Cameron Brinitzer, a USC-Berggruen Fellow at the University of Southern California Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, joins us to discuss his article-in-progress: “The Evolution of Culture: Materializing an Elusive Concept.”
Abstract: In the 1970s and 1980s, at the very moment that many cultural anthropologists were abandoning the concept of culture in light of feminist, literary, and postcolonial critiques, and searching for new epistemic objects to orient anthropological inquiries, an array of life, mind, and behavioral scientists began to center concepts of culture in novel research programs. This essay traces how culture—long renowned for its imponderability and as something that one could only understand or interpret through sustained periods of embodied immersion in the field—has in recent decades been transformed into an object of experimental knowledge production in mind and life science laboratories. While focusing on the work of one influential European research group in the field of "Cultural Evolution" that is institutionally located at the Central European University, this essay also examines how concepts of culture have been turned into objects of reflection and intervention by governmental actors in recent decades. In light of these consequential ways in which concepts of culture continue to orchestrate human activities across a range of political, social, and scientific domains, I argue that anthropologists and historians of anthropology are well positioned to examine how culture is conceptualized in different contexts today and how these concepts are given material forms and force.
Discussants:
Joanna Radin, Yale University
Rosanna Dent, NJIT