Rethinking Culture: A Project for Current Anthropologists [and Comments and Reply]

Author(s): Paul Bohannan, John Blacking, Bernhard Bock, Benjamin N. Colby, Jules
DeRaedt, David G. Epstein, J. L. Fischer, Gutorm Gjessing, Gordon W. Hewes, Thomas H.
Hay, E. Markarian, Michel Panoff, David M. Schneider and William J. Voight
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Oct., 1973), pp. 357-372
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 14, No. 4, October 1973
Copyright 1973 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
Rethinking Culture:
A Pro ject for Current Anthropologists 1
by Paul Bohannan
CULTURE AS AN IDEA iS so simple-and, as it is proving,
so revolutionary-that it is difficult to reassess. The
task I have set myself-and, through the device of
CA- treatment, have set the profession-is to exam-
ine the parts of anthropological culture that interfere
with our understanding of culture and to seek some
way of overcoming these obstacles. I shall begin with
a summary of the problems inherent in the use of
the concept of culture. I shall then put forward the
concept of the "cultural pool," which is like the gene
pool, but no mere analogy. I shall next suggest that
culture is coded in memory, in behavior, in materials,
in language, in art, writing, and computers, and that
the most important thing about culture is that it is
always encoded twice-once within the human being,
in electrical and chemical form, and once outside
the human being in some other form. It is the fact
that anthropology must encompass such double cod-
ing that has given it the appearance of being a mass
of specialties tied together only by the vagaries of
tradition-when in fact bioanthropology at the one
extreme and archaeology at the other are necessarily
both in the same "department" because they are both
dealing with the same phenomenon of double coding.
Then I shall discuss the "cultural tradition" as a
PAUL BOHANNAN is Standley G. Harris Professor of Social Science
and professor of anthropology and education at Northwestern
University. Born in 1920, he was educated at the University
of Arizona (B.A., 1947) and at Oxford University (B.Sc., 1949;
Ph.D., 1951). He taught at Oxford (1951-56) and at Princeton
(1956-59) before joining the faculty at Northwestern in 1959.
His research interests are American institutions and American
ethnic backgrounds. His principal publications are Justice and
Judgment among the Tiv (London: Oxford University Press,
1956), Tiv Economy (with Laura Bohannan; Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1968), Africa and Africans (2d edition,
with Philip Curtin, New York: Doubleday, 1971), Social Anthro-
pology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), and
Divorce and After (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
The present paper, submitted in final form 29 ix 71, was
sent for comment to 50 scholars, of whom the following
responded: John Blacking, Bernhard Bock, Benjamin N. Colby,
Jules DeRaedt, David G. Epstein,J. L. Fischer, Gutorm Gjessing,
Thomas H. Hay, Gordon W. Hewes, E. Markarian, Michel
Panoff, David M. Schneider, and William J. Voigt. Their
comments are printed after the text and are followed by a
reply from the author.
Vol. 14 - No. 4 *
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sensible way of looking at "cultures" and the problems
the "s" has created. Finally, I shall examine some
of the implications of all this for ethnography, for
what anthropologists have always rather imprecisely
called "comparison," and for the study of evolution.
PROBLEMS IN THE USE OF THE "CULTURE"
CONCEPT
One problem in the use of the concept of "culture"
is a tendency for anthropologists simultaneously to
define culture and to investigate it. At the beginning
of a study, it is necessary to delimit the area of
investigation, and often this is stated not in terms
of what is left out, but rather what is put in. Such
a preliminary definition often blinds the scholar to
important dimensions of the subject under consider-
ation. It is fine to define culture in examining person-
ality or natural resources, but one must be more
circumspect in examining culture itself. And a whole
book of definitions (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952)
will help us to perceive new problems only if it can
be used to prevent our doing something that has
already been done. To define what one is examining
should never amount to more than being specific
about what one excludes. Anthropologists for a
hundred years have allowed their definitions, as
assumptions, to get in the way of their examining
their very question.
Although most anthropologists define culture for
themselves, eschewing or carping at all others, almost
no one says that what somebody else calls culture
is not culture. (The only case I have discovered is
that what Edward T. Hall calls "out-of-awareness
culture" is sometimes declared not to be culture at
all.) One may say that so-and-so does not "understand
the culture concept"-but that means that one dis-
agrees with him on which components of the defini-
tion ought to be emphasized. That every anthro-
pologist wants to explain culture in his own way should
'George Dalton, Laura Bohannan, Donald Stone Sade, and
Malcolm Whatley were of great help in the thinking stages of
this study. Several of my colleagues at Northwestern read drafts
and offered useful advice.
October 1973 357
not be taken to mean that anthropologists "disagree"
about what culture "is," but rather that we are talking
about a situation so wide and so general that clarity
does not depend on definitional limitation.
Almost anything human could be, and at some
point has been, used as the basis for a definition
of culture. A definition of culture may stress its
biological foundation or view it as a prosthesis to
enlarge biological capacity and increase the effec-
tiveness of any activity. Here we are faced with the
apparent (but only apparent) paradox that the capac-
ity for culture is biological, but culture itself is not
biological. A definition of culture may emphasize the
senses-the fact that man perceives in terms of certain
logical and emotional categories, usually described
as "learned" (certainly too broad a concept when one
investigates culture closely). Definitions of culture as
communication are numerous and varied; culture is
often called the code (a little different from what
I said above, which is that it is coded). Definitions
of culture as a medium of social transactions and
definitions of culture as value are just as numerous.
All these criteria and many more are often run
together, an "s" added to smuggle in still another
point, and it is said that we pick up our mother
culture as we do our mother tongue-that learning
one "culture" means that we do not learn others (the
limit is probably four or five for all but quite excep-
tional people). We note that the human creature is
''programmed" to learn language and culture-feats
that have little to do with intelligence and nothing
whatever to do with specific languages or specific
cultural traditions (unless, of course, somebody can
prove that a cultural tradition can create the genotypes
it requires).
On the other hand, social scientists can ignore
culture. Like Durkheim, they can make it disappear
into "collective representations." Like Parsons, build-
ing on Durkheim, they can make it disappear into
"expectations." Like Chapple and Coon (1942), they
can make it disappear into a veritable thesaurus of
substitutes. Indeed, like middle-period Radcliffe-
Brown, they can make it disappear and simply leave
a hole.
Perhaps most telling of all, the anthropological
concept of culture has got so far and so deep into
the cultural tradition of the Western world that it
has ousted other meanings of the word. No more
than a century ago, "cultured" meant only "cultivat-
ed." But, in America at least, social studies in the
schools have brought the anthropological definition
to so many people that all other definitions have
more or less disappeared. Everybody knows what
culture is!
A second difficulty, related to the defining diffi-
culty, has already been mentioned in passing. An-
thropologists acquiesced in the early 20th century
when the "s" was added to "culture" and the emphasis
transferred from culture to cultures. I have no com-
plaint about studying cultures-but I am nevertheless
convinced that many anthropologists have thought
they were studying the same thing in the plural as
in the singular, because of the similarity of terms.
A culture is no mere subset of culture, but a different
358 C U RR E NT
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order of abstraction entirely.
Third, because linguistics is rightly considered by
some anthropologists to be way ahead of the rest
of us, culture has for decades now been examined
in either conscious or unconscious analogy to linguis-
tics. Language and material culture are, obviously,
among the most important manifestations of culture.
Linguistics has thrived-indeed, has outgrown the
anthropological mold-while interest in material cul-
ture has waned except among archaeologists.
Another movement in modern anthropology has,
at best, left culture a great unknown: the school of
culture and personality has sought hypothetical con-
nections between two black boxes-insofar, at least,
as its practitioners define what culture is and what
personality is.
And that statement brings us full circle-back to
the problem of definition. Culture is a black box
for most anthropologists. We define culture by what-
ever purpose we ascribe to it in our theorizing, and
are hence allowed to continue on our way without
examining it. Anyone who needs a black box named
culture in order to carry out his activities should
have it. But one man's black box is another man's
field of investigation.
As Stocking (1963) has pointed out, "culture" was
adapted in the late 19th century from German sources
and from the concepts that Matthew Arnold and other
humanists were devising in the field of literature.
In those days, culture was a part of the humanities,
museums were the paramount sites for anthro-
pologizing, and the "cultivated" man listed and even
counted his accomplishments. With the shift, every
catalogable item in a museum came to be considered
an "element" of culture. So was each mark of one's
being"cultured." Moreover, every discernible charac-
teristic of each item came also to be called, by others
or even by the same scholar, an element of culture.
So did every aspect of accomplishment.
The idea of the culture trait was thus soon and
readily applied to items in museum cases and to all
human activities and ideas. Once the pieces had been
recognized, there were obviously at least three kinds
of questions that could be asked about them: (1) where
they came from and how they got that way; (2) how
the various elements found together in fact fit to-
gether; and (3) in what ways elements from different
parts of the world resemble one another. Thus, on
the one hand, several elements that fit together, or
perhaps were merely found together, became culture
complexes, or clusters, or some other such grouping
word. Ultimately this viewpoint led to the idea of
"cultures as wholes." On the other hand, almost as
soon as the culture concept was born, the infant
science of anthropology turned to "comparison,"
which, among other things, means counting and
statistically treating culture elements.
Three sets of people were, and still are, happy
with this arrangement: the museum workers, the
cultural geographers (including those anthropologists
who work on distribution studies of cultural elements),
and the statistical cross-cultural surveyors. But every-
body else was more or less discommoded. An exercise
in mass definition began, so that everybody could
AN TH ROPOLOG Y
use the new concept for his own purposes.
The "original" definition of culture, that of Tylor
(187 1:1 )-"that complex whole which includes knowl-
edge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other
capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member
of society"-assumed the trait frame of reference.
Then Tylor's successors expanded the field with the
idea that "cultures" are "wholes" and that every trait
is affected by every other trait. Only a truism had
been added. Of course everything connects at one
level or another. The statement is not merely true,
it is trite-and it was trite when it was first made.
It led to the "lifted out of context" discussion. When
a trait is lifted out of context, obviously something
of interest about it is lost-but one is in a position
to study its relationship to its context. One can,
thereupon, see that the "trait" is a part of the analytical
system-that the idea of "trait" is necessary to the
study of culture, but scarcely to its existence. A trait,
so conceived, can exist in more than one context.
