

translocal situations, and they do not serve only

il

liberal functions like the reinforcement of prejudice and

the curtailment of freedom. B_oundaries also serve ~

r e s -

sive,_

t QJl

trastive, constructive fun ctions u C

ultl _re.

T h e ~

~ a n i n g f u l even where they are a r b i t r a r ~ y con

~ i i e n t i even where they are crossed.

n d ~

to our thinking and writing, even our

writing about hybridity. But because recent scholarship h

failed to formulate a specifically

an

th ropological concept

boundaries that is distinct from the ethnic nationalist a

-------

-

ommon-sense naturalized ideas that are so vulnerable

~ E . J g the problem of boundaries remains

~ _ _ t . c h i l l

heel-or

at least a recurring inflamed tendon-of

t

discipline.

THE RELEV NCE OF BOASIAN NTHROPOLOGY

Given this recurring inflammation, I believe it is time f

anthropology to revisit the concept of boundaries found

the

work of th e Boasian cultural anthropologists of the fi

half of the last century. To embrace the

fie

ld's intellectu

legacy

in

this way

is

to stake

out

a different position towa

the past than

has

been customary in recent anthropolog

cal work. Notw

ith

standing its sustained attack against

t

metanarrative of progress,

postmod

e

rn

anthropology h

tended to emphasize the inadequacies of earlier anthrop

ogy

wh

ile accentuating its

own

disjuncture from it.

In

so d

ing, it covert ly perpetuates the very notion of progress th

it rightly calls into question. But if we take seriously th

the ongoing historical transformation of our discipline i

volves much more

than

progress (toward what?), we

sho

u

do more than treat th e past as a repository of errors;

rath

we should e

ng

age with what is worthiest in the genealo

of our ideas.

~ o _ g _ s i a n cultural anth:copology had limitations. For i

stance,

the

Boasians lacked

our

current, better understan

ings of cultural structure

and

the politics of

cultwe.

B

they were highly sensitive to cultural hybridities, idiosy

cratic identities, and translocal

c o n n e c t i o n s - p ~ e

t

1af

are-today

he1d

to

reveal

the

failure of

the

conce

of "bounded

cultur

e"

itself. Their awareness of these

sues should be no surprise, since many Boasians we

first-generation immigra

nts

or early feminist

women wh

were acutely conscious of their own sodal alienation an

marginality (Hegeman 1999 :9; cf.

Abu

-Lughod 1991). I

deed, in reference to languages Boas himself wrote

"hybridization" (Boas 1940[1929] :220), and Alfred Kioeb

devoted a section of his anthropology textbook to the top

of "cu .ual h ybridity" (1948

[1

923]:259). We

may

feel li

we are the first generation to grapple with the complexiti

of identity,

but the

Boasians, grappling with

them

in the

time, created a rich ensemble of co

nc

epts for characterizin

culture, its relation

to indi

vidual variation, and

the

ways

is distributed over space and time.

What

I offer here, then, is a look back to Boasian a

thropology

that

is

neither

purely historicist (i.e., seekin

to

understand

past

anthropology in its

own

historical

co

text)

nor

blindly recuperative (i.e., finding that c

urrent

ide

have past precedents). Instead, the position I take here en

gages Boasian

anthropo

logists as seminal thinkers, offerin

a selective retheorization of their work that has implicatio

for current culture theory (see also Darnell 2001), especial

given the in tense concern in the literature over cultural di

tinctions

in

the face of globalization. Specifically,


3/16

Bashkow A Neo Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries 5

that tlfe i a n s concepts of cultural boundaries are su

perior to

those

perpetuated in recent critiques because (1)

y " ' ~

l f e more precisely defined and, therefore, aie of greater

analytical value and i) they -cto .not cr

eat

e absurd con-

. tradictions with commonplate

phenomena

of _culture and

history.

OW

BO SI N NTHROPOLOGISTS UNDERSTOOD

CULTUR L BOUND RIES

While the Boasians differed sharply from

one another

in

the positions

they

took on many questions, they shared

three guiding p i e s in their understandiQ.gs

...Q

f cultural

;Joy__ndaries.

2

C

.

First,

it

was axiomatic to

the ~ ~ ~

b ~ ~ r . L e s . . . . w . e

_ 2 i l l D _ . l : and eermeable. Boasian anthro

pologists, whatever their differences, did not conceptu

alize cultural boundaries as walls or barriers to external

influence. The central argument of Boas's critique of 19th

century cultural evolutionism was

that

similariti

es

be

tween

cultures-such

as shared mythic themes, artistic mo

tifs, rituals, and

ideas-is

not evidence that all cultures

progress according to th e same laws, since the similari

ties are Often much better explained by the well known

facts of diffusion of culture; for archaeology as well as

ethnograPhY-teach us that intercourse between neigh

boring tribes has always existed

and has

extended over

enormous areas"

(Boas

1940[1896]:278). Against the evo-

J lutionist idea that each culture's deve

lopment is

driven

by universal, autonomous processes of change, Boas and

his students argued that cultural deve lopment is contin

gent on the history of a people's interactions with their

neighbors.

Thus, as a principled matter, the Boasians were cen

trally concerned with the diffusion-in today's parlance,

the flows -of

people, objects, images, and ideas between

localities (Appadurai 1996). Indeed, to a large extent , their

purpose in drawing boundaries around cultures was pre

cisely to gauge the historical traffic across them.

3

Many

of the doctoral dissertations ~ directed were trait dis

tribution studies which showed

how

a specific cultural

- - -

~ s u c h as the "concept of the guardian spirit" (Benedict

1 9 2 3 ) - h

~ a r g e region, acquiring var

ied meanings, forms, and functions within different cul

ture

s.

No anthropologist since

has

stressed

the

importan

ce

of diffusion in forming culture as emphatically as Rob ert

Lowie (1921:428), who hyperbolized in his oft-quoted sigh

that civilization is a "planless hodgepodge," a thing of

~ P - < 1 t e s , " since it develops not according to

a fixed law or design but out of a vast set .of contin

gent external influences . In Lowie's strongly antiprimor

dialist view of culhue as intrinsically syncretic (Brightman

1995:531), cultur

es

may be distinct from one another and,

thus, bounded, without this also implying

that

they are

discrete-since, in Lowie's view, the

re

is

no

qualitative dif

~ e between traits h a . L J , r . o ~ c l . S n s i d e . : . a outsidei'

~ Q l 4 { ~ 7 1 0 ~

Other Boasians' _views on diffusion were complicated

by their complementary interest in the psychological pro

cesses by which trai

_s impo

_tled into a culture were rein:.

terpreted in a manner consistent with what was already

there, thereby producing qualities of coherence or inte

gration within a cultUre. This integrationist view was ex

pressed

most

famously

by

Ruth

i c t

in

Patterns

of

ul-

ture (1934:47), in which

g g e s t e d

that cultures were

" ~ o r e

than the sum".ofthe ~

o g e n e o u s

t h e y

borrowed from e l s e

~ r e ,

since thos

_:

traits_-:.ere

~ d r

by and within the_

Q a t t ~ n

of

the b o r r o > ' _ i l 2 g ~

re. No

doubt, Benedict

~

n a l coherence and

- B u

as

James Boon (1999:28) has noted, it is

unfortunately easy to misremember Benedict's argument in

Patterns

as one that presents cultures as closed. In part this

is because sh e used three cultur

es

that were "historically

as little related as possible" and, thus, maximally discrete

in the context in which they were presented; in part it is

because each ethnographic sketch was developed primarily

within

a discrete textual unit, a chapter of its

own

(Benedict

1934:17; Boon 1999:25). But for Benedict, cultural integra

tion

is not antithetical to the diffusiomst view that cultural

QOrous;

