ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins with the neo-Boasians, who have offered the most recent and most self-reflexive presentist accounts of the culture concept in anthropology. Their work provides a venue for considerations of how culture was conceptualized and employed by the Boasians in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and of the arguments against a culture-based anthropology that unfolded in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Interestingly, neo-Boasian theory largely sidesteps what many would take to be culture’s heyday in anthropology, which coincided with the success of symbolic-interpretive theory in the 1970s and 1980s. For the neo-Boasians, Boasian theories of cultural diffusion and cultural integration were not contradictory, nor was the latter intended to supersede the former; rather, they represented two, complementary characteristics or processes of culture. The future of the culture concept in anthropology will surely depend on the effectiveness of its presentist histories.
