ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have also stressed the ubiquity of culture, though they have been more preoccupied with questions of cross-cultural interpretation, and the difficulties of understanding what people are doing when they inhabit a culture very different from one’s own. This can lend itself to exoticism – the presumption that the study of culture is the study of strange peoples pursuing strange practices in lands far away – but there is no reason in principle why it should do so. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, anthropologists were the ones insisting that all peoples have their own complex and internally coherent cultures, thus providing, as Etienne Balibar puts it, “the humanist and cosmopolitan antiracism of the post-war period with most of its arguments” (1991: 21). Typically, this was achieved through the study of remote cultural groups, whose initially puzzling practices and beliefs were then shown to have a coherence and rationality of their own. But some of the most interesting work in contemporary anthropology also turns the spotlight back on the Western countries whose colonial exploits had so shaped the discipline, and applies the methods of anthropology to the metropolis itself. Culture, again, appears as an attribute of all societies. The study of culture is not a matter of exotic others. It is also the study of one’s own society or group.