J.

o the contrary, it presumes it. Bene-

dict's pre

mi

se is that cultures start with a "diversity" of

"disharmonious elements" provided by outside influence,

and these are integrated in

an

ongoing process even as new

material is imported (Benedict 1934:226). Where the im

ported material

has

been integrated harmoniously, Benedict

treats it

as a culture"'s achievement. She also recognizes

that

i ~ r a t i o n is lacking in certaiE_.cultures" and n

others with conflict_ilJ.d dissonance, which she .onsigers

tl'le:Ou

tcome

of integrative processes being

~ t p a c e d

by dif-

rusionfStones

(1934:225, 241). Benedict's conception

ofCul

-

tur

e is thus marked by

an

irreducible tension between the

complementary processes of

Qiffi.lsiQ_

n and integration, re

flecting the characteristic duality of Boasian anthropology

(Stocking 1974:5-8). In this duality, cultures are seen on

the one hand

as accidental assemblages of diffus_fd-in ma-

l : t : f t ~ o n H 1 e o t h e r

hand

as the outcomes of processes

of

11

inner develo ment that tend to mold such material

Q

preexisting patterns (Boas 1940[1920]:286).

Second me- Boasians p l u r a l i z e < L c u l ~ e s

To be sure, in theoretical statements, Boas often wrote

as if the "culture," the "people," the "tribe," and the

"society" were equivalent units,

and

his methodological

holism may be interpreted as posit ing a privileged delimita-

tion of cultures as "wholes" (Boas 1940[1887], 1940[1920],

1940[1932]:258, 1974[1889]; Stocking 1974:13

).

But his_

ethnogl'aphic g y . 9 ~ ~ l i a t e i u U . o dis_ Q.gEish tribal

divisions from the cultures he ~ ~ g n a t e d (Boas 1964, 1966),

a

nd

from hiss ophisticated cosmographical" perspective,

n i z e d

that the uni )': predicated of a culture

that

was constituted necessarily

only

in

the mind

of

the

observer"

(Boas

1940[1987):645).

t

is

worth remembering, too, that Boas articulated his holism

in opposition to the comparativist typologies of the 19th

century social evolutionists, who interpreted any cultural


4/16

6

American

Anthropologist

Vol. 106 No 3 September 2004

element, such as totemic clanship or fired clay p

ot

tery, by

grouping it together with elements of apparently similar

type found in

other

cultures,

and

then ordering the result

ing sets into hypothesized evolutionary sequences that rep

resented hierarchies of progress within artificially discrete

domains such as kinship systems or food containers.

~ _ Q a s

urged ipstead

that

such elements

be

interpreted in light

o_ _tJ e

cu}_ l r.al

wholes within which they are embedde

not to set boundaries that would delimit cultural entities

as such but to provide an appropriate

context

for their in

terpretation. And since there was no a priori limit on what

aspects of a culture might

be

most illuminating, cultures

~ ~ 9 : S ' L c o ~ e i 2 l i O . l

~ e n e c ~ s s

r i l y

eclectt = a n d ~ x < : ~

y _ _ _ e , embracing not only a people's present-day ecological

conditions, livelihood, arts, social relations,

and

so on

but

also the history of the people, the influence of the regions

through

which it passed on its migrations, and the peo

ple with whom it came into contact (Boas 1974[1887]:64).

~ s s

conception, cultures appeared to have d i f f ~ r e n t

boundaries

whe

n looked

at

from different

v i ~ w p o i n t s , and

it

was just

th i

s

theme

that became increasingly central to

Boas's thinking over his career. In George Stocking's words,

the consistent tendency in Boas's thought was toward

growing skepticism of blanket classifications and toward

insistence on the discrimination between dist inct classifi

catory points of view (Stocking 1974:13-14). The

thrust

, - of Boas's early fieldwork was to

show that

culture could

. not be correlated wftn enVironmental d e t e r m i n a n ~

effectively decoupHng

l t u r ~ l bound

-arieSTrom geographi

cal ones (Boas 1940[1896]:278, 1964[18S8]).

Lcrter

on,-

iri.

his

I Critique of racial assumptions, Boas showed that the corre

lation of body form with hereditary lines was complicated

in

the case of migration further, he demonstrated that in

general it was wrong to

assume

a coincidence of racial, cul

tural, and linguistic groupings, since there were abundant

cases in which

the

application of different criteria of clas

sification produced different groupings (Boas 1940[1912],

1938[1911], 1966a [1911]).

Boas's pluralization of boundaries is apparent

in

his stu

dents' work as a basic assumption of method,

and

it informs

the

Boasian interpretation

of the

co

nt

roversial concept of

culture areas. Although

the

term itself has sometimes

been assumed to refer to discrete, territorially bounded en

titie

s,

the culture area concept was embraced by Boasian

a n t h r o p o l o g i ~ t s

like- Edward Sapir

and

Kroeber primarily

as

a

mean

s of making historical

in f

erences from the geograph

ical distribution of similar traits across localities, and it was

based on the critical assumption that it is a normal, per

manent tendency of culture to diffuse (Kroeber 1931:264).

l

ulture areas were conceived not as individual cultures

but as aggregations of cultures- what we might today call

lr regions -with the emphasis on past, rather than present,

f zones of cu

ltu

ral interaction (Boas 1940[1896]:277). The

Boasians recognized that the geographical bounding of ar-

eas was invariably arbitrary, but as Kroeber observed, areal

limitation was only one aspect of a culture aggrega

tion.

c ~ r n g ~ e

theo

rlj_ic_?lly

the ultimate

\} \.-&.

J

-

emphasis was on culture enters instead of culture ar

eas, since in practice what

the

method identified was par

tially ~ V : ~ r a p p l l l g zones of trait distribution implying se

quences of development and the radiation of nfluence from

hi

sto

rically

dominant

centers (Kroeber 1931:251, 261). I

was for th is reason that in Clark Wissler's (1917) study

of

American

Indian

areas, boundary locations were pur

posefully

de

em

pha

sized-only drawn schematically on a

coarse-scaled map using straight lines that highlighted their

artificiality. Like Wissler's, the culture area schemes pro

posed by Sapir and Kroeber broadly resembled the classifi

cations which previous ethnographers of the Americas had

accepted as empirically obvious, but the Boasians' ~ e s

went further in that they explicitly distinguished multiple

kinds

of areas constructed on the basis of different sets of

criteria: for example, traits found

in

present cultures, ar

cha

eological findings, foods, technology, language, phys

ical indices, kinship, a

nd

the environment. In short, even

wh

en

proposing geographically based culture areas, Boasian

anthropologists were careful

to

draw multiple boundaries

reflecting diverse classificatory points of view (Herskovits

1924; Kro eber 1948; Sapir 1949 [1916]; Stocking 1992:136;

Wissler 1917).

5

The plurality of cultural boundaries was used by

Boasia

ns

as a

point of

contention against

the

French soci

ologist Durkheim and the English functionalists Radcliffe

Bro

wn and Malinowski,

fo

r whom it was axiomatic that

the social whole comprised a system of functionally in

terdependent

elements.

