ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes two contexts: academe and society at large. Within the first, the culture concept appears as an anticoncept, what it call a political move in theory, the benefits of which become increasingly restricted by the status of anthropology as a discipline, by the state-centrism of the human sciences, and by micropractices of reproduction. Within the second, the culture concept appears as a theoretical move from politics, that is, a theoretical practice that silences its own conditions of possibility. Two substantive propositions are central to the conceptualization of culture as deployed in North American anthropology. First, human behavior is patterned. Second, those patterns are learned. Recurrences cannot be tied to a natural world within or outside the human body but to constant interaction within specific populations. Unfortunately, culture’s academic career only reinforced the gatekeeping qualities that made its birth possible and necessary. Launched as the negation of race, culture also became the negation of class and history.
