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The Promise of Particularism and the Theology of Culture: Limits and Lessons of
“Neo‐Boasianism”

Article in American Anthropologist · January 2008

DOI: 10.1525/aa.2004.106.3.473

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 A N D R E W O R TA

The Promise of Particularism and the Theology of

Culture: Limits and Lessons of “Neo-Boasianism”

ABSTRACT This article compares the status of “culture” as a politically engaged concept in Franz Boas’s time and in our own time.
Taking a Boasian approach to “neo-Boasianism,” I examine the limits of this comparability in order to shed light on the nature of public
culture-talk today and to identify dimensions of the Boasian concept of “culture” particularly relevant to a contemporary anthropology.
[Keywords: Franz Boas, multiculturalism, culture concept, area studies]

COMPARING CULTURE “Boasian century.” In this light, I am interested in compar-

In a document titled “Celebrating our Nation’s Diversity,” ing the status of “culture” as a politically engaged concept
the U.S. Bureau of the Census suggested a series of lesson during Boas’s time and our own. My concern is with the
plans for grades K–12 (Census Bureau Education Program commensurability of contemporary conceptualizations of
1995). Looking beyond classic models of the United States “culture” evident in discourses of multicultural tolerance
as a melting pot, the teaching supplement prepares teach- and pluralism with similar assertions of the “culture” con-
ers to draw on census data to deliver a vision of the United cept evident in Boas’s work. Specifically, I want to think
States as “a collection of various peoples, traditions, and about the Boasian concept of “culture” as it developed
cultures.” For elementary school teachers, for instance, the and was articulated within a specific political milieu, and
guide suggests a sequence of six lessons. The first seeks to then turn to think about the current status of “culture”
foster a conceptual awareness of difference and national di- as a politically mobilized concept in our present context.
versity, by teaching students to see in their daily practices My project is “Boasian” insofar as I aim to qualify and
the fact that “much of our American way of doing things is a limit the comparability of culture as an “ethically impor-
result of practices originally from other countries” (1995:4). tant” concept then and now (cf. Cole 1999:276). It is only
Next, the students go on to measure diversity by develop- in the wake of such critical qualification that I venture
ing a questionnaire and administering a census of their own in a “neo-Boasian” mode to recuperate specific elements
classroom. Using a variety of graphing techniques, students of Boas’s approach to culture as “usable” contemporary
then compare their class data with “data from the 1990 lessons.
census [that] give us information on our Nation’s diverse I take the turns of these two centuries, and the pub-
racial and ancestry groups” (1995:7). The payoff comes in lic conceptualizations of difference that mark each one, as
the sixth lesson “Celebrating Our Diversity”: “The children productive foils for one another. In the course of the discus-
will have an international festival to celebrate our Nation’s sion, I track what I take to be forgotten or relatively muted
diversity. . . . Now that the students have seen the different dimensions of the Boasian culture concept, and the shift-
racial and ancestry groups represented in the data from the ing disciplinary and societal contexts that contributed to
1990 census and in their classrooms, they should have a their eclipse. Ultimately, however, my aims are presentist.
better appreciation for the different people that live in the Against this Boasian background, I join other anthropolo-
United States” (1995:8). gists who strive to assert a politically relevant cultural an-
In this article I examine the politics of culture and of thropology in a world marked by a proliferation of invoca-
difference at both ends of the 20th century. This effort is tions of culture (e.g., Darnell 1997; Handler 1997; Herzfeld
coordinated with an interest in recuperating elements of 1997; Lambek and Boddy 1997; Turner 1993).
the work of Franz Boas, whose legacy in U.S. anthropol- As data for contemporary culture-talk, I draw from
ogy is such that this time frame is sometimes called the material such as “Celebrating Our Nation’s Diversity” and

American Anthropologist, Vol. 106, Issue 3, pp. 473–487, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433.
C 2004 by the American Anthropological Association.