6

Little concerned with

the chance

historical events that caused societies to change

in

un

predictable ways,

the

Durkheimians

an

_

l the

functional

ists te

nded

to discuss the past

in

terms of culture-internal

e v o l u t Q ~ r y Q . o ~ s e s For th e Boasians, by contrast, cul

'ftlfafintegration was

an ongoing

process

that

could never

be fully completed

and that

was not necessarily unidirec-

9_ona l;

it was not teleological. In Benedict's writings espe

cially, integration is something that, in the long view of a

culture's history, ebbs

and flows, more or less intensely at

various times. So while the Zuni pueblos of two decades

earlier represented for Benedict a nearly perfect integra

tion

(Stocking 1992), s

uch

a climax could on ly

be

tempo

rary, whether long or short lived. For Sapir (1949(1924]),

genuine or

harmonious

culture similarly had

the

capac-

ity to degenerate, for example into the alienation and

inorganic disintegration

of

modern

U.

S.

life. Moreover,

the Boasians conceived of cultural integration eclectically

in terms that were partial, suggestive,_ an_q

metap_horic:,

flffher

than

functional

s y ~ m a h c .

Integration was to

l5e fo und, for exampl

e,

in aes thetic and thematic coher

ence in

an

analogy to styles of art and architecture;

illfhe

patterning of symbolism and motivation,

in

an analogy to

gestalt psychology; in selective perception

and

valuation,

in

an analogy to phonological apperception; and

in

distinc

tive characterological qualities,

in an

analogy to Herderian

ideas of the

uniqu

e spirit, genius, or geis of a nation or

people (Stocking 1974:8). From

the

perspective of Lowie,

who launched a sharp attack on Malinowski's avowedly


5/16

shkow A Neo Boasian Conception

of

Cultural Boundaries

7

antidistributional,

an

tihistorical"

fun

ctionalism, any

po

si

ti

on

that

"treats each culture as a closed sys

tem

implies

"absurdities" in demanding logically th at there is a single,

definitive demarcation:

Social tradition varies demonstrably from village to vil

lage, even from

fa

mily to family. Are we to treat as the

bearers of such a closed syst

em the.

chief's family

in

Omarakana, his village, the district of Kiriwina, the Island

of Boyowa, the Trobriand archipelago, t

he

North Massim

province, New Guinea, or perchance Me lanesia?

In defiance of the dogma that

any

one culture forms a

clos

ed

system, we

must

insist th at such a culture is

in

variably an artificial

unit

segregated for purposes of expe

diency. [Lowie 1935:235]

(, )

Third, in contrast with recent an thropological writers

'..: / who have

tr

eated analytic concepts of cultural boundaries

J

as susceptible to the same cri

tiqu

es as are people's folk ideas,

the Boasians

r e c o g n i

z e ~

that

the bQ daries they drew as

)

3g_a

ly

sts"'"We

re

not

equivalent

to the

u n d a r i e

that

peo

ple drew for themselves. Whereas

the

former were under

s tood to be theoretical propositions, created- as Lowie put

it, "for

pur

poses of expedie

nc

y"

in

analysis, ethnographic

description, and museum displays t e latter were them

selves elements of culture that reflected the

y ~ ~ o p

distinguished "between 'my own' closed gr_Q , p_jind t J: e out

_ d e r " (Benedict 1934:7). Ingeed, the Boasians frequently

g t cized s

uch

distinctions

c J . < J t i Y . a t e d

a

nd

s


6/16

American Anthropolog ist Vol. 106 No 3 September 2004

once-

an

element was integrated, its foreignness was quickly

iost to native awareness. He liked to cite the example of

modern Anglo-Americans

who

were unaware that items like

tobacco, paper, potatoes, and the alphabet were really cul

tural imports. In his textbook he wrote:

As

soon as a culture

has accepted a

new

item; it tends to lose interest

in

the for

-eignness of origin

of

thi$ item, as against

the

fact

that th

e

item is now functioning within the culture. One might say

that once acceptance is

made

,

the

source is played down

and forgotten as soon as possible" (1948[1923]:257). Sim

ilarly, Boas, in his studies

of

folklore and art, emphasized

the forgetting of the foreign origin of borrowed material,

in line with his argument

that

people's current explana

tions of folktale elements

and

art motifs are "secondary

rationalizations"

that

interpret them in terms of contem

porary cultural interests and themes, obscuring or eclipsing

prior knowledge of true historical sources (Boas 1940[1996],

1938[1911]:214-219, 1966a:66).

But it was also possible for the foreign origins of as

similated material to be institutionalized

in memo

ry and

even valued as such, and some Boasians found great the

oretical interest

in

this fact. Mead, for exampl

e,

portrayed

the

Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea as valuing certain

cult complexes, dances,

and

fashions precisely because they

were borrowed. Indeed, in this specifically "importing cul

ture," the foreignness of objects was actively remembered,

since distance of .origin

in

th e direction of the seacoast

was associated with increasing refinement and sophistica

tion.

To

the Arapesh, foreignness as such did

not

neces

sarily

mean

nonhumanity

but

could instead mean greater

wo.rldliness and civilization.

~ r o m

Mead's analytic perspec

tive,

the

fact

that

an

item was imported did

not

make

it

external to Arapesh c u l t u r ~ To the contra )',

t

was pre

?sely

in being categorized as an import from the beach or

beyond

that an

element could represent a positive value

within the distinctively Arapesh scheme of meanings, thus

showing that the zone of

the

foreign can itself play a

central symbolic role

in

the life of a people (Mead 1935,

1938) .

Although cultural boundedness has been targeted

as

problematic in recent critiques of the culture concept, the

critiques are

not

really applicable

to

cultural boundaries as

they were conceived

in

Boasian anthropology. Aco;nding to

{ l t r r v ~ J

Michael y for example, the culture concept 1s

because it pres

uppo

ses boundedness

on

the

model

of

th

e

modern nation-state with its binary logic of territorial and

corporate membership: An individual is either inside the

boundary-as a citizen or a member-or is not (Kearney

1995). But for Boas and his students, culture was neither

modeled on

the

state

nor

confused with a polity. Indeed,

Kr

oeber and Sapir explicitly opposed conceiving of cultures

on the model of nations, their provinces,

and

other

p -

litical or sociological units (Kroeber 1948[1923]:226; Sapir

1949[1924]:329, 1994:100). Cultures, unlike nation-states,

tend

to merge or

blend

into

one

another;

in

Kroeber's

terms, they "intergrade" (1948[1923] :261) . In general, the

Boasians were interested

in

classifying

not

persons but ele-

V ' \

r ~ p J . -

r

ments according to culture: They wrote of cultural "traits."

And

they

were by

no

means uncomfortable with construing

eleme

nts-or,

for that

matt

er,

persons-ambiguous

ly,

as

be

ing either

in

or out of a culture depending on the point o

view.

The critiques of bounded culture have primarily

fo

cused

on

the

spatialized

unit

s t

hat

form

the

province

o

area studi

es

and the autonomous tribal worlds conjured

by Radcliffe-Brownian structural-functionalism.

