ABSTRACT
The overall objective of Classic anthropology was to find a concept of culture which could serve whatever purpose of analysis and explanation was at hand. In the case of A. L. Kroeber, some of whose work is reviewed in chapter 10, this search occupied a lifetime, but he was no closer to an all-purpose definition at the end than at the beginning. In the case of Walter Taylor, whose single book is the focus of chapter 11, the search was devoted to a conception of culture which could serve Americanist archaeology. Kroeber was never really sure what culture was; but Taylor underlined the importance of the distinction between Culture and cultures, and felt that archaeology needed to do more with Culture and perhaps less with the separate, site-specific little artifact collections that occupied so much of the Classic archaeologists’ attention. Although Taylor recognized the existence and importance of universal Culture, he, no more than Kroeber, was able to specify its dimensions or to provide a convincing portrait of its regularities. Kroeber selected simple things—like dress fashions—to analyze and thereby to illustrate the cultural regularities that presumably characterized the behavior of the species, but in the long ran Kroeber found little of a convincing theoretical nature to say about Culture-other than to assert its existence.
