ABSTRACT
The mode of description and analysis in anthropology has been the subject of a long and hectic discussion. What are we describing and what really is the object of our study? Culture and/or society, of course. The tropes used in the description of both have greatly changed during the history of the discipline and have been many times demonstrated not only to describe but to define as well. Accordingly, the culture/ society of anthropology was universal in the beginning, when Edward Tylor declared not to have any interest in the culture of nations and tribes, but in culture in general, followed by a time when culture/society were found in minuscule islands like Tikopia. At present different versions of world system theory are attacking the universal/particular problem and analyzing the globalization of culture. In his complex book Ulf Hannerz tries to attack some of the conventions of the discipline. In the present world, culture cannot be found in any place, he claims, and then defines the basic concept conventionally as ‘meanings which people create, and which create people, as members of societies’. These meanings are externalized and made public in a variety of forms which have a very uneven distribution among the populations of the globe. Thus, instead of meanings, his main attention is directed towards ‘production’ and ‘distribution’, and this focus solves some of the problems Hannerz tries to solve but creates a number of new ones. Thus, he claims, culture is not ‘shared’, but it can be received in a flow which has many directions, and everybody does not get the same share of the flow. The notion of ‘shared’ culture Hannerz sees as a result of the inability of the field-workers to see, amongst the unfamiliar people they are studying, any ‘variations in their interests, or values, or belief, or knowledge’. This inability, Hannerz claims, leads to the tendency to let one single informant stand for the entire community, or in any case to replace the plurality of the voices heard in the field with the authorial voice of the totalizing ethnographic text.