10

While

Boasian scholars did work in these veins, it was after the

mid-1930s when

the Boa

sian paradigm

had

already be

gun to

di

ssipate (Silverstein 2004). As Stocking argues, it

is clear enough

that the

Boasians constituted a distinctive

"scho ol" of anthropology

in

the 1910s, when Boas

and

his

students were united in their radical critiques of evolution

ism and racialism, and in opposing the influence of eugeni

cists

and

racialist anthropologists in the scientific establish

ment. Two decades later, however, Boas's studen s were

no

longer a unified current within anthropology,

as

intellectu

ally they were

in

fact diversifying and diverging from

one

another (Stocking 1992:125). Many of the

Boa

sians pub

lished their mo st enduring works during this time,

but

in

retrospect it may be seen as the twilight of Boasian an

thropology. Already during this decade,

many of

Boas's stu

dents (Mead especially) were becoming attracted to such ap

parently more "scientific" approaches as Radcliffe-Brown's

co

mparative so.ciology, and the dilution of their collec

tive intellectual potency continued and even accelerated

through the 1940s and after th e war. During World War II,

as scientists of every stripe

sought

to apply th eir talents

to th e war effort: Mead and Benedict

comp

iled studies of

Japanese, Russian,

and other national

characters," while

Ralph Linton was involved in founding wartime programs

in

"area studies" that ultimately transformed the musty old

ethnological"culture area"

concept

into Cold War institu tes

for Russian, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African stud

ies (Bashkow 1991:1

79;

Mintz 1998:29; Yans-McLaughlin

1984). In evalu'ating this work by current standards, we

should remember that Mead and Benedict were then writ

ing primarily for no nspecialist wartime policymakers,

and

their reliance on national boundaries as a basis for delimit

ing

cultural units makes sense given their polemical aims.

Indeed, a close reading of their work suggests that they un

derstood the problems inhe

rent

in th is kind of approach.

But

in

any

case, s

uch

work marked a departure from clas

sical Boasian anthropology, and

the

area studies institutes

reflected the new political context and intellectual trends

(Hegeman 1999:165; Pietsch 1981; Ra fae

l)994;

see Orta this

issue). Regardless of their historical and biographical con

nections,

the

culture areas of Boasian anthropology were

constituted on a different basis from the areas that were in-

u t u t i

in

postwar area

s t u d i ~ s

A-; R;n;;-Lede;m;;_

has argued, the Boasian culture areas "were not drawn up

to fit national borders and were at odds with (if not ac

tively subversive of)

the

in terests and naturalizing claims

of nation-states" (Lederm

an

1998:431). Thus, it is not

the permeable, perspectivally relative culture areas of

the


7/16

Bashkow

A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries

9

Boasians to which recent critiques of cultural boundaries

apply.

THE BO SI N PRINCIPLES ILLUSTR TED

BY OROK IV ETHNOGR PHY

To

move beyond

the

theoretical impasse over cultural

boundaries, I present a c o ~ t i o n of cultural boundaries

that builds

-.Q _

the Boasian J2I

in

cples I h a v ~ described . I

emphasize (1) that cultural boundaries are open

and

perme

able, not barriers. which block the flow of people, objects, or

ideas;

(2)

that

y a r e

p l u r ~ and interested, alwaysdrawn

relative to particular contexts, purposes, and points of view;

and

(3) that

the

divergence between

the

anthropologist's

analytic boundaries and people's folk boundaries creates a

7

'zone of the foreign" defined in terms of the own "other"

distinctions

that

people themselves draw.

_t

il

thre

e of these

points

re

spond to problems associated with objectifying

cultural boundaries,

which

are in fact symbolic constructs,

_

in

tenl).S

of spatial metaphors. I will elaborate these points

in

th e next section, but first I illustrate them with ethno

graphic examples from

my own

work on Orokaiva people

in

Papua New Guinea (PNG).

That

the

boundaries of Orokaiva culture are perme

able need

not

be belabored.

It

has been more

than

a cen

tur

y since

the

Orokaiva region was colonized

by

Britain

and, la_ .er, A_ustralia. While the colonial period-ended in

1975 with PNG's independence, people's lives have

re-

. mained profoundly affected

by

neocolonial economic de

velopment, the impress of

an

imported

consumer

culture,

mission Christianity, and Western schooling

and

health

care-all to such an extent that

no

credible cultural bound

aries reflecting current

condi

t

ions

could be conceived as

nonporous. Certainly, there may be reasons for attempting

a historical reconstruction of PNG cultures before Western

contact,

and

in doing so we might impose a hard fictional

boundary between indigenous and Western cultures, filter

ing

out

the more obvious imports of later times. But even

this questionable procedure results

in

cultural boundaries

that are characterized by porosity to earlier strata of influ

ence, like dance genr

es,

rituals,

and

linguistic elements im

ported from other indigenous groups.

~ b _ _ 9 u n g a r i e s of Orokaiva culture may ~ drawn ip

different

w ~ s J o r d i f f e r e n t _ p u r g Q s . . e s . n o ~ , J l ~ th

ey

w e ~ ~

_

n t h ~

Although the

ethnonym

Orakaiva originated

a colonial classification,

in

present times the Orakaiva

designation

pas

become a category of identity employed

by

peo_ple them

selves.

11

But it is not the only such cate

gory. A friend of mine who, in some

C.Q.n ms

, called him

self "Orokaiva" would,

in

different contexts, differentiate

himself from "those

other

Orokaiva" and, instead, call

him

self "Binandere," using the

name

of his particular dialect

area. The boundaries that people assert are sensitive to

the

context and their own immediate aims; this is so not only

in

relation to what they call the "big name (java peni

Orokaiva but also to the many "smaller names" (java isapa)

that ~ x p r s s their identity in terms of dialect,

4

)dLA/rrc

J

region, village, hamlet, or clan

a f f i

~ a t i o n s Thus, it is not

that the historically imposed cultural category "Orokaiva"

represents a merely fictive bounding of culture. Rather,

as

in so many cases of "ethnogenesis" studied by

anthropo

lo

gists,

the

colonial category has itself become a real catego_ Y

in people's lives, though not to the exclusion of other de

marcations

that

remain significant.

Arevealing example of the divergence between the an

thropologist's analytic concepts of cultural boundaries

and

peop

le's folk concepts is the construction of w h i t ~ r n ~

in

Orokaiva culture (Bashkow

in

press).

12

To the Orokaiva

I encountered

in

my fieldwork,

t

was obvious that the

"whi tema n" they spoke to me about represents my culture,

not theirs.

Ind

eed, for

them

,

the

"whi

teman

"

is

paradig

matically foreign: '

rt

is a cultural other they convention

ally contrast w

ith

themselves

in

various contexts of indige

nous life. But from my analytic perspective, it was equally

clear that the whiteman is for many_

pu

oses an Orokaiva

communicated from

one

individual to another,

from generation to generation,

in

a way

that

makes

it

as

authentic a cultural inheritance as the most hallowed tradi

tion. For several generations now, Orokaiva children have

been introduced to "whitemen" primarilyby hearing about

them from

other

Orokaiva as th ey have grown up in the

village;

they

have been fed whi temen's foods" by. their

mothers and wives; and they have themselves performed

the roles of whitemen in community development asso

ciations, church councils, local government committees,

smallholder crop growers' boards, and various businesses.

Of course, Orokaiva interact with actual whites both in

town

and in

thei r villages. Indeed, a few Orokaiva have even

1

stayed with whites in their overseas homes. But these cross

cultural experiences are inevitably interpreted from

the

ref

erence point of their far more

intima

te acquaintance with

the

construction of w

hi t

emen perpetuated within their own

culture at h ome.

Similarly, with certain imported commodities that are

regarded

by

Orokaiva as

the

culture of w

hi t

emen, it is

most

analytically powerful to treat them ethrwgraphically as a

part of Orokaiva culture, despite their foreign origins and

the fact

that they

are categorized as "foreign" from

the

Orokaiva folk po

int

of view. For-Orokaiva, the paradigmatic

"whitemen's foods" are boiled white rice, canned

ma

ck

erel, and Spam-like cans of corned beef. Historically, these

foods were among the most prominent brought to the re

gion

by

Australian patrol officers,

but they

have since be

come central to a highly conventionalconstruction of racial

characteristics

that

interprets th ese foods

in

opposition to

local taro and pork

in

terms of an elaborate set of indige

nous contrastivequalities (Bashkow in press). Moreover, for

eign "whitemen's foods" have become all but essential

in

Orokaiva ritual feasts. Thus, even though

they

are impo

rt

ed,

"whitemen's foods" must be viewed ethnographically as a

living part of Orokaiva culture.

