The Illusion Of Cultural Identity

摘要

When the man who has been regarded -at least since the death of Pierre Bourdieu -as France's leading public intellectual publishes a sustained and polemic attack on 'culturalism', anyone interested in developments in contemporary socio-scientific thought will naturally sit up and pay attention. Moreover, amongst Jean-Francois Bayart's many influential positions (he has been Permanent Advisor to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for nearly two decades) is that of Governor of the European Cultural Foundation, so one is entitled to wonder just what is going on here: has he shot himself in the foot? Of course, lively debate about the meaning and value of the concept of culture 'in the anthropological sense' is nothing new, which is precisely why I place the expression in inverted commas: no two anthropologists - or sociologists, historians or ethnolinguists, for that matter - ever seem able to agree on a common definition of the term. Since Kroeber and Kluckhohn published their famous overview Culture (1952), there has been a torrent of publications on the subject which not even major studies such as Kuper's Culture: The Anthropologists' Account (1999) or Cuche's magisterial La notion de culture dans les- sciences sociales (2004) have been able to stem.