All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street,
Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
474 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

related discussions in mass media. The bulk of my argu- Starr’s comments are remarkable for their Boasian fla-
ment, however, stems from field research with Catholic vor: relativizing Anglo hegemony within a longer regional
missionaries in highlands Bolivia. At first glance, this may historical context. I also read a certain tension between the
not seem the most obvious ethnographic example for the regional historical particularism he invokes and the slant
discussion at hand. Yet I will argue that contemporary mis- of the article, which presents the California data as a bell-
sionary ideology, which has recently come to embrace cul- wether of impending multicultural and multiracial diver-
tural differences that previous generations of pastoral work- sity for other populous states and, ultimately, the nation.
ers once sought to erase, is an apt index of multicultural This theme was picked up in other coverage of the Cen-
discourse reflecting both a recent rejection of more assimi- sus report. A USA Today article suggested that California
lationist approaches to difference and the signature paradox provides a glimpse of the United States later in the cen-
of contemporary multicultural discourse: celebrating differ- tury, “a place where people are learning what it’s like to
ence within a universal framework. live politically, socially and economically with no major-
ity group” (Ritter 2001: A1). The Times article goes on to
LESSONS LEARNED quote Paul Ong, Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, who
Hispanic USA: Marketing Niche of the 90s comments,

—Marketing video by the Spanish-language television

California certainly represents what many states are mov-
network Telemundo, 1994, in Yüdice 1995 ing toward. I don’t think most states will end up at the
Mi Casa Blanca es su Casa Blanca same level of diversity. The truth of the matter is the rest
of the country is going in this direction, but it won’t be-
—President George W. Bush, at a White House come this, in the same way that New York at the begin-
celebration of the Mexican holiday Cinco ning of the last century represented an important trend,
de Mayo, 2001 but the rest of the country didn’t become New York.
[Purdum 2001: A1]
The president’s glad-handing bilingualism is at once in-
clusive and imperial. The White House celebration of a The reference to Boasian-era New York is helpful. My
Mexican national holiday, like the incorporation of the goal is at once to limit and to insist on such centenary
Spanish language in the official activities of the presidency, comparisons. I want to limit the comparison by particu-
enacts the lessons of the Census. To some they might signal larizing our understanding of culture-talk in each historical
the erosion of U.S. national identity. But the Hispanophile moment. Yet this comparison is a necessary one for at least
hospitality of the phrase “my White House is your White two reasons. The first is that, in the context of current skir-
House” allows other readings. It articulates, for instance, a mishes of the “culture wars,” multiculturalist discourses are
larger geopolitical truth; a truth that might be dated to the typically mistaken (and often condemned) as a function of
“Monroe doctrine” (1823) but that became particularly self- a cultural relativism deriving from the Boasian culture con-
evident in Boas’s time against the backdrop of the Spanish- cept. It is useful, then, to return to the source: if not to
American War and Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency. retrieve the intrinsic DNA of the culture concept, at least
Bush’s comments also reflect the growing significance to mark accurately the particularities of its Boasian expres-
of Hispanic voters in the United States and suggest parallels sion. A second reason for the comparison is that the space
between contemporary politicking and the niche market- between culture-talk then and now calls forward a closer ex-
ing that has made multiculturalism an attractive register amination of the history of the culture concept across the
for global capitalism. Here the demographics of marketing Boasian century. This history certainly exceeds the Boasian
help form the Sapirian “grooves and rails” of identity, defin- genealogical lens that I bring to it and requires more pages
ing the attributes that enable the most user-friendly access than I have here. Nonetheless, as a bridge between my ex-
to political (as well as consumer) culture (Yüdice 1995). amination of Boas’s work and my assessment of contempo-
A month before the president’s comments, the Cen- rary multiculturalist discourses, I sketch certain interven-
sus Bureau reported that the Hispanic population of Cal- ing moments in the process distinguishing the Turn of the
ifornia had grown to nearly a third of the state’s popula- Century work of Boas from the midcentury consolidation
tion, while non-Hispanic whites composed less than half. of the culture concept by his students. These midcentury
A front-page story in the New York Times included a com- examples—institutionalized most potently in the frame of
mentary by the California state librarian, Kevin Starr, who area studies—help set in relief the key transformations of
observed, culture and its contexts between the Boasian moment and
The Anglo hegemony was only an intermittent phase in our own.
California’s arc of identity, extending from the arrival of In crossing this bridge, Catholic missionization will
the Spanish. The Hispanic nature of California has been again serve as an unexpectedly apt case. Recent Catholic
there all along, and it was temporarily swamped between
evangelization in the Andean region reflects an institu-
the 1880’s and the 1960’s, but that was an aberration.
This is a reassertion of the intrinsic demographic DNA of tional reengagement with the region that corresponds
the longer pattern, which is part of a California-Mexico closely with the intellectual and geopolitical milieu of post–
continuum. [Purdum 2001: A1] World War II (hereafter “postwar”) area studies and reflects
 Orta • The Promise of Particularism 475