Fo

r

another

example, in

their development activities, Orokaiva often try to work ac

cording to Western clock time,

which

they call"whi emen's

ime," in contrast to a second, more autonomistic pattern


8/16

I I

;f.J ,

v

(,,,/ 1 .

/ {

I

.

.

45 American

Anthropologist

Vol. 106 No3 September 2004

of time use that people see as characteristic of their own

- cultur

e.

But from

an

analytic

point

of

view this co

ntra

st

; f l it

self is be

st

seen as p

art

of Orokaiva culture, since

it

is con-

structed largely

in

terms of

the

culturally distinctive virtue

, (

of

social unity,

which

is dramatized

when

different individ-

' ; '

1

uals work together in close synchronization. Thu

s,

one can

see

th

at

the

folk

bound

aries Orokaiva use to distinguish be

tween their culture and the foreign culture of whitemen are

in no

way to be taken for

granted as

cultural

bound

aries

in

ethnographic analysis; they are rather culture-internal dis-

tin

ctions

th

at org

an

ize a

nd

give

meaning to

people's lives.

13

This divergence between folk and analytic boundaries

shown in the Orokaiva case gives the anthropological cul

ture concept a way out of the old conundrum, in

wh

ich cul

tur

al distinctiveness

im

plies c

ultu

ral boundaries

th

at

wou

ld

seem to place strict limitations on the kinds of experiences

that

people

can

have a

nd on the

ex

ten

sibility

of

their cul

tu

re to novel situations. The disti

nction

s

that

Orokaiva

draw between

th

eir

own and "whi t

e

men'

s cu

ltur

e" reside

in

th

e zone of

the

foreign: WJle

they

are

thin

gs

that

Orokaiva

themselves consider to

be

outside t heir culture,

fr

om an

an

alytic point of view they must

be

considered to

be

a part of

it

since

the

y are interpret ed in terms of Orokaiva categori

es,

valu

es,

assumptions,

an

d interests,

and

they are assimilated

O

istinctively Orokaiva

fo

rm

s of practi

ce.

This zone

of th

e

forei

gn

is an intrinsically flexible and accommodating part

of th eir culture; it is what allows Orokaiva.to in terpret their

nov

el experiences

usin

g their preconceived notions

of

oth

ers

that

are constructed in a dialectical relationsh ip with

their ideas of themselves.

Al

th ough such a construction of

the ot

h er isoften derided as e

thn

oce

nt

ric projection, it is

un d

oubtedly universal. Its value

to

anthropology lies in the

way

it

releases Appadurai's (1988:37) "

in

carcerated"

nati

ve

from the bounds

of hi

s cultural cell,

by

allowing us

to

rec

ognize

that

cultural bo

unda

ries,

rather than

imprisoning

people, can paradoxically serve to extend cultures across

_

hem,

to t

he

limits of

peop

le's experience.

Th

ere is really

no

contradicti

on

between

the

boundedness

of

culture and

the open-ended natu re of cultural experience, because cul

ture itself provides a schema for incorporating external

ments in th e very possibility

of

constructing.

an

e

lement

C\S

foreig l

THE BO SI N CONCEPTION OF CULTUR L

BOUND RIES RETHEORIZED

ND

EXTENDED

Ju

st because cultural boundaries do not really co

nt

a

in

cul

tu res within them does not mean

that

they are meanin

gl

ess

and of

no account; it ju

st

means

th

at we h ave

been

misled by

th

e spatial images conventionally used to depict

th

em , espe

cially

th

e line (whe

th

er "stra ig

ht

" or "curved"). Drawn lin

es

appear

to

block

thin

gs from passing across

them

, a

nd th e

y

appear to create discrete

dom

ains,

when in

reality, cul

t rf.

l

boundaries are less like barriers than th ey are like f h 1 ~ s h

5

olds or frontiers that mark the

movement

across them and

even create

th

e

mo

tivation for relations

hip

s with w

hat

li

es

beyond. Another problem

with

lines is

that

the divisions

th

ey represent are

continu

ous and complete. Lines have

a

uninterrupted extension-in formal geometric te

rms, th

space

be tween an

y

two point

s

on the

line is filled by

inte

ve

ning points-and they

appear to create nonoverlappin

entities

that

are closed

to

each other. But

as

we will discus

cu

ltur

al

bounda

r

ies-w

hether

they

are conceived in geo

graphical, social, or co

nceptu

al s

pa

ce-

may

be discontin

uous

and

i ~ o m p l e t e

In

a provocative passage, Appadura

pr

oposes

th a

t we sho

uld think

of cultures

as

"possessin

no Euclidean

boundaries"-and

alt

hough

he does not sa

very clearly what h e has in mind by way of alternatives

suggesting o

nl

y

that

we instead use a "

fr

actal me

taph

or

an

d recogni

ze that

cultural forms overlap (19

96:46)-

he i

right

to

poi

nt

o

ut that

cultural

boundari

es are easy to

mi

s

in t

erpret when

drawn

as

lin

es.

To re

th ink

th e_meaJ ings o

the

lines we draw

to

represent boundaries, I

now exten

Boasian anthropology's

th

ree guidi

ng

principles abo

ut th

boun

daries

of

c

ultur

e.

,First, we should recognize

that

cultural

boundar

ies, i

and of

th

emselves,

do

not

exclude or

contain

. A

ll

too

often

we

tend

to confuse th e

con

cept

of

"boundaries"

wit

h

that o

"barrie

rs -

which, by definitio

n,

bar, hinder, or block.

Ex

amp

les of

bar

riers are

the

col

onia

l color line, rugged m

ou n

tain ranges, barbwire fences, and poverty, ail

of

w

hich

ca

imp

ede or deny persons' access

to

objects, places, ideas,

an

resources. Boundaries

do

not actually separate; they

on

ly de

marca

te

or differentiate; they

do

not exert force to exclud

or co

ntain

any aspects of culture. What

o ~ s t s

call_

"ha

rd boundary"

is,

in

our

terms, a

sy

mbolic boundary

tha

_has been fortified by some kind of barrier, which "

hold

s th

line,"

makin

g

it

hard to cro

ss ove

r, like Jim Crow laws in

th

segrega

tion

ist So

uth (Ban ton

1983:125ff.). Similarly, wha

th

e term

boundary.maintenance

really refers

to

is the sh

orin

up of

a

boundary with

barriers. But

many

boundaries ar

n

ot

sh or

ed up

at all.

A

ni

ce illustrati

on

of

th

e dis

tin

ction between

bound

aries

and

barriers may

be

found in the borders of n

at

ions

states, counties,

and

so on. Such political b

oun

daries ar

defined in taw in terms of latitude

s,

longitudes, and th

mid

dles of rivers.

They

are symbolic representations

tha

exist independently of

the

fences

and

chec kpoints

th

at in

some places sec

ur

e

th

e

m.

This is im

portan

t, since

mo

re o

f

ten than not the re are

no

markers or barriers on the ground

Because barriers are expensive to

con

struct and

maintain

they are usually se t

up on

ly wh ere cross-border traffic is

o

political concern. Along major roads, we pass checkpoint

marking n ational boundaries

and

signposts for

the

b

ound

aries of states and counties. Similarly, news reports sh ow u

pictures

of

boundaries

in

confli

ct

zones

li

ke Gaza,

whe

re a

I write this, Israel is building a

high

concrete wall to keep

Palestinians ou t. But such boundaries are well in the mi

nor

ity. Off

the

road, amidst fields, and away from

t ~ e

conflic

zo

ne

s,

most boundaries are invisf'?le.

