The Issues

In the following conversation, the participants, who come from several professional fields, discuss their respective understandings of culture. In the course of their remarkable discussion, they cover most of the basic issues about the concept of culture. We will have occasion throughout the book to draw on their insights.

Clyde Kluckhohn & William H. Kelly, The Concept of Culture, inThe Science of Man in the World Crisis 78–106 (Ralph Linton ed., 1980)

the lawyer: At the last meeting of this little discussion group of ours, we got into quite an argument about “culture” as a technical term in anthropology – exactly what anthropologists mean by it and whether it is any use or not. The big dictionaries and even the anthropological books here in the club library didn't help us out very much. We did gather that the anthropological conception, like all the other scientific and popular usages, carries with it an implication of human interference, of something being added to, or altered from, a state of nature. But we found ourselves wishing that we could ask questions which might clear up points which were sidestepped or simply not discussed by these formal statements. We therefore prevailed upon you gentlemen to come here and let us put you on the spot.