ABSTRACT
Culture, once staid and stale, is the stuff of vigorous debate. From the left come calls for multicultural education and public recognition and acceptance of diverse moral systems, values, and cultures that exist among the world’s peoples and increasingly within the own society. Those on the right, fearful of a creeping moral relativism, counter with demands that English be made the nation’s official language, that material that offends them be censored, and that the public schools increase the amount of time they spend on moral instruction. To former Reagan administration official William Bennett, the stakes in the debate are clear: “Whoever wins the battle for culture gets to teach the children.” The idea of culture as something purely ideational has traditionally not sat well with a lot of anthropologists and other behavioral and social scientists who see themselves as working in the materialistic tradition of the natural sciences.