So

a

lthough our at

t

ention

is drawn most often to hard boundari

es

that

ar

sho

red

up

by barriers, barriers are by

no

me

an

s essential to

th

e definition of boundarie

s and

we need to be careful to

disti

ngui

sh

them th

eoreticall

y.


9/16

Bashkow A Neo-Boasian Conception

of

Cultural Boundaries

45

t

Moreover,

not

all cultural boundaries can be repre

f en ed in maps. Some of the most important ones must

be conceived of as abstract typological distinctions. Return

ing to our example of the

boundary

Orokaiva construct be

tween whitemen and themselves, what we are faced with is a

constellation

of

typified feature contrasts (e.g., dark vs.light

-skin, eaters

of

garden-grown foods vs. eaters

of

store-bought

foods, generous and

ho

spitable vs. closefisted and aloof,

etc.). The constellation has a core and periphery in that cer

tain highly conventionalized contrasts are salient and often

remarked on while other contrasts are drawn idiosyncrat

ically in particular contexts and are ideologically unelabo

rated. Nevertheless,

th

ese culturally salient feature contrasts

are distributed_ ~ g r e a t deal of empty space, since many

a.spects _ _f ~ ;ge ass ;gned no special value in terms of

the

_9rokaiva/whiteman distinction (Bashkow 1999:183-199).

For example, personality (as opposed

to

behavioral) charac

teristics are not seen

by

Orokaiva as generalizable,

and they

are generally not

among

the dimensions

of

contrast that

Orokaiva elaborate

in

typifying

th

emselves

and

whiteman

others (Bashkow 2000:295). Thus, t_he boundary between

Orokaiva and whitemen's culture does

not

create a compre

hensive division but, instead, contrasts certain focal areas

only, leaving others untouched. In short, the boundary be:

tween Q okaiva and whitemen's culture is not complete and

continuous, but partial and fragmentary.

1

The porosity of cultural boundaries, which seems coun

' terinlullive when we objectify boundaries

as

solid lines,

l

ollows easily when we h _ld of s atial metaphors

li

~

represent

them

instea

_cDJs conceptual

structures centered

t

n

symbolic contrasts or Of f Eitions

t

is a structuralist tru

'ism that opposed terms like self and other define one an-

other reciproca.\ly, so

that

th

e very opposition which de

fines a boundary serves as a conceptual conduit by which

the

other gets smuggled into

the

world of the self. More

over, such conceptual structures , far from precluding trans

gressive feature reversals, seem to invite them, the way a

Rubik's Cube invites be

ing turned

or mythic symbols in

vite transformation within the structure of Levi-Straussian

matrices. Indeed, it is the reversal

of

specific features

that

evokes, casts into relief, and activates

the

larger structure of

relationships with in which those features are opposed.

For

example, when Orokaiva turn whitemen" in church ac

tivities, schooling, and village business, the normal opposi

tion

between whitemen

and

Orokaiva is in no way undone,

inasmuch as the activities in which people are engaged are

nevertheless understood to be a part of whitemen's culture.

To the contrary,

the

reversal dramatizes and draws attention

to

the contrast, paradoxically affirming and substantiating

, the cultural

bo

undary in the very act

of

transgression.

Second extending our understanding of the Boasian

principle of multiplicity,

we

should recognize as a cardinal

principle that no single way

of

drawing a cultu.ral bound

ary can serve every purpose. That cultural boundaries do

not mark the edges

of

discrete social, political, economic,

and technological systems is clear enough in

the

case of

conceptually defined typological boundaries like those just

discussed: As is illustrated

by

the Orokaiva construction

of the boundary between themselves and whitemen,such

,-

boundaries may distinguish

u l ~ r e s

even where ~ r -

ctclosely or interpenetrate socially. But the point is partic-

ularly

re1evant fu the complex case of mapped boundaries

that is, bounda.ries we

do

locate in geographical

or

social

space.

As

noted

by

several critics, social scientists have of

ten tended to speak of cultural boundaries as interchange

able with

the

edges of integrated social totalities (Gupta and

Ferguson 1997; Hays 1993). That is to say, a culture's lim

its are taken from

the

territorial bounda.ries

of

the corre

sponding social collectivity

(e

.g. ,

the

boundaries

of

Iatmul

culture are given

by

the limits

of

the territory occupied

by

Iatmul people). These cultural boundaries are then legit:_

imated by bringing

to

bea.r as many additional criteria

~ t h n i c political, linguistic, historical, and so forth--:;as pos

sible (Handler 1988:7). But as the Boasians knew a general

~ o s e

compartnientalization _Qf_human is chimerical.

They found no basis fo

ras

suming an ideal c i d e n c e

of

the bo

un

daries

of

collectivities, cultures, languages,

and

his

torical populations or races. Indeed, our knowledge of the

possible bases

on

which

human

worlds can be segmented

has only increased since their time. The old Boasian triad of

race, language, and culture ramifies today into a larger set

of

demarcational viewpoints that include varied constructions

of

society, polity, economy, geography, interactional fields,


10/16

45 American

Anthropologist

Vol. 106, No. 3 September 2004

';annQ_be unique ly fixed: Given a chain of partial mutual

intelligibiii l: T,

it

is never clear where to draw the line. Where

dialect chains span conventional language divisions like

Spanish and French, the boundaries

the

y cross are drawn in

only one of

many

ways supportable

by

linguistic evidence,

though they may have dense historical

and

political moti

vation (Crystal1987:25-33). The lesson dialectologists draw

from

th i

s is not that distinguishable languages do not exist,

but

that

the way

one

draws their boundaries depends

on

the

12.articu

lar language features one chooses

to

emphasize, and

_that ultimately

one

must keep in mind multiple isoglosses

and

one's purpose

in

drawing

the

boundaries

in

order

to

create an accurate picture. Cultural boundaries are tl us sim

ilar to isoglosses in that they are

irreCluCI1:5ly

multiple.and

reflect different criteria, a

nd

also

in that

even where they

coincide with conventional political

and

social divisions,

\ they should not be identified with them theoretically.

14

r Third,

and

finally, extending o

ur

understanding of

the

Boasian distinction between analytic and folk boundaries,

we s

hould

recognize

th

e

imp

ortance

of

a generative concep

tion of culture, in which culture is

not

only the product of

-but also the precondition for meaningful action, t h o u ~ h t

_and expression (see Rosenblatt th is issue). To be sure, such

a conception

may

not be

necessary

to

every project

that

ap

peals to a distinction between analytic

and

folk boundaries.

For example, when we engage in what Richard Handler has

called the "destructive analysis" of assumptions underly

ing

identity politics in ethnic nationalist movements, the

important function of our analytic boundary concept is to

provide critical distance from

the

folk concepts of interest;

t is the standpoint from which we are at sufficient remove

from the folk concepts that we can refute false primordialist

claims, such

as

that

multiple boundaries

of

national iden

tity, culture, language, ancestry,

and

so

on

converge (Han

dler 1985). But it would be wrong to let such a critique take

over our anthropological culture concept en tirely, as Ap -

/ padurai does when he suggests that we "regard as cultural"

only those differences

that

people use

to

express or sub

stantiate

the

boundaries of group identities (1996:13). The.

problem wi

th

the culture-as-identity view is

that

it effec;.:

tively eliminates any basis f

or

distinguishing between an

alytic and folk views except insofar as

the

y imply differ

ent evaluative stances toward

the

same substantive claill)..

