ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the humanistic and "literary" aspects of culture. It examines the social science concept of culture as an analytical abstraction made from observations of behavior. The book represents the two sides of a controversy which has dominated anthropology since the Classic era. It suggests that the Classic era had its decisive intellectual beginning in the 1910s, when the implications of Franz Boas's ideas about Culture led his students to strike out in novel theoretical directions, and continental ideas about Society began surfacing in Britain. Classic anthropology had a variety of ideological and moralistic undercurrents, despite the prevailing relativism. Classic-era anthropologists also were reluctant to make important choices or distinctions between the mental or behavioral phenomena they perceived to be culture.