shifting conceptualization of cultural difference across that about cultural relativism shaping liberal thought in the
time. United States. Boas has remained a recognized seminal fig-
ure thanks to the very public work of some of his students
and to the pioneering recuperative work of George Stocking
ENDURING SIGNS AND DUSTY ROADS (1968, 1974; see also Cole 1999; Lesser 1981; Lewis 2001).
In recent years, Catholic missionaries serving Aymara- Though there is considerable space between current no-
speaking communities of the Bolivian highlands have of- tions of “relativism” (as embraced by some and attacked
fered a surprising message to their flocks. After centuries of by others) and his writings, Boas remains on the field of
preaching that the Aymara should turn away from their tra- battle in contemporary culture wars. Boas is attacked, for
ditional cultural practices in order to embrace Christianity instance, by Dinesh D’Souza (1995), who quickly flattens
more fully, they now insist that the old ways were Christian a nuanced sketch of Boas’s importance at the turn of the
all along. To become more Christian, the missionaries now 20th century into a shorthand (“the Boasian paradigm”) for
declare, the Aymara must become more “Indian”: They his targets of “relativism” and “multiculturalism” (cf. Cole
must return to “the ways of the ancestors,” ways the mis- 1999). Boas was also tangentially embroiled in commentary
sionaries have come to see as local cultural expressions of prompted by Patrick Tierney’s (2000) attacks on Napoleon
Christian values. In some cases, missionaries are in the awk- Chagnon a few years ago, in which he was damned as a
ward position of encouraging Aymara to celebrate the very progenitor of Margaret Mead and so held responsible for ro-
ritual practices they or their predecessors effectively eradi- mantic, antiscientific, postmodern relativism (cf. Bashkow
cated. And so, some five centuries after their arrival in the 2000; Gregory 2000). That his original appearance in some
New World to spread the Christian message at the expense of these texts was as “Fritz Boas” is some indication of the
of indigenous cultures, foreign Catholic missionaries at the dusty disheveled state of this important sign.
turn of the millennium find themselves teaching the Ay- Reports of Boas’s postmodernism are exaggerated. In in-
mara their own culture. voking the specter of Boasian cultural relativism, contem-
This evangelical discourse is of piece with other dis- porary culture warriors conflate postmodernism with an in-
courses of multicultural inclusion. As I detail later, while tellectual moment at the core of modernity and tap into
it echoes dimensions of 16th-century missionary philoso- an intellectual genealogy that served to nourish a number
phy, the Church’s late-20th-century turn to inculturation of academic enterprises—including area studies—that post-
is symptomatic of the late-modern ascendance of “culture” modernists have been bent on unsettling. Ironically, the
as a key concept of political discourse and practice. In Bo- postmodern turn in anthropology has often entailed a rejec-
