ABSTRACT
Along these lines, culture can be a neutralizing or naturalizing mask for group differences that have more disturbing social determinations. Saying that someone does something because of “his culture” can have the effect of diverting analytical attention away from the broader social structures that may play a role in conditioning people’s behavioral decisions or choices. In the example of France’s headscarf issue raised in the Reader’s Introduction, for example, it was suggested that to attribute the behavior of Fatima, Leila, and Samira simply to culture missed the inherently political nature of their actions, which were structured by specific place-based social relations. In general terms, such structures may
include, for example, institutionalized racism or various kinds of ethnic, gender, and/or sexual discriminations. This point is suggested by Lila Abu-Lughod, who, in a selection later in this selection, argues that culture carries too much colonial and imperial baggage to be used as a neutral category of social inquiry. For her, scholars should be doing what they can to dismantle culture as an explanatory category of human behavior or practice.
