Toward a Richer Description and Analysis of Cultural Phenomena
Fredrik Barth
Abstract
All cultural phenomena are invariably related to certain other cultural phenomena to which they are similar and which precede or succeed them or occur near them contemporaneously; and their fullest understanding can be attained only through cognizance of these relations. This chapter focuses on the present construction of culture as a category and discusses its complexity and some unfortunate forms of reasoning to which it leads, before moving on to what might be done about it. A minimum of reflection suggests that the trouble must spring from a weakness in the present construction of our whole category of culture, as well as from the diversity of tasks for which we employ it. Generalizations about a category are valid only in regard to those features that members of the category have in common. The mode-of-acquisition clause recurs in later anthropological definitions in the specification of culture as “learned behavior” or even “ideas transmitted through symbols.”