Culture

This chapter provides an overview of the concepts meandering career in anthropology and examines its position in the crowded marketplace of global discourse by empirically demonstrating culture as a topic of concern for health and medicine. The contemporary anthropological use of culture emerged, post-Enlightenment, as an outcome of Europe's complex project of modernization. If conceptualizing culture became a way for the Germans to distinguish who they were in the changing economic and political landscape of nineteenth-century Europe, for many British thinkers it was a resource to enlarge understanding of an increasingly complex world. The constitution of cultural reality and claims to truth as social practices, in and of themselves, was, in fact, not entirely new. It took its lead from Wittgensteinian philosophy and phenomenology and had been exemplified in sociological approaches such as ethnomethodology and the expanding domain of science and technology studies, similarly dependent on ethnographic forms of inquiry and the elucidation of cultural concerns.