Most crucially,

in

order

to understand how

boundaries

can

_hemselves be a creative part of culture, we need to move

beyond

tR

notion

that

cultural boundaries are

motiva

ted,

by

sl'i Jtedness, whether it is conceived of in objective terms

(shared language , ancestry, territo

ry,

social habits,

or

other

traits) or in subjective terms (shared feelings of belonging).

_What we need

to

appreciate is that boundaries

can ~

' ductively defined in terms of a relationship of mutual com

prehension.

Such appreciation is evident in Sapir's writings

on

cul

ture and the individual. For Sapir, t was plainly ~ ~ q u t e

to

conceptualize culture purely

in

terms of sharedness, since

individuals differ so markedly from one another in every

im gin ble

respect. Underlying Sapir's conception of cul-

ture is

the

idea

that

people's perception of a commonality

of culture is founded more

on

relations of mutual com

prehension

than

on actual sameness or identity.

What

is

required is only that people can understand one another,

if only partially and imperfectly; indeed, Sapir remarks

on

how forgiving and elastic such perceptions of mutual intelli

gibility

can

be, given people

's

tendency to try

to

make sense

of things

by

attending

to

that which is intelligible in their

experience and disregarding that which is incomprehen

sible. He gives the example of two individuals who live as

neighbors

within the

same town: "The cultures of these two

individuals" may be "significantly different, as significantly

different, on

the

given level

and

scale,

as thou

gh one were

the

representative of Italian culture

and th

e other of Turkish

culture," and, yet, "such differences

of

culture never seem

as significant [to people] as they really are

. . .

partly because

the economy of interpersonal relations and

the

friendly am

biguities of language conspire

to

reinterpret for each indi

vidual all behavior which he has under observation in the

term

s of

th

ose meanings

which

arerelevant

to

his

own

life"

(Sapir 1949[1932a]:516). The possibility of negotiat ing dif

ferences

to

arrive

at

what may be an exagger11ted impression

o f m u t u a l u n d e r s t a n d j n g is, for Sapir, w

hat

allows individu-

als of diverse backgrounds

to

feel themselves participants in

a shared or "generalized culture" even as

they

each "

un

co

n-

SaoUsly abstract'' for themselves from

it

some idiosyncratic.

"wo

r1a

ofmeanings" (1949[1932a]:515 ). Mutual

in t

elligibil

ity is also

the

aspect of culture that enables people to express

meanings

that

are previously unknown within their culture

but that can

nonetheless be readily grasped

by

others

thus,

must be considered a legitimate part of

the

culture out

of which they arise.

15

So, for example, when Sapir describes

Two Crows' rejection of a conventiona l

Omaha

pattern, this

cultural rebel's distinctive response commands our atten-

tion: Again,

it

is the capacity

of

his distinctive response to

be

in t

elligible

to

or "communicat[ed] to other individuals"

that provides

the

psychological basis for his idiosyncrasy to

someday become orthodoxy-by means of "some kind of

'social infection' thr

oug

h

which

it might "lose its purely

personal quality" (1949[1938]

:5

71, 5 73). From Sapir's per

spective,

i t

is th us not only things that conform to a shared

norm that should be construed

as

a part

of

a culture but also

things that deviate from

the

norm in recognizable ways: In-

deed, u l t u r e is the symbolic field within which deviations

can be meaningfully interpreted (Handler 1983:211; Sahlins

1 985). And it is in just this way that people's frameworks

for interpreting

the

differen

ces

between "their own" a

nd

"foreign cultures are themselves paradoxically an authen-

tic part of their culture;

the

foreign itself is incorpora

ted

within the very cultur

al

perspective from which

it

is seen

as

external. Indeed, w

hat

Sapir

wrot

e of fashion

and

culture

could as well be said of

the

foreign

and

culture: Ideas of

the

foreign are cultu re in the guise

of

departure from culture

(Sap ir 1949[1931]:374).

Viewing culture solely in terms

of

identity relations

is inadequate for understanding this paradoxical aspect of

boundaries:

that

in separating cultures, boundaries actually


11/16

Bashkow A Neo Boasian Conception

of

Cultural Boundaries

45

facilitate the interpretation and integration

of

cultural -dif

ference

within

a culture. Whatever

the

forms

it

takes,

the

ex

perience

of

foreignness is part of everyone's world,

and

cul

tural boundaries, in serving

to

map, evaluate, and delimit

culture, simultaneously

project

it onto the foreign other, eth

nocentrically,

in

the form

of the

projecting culture's values

and

self-conceptions.

In

effect, cultural boundaries are cru

cial

sym_El.Q kdivisions that

enable people's action, thought,

and expression relating

to

,

as

with otper things, the foreign.

And, for this reason, it

is

inadequate for

the

analytic culture

concept to portray boundaries functioning solely to confine

and exclude, such as has been the

tendency

in our

fie

ld's

most elite theoretical discourse

in

recent years. Instead, our

culture concept

must

be a generative one

that

provides

the basis for meaningfulness and creative expression and

action.

W Y

THEORY OF CULTUR L BOUND RIES

IS NECESS RY

f

boundaries were barrier-like walls

that

separate cu

ltur

es

from

one

another, as some critics have depicted them, it

would seem obvious

that they

are theoretical constructs

anthropology would

do

well to be rid

of;

after

al

l, global

ization processes disrupt, diasporize,

and

hybridize cultures

communities, making boundaries

at

best irrelevant and

at worst patently wrong. Moreover, when we

think

of the

pernicious colonialist, nationalist,

and

discriminatory pur

poses that the idea of boundaries has served, we find further

support for rejecting

them in

the

harm

they may cause.

However, this critical position is too limit

ed

.

t

assumes

and perpetuates a common-sense conception

of

natural

boundaries

that

is analytically flawed, and it generalizes

about boundaries' harmful functions based

on

a biased and

narrow set of examples. In the remainder of the article, I

suggest

that

(1) cultural boundaries are necessary for our

thinking and writing, so

t is not

realistic

to

repudiate

t_ le

general concept of

bounded

culture as such; (2) cultural

boundaries remain important

phenomena

in

the worlds

that we study even

under

circumstances

of

interconnection

and

globalization; and (3) cultural boundaries do not exclu

sively serve harmful

or

discriminatory purposes, but a mix

of undesirable and desirable ones, so that a pan-situational

moral critique of boundaries

as an

n lytic l

concept

is un

fou

nd

ed.

'A)

First, cultural boundaries are necessary for thinking and

writing about human cultural worlds.

As

we know from

the teachings

of

both Saussurian a

nd

Boasian structuralisms

(see Hymes and Fought 1981), symbolic value derives from

systems

of

contrast, making

the

very possibility

of meaning

dependent on representations of categorical difference. In

this way

thinking

about culture is

no

different from other

kinds of symbolic processes that human beings engage in.

Comparison is also inevitable if we are to acknowledge the

particularity

of human

cultural worlds.

To

avoid all formula

tion of comparative perspective in our ethnography would

be untenable; all it would do is leave

the

implicit contrast

for readers to supply, which they would do from their own

cultural frames

of

reference. Once again, we see

that

the

symbolic distinctions we draw need not m p onto spatially

discrete units.

In

deed,

it

is where different cultures meet

tll.at people feel

the

distinctions of culture most acutely,

since these are so often relevant

to

navigating their complex

social landscape. So it is as well with identity: The complex

ities

of

contact between people of different identities only

intensify people's awareness

of

identity

distinctions-all

the

more so when multiple

or

ambiguous identifications are at

play.