What it can never meaningfully be is totally without
context. Lifting a trait out of context means no more
than going from one basic problem-the ethno-
graphic problem, in which everything connects-to
the other basic problem (usually called comparative),
which highlights the fact that "some do and some
don't." The problem is whether the trait is the same
thing in one context as in another-and all anthro-
pologists necessarily worry about context to some
degree.
The most sensible present-day statement about
culture traits that I know is that of Schneider
(1968:1-2): "A unit in a particular culture is simply
anything that is culturally defined and distinguished
as an entity. It may be a person, place, thing, feeling,
state of affairs, sense of foreboding, fantasy, halluci-
nation, hope, or idea. In American culture, such units
as uncle, town, blue (depressed), a mess, a hunch,
the idea of progress, hope, and art are cultural units."
(I would point out, however, that the concept of traits
assumes ''a culture" rather than merely "culture" and
can be used as a black box to connect them.)
Schneider goes on to say that cultural units or traits
can be analyzed into smaller units and combined into
larger units, and that objective existence is no criterion
for whether or not a cultural unit exists. In his
example, a ghost and a dead man are separable and
differentiated cultural units, and the fact that one
can be pointed to in materiality and the other cannot
is beside the point. He also points out that some
cultural units have single-lexeme names and others
do not, and that there is no "minimal unit" of culture.
I shall suggest below that neither is there a "maximal
unit," not even "a culture." Rather, there are units
combined into units. It is the nature of culture that
the "whole" is not greater than, less than, or equal
to the sum of its parts; it is the same as its parts.
And that, as we shall see, lies behind the difficulty
of "a culture."
Another way that anthropologists used to try to
get around the difficulty of the definition of culture
was by adding criteria, thus making the definition
more complicated. The addition of "learned" (to
replace Tylor's more ambiguous "acquired by man")
Vol. 14 No. 4 October
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Bohannan: RETHINKING CULTURE
is a case in point. Under the impact of early learning
theory, anthropologists came to realize, at a new level,
that culture was learned. This addition hides more
than it reveals. Acquisition of culture is scarcely a
mere "learning" process, unless we define learning
simplistically and residually as some way other than
genetic encoding of creating a systematic information
source that leads to behavior. After all, no matter
how much he may resist learning certain culture traits,
a human being can't help learning, unless there is
some physical or psychic defect. It is true that he
learns one set of traits instead of another-that is
a problem in history, as has often been pointed out.
With the Freudian revolution, culture became, at
one level, equated with superego: again, the matter
was examined by definition, as if the concept of
superego added something to our knowledge of
culture, which it does not. It simply fits culture into
brave new contexts.
All this led to the greatest of all definitional ploys
to get beyond the definition: analogy. And of all
the analogies used to explain culture, probably the
most common, and the most confusing, was the
analogy with what is today linguistics. Because lan-
guage is one of the standard ways for encoding
culture, it is part of culture. Because it can be broken
easily into traits and because it is comparatively easy
to record, it was one of the things about which we
got information. Because of the subtle and still im-
perfectly understood associations between language
and other forms of encoding culture, we came to
take advances in linguistics as models for desirable
advances in our studies of the rest of culture.
Indeed, the language analogy has now become so
commonplace that it is difficult to overcome it. Levi-
Strauss has all but petrified it into permanence for
the present generation. But this only provides greater
reason that the analogy should be questioned. One
must even inquire whether it is sensible to make an
analogy between part of a thing and the whole of
it. For present purposes, I can only say-with what
I recognize as a certain summary quality-that lan-
guage, like material, is a medium that can be used
for encoding culture into a system, but, unlike ma-
terial, it has no existence that is not culturally branded.
Material like stone can carry one set of information
before it is worked and another or additional one
afterwards. Language is different-it is nothing if
not culture. Therefore, culture is not like language;
rather, language is culture.
It seems safe to say that the days of "defining"
culture, as a technical term, are over. If that is the
case, how do we explain it? What do we study? What
the biologists have done with "life" is an instructive
parallel. So long as proto-biologists studied "life" they
worried about making a homunculus in a retort. Since
they began to focus on manageable problems, and
to deal with the challenge of the molecule on the
one hand and of behavior on the other, they have
come close to "making life," realizing that is it now
a general concept so gross as to have little scientific
validity.
1973 359
 The first thing we must do, then, is to reduce
everything about culture that we can to biology or
chemistry (or whatever else we can reduce it to),
just as the molecular biologists reduce some aspects
of life to chemistry. However-so far, at least, and
I do not doubt that it will remain the case-there
would seem to be something left over that we must
seek to explain on a new level. As Durkheim put
it long ago, things must be explained in terms of
themselves. In short, although I think that we must
ultimately explain the matter of culture-in-memory
and perhaps much cultural behavior by biological
means, biology does not in the least help us to explain
culture that is encoded in stone or in writing, or
even (beyond the description of the vocal apparatus)
in language. The code of a pot or of a computer
is not to be found in the biological basis of man-but
both pots and computers, in another form, are bio-
logically encoded in man. The double code is the
secret.
The rest of this paper will set to one side the
question of the biological basis for encoding culture
in memory and behavior. That is a problem I am
not competent to deal with. Anyone who can comment
on it is requested to do so. Rather, I will here deal
with the extrabiotic coding of culture. This is difficult,
because language is behavior and because manipula-
ting material is behavior. But we are not talking about
behavior here: rather, we are talking about culture.
CULTURE AND THE CULTURAL POOL
I noted above that an analogy between a part and
a whole was questionable procedure. But a good
analogy, between two parts of a whole, can clear the
air if nobody takes it too literally. The tactic I propose
here is to use another analogy to explain culture-
analogy with genetics-and then to make the anal-
ogy disappear before an enlarged concept of infor-
mation-based behavior.
Culture traits are analogous to genes in that each
is a repository or locus for encoded information. In
the gene and further in the chromosome, the infor-
mation is encoded chemically; in the trait, the infor-
mation is encoded culturally. Further, in the process
of reproduction, genes from each of two donors
combine to form new chromosomes; just so, in a
social transaction, each party brings certain cultural
items. If they bring the same or complementary
cultural items, the transaction will go smoothly, more
or less according to the expectations (culture traits)
of both.
However, both parties to the social transaction also
engage in many other transactions. Therefore each
has many cultural items available to him that may
not be relevant to the immediate transaction but that,
in the event of a poor fit of the cultural elements
of the two parties to the immediate transaction, he
may drag in. In other words, every person has a
huge "body of culture" on which to call. Most of
360 C U R RE N T
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it remains unused in each of his relationships, and
even more remains unused in each transaction. His
body of culture is a bounded entity only because
it is his. However, from the standpoint of that person,
there is a pool of culture made up of all the culture
of all the persons with whom he is in transaction-and
ultimately, at one remove, with all of the persons
with whom they are in transaction.
The body of culture associated with a person must
have some sort of integrated order, and it has: the
order is manifest in the personality and in the style
in which that person runs his transactions.
As any particular dyad or larger social group
develops or is maintained, the cultural pool from
which it draws its body of culture may get larger
and more inclusive. The body of culture of any
individual or group is a temporal arrangement of
traits from the total cultural pool available, at whatever
remove, to that individual or group.
Put another way, each party (either a person or
a group) brings to each transaction certain cultural
elements, more or fewer of which are shared. Each
chooses, more or less (usually less) consciously, from
among the large or small number of cultural elements
available to him, in order to act. Finally, each makes
modifications in not merely the body of culture
available to both (and hence the body of culture typical
of the relationship of which this transaction is one
manifestation) but also possibly of the cultural pool
itself.
Every social group, in other words, has its own
body of culture-drawn from the pool of cultural
units from which all of its members and all of its
alters draw their bodies of culture. The analogy to
the gene pool and the population of interbreeding
animals is arresting. Just as there are boundaries in
the gene pool, so there are boundaries in the cultural
pool-and this does not mean that some of the same
genes (or cultural units) may not be present on both
sides of a boundary.
Within the cultural pool are to be found bodies
of cultural traits at every level from the person to
the state, from the family household to the United
Nations. The traits are not exclusively encapsulated
within one such body but may be shared by many
bodies, of different sorts, sizes, and complexities.
A cultural item may vary from one context to
another-in a way somewhat similar to the way in
which gene's occur in a number of forms or alleles,
which have similar but not identical sequences of
nucleotides and therefore similar but not identical
functions.
There are, of course, limitations to this analogy.
The genetic plasm of an animal is given at the time
of conception and is, for all practical purposes, not
changeable. The culture item, certainly the complex
culture item, is subject to change constantly through-
out the period of its existence. Cultural bodies form
and reform. Any critic can obviously find more
limitations and many more ways in which the analogy
is faulty-but an analogy can never be more than
a vivid mode of exposition and can never prove
anything about the topic at hand. The analogy is
a useful one in spite of limitations.
AN TH ROPO LOG Y
CULTURE AS DOUBLE-CODED INFORMATION Bohannan: RETHINKING CULTURE
The association of culture with genetics is no mere
analogy. At another level, genetics and culture are
two parts of a single process.
In the course of evolution, it has proved efficient
for some of the information necessary to an animal
not to be encoded in the genes. In the processes of
maturation and maintenance, which are indeed coded
in the genes, there are certain pieces of behavior
the normally functioning animal must perform. The
animal with a genetic capacity for what is too often
merely called learning, but which includes some
process for turning the electrical processes of percep-
tion and action into some form, presumably chemical,
of encoded "storage" mechanism, can perform as well
as one that has the information genetically encoded.
Indeed, it would seem that the animal with a learning
device can make do with a somewhat simpler genetic
mechanism, and can achieve more.
In such animals, in other words, coded information
comes in two forms: genetic and (for lack of a better
word at the moment) cultural. The equipment for
learning and storing cultural information is, of course,
as biotic (no matter how different) as that for acquiring
and storing genetic information. Both are, at one
level or another, chemical. But the principles are
different, and the content of some information is coded
genetically and the content of other information is
coded culturally. As we approach Homo sapiens sapiens
on the Linnaean tree, more and more is coded
culturally and relatively less is coded genetically. And
the more information is coded culturally, the greater
the variety of reactions chemical agents such as
hormones can create-the more diencephalon the
animal has, the more his hormones can do for him.