livia the ideology of inculturation is tightly linked to ethnic tion of disciplinary ancestors—including Boas. In counter-
politics in what is now officially defined as a “pluricultural” point to this, Herbert Lewis (2001) has sought to recuperate
nation. It is, moreover, a stark example of a more general a “usable” Boas, enshrined as a disciplinary ancestor whose
tension entailed by embracing local distinction through the work satisfies the contemporary concerns of postmodernists
authority of a posited universal framework. skeptical of master narratives and scientists committed to
I find inculturation “good to think with” here for yet empirical rigor and disciplinary coherence.
another reason. Missionaries see themselves as recovering a Any neo-Boasian anthropology thus risks the polemical
deep historical truth in codifying and celebrating Aymara ruts of an anti-antirelativism or a post-postmodernism, not
culture. At the outset of a course I observed for indigenous to mention the more polished grooves and rails of Stocking’s
catechists aimed at defining an “Aymara liturgical calen- suggestion that the history of U.S. cultural anthropology
dar,” one priest posed the challenge in the form of a para- has been the working out of a set of concerns already present
ble: “When one is walking down a road, although he begins in Boas’s work. While I affiliate with these positions,1 I am
very clean, by the end it may be that he is full of dust and his wary of efforts to reconnect in any transparent way with
clothing all disheveled. That is to say there are signs that, disciplinary ancestors. Seeking more than a straightforward
sometimes if we don’t look at them a little, they may be los- dusting off of Papa Franz, I approach a neo-Boasian an-
ing their meaning. So it is important to look at them.” The thropology as an opportunity to contextualize historically
signs at issue here are “Aymara” ritual practices, some nearly contemporary challenges to cultural anthropology against
abandoned, all of them stigmatized in the face of Catholi- the backdrop of those challenges shaping the emergence
cism and Bolivian national society. In recuperating these of Boasian anthropology. That is, I approach neo-Boasian
practices, missionaries aim to brush away the deceptive dust anthropology through its limits.
of conquest, of faulty evangelization, and other accretions In thinking about the limits of neo-Boasianism, my
of colonial and postcolonial history. Underneath it all they goals are threefold. First, against the foil of the Boasian
find enduring signs of Aymara culture and meanings from moment, I hope to set in sharper relief the particulari-
the past that are entirely congenial to the Aymara–Christian ties of contemporary culture-talk. I want to qualify any
future they hope to bring about. This missionary ambition neo-Boasian recuperation by stressing the specificities of
is uncomfortably close to the neo-Boasian project at hand. Boas’s political project and the present-day impact of a
Franz Boas, of course, has himself been an enduring now-objectified sense of culture and routinized rhetoric of
sign within anthropology and within the arc of discourse relativism.
476 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

