ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at A. L. Kroeber's classic papers on the "superorganic," dress fashions, and civilizational configurations as examples of the consequences of his way of conceptualizing culture. Kroeber proceeded through a series of setpiece discussions of current issues and writings which permitted him to make his main point: that civilization—Culture, The Social—is a thing in itself, and not reducible to biological—"organic" phenomena. Kroeber started thinking about dress fashions in 1899, wrote his first piece on it in 1919, and the final version in 1940 had Jane Richardson as a coauthor. The mystery of A. L. Kroeber is simply that he must have known that the rhythms he found in cultural florescence match patterns of human and mammalian behavior. Kroeber became more and more preoccupied with—interested in—a set of questions that historians had been puzzling and fighting over for a century or more.
