ABSTRACT
In chapter 1, we discussed the historical trends in the scholarly study of culture. After a brief foray into the earliest notions of culture, we focused the bulk of our analysis on A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s (1952) groundbreaking work that collected and analyzed most of the existing definitions at its time of publication. We identified three theoretical perspectives that postdate this work: the interpretive, intergroup, and cultural studies perspectives. As a result, we concluded that the terrain of culture studies (not only cultural studies, but also the study of culture) had expanded far beyond that in which the Kroeber and Kluckhohn analysis was situated. With these changes has come a certain degree of “dis-census” (some would say turmoil) as definitions proliferate not only within anthro-
pology, Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s home discipline, but also across the social sciences and humanities. The centrality of culture to so many disciplinary and interdisciplinary traditions has argued for a language or discourse to understand the diversity in approaches and to promote discourse within and between groups operating from the various perspectives. Our goal, then, in this chapter is to study the themes of definitions for culture that have emerged since Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s 1952 book.