Second, I want to gesture to a complex historical irony frequently emphasized by A. Bastian” (1940[1887b],
concerning the political relevance of anthropology today. 1974:62). This appeal to history is at the core of Boasian
At a time when culture has become politically salient to a anthropology. What I wish to underscore is that Boas’s his-
degree perhaps not seen since Boas’s day, the popular rou- torical method entailed a doubly temporal move: a particu-
tinized concept of culture is a stunted descendant of Boas’s larizing turn to the past as an archive of the mutability and
work and the politically engaged lessons it taught. In the contextual specificity of human sociocultural forms, and an
face of such developments and their misattribution to an- ecumenical claim about the future authorized by the docu-
thropology, the discipline is often hamstrung. mented plasticity of culture. I detail the first at some length
The popularization of the culture concept is a phe- before turning to the second.
nomenon of long standing, linked to the successes of Mar- On the one hand, Boasian “culture” was anchored in
garet Mead and Ruth Benedict (and, more recently, Clif- the historical past, cast as a medium for the spatially partic-
ford Geertz) as the “ambassadors” of anthropology (Sewell ular convergence of race, language, and culture. By substi-
2001:35). Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) re- tuting the spatialized history of a culture area for the uni-
marked warily on the popular circulation of the culture versalizing axis of nature, Boas disaggregated race, language,
concept in the 1950s. The popularization of the concept and culture. The principal political payoff for this historicity
over the early decades of the 20th century was one index was to assert the contingency and potential mutability of
of the intellectual, political, and aesthetic crystallization of any given arrangement of the three. Culture traits and lan-
modernity (Hegeman 1999). However, the contemporary guages could be seen to have been diffused independently
fit between “culture” as popularly conceptualized and in- from place to place and to have combined in multiple ways
voked and “culture” as it is politically institutionalized and among physically distinct populations. Human difference
operationalized is less straightforward, compelling at once was thus rendered a historical rather than a natural fact in-
a revitalized understanding of culture and a cultural analy- sofar as “natural” differences of race were shown to have no
sis of metacultural discourse. Thus, my third goal is selec- causal or necessary link to contextually coexisting linguistic
tively and critically to identify elements of Boas’s approach, or cultural phenomena.
as these may be newly relevant to an anthropology of the Boas makes this point through a thought experiment
current moment and an anthropology seeking to engage involving a series of sticks of equal length, cut by one person
publicly and politically with culture-talk. at an angle resulting in a set of differing lengths and painted
Part of my argument will make a virtue of Boas’s frus- by another person resulting in a series of varying shades.
trating silence regarding a systematic gloss of “culture.” There is no correlation, he explains, between length of stick
While he certainly gestures to a sense of culture as a noun, and color, only a correlation between the coincidence of
his work on balance calls more attention to culture as pro- color and length and the position of the stick at the times
cess, or as a human capacity (as Daniel Rosenblatt suggests). of cutting and painting. The Boasian payoff follows:
The plasticity of culture is central for Boas. Indeed, my argu-
ment here is that the relativizing, particularizing thrust of The population of each locality or every social group has
Boas’s work (which seems to have led to an objectified sense certain traits of bodily form and mental behavior pecu-
of a plurality of cultures) is but one step in an argument liar to itself, but this does not prove that the two are
causally related. Bodily form and mental characteristics
ultimately tending more toward a melting-pot ecumenism
change each according to its own laws and each in its
than a map of discrete cultures.2 own tempo, so that it is justifiable to ask whether the
population placed in another geographical location may
not retain its bodily form and change its mental char-
THE PROMISE OF PARTICULARISM acter, analogous to the change of the location of sticks
of decreasing length before the paint had been applied.
Boasian particularism sought to disrupt a universalizing
[Boas 1940(1932):192f.]
comparativism that yielded a hierarchized reading of dif-
ference along a common axis of nature. The centrality of
He is similarly at pains elsewhere to stress the archival
the “historical method,” anchored in the empirical study
value of language study, as a function of the independent
of phenomena whose specificity is always a function of
plasticity of language:
time, is well remarked in studies of Boas (Bunzl 1996; Cole
1999; Lesser 1981; Stocking 1968, 1974). The particularist
underpinnings of Boas’s inductive approach derived from While anatomical characteristics are important on ac-
count of their permanence, languages change more read-
the dissolution of existing generalizations in the face of ily and the changes are such that they throw much light
unique historical trajectories—“tracing the full history of on their history. . . . The analysis of dialect enables us to
the single phenomenon” (Stocking 1974:12; see also Boas follow the history of words and of concepts through long
1940[1887a]). As Boas put it in his exchange with Otis periods of time and over distant areas. The introduction
Mason over the principles of ethnological classification: of new inventions and migration into distant countries
are often indicated by the appearance of new words, the
“We have to study each ethnological specimen individu- origins of which may be ascertained. Thus the history of
ally in its history and in its medium, and this is the im- language reflects the history of culture. [1940(1889):630–
portant meaning of the ‘geographical province’ which is so 631]
 Orta • The Promise of Particularism 477

