Our discipline was arguably founded to understand the concept of culture. And yet, over the last fifty years, culture is a formulation that has fallen out of favor in anthropological circles. This is a paradox indeed. How did we arrive at a juncture where the very subject that we study is out of fashion? But we have created an unnecessary conundrum. Let us take a step back, inhale a deep breath, and see if we can rechart our course.

Today I want to trace the genealogy of our distinguished hallmark method – the one we came up with to study that construction of culture: ethnography. We might differ on the extent to which ethnography is anthropology's to claim, or whether it matters if ethnography belongs to our discipline or is a method that is more widely used in the social sciences and even humanities, but I am inclined to call it our own. Ethnography as it has been practiced for the last century is our discipline's great innovation, our superlative methodological tool. Others may borrow it, as well they should, but in good faith they should recall where it comes from: sociologists; behavioral scientists; mass marketers; public policy experts; students of law, finance, journalism, business; education experts; development experts; geographers – all of them claim to do ethnography. But ethnography proper is ours, and I would argue that what we do with it is unique in our intent to describe, explain, and consider the dimensions of culture in action. In anthropological hands, ethnography does not simply mean “fieldwork” or conducting “qualitative interviews,” or even living with informants, for a few weeks or months, to participate and observe. It means immersing oneself within the rhythms and the pacing, the meanings and the logics, of a specific cultural setting – whether “someone else’s,” if you will, or one's “own,” perhaps, but with new lenses – so that we can know what life looks and feels like in situ.

Much as we may debate subjectivity and objectivity; presentation, representation, and self-representation; the third-person or the first-person; contestation and translation; or the epistemology of the “other,” no serious anthropologist has ever doubted the sheer and incomparable capacity of ethnography as a method to understand a cultural lens, in the sense of an on-the-ground context.

We began this series by reviewing the way comparison set up the beginnings – and perhaps the limits – of our discipline, anthropology. We then moved to the history, and indeed the myth, of ethnography, our mainstay method. In the last lecture we considered the importance of historical diachronism as a key element in the production of social – we might bravely say “cultural” – forms, and what I like to call cultural flows. But where are we with regard to culture itself, that contested term? Can we recuperate the concept of culture from its embattled terrain? And if so, how might we productively define it in such a way that we avoid the pitfalls that led many in our discipline to challenge – even discard – the word in the first place?

Over the past half-century, we have encountered a series of critiques of the concept of culture that explains why we have tried to leave it behind. For starters, it sounds fixed; it sounds narrow; it sounds bounded. Lila Abu-Lughod has eloquently argued that the concept “tend[s] to overemphasise coherence” (1991: 146); Sherry Ortner points to “the problem of essentialism” in the attribution of qualities attached to human collectives (2006: 12). Kuper worries not only that we have “endow[ed] it with explanatory power,” but also that the conflation of the concept of culture with ideas of identity, especially in a political climate where nationalism is on the rise, makes it unsuitable for anthropological use at all (1999: xi). Together these constitute a good set of reasons for why anthropology might consider being a post-culture discipline altogether.

And yet I am suggesting that we reject the idea of culture at our peril. My argument in this book is that we bring culture back into our disciplinary conversation, not in the form that we knew it – singular cultures attached to singular places – but as the living, active process through which we as humans, invariably as part of collectives, come to see and act in the world. The process of human perception means that that which we see (or experience, or feel, or understand) is always and only through such a lens: there is no other way to perceive. That is why we need to continue to grapple with culture as part of the human condition: it is integral to what makes us human.

This week we turn to the subject of history, or more precisely, to the subject of time. Rather than speaking about the formal – or even the conceptual – relation between the disciplines of anthropology and history, my comments today are offered in the spirit of Barney Cohn's famous book, An Anthropologist among the Historians (1987): I am thinking about anthropology in a relaxed conversation with history, in order to evoke different ways that we can think about – and use – the arc of history in anthropology. My intention is partly to emphasize the importance of history and historiography, alongside mythography or even, perhaps, what I might call mythopoeiography, the process of the production of myth, in our discipline. But more importantly, it is to consider the concept of time, and specifically how historical trajectories – let us call them cultural flows, or cultural pasts – can be traced or tracked in a particular cultural milieu. My contention is that anthropology is uniquely capable of understanding how what Geertz called “symbolic action” or “symbolic formulations” (1973: 27; 120) can, over time, come to constitute a particular landscape that we are researching in the contemporary moment. Those “systems of symbolic meaning” (49) have led us to where we are today, and anthropology can research both the past and the present through a lens that accommodates such temporal flow.