The genetic information received from inheritance
and the cultural information received from experi-
Systems
General Systems Information
Ecosystems Social Intrapsychic Genetically Experientially
Systems Systems
FIG. 1. Some distinctions in systems.
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ence make up a total fund of information in whatever
species we are investigating. Genes and memory bits
are no more than two different ways of storing
information. Probably few animals depend solely on
genetic information; certainly none depends solely
on cultural information.
Some anthropologists will rebel at so broad a use
of the word culture. Indeed, one could use the word
culture for the right-hand member of any distinction
below the term "Information Systems" in figure 1;
in some places, I have been unable to find a sensible
substitute. What is probably the weakest point in the
classification represented in figure 1 is the distinction
between general systems and information systems.
The two sets of systems, both sets of explanations,
cover the same ground, but from different viewpoints.
That is to say, every ecosystem exists in chemically
and experientially encoded forms, in combination.
Social systems and intrapsychic systems are encoded
in the same way, but obviously envelop different
universes. There can be no social system without an
information system. I am not sure whether there
can be an information system without a social or
intrapsychic system, but can conceive that there might
be (Teilhard de Chardin called it the "omega point,"
but I do not wish to follow his reasoning into this
intergalactic void). For the matters we study, the two
kinds of systems are two ways of explaining what
it is we observe.
Information systems contain the information nec-
essary to form general systems but organized in a
far different way from the "product" of that informa-
tion organized as general systems. I shall leave this
point; anyone who can illuminate it (including deny-
ing it) will please do so. In my view, every intrapsychic
system, say, exists in chemically and/or culturally
Systems
Encoded Encoded
Infracultural "Culturally"
Signs Encoded
Out-of- Material Symbols
Awareness Culture
Culture
Language All Other
"Symbolic"
Culture
1973 361
encoded forms; so does every social system or ecosys-
tem. But information systems are of a different
order-they are not closed in the same sense. Every
psyche, every social group, every ecological entity,
needs an information system.
The next distinction on the chart is that between
genetically encoded and experientially encoded in-
formation systems. Two points must be made here:
First, this is more than a mere restatement of the
nature-nurture dichotomy (which in any case is a
false commonsense dichotomy, reinforced by misap-
plication of valid discoveries of learning theory).
Second, the terminology is poor-both are undoubt-
edly "chemical" in one sense of the term, and, if
one goes beyond the individual organism, both may
be experiential. Therefore, to be more precise we
might have to say "DNA-encoded," on the one hand,
and "encoded (whatever the process) in the course
of the experience of the individual animal," on the
other. Will we someday find a chemical that is to
memory what DNA is to genes? Indeed, could it
be DNA?
At the next stage, we must distinguish between
cultural communication and infracultural com-
munication. The most interesting discussion of this
point I know is that by Bateson (1969), in which
he compares animal behavior to dreams as dreams
were understood by Freud.
The next distinction in the paradigm is that among
out-of-awareness culture, material culture, and sym-
bolic culture. This whole area is subject to review-
after all, certainly not all out-of-awareness culture
is nonsymbolic or even nonmaterial, and certainly
cultured creatures evaluate infracultural sign behav-
ior culturally.
Finally, we have a distinction between language
and other symbolic forms, such as art.
In summary, we can say that culture is a mode
of encoding information, as is genetic chemistry.
Culture, then, is manifest in memory, in behavior,
in interaction. But the same information is simulta-
neously encoded in other forms: in speech, in action,
in so-called material culture, in social structure, and
in writing. In these areas, we have culture that is
coded superorganically. That is to say, a language
can, in one sense, exist independent of speakers.
Certainly the artifact, once produced, may exist with-
out a user. Writing makes possible the handing on
of information without social interaction (the feed-
back loops that surround the writer and the reader
usually do not overlap). And once the culture is put
into the computer, then the computer can (so far,
it is true, only at human command) do all sorts of
things with it. The culture, encoded as a "computer
memory" and a "program," can interact with itself
totally outside the chemistry of the animal. This is
information interacting (to use a bad metaphor) with
information. And where it will all stop, none of us
knows. Culture is breaking loose from its biotic matrix.
CULTURE AND THE CULTURAL TRADITION
I have used the term "body of culture" in order
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to explain the relationship of certain entities within
the cultural pool to the cultural pool as a whole.
I wish again to fall back on an analogy to explain
something about this-and then will throw out the
analogy because it is misleading. What I have called
the "body of culture," and what has traditionally been
called "a culture," is, at a superficial level, analogous
to the individual creature, the population, or the
species within the genetic picture.
Because (as a glance at Kluckhohn and Kroeber
1952 shows) to maintain the difference between
culture and a culture without an adjective of some
sort is apparently impossible, I will use the term
"cultural tradition" or just "tradition" for what an-
thropologists have in the past called "a culture."
People will, of course, continue to use "a culture"-I
find I do it myself out of habit. However, when we
are being precise, the distinction can be profitably
maintained, and here I shall be pedantic: when I
say "culture" I (like Humpty-Dumpty) mean culture;
when I say "tradition," I mean what anthropologists
have called 'a culture."
In the past some anthropologists have appeared
to think that cultural traditions were natural units
in the real world. They are not. Whether the anthro-
pologist has chosen a "national" "tribal," or "com-
munity" cultural tradition, whether emic or etic units
(in Pike's ugly neologisms), all too often he has
ultimately had to fall back on more or less arbitrary
decisions. What are the processes in culture, utilizing
traits in the cultural pool, that are like processes that
lead to the concatenation of genetic traits in specific
animals and in populations and in species? What in
culture is analogous to biological speciation? This is
the vital question that is begged by the bland assump-
tion that "cultures" exist in the real world, like
muskrats or gorillas.
A cultural tradition is in some ways like a race.
A race is a genetically very real situation in which
a number of animals share a proportion (which must
be defined) of their genes. There is a second, cultural,
definition of race-a social category to which individ-
uals are assigned on the basis of overt physical
characteristics. The social definition and the genetic
definition may not overlap at all, or may overlap
only very little. A race, in cultural terms, is a category
picked out of the biotic network of human beings,
with boundaries drawn by social forces, too often
out-of-awareness. "A culture" is the same kind of
mistake as the culturally (rather than biologically)
defined race. Out of all the distinctions and repre-
sentations in the world, it is possible to package some
of them, throw them into tribal or national or geo-
graphical or some other such category, and call it
"a culture." We can then count, compute, and come
out with correlations. But are they meaningful? Just?
Relevant? And if so, to what?
A cultural tradition exists only in a given context.
Therefore we had better admit once for all that we
must determine our "cult-units" for the specific prob-
lem in hand, and that the definitions and criteria
will be irrevocably tied to the specific problem, overtly
rather than covertly. To put it another way, the
"sampling" procedure is even more complex than
AN T H ROPOLOG Y
has been thought by students of cross-cultural surveys
(Naroll 1970).
The efficacy of this viewpoint can be underscored
by a look at the subculture problem. The idea of
subculture is another device for reifying the cultural
tradition of a group of people. Every group, of
whatever size, of whatever composition, has a cultural
tradition. To freeze one or more levels of cultural
tradition into a "subculture" for any purpose, other
than for a specific problem, is to miss the most
important thing about it. The question inevitably
arises, how do subcultures make up "whole" cultures?
The sad thing is that our terminology, definitions,
and concepts have brought us to the point that we
have had to consider this a good question.
This idea can be stated more simply in terms of
social relations. Every transaction draws its own body
of culture from the cultural pool. The parties to the
transaction call first on the culture that both already
know. In a short-term dyadic relationship such as
buying a pack of cigarettes in a drugstore, there are
adequate representations on both sides so that mini-
mal adjustment need be made. (Indeed, one role
can be played by a machine.) However, if the dyad
persists for any duration of time, the people playing
the roles in it may themselves create, from the cultural
pool, a relationship that is unique to them. Further,
among human beings at least, familiarity breeds not
just contempt but playfulness. Those animals with
the most culture obviously play culturally-and, ulti-
mately, they play with culture. One way to do this
is to expand the body of culture within any given
relationship. They seek new relationships to learn
to manipulate new culture; they confound past tradi-
tions by creating new combinations. The improvisa-
tion leads, with repetition, to private interactional
patterns-like private jokes. The cultural script for
any dyadic relationship may change (but, of course,
may not), and after a good joke may never be the
same again.
In a relationship as relatively permanent and as
relatively rich as marriage, a great many of the
traditional aspects of the relationship are not shared
by other people in analogous relationships (although
none may be alien to the cultural tradition writ large).
To go on, children are born into families. Because
they are programmed to pick up culture, they pick
up the particular cultural tradition of their particular
family; some of them spend the rest of their lives
repeating it, others the rest of their lives getting over
it. However, each family has a tradition, and within
each community, even a homogeneous community,
there are many family traditions. As the number of
types of group increases, the number of traditions
for each type increases, and style enters in-so that
in complex societies, the number of traditions be-
comes all but infinite.
The pool, all this time, has changed little. There
may have been a few additions and deletions: muta-
tions and gene loss, as it were. But fundamentally
no two relationships are quite alike for the same
reason that no two people are alike. Identical twins
may start with the same genetic equipment, but
culturally coded input makes them significantly dif-
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Bohannan: RETHINKING CULTURE
ferent once for all. It is the same with social relation-
ships.
A cultural tradition is an entity only in the sense
that a lineage in a lineage system is an entity. (This
particular image may be an inept one, considering
the fact that the principle of the lineage system has
proved so simple as to be difficult for some social
anthropologists to grasp. However, it is vivid, and
I think accurate.) There are many cultural traditions,
all latent in the cultural pool, that are ready to be
utilized whenever the situation requires them. Each
specific social group, at each specific time and place,
activates the relevant parts of its cultural tradition
out of the greater reservoir of traits and ideas. The
similarity to Redfield's Great Tradition and Little
Tradition can be illustrative if we do not take it too
literally. We might see the tradition of a larger unit
as the Great Tradition, or "greater tradition." Indeed,
every complex situation can be viewed as made up
of many traditions, all coexisting and simultaneous.