This assertion of the causal independence of cultural phe- parallel histories of development. Different stages of civi-
nomena was the cornerstone of Boas’s culture concept and lization found among regionally separated societies are not
the condition of possibility for a number of important po- evidence of differing capacities; rather, they are statistically
litical interventions by the “citizen-scientist” (Lesser 1981). normal (and insignificant) variations within a longer arc of
I will focus on three here. progress.
First is a historical critique of contemporary relations In emphasizing the statistical insignificance of intrahu-
among social groups. Boas stressed that contemporary dif- man variation, Boas was not offering a relativizing benedic-
ferences in “achievement” need not reflect innate differ- tion of the status quo. Rather, Boas’s conceptualization of
ence in racial ability; rather, they could best be explained by culture consistently enabled a liberal sense of assimilation.
particular historical factors. Why did “the tribes of ancient This is the second temporal move implicit in the Boasian
Europe readily assimilate the civilization that was offered culture concept and the third political implication of the
to them, while at present we see primitive people dwindle concept I want to stress: The lesson of historical particu-
away and become degraded before the approach of civiliza- larism was the promise of a future ecumenism. To be sure,
tion, instead of being elevated by it [?]” (Boas 1911a:11). this promise was built on relativizing foundations and as-
Boas attributes these differences to patently historical fac- pired toward a civilization self-aware of the contingency of
tors: “the devastating influences of diseases” resulting from its dominance. But the broader point remains: The disag-
transatlantic contacts versus the more benign impact of in- gregation of race, language, and culture yielded the possi-
teractions among the contiguous population of Europe; the bility of a cosmopolitan melting pot. The political lever-
greater phenotypic range in contexts of European colonial- age of the concept of culture was to assert difference with-
ism, which impose social barriers preventing capable mem- out determinism, casting difference as an index of muta-
bers of “primitive” groups from assimilating (see, partic- bility and historicity. The Boasian lesson that people are
ularly, Boas 1938); and the conjunctural material realities who they are not essentially but historically is a double-
of industrialization, which pose particular and historically edged plea for tolerance: an appreciation of difference as a
unique challenges to those people with whom Europeans condition of possibility for its transcendence. This is what
came into contact. Other examples could be drawn from distinguishes Boasian talk of culture from contemporary
Boas’s discussions of social and biological differences among multiculturalism.
immigrant populations in the United States, which he at- The upshot of Boas’s efforts to disprove racial deter-
tributed to contextual socioeconomic factors such as nutri- minism and document histories of diffusion across cultural
tion or disease (1911a:27; 1940:28ff.). boundaries was a sense of human progress in which all hu-
Second, he set these specific contextual challenges, en- mans were potentially engaged. Notwithstanding a clear
abling or impeding the “advancement” of particular so- sense of cultural determinism, Boas’s concept of culture was
cial groups, within a longer arc of human history and not an abstract superorganic thing. “It seems hardly neces-
progress. The effect is relativizing and comparative. Rather sary,” he wrote, “to consider culture a mystic entity that
than taking the West as an absolute benchmark, Boas ar- exists outside the society of its individual carriers, and that
gues that the current moment of Western ascendance is one moves by its own force. The life of society is carried on by
among a number of such moments in human history. He individuals” (1928:245; Lewis 2001:386). Boasian particu-
wrote: larism led ultimately and quite persistently to the individ-
ual, driven by an optimistic sense of an unfolding history
During the dawn of history, we see civilization cling to
certain districts, in which it is taken up, now by one peo-
of change and cross-fertilization resulting in an ever more
ple, now by another. In the numerous conflicts of these robust stock of ideas and experiences supporting individ-
times the more civilized people were often vanquished. ual reflection. Note that this is not to suggest that Boas
The conqueror, however, learned the arts of life from the espoused a notion of an abstract individual. Far from the
conquered, and carried on the work of civilization. Thus author of society, the reflective Boasian individual was al-
the centres of the civilization were shifting to and fro
over a limited area, and progress was slow and halting.
ways embedded in context. Put differently, Boasian culture,
At the same period the ancestors of the races that are conceived as a process, unfolded across different levels of
now among the most highly civilized were in no way su- scale. The Boasian individual was one locus of culture as
perior to primitive man as we find him now in regions process and a crucial one for the Boasian vision of a cumu-
that have not come into contact with modern civiliza- lative species achievement of civilization. “Tradition” thus
tion. [1911a:6]
shifted from being a collectivizing constraint to a resource
Along with the shifting “bloom” of civilization, Boas for individualized refinement. For Boas, the salient differ-
stresses that this advancement is a cumulative human en- ence between “primitive” societies and “our modern civi-
deavor, crediting a history of “intercommunication” and lization” is that modern society, through the refinement of
“diffusion” rather than “the genius of a single people” for conscious reason, has accelerated the processes of cultural
the “general progress” of humanity. The exception to this change. As he put it, “the difference between the type of
sense of a collaborative process of advancing civilization is primitive thought and feeling and that of our own appears
in the form of sharper regional divides such as that between to us rather as a product of the diversity of the cultures that
the “Old” and “New World,” which Boas links to regionally furnish the material with which the mind operates than as
478 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