My discussion of “history” is thus not an archival one as such (cf. Dirks 2001, 2015). I am interested instead in the way we map cultural flows that evolve or develop over time, and how we can use those cultural genealogies – genealogies of ideas; of symbolic nexuses; of praxis and ideology – to help us understand the contemporary formations of social worlds. In short, I am talking about the social – and the historical – construction of the present. To understand the ways ideas have been transmitted and inherited – not in a fixed way, but in a dynamic one – is part of what anthropology must undertake if we are to uncover how they come to be seen as natural.

My genealogy of our discipline in these lectures is not unlike the kind of genealogy I am suggesting is productive for the study of any cultural mode of thought.

Thank you so much for the invitation to be this year's Jensen Lecturer: it is a great honor to be here at Goethe University and in particular at the Frobenius Institute. And it is a great pleasure, too, to be with old friends and new here in Frankfurt: I have only recently arrived but I am glad to be both at the Institute and in this city, which I have seen sparkling in the distance. I know that the Frobenius Institute has long been at the heart of the intellectual and ethnographic aspects of Frankfurt's cultural offerings.

I am especially pleased to give a set of lectures named for Adolf Ellegard Jensen. In the context of these distinguished named lecture series, it is customary to spend a few moments on the accomplishments and legacy of the person for whom the series is named. Usually the lecturer then moves on to the topic at hand, after some brief niceties and an appropriate homage to a figure of old. But I hope you will excuse me if I spend a little more time with A. E. Jensen than lecturers normally do: I have come to know the work of Jensen over the past few months, and I have become quite charmed by him; Jensen's work is highly significant to the material we consider in the study of religion today. As the advertisers of his most important work, Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples (1963 [1951]), put it at the time, Jensen's “sympathetic and richly documented” text is able to “demonstrate the importance of anthropology for the study of comparative religion.” Myth and Cult was published in German in 1951, and translated into English in 1963, but, unfortunately, it soon fell out of fashion: it has not been taught even in Germany in decades. And yet, to my eye, the intellectual project is one whose pertinence powerfully endures after almost seventy years.

So let us begin with a little excavation. In 1951, Jensen takes up the mid-twentieth-century question of religion, and shows how we, as anthropologists, can contribute to studying it. Significantly, he asks both what qualities religion has – that is, what qualities of humanity religion displays – and what form, or forms, religion takes over time.

For much of its 150-year-old history, anthropology has been a discipline of the human sciences that has at least implicitly sought the definition of culture. The way we have traditionally set upon our search has been to gather materials from multiple places and times with the tacit presumption that lining them up, or looking at them in comparative relief, would give us a greater knowledge, and maybe even a definition, of culture in its many permutations. For it was culture – the material, embodied (as well as conceptual and verbal) lens through which life is perceived, experienced, and navigated – that we knew to be at the base of collective human existence. Our assumption was that, if we could collect as many examples of its operations on the ground as possible, we could better understand the whole, that great human phenomenon of culture.

And yet “culture” is a contested term if ever there was one. As our discipline has developed, and deepened, we have learned that culture is curiously resistant to definition, both in the singular – “culture” – and in the plural – “cultures.” Cultural meaning has the extraordinary capacity to mean many things to many people, and even to ourselves as individuals over the course of our lives; it is both necessarily fragmented and that which enables coherence. Poke and prod as we might, it seemed that we could not find a way to reconcile our search for the general in perennially expanding investigations of the particular. Everything humans think or do might be culture, or cultural, and yet the more we tried to pin down the concept of culture, the more it eluded our grasp.

This book emerged out of a set of four lectures that together took up the question of our disciplinary search for the meaning of culture through the lens of method. There are innumerable histories of anthropology, and this text is not intended as another: it is rather a reflection on the genealogies – the lineages – of the methods of anthropology, and an enquiry into the historical relation of our subject to the way we have studied it.