The error comes when we try to make one tradition
a part of another tradition, losing sight of their
coexistence.
A group may participate in a more inclusive social
system, in terms of a greater tradition. Groups with
similar traditions interact and in the process form
still greater traditions. Which traditions are para-
mount in any given situation is dependent on who
is involved in that situation and their purposes.
It is possible to pull out entities. We must do so
every time we make up our minds to act, every time
we want to write an ethnographic monograph, every
time we create a sample for comparative studies. Yet
the entities are only situational variants. Each person
uses, knows, or participates in a lot of culture traits.
The cultural tradition of any marriage contains a
lot of things that are part of the cultural tradition
of many other marriages in the same social space,
but a lot that are not. The cultural tradition of one
university shares many traits with those of other
universities in its reference group and rather fewer
with those of colleges and universities it chooses not
to include in its reference group. The cultural tradi-
tion of each community is different from those of
other communities in other parts of the country. All
result from more or less (usually less) conscious
decisions about which traits to lift out of the cultural
pool, with occasionally a new idea or a new social
form being invented, to be added to the pool and
hence made available to other communities for their
cultural traditions.
All this is straightforward. It becomes difficult only
when we try to bring it all together in morphological
terms-to show how the traditions of the family, the
community, the university, and the policy fit together,
as parts, into some kind of a single "culture." Anthro-
pologists have, in the past, by studying exotic and
isolated situations, managed to persuade themselves
that there is such a thing as "a culture." It isn't so.
The moment you get to an admittedly complex
situation (all are complex, but some are more complex
than others), this becomes evident. What is "American
October 1973 363
culture"? What indeed! At one level, it might be the
cultural tradition of the federal government of the
United States. At another, it might be the body of
cultural traits most often found in American person-
alities and social groups. Whatever it is, it is in a
constant state of flux, and-very important-many
(perhaps most) of the traits in it are part of a wider
pool, a pool shared not only by, for example, Greeks
and Italians (from whom we got some of our myths),
Englishmen (from whom we got the basic concepts
behind our government and laws), and Poles (from
whom we got our Copernican view of the solar
system), but also, in varying ways and degrees, by
Africans, Chinese, and Australian Aborigines. Today
the relatively isolated cultural pools of a few centuries
ago are all flowing together, and the capacity to regard
the tradition of any group as "a culture" is being
undermined.
The point is a tactical one. In one sense, anybody
has a right to define a term for a specific problem.
To do so is shortsighted, however, if in the general
language the term has additional meanings known
to all. Such a definition has what Empson (1951)
calls a "negative pregnancy," which means using a
term more narrowly than it is used in ordinary
language. There is a tendency for all the other
dimensions of meaning in the common parlance to
be slipped back in, often unconsciously, by the reader.
The difficulty with the idea of "a culture" is simple:
as is so often the case in behavioral science, we have
thought in terms of morphological categories and
their classification. Surely, none of us would argue
that such a procedure is anything other than a
stopgap. The next step is to understand the principles
better.
ETHNOGRAPHY, COMPARISON, AND
EVOLUTION
This way of looking at culture-as doubly coded,
once chemically in the brain as memory, once exter-
nally as language or behavior or material or docu-
ment; as a pool from which individuals and groups
draw or are given certain traits organized for their
purposes by knowable principles-provides a new
freedom for all branches of anthropology. Culture
is a vital element in evolution (to say merely that
cultural and biological evolution are intertwined is
to misunderstand the principle). Cultural traditions
at any level are the subjects for ethnography. And
"comparative studies" can be undertaken at any level
of social and cultural complexity-whether the units
to be compared are families, nations, or any other
unit-so long as the unit is adequately defined and
the suitability of comparison adequately spelled out.
This means that we can adjoin sociology, fusing some
types of comparative studies with statistical studies
of traits in small groups; that we can cooperate with
political science in doing comnparative studies of vast
power systems; that we can join psychoanalysis in
studying the culture of an individual, or of a selected
few individuals or institutions.
Thus, ethnography comprehends the culture asso-
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ciated with any social relationship or any concatena-
tion of social relationships into groups, no matter
how complex. One can study a family, as Lewis (1961)
did (although in my opinion his work illustrates our
need for a more overt theoretical base for ethnog-
raphy). One can study the cultural traditions of a
dyad or those of any other group. Ethnography, as
a method, will spread out to all disciplines and join
the other methods already present. The techniques
of doing ethnography will change with the complexity
of the social organization and the variability of choice
of culture open to members of the group.
Comparative studies-and surely it is time to dis-
cover another name for these-can, like Whiting,
Kluckhohn, and Anthony's (1958) study of sleeping
arrangements, on the one hand, or statistical studies
made from census data such as Shevky and Bell's
(1955), on the other, be given a new dimension with
this simplified culture concept. We cannot compare
traits in morphologically false entities; we can,
however, compare the organization of traits in many
different kinds of processes. The basis of comparabil-
ity must be selected and worked out for each problem.
We are not stuck with the "cultures" of the World
Ethnographic Sample or the Ethnographic Atlas,
although we can continue to use them for suitable
purposes. These are, of course, the best mousetraps
built so far, but the assumption that they are more
"real" than some other units must be carefully exam-
ined and, in my opinion, abandoned. It is also evident
that whether the community we happen to have
studied is "typical" of the "culture" as a "whole" is
a problem without substance, forced on us by our
belief that "cultures" are somehow natural units. I
am not, of course, saying that such units not be
compared-only that to take them as the standard
unit is to misunderstand the cultural processes.
Evolution is the area in which the idea is most
immediately useful, for the new model permits us
to see culture no longer as limited to the human
species, but as an integral part of animal life and
evolution in the broadest sense. It allows us to look
at both the cultural tradition (based in history) and
culture (based in genetics and information flow). We
can then examine, overtly, the way in which history
and genetics and what is usually called human devel-
opment are all, as Bateson (1969) puts it, in the same
basket.
Whatever else it may be, evolution is a process
for selecting and manipulating information that is
both chemically and culturally encoded. As the genetic
capacity for culture increases, the amount of infor-
mation that has to be genetically encoded can be
reduced, and the simpler creature is more efficient.
This means that the cellular and genetic material
can be simplified the very while behavior becomes
more complex. The evolved capacity for culture
means that more choices are open to a creature-that
his very hormones will do more for him. And there
lies the irony; for the capacity to choose, like any
other animal capacity, is neutral-it may lead to
survival or to extinction-but it does lead to caring
about the outcome.
Boas spent a lifetime promulgating the proposition
AN TH ROPO LO G Y
 that what is here described as the overt content of
the genetic information and the cultural information
are independent of one another-that any genetically
normal human being can learn any cultural informa-
tion. Anthropologists have, however, not been content
with that insight. They have insisted that biology and
culture are therefore separable-when what they
meant is that a race and a culture are separable.
Both "a race" and "a culture" have to be given specific
definition to be meaningful. Neither is a natural entity
in the real world (whatever that is), not even to the
extent that a species is such an entity-and biologists
have long known that species are not closed categories.
Rather, once a human being has learned cultural
information, then that cultural information conjoins
with the chemical information in his genes to create
the complete creature. The cultural information can
never be removed; no more can the genetic. That
does not mean that behavior cannot be changed, for
obviously it can. Freud (1900:chap. 7) understood
that "new structure" can be built in a psyche to take
over from old and inadequate structure. But the old
structure remains. That does not mean that every
memory remains. What you had for breakfast on
October 12, 1958, probably cannot be recalled because
it was never translated from electrical to chemical
storage. (In Freudian language, it was never cathect-
ed.) It is information of no value, so it has not been
preserved in the memory. But the structure remains.
New structure is added, and with it effective changes
in behavior are brought about. But, whenever the
new structure fails, the old structure is there to take
over.
Today, we are on the verge of making chemically
coded information subject to new structure and
Bohannan: RETHINKING CULTURE
perhaps to total change. Perhaps we will, in that
process, learn to make total changes in cultural and
memory storage.
In summary, what I am proposing is that we-or
at least some of us-view culture as information that
is doubly encoded. Nothing that is not (or has not
once been) doubly encoded is culture, although ob-
viously what is culture can affect what is not. Culture
has been studied, by anthropological methods, in its
external coding; it has been studied, by psychoanalytic
and physiological methods, in its internal coding. And
philosophers have organized our ignorance about the
way it all fits together.
Abstract
Culture as a concept has not been fully examined
by the profession for some time. This article is a
challenge to carry out this examination. It begins
by discussing problems in the use of the concept
and then goes on to suggest a new way of looking
at culture: as a cultural pool, analogous to the gene
pool (both culture and genes being forms of storing
and retrieving information), from which each indi-
vidual, each dyad, each group draws its particular
body of culture; and as information coded twice, once
in the brain and once externally, in language, stone,
writing, repetitive behavior, and social institutions.
It examines the implications of this view of culture
for ethnography, comparative studies, and the study
of evolution.

Comments
by JOHN BLACKING
Belfast, Ireland. 9 iii 73
I have greatly admired Bohannan's
analyses and arguments in earlier
works, but I am not sure that I follow
him in the present article, and so my
comments may be irrelevant to his
thesis.
I would agree that culture as a con-
cept needs re-examination, especially
in the light of recent discoveries in the
fields of brain function, the biological
foundations of language, paralinguis-
tic communication, transcendental ex-
perience, and so on. But I do not see
how the analogy of a gene pool and
the use of dualistic terminology will
help us to understand what Vico right-
tary Forms of the Religious Life reiterates
ly described as a unitary system almost Vico's insight that people "danced be-
150 years before Tylor.
Our new knowledge of perception
and cognition tends to support Vico's
idea that although human nature
changes according to men's ways of
perceiving and acting in the world,
certain basic cognitive and affective
structures are species-specific. As I
read him, Bohannan also agrees that
culture is not entirely a superorganic
product of the conscious mind that is
learned like the arbitrary rules of a
game. He sees the need to reconcile
those elements which some might call
"the collective unconscious" with the
"experientially encoded" data that an-
thropologists try to record and analyse.