the result of a fundamental difference in mental organiza- the historical comparative arc to embrace pre-Hispanic “Cal-
tion” (1904:243). ifornia” and raise questions about the utility of the label
The progress of civilization, in Boas’s view, stems from “Hispanic.” More to the point is the extent to which such
the cumulative wisdom of empirical experience categorized, descriptive demographic categories are taken to reference
recorded, and transmitted in ever more effective ways.3 This discrete cultural communities within U.S. society. For this
sustains individual events of conscious reflection on cul- is the referent of “diversity,” as celebrated and enumerated
tural practices and assumptions about the world. Such meta- by the U.S. Census Bureau or as targeted by niche marketers.
cultural opportunities, in Boas’s view, can become opportu- Moreover, the relativized distinction of these communities
nities lost through the sorts of “secondary rationalizations” turns on their encapsulation within a social order gener-
by which Boas felt “primitive” people sought to explain to ating relatively silent criteria of difference. Where Boas’s
themselves elements of their culture that became objects of culture concept aided an understanding of discrete ethnic
reflection: communities as a function of unnecessary social barriers
that, with reflection, might be dismantled, the contempo-
While each habit is the result of historical causes, it may rary rhetoric of diversity takes cultural difference as a stable
in course of time associate itself with different ideas. As
quality to be codified and celebrated.
soon as we become conscious of an association between
a habit and a certain group of ideas, we are led to explain I am interested in the ways the contemporary politics of
the habit by its present associations, which probably dif- culture reveal important changes in “culture” as a metadis-
fer from the associations prevailing at the time when the cursive concept, and it is this ascendance of culture as a
habit was established. [1904:249] noun that I have in mind. This is certainly continuous with
important elements in Boas’s own thought; the invocation
Secondary rationalizations at once misrecognize and ob-
of an intrinsic regional DNA is resonant with the Boasian
scure (for the archivally minded ethnographer) the true his-
notion of a “culture area,” which was inspired by the same
tory of particular traits. Moreover, by justifying and perpet-
cosmographic tradition that gave rise to Boasian historical
uating customs to which people have an emotional attach-
particularism. As taken up by some of Boas’s students (no-
ment, such rationalizations stunt what might otherwise be
tably Kroeber, Kluckhohn, and Benedict) and institutional-
occasions for cultural change and progress. My claim is not
ized within the interdisciplinary arena of area studies, the
that Boas was prescriptive in this regard, but that the situ-
concept of “culture area” shifted from a spatial heuristic for
ated political leverage of his evocation of culture stemmed
marking cultural change over time (tracking the develop-
from establishing this as a possibility.
ment of particular cultural configurations in a given locale)
and space (as a comparative source of evidence of historical
borrowing and influence among neighboring cultures) to a
BRIDGES AND TERRITORIES shorthand for referencing discrete contemporary identities.
I am arguing that Boasian cultural relativism conceived of Over the middle decades of the 20th century, and es-
human cultural differences as evidence for the potential for pecially in the wake of World War II, the spatial dimen-
ecumenical merger, and that his thought was congenial to sions of the culture concept increasingly became cotermi-
(if not guided by) a liberal ideal of a society as a “melting nous with national or quasi-geopolitical spaces. The cul-
pot.” In contrast, contemporary rhetorics of cultural iden- ture area became a bounded territory. This shift is evi-
tities tend to invoke more stable essences, whose integrity dent in the work of Benedict. In a 1946 radio address
as an object of motivated or strategic reference is founded titled “Race Prejudice in the United States,” she follows
less on a sense of a shared human capacity and more on a closely the lessons taught by Boas criticizing racial formal-
premise of translatability among elements in a set. I will take ism: “No scientific study [gives] any basis for thinking that
up this question more directly below. Here I want to qualify all the healthy people, the intelligent people, the imagina-
this sharp sense of juxtaposition (and incommensurability) tive people, are segregated in one race or born in certain
by examining some of the intellectual and historical bridges countries [NB] and not others” (1959[1946]:359). Benedict
between the Boasian culture concept and contemporary no- refers to an anthropologist friend, returning from field-
tions of multiculturalism. work in Philippines, who reported the comments of a vil-
Recall the New York Times article on the shifting de- lage “chief” on passing a stranger along a path. “In the
mographics of the state of California. While Starr’s histor- old days,” the chief explained to the anthropologist, “our
ical contextualization of Anglo hegemony in California as village would have killed him” (1959[1946]:358). On the
but one phase in a longer regional history is quite Boasian, one hand, Benedict points to savage tribalism as a shock-
his invocation of an intrinsic demographic DNA for the ing site for “American” self-recognition: “The old jealous
region is not. Although the article is careful to note that tribalism of the untutored savage has not died out even
“Hispanic” is a demographic rather than a racial category, in our literate industrial world” (1959[1946]:359). On the
the genetic metaphor seems to suggest a tight (natural?) other hand is the narrative calibration of “the old days,”
fit of race, place, and culture inevitably reasserting itself. suggesting that such attitudes can be transcended. In an
Such determinism was a prime target of Boas’s critical in- unpublished manuscript, Benedict (1959[1947]) discusses
ductive method. Indeed, one could imagine Boas extending postwar race prejudice, arguing that the wartime boost to
 Orta • The Promise of Particularism 479