Indeed, so necessary are cultural boundaries

to

our

thinking and writingabout

human

cultural worlds that they

are invariably presupposed by the very arguments offered

against them. The classic argument that cultures cannot

be thought of as bounded because they are connected to

one

another through

relations

of

politics, trade, migration,

and influence presupposes that we can think of the cultures a/

as

distinct from

one another

and, thus, conn ectable (Wolf

1982:6).

Another example is

the

poststructuralist argument

that cultural boundaries are absurd given that individuals'

identities may be culturally hybrid, in-between, or

impure

(Ab u-Lughod 1991; Bhabha 1994 :219). Here, too,

the

argu

ment

presupposes

the

idea

of

boundaries even

as

it chal

lenges it, since it presumes an ability to recognize the terms '

that are hybridized (Robbins 2004:327-333). No doubt it is

true, as Kirin Na rayan observes, that we al J belong to

eral communities simultaneously,

and

we participate in

'different cultures

and

different identities in different con

texts (1993:676). But this realization, far from rendering cul

tural boundaries moot

or

inapplicable, makes it all the more

necessary

to

have them constructively theorized, since

it

illustrates

that the

boundaries

of

cultures, identiti

es,

and

communities cannot be drawn simply

in

terms of groups

of

individuals.

Second, cultural boundaries are not made irrelevant

/13

by globalization, since

they do not

depend

on an

absence

of interaction across them (see Barth 1998[1969]:10). It is

thus wrong to depict the concept of bounded culture as ir

reconcilable

with

translocal connections.

In

the world

of

globalization, old t ribal distinctions like Nuer versus Dinka

and Tlingit versus Haida have not become obsolete but, in

stead, are refashioned

in

contexts like tourism, media rep-

resentation, and political

and

legal action.

~ o r e o ~

alization itself produces new forms

of

distinctiveness and

identity politics.

As

Benjamin Barber has argued, even as

globalizationis bringing the world

to

gether pop culturally

and co

mm

ercially,

it

is fostering

the pr

oliferati

on of

localist

movements and identity politics, and intensifying people's

awareness

of

them

through

possibilities of mass mediation

and diasporic communities (Barber 1995:9). Global commu

nication

and

commerce oblige people

to

operate

in

increas

ingly multicultural environments,

in

which they become

ever more aware of cultural differences and the complex-

ities

of

identity. Advertisers and marketers objectify cul

tural boundaries in their niche marketing of culturally cus

tomized advertiseme

nt

s and products; promoters of tourism


12/16

merican

Anthropolbgist

Vol.

106,

No.

3

September

2004

e ~ p h a s i z e local cultural distinctiveness to attrac t visitors

from outside;

and

parochialist demagogues, ethnic nation

alists, and religious extremists l:lroadcast the ir opposition

to the amorality and uniformity associated with Western

cultural imperialism and with globalization itself. Thus, in

.stead of rendering cultural boundaries obsolete, globaliza

tion has amplified certain boundaries

and

multiplied

the

contexts

in

which people deal with them a ituation not of

boundlessness but, rather, of

boundary

"superabundance"

(Brightman 1995:519).

Third, it is of course true that_cul Ural o u ~ d a r i e s are -

ten

drawn xenophobic_glly use:j_n wayuh_q.t are harm

~ v h i e r , a r c h i z i n g , an ra.


13/16

Bashkow A Neo-Boasian Conception

of

Cultural Boundaries

55

of hybridity and liminality," which is often put forward

as

a displacement of difference, does not offer a politics

that

is necessarily more egalitarian, forgiving, or liberatory; we

know that hybridity, too, can cause conflict and serve as

'a Q.asis for dominance (Kapchan and Strong 1999:247). In

-short, t

he

postmodern idealization of a

wo

rld

without

shib

boleths

is

a red herring. A f f' ' ' J ~

t

is a sign of

the

peculiar intellectual ethos of

our

times

that merely sophistic arguments have become so influen

tial. The pervasive notion that boundaries could

be

inval

idated by their artificiality, instability, fuzziness, and lim

inality should be no more convincing than a claim that

the transitional periods of dusk and da

wn

render invalid

the distinction between night and day (Ian Fraser, e-mail

to asaonet listserv, September 3, 2002; cf. Hays 1993). And

we readily equate bounded culture with problematic es

sentialism, even

though

boundaries offer the sole basis for

constructing entities in a nonessentiallst way. As Andrew

Abbott (2001:277)

ha

s shown, viable sociocultural entities

can be created entirely through a process of bounding,

by yoking together particular sites of difference to form

an

apparently enclosing frontier. Drawing boundaries

and

positing essences are really

altemative

ways of construct

ing cultural entities. And while our strongly antiessentialist

commitment should be leading us to focus on the distinc

tions which create boundaries, the unease over difference

that characteriz

es the anthropology

of

our

times has pre

vented us from doing so.

IRA

B SHKOW

Department of Anthropology, University of

Virginia, Charlottesville,

VA

22904-4120

NOT S

Acknowledgments The writing

of

this article was supported in

part

by a National Endowment for

the

Humanities Fellowship and from

a Richard Carley Hunt Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship from the

Wenner-Gren Founda tion for Anthropological Research. It incor

porates material from my fieldwork in the 1990s

that

was sup

ported by

the Wenner-Gren

Foundation

for Anthropological

Re-

search

and

a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad

Fellowship. I

th

ank Matti Bunzl for inspiring the article, Richard

Handler for

help

in editing it, and the American Anthropologist edi

tors and reviewers for many helpful suggestions. Thanks also

go

to

Matthew Meyer, Daniel Rosenblatt, Daniel Segal, and Rupert Stasch

for reading drafts

of

the manuscript,

and to

the

students

in my fall

2000 graduate seminar on Boasian Anthropology at the Univer

sity of Virginia particularly Sevil Baltali and Suz

anne

Menair, for

their contribution to my general understanding

of

the writings of

Boas

ian

anthropologists. I am grateful

to

George Stocking for his

encouragement

of

my

work over

many

years. My wife, Lise Dobrin,

helped

me develop ideas

of this

article in

numerous

conversations

and provided invaluable help in strengthening

the

final version

with

her careful editing;

my

debt

to

her e

xtends

well

beyond

this

article

and

knows no bounds.

1.

In the culture of academia,

the

current discomfort with

bound-

aries is reflected in a trend

of

devaluing disciplinarity. The tradi

tional boundaries

of

scho

larly fields

have become

associated

with

intellectual stuffiness and narrowness of perspective, as opposed

to the pathbreaking departures

and

exciting unconventionality as

sociated

with

scholarly work that is valorized as interdisciplinary.

Particularly in

th

e humanities, hewing to scholarly boundaries im

plies a lack of originality, independence,

and

spunk. To avoid the

hu

mdrum staidness

of wo

rk

conducted within the

boundaries

of

traditional fields,

scho

larship is routinely evaluated

i

n

grant

com

petitions, job descriptions, etc.) on the basis

of

how successful it is

in creatively transgress ing or, best

of

all, reconfiguring disciplinary

demarcations.

2. In what follows, I focus on

the

views of Boas, I


14/16

56 American

nthropologist

Vol. 106 No. 3 September 2004

disciplinary beliefs," while overlooking those aspects which are

consistent

with

such beliefs and

continuous with the pre

sent

(Brightman 1995:527).

I t

should be noted

that

structural

functionalism

is not

even

th

e best example

to

criticize for the reifi

cation

of

cultural boundaries.

That

honor

may go

instead

to

bashkow ira.pdf

Documents