But is it necessary to create an elaborate
dualism to distinguish "culture" from
"cultural tradition" (a culture) when
we already have an impressive theory
to account for the transformation of
animal brain and nervous system into
human mind?
I refer to the theory of Durkheim,
whose secondary theme in The Elemen-
the rhythms of shared and personal
experience. He calls these contrasting
fore they walked, and created poetry
before they created prose." I believe
that it is as wrong to call Durkheim
a conservative as it is to say that he
ignored culture. Some of Durkheim's
followers seem to have assumed that
if society is a system of forces and not
a nominal being created by reason, any
group that calls itself a society must
contain forces that contribute to its
solidarity. But Durkheim himself, like
Marx, surely distinguished between
real and rationalized solidarity, be-
tween societies as they really are and
societies as men conceive them in lan-
guage and institutions.
For Durkheim, the forces of pro-
duction do not generate but pre-
suppose social forces; and the existence
of society as a system of forces is also
a prerequisite of both self-con-
sciousness and conceptual thought.
Durkheim endorses the psychological
argument that "the self is a product
of social interaction" and explains how
concepts grow out of contrasts between
modes of experience "sacred" and
"profane." If these modes are stripped
of their religious connotations, the
"sacred" can be seen as the source of
individuation and social creativity, and
hence of concepts and cultures, and

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the "profane" as the realization of these
discoveries in the form of traditional
institutions. We then have the basis of
a theory of culture that incorporates
the apparently conflicting theories of
Marx and Freud, dispenses with Bo-
hannan's dualism, and satisfies Vico's
criterion of cultures as unitary systems
that men create in society from "mate-
rials" that are in the body and in the
world of nature.
Culture is not simply a device for
"storing and retrieving information"
from which a "group draws its particu-
lar body of culture." Residues there
may well be, both in individual bodies
and in "external" cultural traditions;
but individuals and social groups do
not draw their cultures from a pool,
once and for all, as bodies acquire their
genes at the moment of conception.
Nor, I believe, is cultural information
encoded in the same way as genetic
information. Cultures are not real in
the same way as genes: they have to
be made and re-made by human
groups, whose patterns of interaction
provide both their form and content.
Cultures emerge as unitary systems
because of continuities in social in-
teraction. This is not to deny that in
any one "cultural tradition" the range
of individual behaviour overlaps those
of a hundred other traditions, but to
claim that when individuals interact or
react as groups they tend to conform
to models whose consistency both
emerges from and reflects their social
solidarity. If we see cultures as pro-
cesses rather than products and can
accept the validity of Durkheim's
"sacred" mode of experience as a
source of knowledge, the selection and
manipulation of both chemically and
culturally encoded information is sub-
ject to experiences of social interaction.
We know this to be true of learning
a language and learning to think, and
it may be relevant in cases of marasmus
and autism.
The ideas of Vico and Durkheim
on the subject of culture are rather
well expressed in the world views of
some African and Asian societies. In
rethinking culture, should we not con-
sider the theories of the societies we
study, as well as those of the anthro-
pologists who study them?
by BERNHARD BOCK
Braunschweig, Germany. 2 iII 73
Bohannan justly suggests a common
basis for all sciences of man. "Culture
as doubly encoded information" is his
common denominator for anthro-
pological research. This formal view-
like information theory itself-is com-
parable to structuralism in linguistics.
Both theories, however, are confined
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to transmitting, evaluating, and storing
signs and structures, regardless of their
meanings. Likewise, Bohannan's ex-
plicitly one-sided conception lacks es-
sential traits of culture.
Man not only receives encoded in-
formation, but also flexibly reacts to
concrete situations. Moreover, he "be-
haves," because he divines a meaning
in his life. Through discernment and
creative activity, he masters many dif-
ficulties of his existence and finds ways
of expressing his feelings and thoughts
in art, music, poetry, or philosophy.
Man's experiences are accumulated
and communicated through tradition
and education. But each culture offers
only a selection from all possible
human capacities. Every "pool of cul-
ture" (Bohannan) is, therefore, limited
and subject to losses and changes over
time. On the other hand, new inven-
tions may enrich a culture. Cultures
seem to be a give-and-take affair, an
interaction between the individual and
the society he lives in.
Man can also change his cultural
codes and transform his surroundings.
He communicates not only with
members of his cultural group, in
whose code he participates, but also
with the rest of the world, without
having been encoded for speaking
foreign languages from the beginning
of his life.
As Bohannan points out, anthro-
pologists should keep in mind both
universals of culture and units of cul-
tures.
1. Universals of culture. Starting from
broad definitions, the research worker
should bear in mind the old rule that
"culture" is not always our culture, art
not our art, morality not our morality.
Basic conceptions-even preliminary
and vague ones-need not "blind the
scholar" (Bohannan), but are indis-
pensable as a kind of framework to
be filled out and verified in detail. Such
general conceptions, adjusted and
adapted, will again form the basis of
new fieldwork resulting in new verifi-
cations and a clearer scientific recogni-
tion of cultural units, and so on. Fun-
damental conceptions of culture will
comprise material bases (food, hous-
ing, clothing, arms, instruments), do-
mains (religion, art, law, society, eco-
nomics, communications), and psychic
factors (love, jealousy, envy, hatred,
fear, courage, spirit of sacrifice, nur-
turance).
2. Cultural units. Bohannan refers to
various groups of human beings-
tribe, nation, family, dyad-as bearers
of cultures and subcultures. The an-
thropologist is confronted with a vast
number of cultural units, each (a)
selected out of the multitude of imag-
inable cultural units, (b) structured
T A N T H R
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accordng to the various strata and
domains of culture, and (c) limited in
order to be easily stored and applied.
Cultures, moreover, seem to be so-
called open systems, subject to a con-
stant change which is often nearly
unnoticed.
Though Bohannan's "information"
thesis is fertile and a welcome cause
to reflect critically on the various fields
and methods of anthropological re-
search, in my opinion the conception
of culture should not be reduced to
a formal device. Culture should be
regarded from another point of view
as a dynamic field of creative actions
and achievements.
by BENJAMIN N. COLBY
Irvine, Calif., U.S.A. 10 ii 73
Of the many points of contention over
the usage of "culture," the major one
is whether the locus of culture is in
the mind (in which case we can speak
only of "users" of a culture, rather than
"members of" or "participants in" a
culture) or external to the mind. The
compromise notion of double coding,
once within the human being and once
outside, is attractive until one stops to
think: just how is a pot or a building
a code? In the past my own idiolect
was that culture was a system in the
individual's mind and the term cultural
production referred to the external
manifestations of this mental system.
This is a convenient way of thinking
about it as long as one is working in
cognitive anthropology, but problems
arise when this usage is applied to other
areas of study.
I think the solution is to treat culture
as an unbound variable. In so doing
we ascend to a higher and clearer level
of discussion which avoids most of the
difficulties Bohannan speaks of. When
precise theoretical statements are to be
made, or when experimental or obser-
vational tests must be done, then cul-
ture will have to be bound. Binding
can be done in a series of steps. For
example, the modifications, "Neolithic
culture," "Navaho culture," or "sail-
boat-racing culture" are bindings that
must be further specified, according
to the requirements for precision
imposed by the task at hand.
by JULES DERAEDT
Baguio City, Philippines. 19 ii 73
In reply to the question "how the
traditions of the family, the commun-
ity, and the polity fit together, as parts,
into some kind of a single 'culture,"'
we have long known that cultures are
not consistent units. Geertz, for ex-
ample, has sufficiently called our at-
tention to the existence of "cultural
O P O L O G Y
perspectives." The potential infinity of
definable cultural traditions (in the
author's social-structural framework,
that is) cannot be turned around to
refer all cultural traditions back to a
single cultural pool of global dimen-
sion. The American example is uncon-
vincing and the analogy overdrawn.
The answer to the question "What
in culture is analogous to biological
speciation?" is to be found in the exis-
tence of cultural (and not structural)
boundaries. In support of their exis-
tence I refer to Bernstein's two cate-
gories of speech (Douglas 1970:22),
Evans-Pritchard's problem of transla-
tion, the common ignorance of mis-
sionaries about the culture of the peo-
ple with whom they spend as much
as a lifetime (although some of it does
rub off), and the rare event of true
communication between the experts
(anthropologists) and the people
whose culture they study.
Bohannan's paper does not strongly
reflect the profession's concern with
refinement of its analytical tools as it
tackles more manageable problems.
Notwithstanding the reference to
Schneider (1968), the term "trait"
(and its equivalents in the paper: cul-
tural element, unit, item) is used in
a rather vague manner. To use it to
cover such diverse things as symbols
and social institutions obscures rather
than clarifies the discussion. The term,
abundant elsewhere in the paper,
strangely disappears in the "culture as
double-coded information" section.
Schneider's cultural units are symbols
and not simply traits. He speaks from
a very specific tradition in anthro-
pology that views culture as a system
of symbols and their meanings (Sch-
neider 1968: 1; 1971).
In proposing that we view culture
as information that is doubly encoded,
the author has articulated an impor-
tant aspect of the notion.
by DAVID G. EPSTEIN
New York, N.Y., U.S.A. 2 III 73
Ho-hum. Bohannan would like to be
Talcott Parsons, even if Evanston isn't
Cambridge. For the rest of us, this
Grand Theory Game is a crashing
bore.
The task which Bohannan "set [s]
the profession," no less, leads to no
questions worth asking, nor answers
any. For all his obeisances to evolution,
Bohannan's preoccupation is with fix-
ing a timeless definition of culture like
an etherized butterfly with a pin
through its thorax.
Bohannan discusses at length, for
instance, the arbitrariness of bounda-
ries between units in anthropology, but
he has no proposals to offer about the
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processes transforming them in the
real world. Ethnographic observation
will confirm the increased prevalence
of such units as national states, state
bureaucracies, and multinational
corporations. The Nuer today are in
the aftermath of a separatist civil war;
Papuans approach national "indepen-
dence." State bureaucracies are armed
with helicopters, television, and
computerized torture devices. Multi-
national corporations are treading a
path through primitive stamping
grounds from Central Brazil to Mi-
cronesia. Bohannan's own Tiv have
passed from acephalous autonomy to
colonial dependence to inclusion in a
neocolonial national state. A theoreti-
cally grounded discussion of this last
process would be infinitely more valu-
able than the present folderol.
