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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
When henry nash smith defined American Studies in 1957 as “the study of American culture past and present, as a whole,” he summarized more than two decades of a wide-ranging and self-conscious critical analysis of culture in the United States and, at the same time, initiated the search for the unified or holistic “method” through which American Studies would, finally, achieve maturity as an (interdisciplinary) discipline. The 1930s were the decade when, as Warren Susman pointed out years ago, the complexity of American culture as well as the culture concept were discovered and discussed in the wider public. We think of the work of cultural anthropology, of the studies in cultural relativism by Margaret Mead or of patterns of culture by Ruth Benedict that emphasized the unity of cultures and often were written with a self-critical look at American culture in mind. What was, however, even more important was the fact that during the 1930s American culture manifested itself as a multiculture, as a culture that was characterized even more by variety, heterogeneity, tensions, and alternative traditions than by the strong drive toward national identity and consensus. Cultural anthropologists, critics, and (“documentary”) writers such as “native anthropologist” Zora Neale Hurston, Constance Rourke, or James Agee (with photographer Walker Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) worked out radical new methods and strategies of cultural critique and ethnographic writing in the study of American cultures, in the plural. Thus, historian Caroline F. Ware, writing for the American Historical Association in The Cultural Approach to History, could argue in 1940 that the “total cultural approach” does by no means imply that American culture is something like an organic unity, but that “American culture” is exactly the multiplicity of regional, ethnic, and class cultures and the interactions of these cultures in terms of rhetoric as well as of power, not some “common patterns” or the Anglo-Saxon tradition the “other” groups have to “contribute” to.
1. For a discussion of Matthiessen's and Ware's work and the early context of American Studies, see my essay “American Studies and the Radical Tradition: From the 1930s to the 1960s,” Prospects 12 (1987): 21–58.Google Scholar
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The critics of Writing Culture often focus on Stephen Tyler's highly evocative and dense contribution and base their polemic on an understanding of postmodernism as an “anything goes” playful arbitrariness that has nothing to do with the notion of postmodernity developed in the work of Clifford, Marcus, Rabinow et al. This also applies to some of the feminist critiques discussed below.
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