ABSTRACT
Culture is a notoriously difficult concept, the subject of hundreds of different technical definitions over the past hundred years, and bearer of much political baggage handed down to us from its original usages in the nineteenth century. Elsewhere (Avruch 1998: 6-9; 2003a) I have written about these definitions and usages in some detail. In this chapter I wish to concentrate upon a particular culture theory, one that comes to us from the influential work of the political scientist Samuel Huntington. But the point of the chapter is not simply to critique Huntington’s theory of culture from a theoretical point of view. In the social sciences generally, but especially in those social sciences (such as conflict resolution) that come attached to a strong social activist agenda, theory is connected to practice in very important, and often unrecognized, ways. In the case of conflict resolution, theory itself comes in at least two varieties. First, there is the underlying social theory of conflict – conflict theory for short – that must be considered. Conflict can be understood as a deviant or aberrant feature of social systems, as in most varieties of functionalism, or an intrinsic and necessary part, as in Marxian social theories.