Abstracted from historical processes,
Bohannan would also abstract culture,
or at least cultural traits, from material
roots as extrasomatic means of ad-
aptation. For example, he adopts
Schneider's emic definition of a
trait: "anything culturally defined and
distinguished." No cultural materialist
and certainly no Marxist denies the
relevance of the "native model": rules,
beliefs, values, symbolism, semantic
structures, and grammars are all grist
for our mill, because they are essential
to human adaptation. But restriction of
the scope of anthropology to such
matters implies neglect of the material
conditions of life (not just "material
culture," as Bohannan would have it),
of the capture and transformation of
energy and materials, production and
reproduction. How does Bohannan
propose to explain the extinction of
some, the transformation and persis-
tence of other, and the origin of new
inforjnation systems, however encod-
ed, except in terms of their adaptive,
i.e., practical, consequences? Bohan-
nan's circular-and idealist-explana-
tions in terms of "who is involved . . .
and their purposes" simply won't wash.
So Bohannan's exercise fails even as
a proposed charter for anthropology's
disciplinary boundary.
Given the onrushing depletion of
supplies of energy and materials for
which present technology is suited and
the fact that dominant social and ideo-
logical arrangements are destroying,
rather than maintaining or expanding,
human productive and creative poten-
tial, our choice is to be either partici-
pant observers of the debacle or obser-
vant participants in the next steps re-
quired for the institution of a more
adaptive pattern. As a tactic deflecting
the increasingly severe risks undertak-
en by those who would examine care-
4 October
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Bohannan: RETHINKING CULTURE
fully the material conditions of life in
the contemporary world, restriction of
research attention to _definitional exer-
cises and to arcane corners of the
cognitive and symbolic domains is per-
haps prudent. But as a scientific strate-
gy aimed at the specification and ex-
planation of sociocultural differences
and similarities, Bohannan's proposal
is sterile. To those of us who wish to
play a part in changing the world as
well as understanding it, it is just an-
other obstructive waste of time.
by J. L. FISCHER
New Orleans, La., U.S.A. 4 iII 73
Rather than repeat points on which
I agree with the author, I will call
attention to some differences of opin-
ion and points which appear to deserve
further development.
Bohannan suggests that a negative
definition ("being specific about what
one excludes") is more suitable than
a positive definition because the latter
may blind the investigator to "impor-
tant dimensions of the subject under
consideration." On the contrary, a
negative definition runs a great risk
of accidentally excluding "important
dimensions" and at the same including
a vast mass of irrelevant material,
namely, everything in the universe
which one has forgotton to specifically
exclude. What is called for at the be-
ginning of a study would seem to be
rather a simple and flexible positive
definition, what I would term a "focal
definition." One should specify that
the concept of culture includes certain
phenomena manifesting certain values
of certain dimensions and leave the
matter open for study as to what the
other characteristics of cultural phe-
nomena are.
I agree with Bohannan that "double
coding" of cultural information is
important, but wish he had gone fur-
ther into its implications. For one
thing, double coding is the means by
which culture is reproduced or trans-
ferred from one organism to another.
But does Bohannan believe that all
double-coded information is culture?
What about nonhuman social animals
which understand each other's acts and
gestures? Bohannan appears to touch
on this only briefly and implicitly in
figure 1, where he distinguishes two
kinds of "experientially encoded in-
tormation systems": "infracultural
signs" and "culturally encoded" infor-
mation. If he believes, along with per-
haps a majority of anthropologists, that
only man has culture, how does he
exclude learned traditions in other
animal species?
1973 367
 Some kind of quantitative definition
of culture may be more useful than
the categorical type of definition Bo-
hannan and nearly all other anthro-
pologists have tried to use. If we define
culture as "persistent, widespread in-
formation dependent on social learn-
ing," then we can measure the degree
of culturality of an item of information
as the product of its persistence in time,
its distribution in society, and the de-
gree to which its presence is dependent
on social learning as distinct from indi-
vidual rediscovery or genetic inheri-
tance. A panhuman mode of locomo-
tion such as walking is both widespread
and persistent but has a low degree
of culturality, since its appearance in
the individual depends mainly on mat-
uration, not on instruction or example.
A fad is highly dependent on social
learning and can be temporarily wide-
spread but likewise has a low degree
of culturality because of its evanes-
cence. A personal idiosyncratic recipe
may persist for a lifetime but is barely
cultural because of its restriction to a
single individual. Whether anthro-
pologists like this definition or not, it
seems to fit what they in fact study
and describe under the label of "cul-
ture." Also, it leaves room for con-
sidering the influence of other factors
-genetic, situational, idiosyncratic-
on human behavior.
by GUTORM GJESSING
Oslo, Norway. 27 ii 73
"Rethinking" seems to have become a
fashionable anthropological sport.
Leach started out with his Rethinking
Anthropology (1961), and Chang fol-
lowed with his Rethinking Archaeology
(1968); now Bohannan is "rethinking"
culture. Rethinking once in a while is
appropriate, because Evans-Pritchard
was deplorably right in his remark:
"Anthropological theory is conserva-
tive!" The "rethinking," however,
should critically analyze our theoretical
basis right down to its positivistic
philosophical premises. Both Leach
and Chang confined their "rethinking"
to the traditional structuralist-func-
tionalist cage.' How fruitful Bohan-
nan's "rethinking" will be only time
will show.
The analogy to gene pool is a new
formulation, but how new is the idea
itself? Most of us will probably agree
that in socioculture nothing is entirely
'Leach, to be sure, proposed thinking
in terms of processes in addition to our
closed categories, but, significantly, topolo-
gical processes. Topology deals with those
properties of figures which remain in-
variant under all continuous deformations.
Consequently, Leach's processual thinking
is limited to system-preserving changes.
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cultural and nothing entirely biologi-
cal. But, of course, a new formulation
may lead to the posing of new and
important problems. What strikes me
as most fruitful is the "double coding."
(Why this cybernetic terminology,
when Wiener [1964] himself strongly
warned us against using cybernetics in
the social sciences?) This duality, which
is no dichotomy but a comple-
mentarity, may be elaborated further
to show the tension between dynamics
and statics within individuals as well
as sociocultures that is necessary to all
change. In a letter to the critic George
Brandes, Henrik Ibsen wrote (Heiberg
1967) :2
The different spiritual functions do not
develop parallel and side by side within one
and the same individual. The acquisitive
drive chases ahead from profit to profit.
The moral consciousness, "the conscience,"
on the other hand, is very conservative. It
is deeply rooted in tradition and, on the
whole, in the past. This causes the individual
conflict.
Since, as Kroeber once remarked,
"culture and society are as inseparable
as the two sides of a sheet of paper,"
we cannot study either culture or soci-
ety in isolation (except, perhaps, in
certain very specific and restricted sit-
uations). Further, we must abandon'
the positivistic philosophy, based on
an outmoded Newtonian, mechanistic
world view, that results in the watch-
work model of socioculture according
to which the cogs work into each other
and so nothing happens at all. If we
are to deal with the tension between
statics and dynamics, we have to apply
a dialectic or, rather, a complementary
way of thinking (Gjessing 1968) within
a holistic framework. The watchwork
model certainly is "trite," as Bohannan
says. It is positivism, but it is not holism,
whose main postulate is that "the whole
is more than the sum of its parts." It
is easily demonstrable that a qualitative
change takes place in the individual
when he is integrated in a whole,
whether it be a religious congregation,
a trade union, a political party, or the
crowd at a football game. Therefore
I disagree completely with Bohannan's
statement: "It is the nature of culture
that the 'whole' is not greater than,
less than, or equal to the sum of its
parts; it is the same as its parts."
This is why I am not stimulated by
such microtheories as "componential
2"De forskjellige 'andsfunksjoner utvikler
analogies to phonemes (or better, let-
seg ikke paralelt og jevnsides i et og det
samme individ. Tilegnelsesdriften jager
fremad fra profitt til profitt. Den moralske
bevissthet, "samvittigheten," derimot er
meget konservativ. Den er dypt rotfestet
i tradisjonen, og i det hele i fortiden. Dette
forarsaker den individuelle konflikt."
E NT AN TH
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analysis," etc., by which Bohannan's
paper is apparently inspired; I have
long suspected them of being another
escape from having to approach the
really important problems of our day.
The crisis in anthropology is not to
be resolved by "pedanto-cracy," but
rather by a painstaking and critical
analysis of our theoretical foundation.
U.S.-American anthropology seems
to me to be in danger of developing
an atheoretical, or even antitheoretical,
position. I am thinking not only of
Bohannan's paper, but even more of
Murdock's (1971). At any rate, Bohan-
nan's paper inevitably leads to an over-
rating of the role of the individual at
the expense of society. Individual and
society are just as inseparable as culture
and society. As Bloch (1972) has put
it, "In the category of solidarity the
contrast between individual and col-
lectivity is abolished."3 While Durkhei-
mian and Radcliffe-Brownian anthro-
pology grossly underrated the individ-
ual, it is at least equally detrimental
to overrate him.
I agree with Bohannan that the
science of man must be biologically
based, and his "double coding" to me
means that culture represents the dy-
namic, individualistic tendency and so-
ciety the stabilizing tendency, deeply
rooted in biological heredity. These
tendencies are manifested in processes,
the one type dynamic, the other repet-
itive, which again can be defined in
terms of cultural and, social "cate-
gories" except that these have to be
open ones subject to change. The cul-
tural tendency is represented by tech-
nology, forms of production, etc., and
by the ideational content of religious,
artistic, and philosophical expressions,
whereas the social tendency is repre-
sented by various social institutions,
organizations, and groups, rituals, ar-
tistic forms, etc. One must always re-
member, however, that every social
phenomenon has a cultural aspect and
every cultural phenomenon a social
side. Form is stabilizing; idea is dy-
namic.
by GORDON W. HEWES
Boulder, Colo., U.S.A. 7 iII 73
I am not convinced by Bohannan's
stimulating essay that anthropology is
or should form a connected whole
simply because our bodies and cultures
are outcomes of doubly coded infor-
mation systems. One cannot quarrel
with the facts: DNA molecules exhibit
ters of the alphabet) and longer mes-
sage-strings, and human cultures may
"I kategorien solidaritet oppheves mot-
setningene mellom individ og kollektiv."
