Writing for Culture
Writing for Culture
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为文化而写作
作者：
C. Brumann
在过去的十年里，“谈论一种文化不可避免地暗示着过度的界限性、同质性、连贯性和稳定性”的观点得到了相当多的支持，一些文化/社会人类学家甚至呼吁放弃这个概念。然而，这里有人认为，不受欢迎的含义并不是概念所固有的，而是与某些用法相关，这些用法不像这些批评者假设的那样标准化。混乱的根源在于学习习惯在个体之间的分布：虽然这些习惯从来都不是完美共享的，但它们也不是随机分布的。因此，“文化”应该保留为一个方便的术语，用来指代人们经常互动时产生的共同概念、情感和实践的集合。此外，在人类学和学术界之外，这个词越来越受欢迎，并且越来越多地以人类学的方式来理解。保留这一概念，同时澄清文化并不是毫无问题地复制的，在个体和普遍性方面都有其局限性，并且不是种族和身份的代名词，这将保留该概念在学科内创建的共同点。此外，它将简化向公众传达人类学思想的过程，从而挑战错误的假设。
In the past decade, the idea that speaking of a culture inevitably suggests an inordinate degree of boundedness, homogeneity, coherence, and stability has gained considerable support, and some cultural/social anthropologists have even called for abandoning the concept. It is argued here, however, that the unwelcome connotations are not inherent in the concept but associated with certain usages that have been less standardized than these critics assume. The root of the confusion is the distribution of learned routines across individuals: while these routines are never perfectly shared, they are not randomly distributed. Therefore, “culture” should be retained as a convenient term for designating the clusters of common concepts, emotions, and practices that arise when people interact regularly. Furthermore, outside anthropology and academia the word is gaining popularity and increasingly understood in a roughly anthropological way. Retaining the concept while clarifying that culture is not reproduced unproblematically, has its limits in the individual and the universal, and is not synonymous with ethnicity and identity will preserve the common ground the concept has created within the discipline. Moreover, it will simplify communicating anthropological ideas to the general public and thus challenging mistaken assumptions.