Culture theory is at an impasse.

From the perspective of the late 1990s, descriptions of “the culture of the X” seem old-fashioned. In part this is because we have learned how problematic it is, in a world of shifting and multiple identities, to label any set of people as “the X.” But to a greater extent the problem lies with the phrase “the culture of the X.” In our discipline's past, such descriptions have too often made it sound as if all of the X thought, felt, and acted the same way, had shared this way of life for centuries and would have continued in their traditional ways, unchanged, if colonial education and modern mass media had not intervened. Past descriptions, too, sometimes missed the extent to which the story they told about traditional cultural values and practices was the interested account of one powerful class or faction or a public, “for show,” version that hid alternative accounts, challenges to the powerful, or even mundane, widely shared practices and understandings that contradicted informants' conscious beliefs about what they were doing.

Yet to ignore the force of culture (in something like the old sense) is also problematic, if culture is not limited to official representations but includes shared understandings of all sorts as well as the publicly observable objects and events from which these understandings are learned.