ROPO LOG Y
be thought of as doubly coded in the
brains of their carriers and in the
extrasomatic products of cultural ac-
tivity. Bohannan is not alone in having
perceived parallels between genetics
and culture and/or language. Dob-
zhansky, Waddington, Huxley, Levi-
Strauss, Gerard, and, most recently,
Masters (1970) have expressed similar
notions. Gerard's (1960:255) comment
seems especially apt: "The problem of
fixing experience is universal; the
mechanisms involved are highly par-
ticular." Along with some undeniable
similarities, genetic and cultural sys-
tems differ from each other in a great
many significant ways.
The accepted analogy for the central
nervous system 50 years ago was a
telephone central exchange. Recent
psychology texts are likely to employ
the idiom of the computer center in-
stead. Early in this century, the atom
was thought of as a miniature solar
system. A whole school of ethnology
or metaethnology has been based on
a borrowed linguistic model. Science
has advanced as the result of such
conceptual borrowings, or applications
of paradigms from one field to an-
other, but success is not inevitable. In
the present case, the genetic model
itself was affected by ideas taken from
language, or at least from analogies
with written messages. In dealing with
Bohannan's essay, confusion is
compounded because language has
been seen as the "functional and evo-
lutionary analogue of genetic material"
(Masters 1970:312). Most of us recog-
nize that language is not all there is
to the informational content of culture,
but efforts to force what is left over
into formal linguistic models have not
been spectacularly successful. Shortly
after World War II, information
theory exhibited great promise as a
long-sought synthesizer of much of the
distressingly compartmentalized world
of science. Although many of its con-
cepts have been assimilated, the goal
of unified science seems as far away
as ever. At a much less grandiose level,
even the hope of turning cultural
theory into something approximating
the formerly rigorous and autonomous
model of linguistics has been under-
mined. I am not sure we are at a point
where the "geneticizing" of sociocul-
tural anthropology will solve our con-
ceptual problems.
by THOMAS H. HAY
St. Louis, Mo., U.S.A. 8 iii 73
Bohannan calls upon the profession
"to examine the parts of anthro-
pological culture that interfere with
our understanding of culture and to
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obstacles." If he means, as I think he
does, that the task is to analyze com-
mon behaviors of anthropologists
which are obstacles to the development
of anthropological theory, I heartily
applaud his call. Unfortunately, his
article makes no direct contribution to
this analysis. Rather, it exemplifies an
especially serious obstacle to the devel-
opment of anthropological theory-
the tendency, noted by Moore (1952)
and Goldstein (1957), to use the term
"culture" (and other terms) in several
different senses and to change even
explicit definitions within a single ar-
ticle.
Although Bohannan refuses to offer
a formal definition of the term "cul-
ture," various statements effectively
define the term in at least three dif-
ferent ways-as information, as a
repository for information, and as a
mode of encoding information. These
statements refer to different "things."
In the case of culture as information,
we must be in possession of the code
before we can know what information
is culture. In the case of culture as
repository for information, we are in
possession of culture as soon as we have
the behavior or artifact in which the
information is encoded and before we
have decoded the information. In the
case of culture as mode, there are several
possible interpretations, but it seems
obvious that a mode of encoding in-
formation will be different from both
the information and the behavior or
artifact in which the information is
encoded.
The seriousness of using one term
in two or more senses arises from the
role of terms in theories. A scientific
theory consists of a set of propositions
(some or all of which may be expressed,
in whole or in part, in mathematical
or logical symbols). These propositions
fall into two classes: (1) a set of axioms
or basic assumptions, usually not di-
rectly testable, and (2) propositions
(often called theorems) deduced from
the axioms or from the axioms and
previous theorems. Hypotheses are
theorems which can be tested empiri-
cally. If a hypothesis has been validly
deduced, then empirical support for
the hypothesis provides indirect evi-
dence for the truth of the axioms.
Similarly, if a validly deduced hypoth-
esis is not supported by empirical test,
our confidence in the axioms is re-
duced. It is the requirement of valid
deduction that makes it vital that each
term be defined carefully and used
consistently. If a term is used am-
biguously, we may invalidly deduce
hypotheses which are "disconfirmed"
by empirical test, thus falsely casting
4 October
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Bohannan: RETHINKING CULTURE
doubt on the truth of the axioms.
Similarly, deductions which are invalid
because of the ambiguity of terms may
lead us to accept the whole theory when
it is false (Braithwaite 1960, Nagel
1961, Rudner 1966).
by E. MARKARIAN
Yerevan, U.S.S.R. 9 ii 73
Bohannan's paper is of great interest.
Especially stimulating is his attempt to
comprehend the direct interrelations
between mechanisms of biological and
cultural levels. His view of the culture
phenomenon, however, is not convinc-
ing. Defining culture as a mode of
coding information, Bohannan con-
siders as "cultural" any information
acquired by learning. Thus culture
becomes the property not only of
human behavior but of that of animals
as well.
The theoretical premise of this con-
ception is the consideration as biologi-
cal only of genetic programs of behav-
ior. The activity of biological systems,
however, presupposes models of be-
havior based on both programs geneti-
cally transmitted and programs ac-
quired by learning. In other words,
nongenetic acquisition is not in itself
the index of culture, and information
acquired nongenetically may be purely
biological in nature.
The basis of a distinction between
biological and cultural phenomena
must be not mode of getting informa-
tion, but type of organization. The
concept "culture" is the fundamental
theoretical means for the discrimi-
nation of sociocultural and biological
types of organization. But in this func-
tion culture is more than a mode of
coding information. To understand
the nature of culture, it is necessary
to use the concept "specific mode of
activity (existence) of a system," which
permits an answer to the question how
a system operates. From this point of
view, culture, as a "superstructure"
above the biological type of organiza-
tion, is a mode by which the biological
potentials of human beings are trans-
formed into socially directed activity.
The heuristic value of this concept is
in the general characteristic of the
extrabiologically derived means and
mechanisms by which human activity
is stimulated, programmed, coordi-
nated, realized, and provided for so
as to produce socially adaptive ef-
fects (Markarian 1972).
As to the concept "a culture" (I
prefer the term "local culture"), Bo-
hannan is quite right in stating that
it expresses a different order of ab-
straction, but his estimation of it as
1973 369
"nothing other than a stopgap" seems
too negative. If the concept of culture
characterises the specific mode of
human existence in contrast to the
modes of existence of biological sys-
tems, the concept "a culture" expresses
specific features of the modes of exis-
tence worked out by different peoples.
The main difficulty with the concept
"a culture" is that it acquires quite
different meanings depending upon
the historical type of culture under
consideration: the local historical type,
which generalizes the individual char-
acter of a cultural system within defi-
nite space-time limits, or the general
historical type, which generalizes com-
mon historical properties and stages
of cultural development abstracted
from definite space-time limits. To
reconstruct "a culture" as a historically
worked out mode of human existence,
it is necessary to combine these two
different kinds of generalization (Mar-
karian 1969:99-130).
by MICHEL PANOFF
Paris, France. 7 III 73
It is true that there has always been
some uneasiness about culture among
anthropologists. Bohannan is there-
fore to be commended for coping with
this subject matter. Nevertheless, I
doubt that his attempt will take us very
far, for he has not carried it far enough
himself.
All of us will probably support his
describing culture as a black box and
his attack on our tendency to reify
culture and culture elements. Again,
he is right in stressing that cultural
traditions are not natural units in the
real world. As a result, no anthro-
pologist will fail to find it sad that we
have to raise such a question as "How
do subcultures make up whole cul-
tures?"
But why, for God's sake, stop half-
way? If the many discussions of the
idea of a "culture of poverty" (see
especially CA 10: 181-201) have been
of any use, it is in reminding us that
culture is a combination of forces and
that the relationship between "subcul-
tures" and "whole cultures" is there-
fore not a matter of inclusiveness but
one of domination, repression, and
struggle. Thus one cannot be content
with complaining that the idea of "a
culture" has fallen victim to the craving
for morphological categories and their
classification. One has to go further
and ask what is left out when one
concentrates on definitions. As long
as one asks "What is culture?" one
overlooks the basic question "How does
culture work?" Marx and Freud,
among others, tried to answer this
question, and anthropologists would
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be better off knowing a little more
of what they wrote. To dismiss the
Freudian theory of culture in two sen-
tences while devoting a full page to
Tylor's and Schneider's definitions is
to prove blind to what constitutes rele-
vance in the realm of social theory.
Freud (1929) did not examine the mat-
ter by definition; instead, he tried to
visualize how culture functions, thus
avoiding all unproductive questions.
Marx did the same.
Culture has to do with external co-
ercion and internal repression, with
frustration and sublimation, but I find
no mention of such things in Bohan-
nan's paper. He speaks, it is true, of
"information coding" and "double
coding," but he fails to ask where this
coding comes from, by what means it
is achieved, and to what ends. Instead,
he argues as if the individual or the
group took at random or freely select-
ed items from the cultural pool, as if
the contents and limits of such a pool
were quite immaterial to the subject,
and as if the individual or the group
could occupy any position within the
social system. That is probably why he
takes for granted the importance of
family traditions versus community
traditions. All this has been seriously
and fruitfully questioned by several
writers, especially Marcuse (1955) and
Deleuze and Guattari (1972). In intro-
ducing his concept of the superego,
Freud was not "fitting culture into
brave new contexts"; nor was Marx in
expounding his idea of alienation.
Both were simply trying to explain how
culture could perpetuate itself and how
the individual could cooperate with the
coercive system in enforcing repres-
sion.
Bohannan himself says that anthro-
pologists studying "culture" can find
an instructive parallel in what biologists
have done with "life." Instead of wor-
rying about what "life" is, biologists
have tried to understand how it works.
Here is our way out, but we cannot
follow it merely by putting side by side
sociology, political science, psycho-
analysis, etc.; to begin with, we have
to cope with the fact of coercion and
repression. Otherwise we will be play-
ing with black boxes for some time
to come.
by DAVID M. SCHNEIDER
Chicago, Ill., U.S.A. 9 III 73
Circumstances prevent me from com-
menting in the detail and at the length
which I feel this paper merits. I will
confine myself to one comment which
is, I think, indicative and has more
general relevance than its substance
might indicate.
I have been quoted in this paper,
E NT A N TH
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
and the quote is perfectly accurate in
that it is a precise repetition of the
words as they appear in print-but the
words are so taken out of context and
so distorted that I am moved to ask
whether much of the rest of the paper
is not of the same quality. My answer,
were I to detail and document it,
would be that the paper does indeed
show similar gross miscomprehensions
throughout. I will therefore correct the
misinterpretation of the quotation of
my own work and provide two other
examples.
I am quoted as providing "the most
sensible present-day statement about
culture traits" (my emphasis) Bohannan
knows of:
A unit in a particular culture is simply
anything that is culturally defined and dis-
tinguished as an entity. It may be a person,
place, thing, feeling, state of affairs, sense
of foreboding, fantasy, hallucination, hope,
or idea. In American culture, such units
as uncle, town, blue (depressed), a mess,
a hunch, the idea of progress, hope, and
art are cultural units.
This is indeed a precise quote from
pp. 1-2 of my 1968 book. It is likely
that Bohannan read the whole book
through, but he apparently forgot or
decided to ignore the rest, for the book
makes amply clear that in my view
"culture" is an integrated system of
symbols and meanings and that the
view of culture as "traits" in the old
Kroeberian or any other sense is
directly, explicitly, and most emphati-
cally abhorrent to the scheme I
present. Why does Bohannan quote
me as providing "the most sensible
present-day statement" of something
that I explicitly excluded from my
formulation-that I disowned and dis-
avowed, and do again, for his benefit,
here? I refrain from speculation.
That I am not the only one so
distorted may be seen in his treatment
of Durkheim and Parsons: "Social sci-
entists can ignore culture. Like Durk-
heim, they can make it disappear into
'collective representations.' Like Par-
sons, building on Durkheim, they can
make it disappear into 'expectations."'
The concept of culture as it is used
by Parsons is quite clear and explicit
in his writings, and, as is well known,
my own view derives from his. In no
way can it be shown that Parsons made
the concept of culture "disappear into
'expectations."' Parsons is not merely
explicit, he is redundant to a fault in
insisting on the integrity and indepen-
dence of culture as a subsystem which
cannot be reduced to "expectations,"
the psychological system, or the social
system. His statement with Kroeber
(Kroeber and Parsons 1958) is clear
on this point, and his latest statement
ROPOLOG Y
(Parsons 1972) reiterates and further
clarifies it. So far as Durkheim is con-
cerned, the concept of culture was
clearly embedded in the concept of
collective representations and collec-
tive conscience, but it by no means
disappeared there. Indeed, it is pre-
cisely one of Durkheim's claims to the
position of preeminence he holds as
a social theorist that a clear, distinctive
notion of culture as an independent
and irreducible subsystem of social
action had emerged by the time he
finished The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life. I remain puzzled as to
why Bohannan garbles such perfectly
clear and simple points of view as
Durkheim, Parsons, and I have taken.
by WILLIAM J. VOIGT
Budapest, Hungary. 5 II 73
Probably for the same reasons Leach
titled his book a dozen years ago Re-
thinking . . ., there are now many
attempts to rethink some basic prob-
lems in anthropology. Bohannan
offers three main ideas: (1) culture is
double coding, (2) in one aspect of this
coding, information systems play a
definite role, and (3) all this yields a
new culture theory. Of course, one
should always be in favour of new ideas
in culture theory, and it is clear from
Bohannan's preliminary remarks on
the history of culture concepts that he
knows well how social, biological, and
even information problems are bound
together in such theory. Nevertheless,
we ought to be dissatisfied with some
of his conclusions.
1. It is not quite clear what the two
parts of his double coding are, whether
"biological" and "extrabiotic" codes, or
"genetic" and "cultural" codes, or cod-
ing "within the human being, in electric
and chemical form" and coding "out-
side the human being in some other
form." The dichotomy seems to me
equivalent to the old "nature-culture"
or "biological-social" dichotomy and
neither more logical nor more system-
Bohannan: RETHINKING CULTURE
atic. The problem must be explored
more profoundly.
2. There is no need of emphasizing
how important a general-systems ap-
proach to culture theory is today. Still,
the proposal in figure 1 raises a lot
of questions. Why distinguish "social
systems" from "information systems?"
How can "material culture" or "sym-
bols" exist apart from "ecosystems" and
"social systems?" A matrix of correla-
tions would be better than a set of
dichotomies for solving Bohannan's
problems.
3. Without solving the problems just
mentioned, one can find neither a new
culture theory nor a theory for "cur-
rent" (in which meaning?) anthro-
pology. Many ideas in Bohannan's
paper are fruitful. His aim, too, is
highly welcome. Still, if he "rethinks"
(instead of systematically examining)
the basic ideas of culture theory, one
needs to "afterthink" his conclusions,
of which the culture theory itself is
the Achilles' heel.

Reply
by PAUL BOHANNAN
Evanston, Ill., U.S.A. 5 iv 73
It has been two years since I wrote
this paper. During those years, I have
been involved in other pursuits, and
a lot of water has gone over the an-
thropological dam. Moreover, I have
long ago learned (and Schneider has
chosen to make the point above) that
one can have absolutely no control over
the' way in which anything one says
is either received or used. Thus, I am
not much in the mood of "defending"
it.
Some disappointment (if that is not
too strong a word) comes because
commentators chose not to rise to the
bait. Hewes raises doubts, which I
share, and stops there. Voigt says that
a matrix of correlations would be better
than a set of dichotomies to explore
some of these points. I agree. If he
would provide it, the profession would
be in his debt for generations to come.
Panoff is quite right that I have not
carried the argument far enough. That
is, indeed, why I placed the article in
CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY-it was an overt
request for help. But Panoff hasn't
carried it farther either. Fischer sug-
gests that we find ways of quantifying
the "culturality" of a trait. I think this
is a very good idea-his work is cut
out for him. Hay says that I have
defined culture at least three ways.
(Undoubtedly he hasn't looked very
hard-there must be half a dozen
more.) The criticism that he should have should be a matter of exami-
animals
made, but did not, is that these three nation, not definition. In response to
uses of "culture" may be at least as Markarian: How does one distinguish
bad as the confusion between culture between culture and other "learned"
and a culture. It is our loss that he behavior? Is it possible? White's "sym-
chose to lecture me on scientific meth- boling" would seem to help-but to
od instead of analyzing the point. I be inadequate.
am rather pleased that only one cor- Fischer has suggested that I could
respondent-Epstein-rejected my not possibly believe that any animal
Glassperlenspiel in order to push his except man has culture. Man is
own. It would seem, however, that he apparently the only animal who has
confuses his with the real world on the equipment to think up ways in
the undeniable grounds that the issues which he supposes himself to be
are pressing. unique. I still think that you can "de-
Several points: fine" culture as any of the right-hand
1. Cybernetics. Gjessing points out elements in my chart, and that the
correctly that Wiener said that cyber- point in the hierarchy you select deter-
netics should not be used to explain mines what you think about nonhuman
social relationships. Unfortunately, animals' having culture. Learned be-
like the rest of us, Wiener cannot havior of, for example, wolves is cul-
dictate how others should use his work. ture insofar as students of wolves and
Powers (n.d.) explains behavior very culture make it so.
convincingly as a hierarchy of nine 3. Durkheim and culture. Both Black-
cybernetic systems, each of which sets ing and Schneider read me to say that
the reference level for the one just Durkheim ignored culture. Certainly
below it. If we look at a social relation- I did not mean to. No social scientist
ship as two interacting cybernetic sys- can ignore culture. I meant to say that
tems, each of which is part of the Durkheim discussed cultural matters
environment of the other, I think we without a concept of culture. I have
can learn a lot. In fact, Powers's book said it before (Bohannan 1961). Inci-
is useful for several of the inquiries dentally, I am grateful to Schneider
raised in the responses. I hope all for the reference to Kroeber and Par-
anthropologists will read it, because it sons, which I should have known and
provides a set of ideas about psycholo- didn't. The Parsons 1972 was pub-
gy that would seem to be more useful lished after this paper was accepted.
than either behaviorism or psycho- 4. Dualism. I do not think that a
analytic theory for the purposes of distinction should be confused with a
anthropologists. dualism-I read Blacking's comments
2. Men and animals. The differences to make that confusion, and I hope
between human animals and other I did not. Just as economics must be

Vol. 14 No. 4 October 1973 371

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All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
distinguished from capitalist economy,
so must culture be distinguished from
a culture. It seems to me that every-
thing in Blacking's response can be
more profitably stated in terms of my
article than as objections to it.
Gjessing refers to this point too when
he notes "this duality, which is no
dichotomy but a complementarity." A
distinction, I agree, implies comple-
mentarity.
5. Culture, society, and the individual.
Gjessing cites Kroeber to say that cul-
ture and society are as indivisible as
the two sides of a sheet of paper. He
then reuses the metaphor for society
and the individual. In teaching, I have
found the two-sided metaphor too
limiting. I use a tetrahedron, label-
ing its four surfaces "soma," "soci-
ety," "culture," and "behavior." Each
plane meets every other. Each three
planes come together in a point. It is
astonishing how many times scholars
use the word "cause" when they find
two of the planes meeting. However,
the tetrahedron is not enough by itself.
One also needs a thumbtack or draw-
ing-pin, which I call "experience." The
drawing-pin is thrust into the tetrahe-
dron. I experience aspects of the tetra-
hedron from that position, but I do
not confuse my experience with "the
real thing." However, I cannot have
any information of the real thing if
I do not engage it in my experience.
Given this simple model, ethnog-
raphy becomes an exercise in trying
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ROPOLOGY