national sentiment broke down racist boundaries, but that would become crystallized and reproduced in and through
this progress is now vulnerable to reversal as old patterns the institutional infrastructure of area studies.
reassert themselves.4 Seizing on the achievements of the This conceptualization of culture referred to an anti-
war effort as an opportunity for further progress, Benedict cipated spatial array of differences rendered commensurable
suggests a number of strategies for “lessening our national as a function of a patently evident geopolitical reality—
shame of race and ethnic discriminations before the eyes of embodied in the United Nations and emerging postcolo-
the rest of the world” (1959[1947]:365). Citing the strong nial nations, and defining challenges of postwar diplomacy
“assimilationalist” bent of “our minorities” in the United and development and a vision of global democratization.
States as well as an “American” faith in “nurture as com- What is more, this vision of a global grid of national cul-
pared to ‘nature,’” Benedict asserts: “We have a wonder- tures entailed a somewhat tentative insertion of the United
ful faith in education and we believe that man is shaped States—an “American” “we”—within that order. The territo-
by his environment. We constantly fail to act upon this rialization of culture went hand-in-hand with the assertions
faith, but we do not have the philosophical doubts about it of two not-yet-presupposable claims about “America.” The
which are bred in societies with a surviving feudal heritage” first is an assertion that there was a national–cultural “there”
(1959[1947]:367). there: a public ratification of a sense of an “American” “way
A different sense of culture and relativism appears, how- of life” (Hegeman 1999; Susman 1984). Warren Susman
ever, when Benedict turns her Boasian gaze to the emerg- (1984:153) cites the decade of the 1930s (and references
ing international order (of societies with differing her- Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1989[1934]) as a moment in
itages?) of the midcentury. In a paper titled “Recognition of which the discourse of culture became domesticated as a
Cultural Diversities in the Postwar World” (1959[1943]),5 resource for conceptualizing and articulating “American”
Benedict applies the concept of culture to a field of na- national self-consciousness. This involved wrestling with
tional difference. For U.S. citizens, whose “national expe- the stigma of being a mongrel nation of immigrants, and
rience in Americanizing millions of Europeans” has “made so turned on a premise of assimilation that was not at all
us believe . . . that given the slimmest chance, all peoples will at odds with Boasian “culture.” Correlated with this is an
pattern themselves upon our model,” she cautions, emerging claim about the status of “American” culture as
metonymic of “Western civilization.” Benedict’s comments
the post-war world will bring us face to face with a quite
in the 1940s are cautionary assertions of an “American” na-
different situation; and just insofar as the United Nations
succeeds in operating through mutual cooperation, the tional character only recently articulated, and a sense of
need for cultural understanding will be intensified. Deep- international prominence that could not at that moment
lying cultural diversities were not a matter of intensely be taken for granted.
practical moment so long as the relationship of Western The emergence of area studies involved the articulation
nations to the rest of the world was authoritarian. . . . In
of a field of difference in which the position of the United
such relationship the foreigner deals with the whole cul-
ture only tangentially, and needs only isolated bits of un- States was initially uneasy. Area studies posited and sought
derstanding of the culture with which he deals. But the to domesticate a grid of relatively horizontal differences, in
cooperation of the United Nations in the postwar world, which the United States, although the point of scholarly
President Roosevelt has said, is to “lay the basis of that vantage, was a relatively commensurable element within
enduring world understanding upon which mankind de-
the set.
pends for its peace and its freedom.” [1959(1943):439–
440] In a seminal statement, Julian Steward (1950) charac-
terized the fourfold aims of the nascent field of area studies:
Continuing, Benedict voices a conceptualization of culture (1) to provide “knowledge of practical value about impor-
that is heavily informed by its Boasian roots—rejecting bi- tant world areas”; (2) to foster “awareness of cultural rela-
ological explanations of difference and asserting a holis- tivity”; (3) to provide understanding of “social and cultural
tic understanding of culture as determining of individual wholes as they exist in areas”; and (4) to further the devel-
values and ideals. But she also presents a newly spatialized opment of a “universal social science” (1950:2). “A deep-
sense of cultures as integrated patterns varying significantly ened recognition of cultural relativity,” he wrote, “means
at the level of nations: that one knows enough about foreign cultures to under-
stand that each has a self-consistent and distinctive pat-
With every occupied country the United States assists in
tern, that each has developed its own solutions to life out
freeing from Axis domination, with every Asiatic coun-
try where we operate in cooperation with the existing of a unique past, and that none is absolute or inherently su-
culture, the need for intelligent understanding of that perior to the others” (1950:4). This kind of knowledge, he
country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations continued, led to greater “tolerance” among laymen and
will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are greater “objectivity” among scholars (1950:4). Moreover,
familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irre-
such an approach is not limited to fostering knowledge of
sistible. [1959(1943):441]
others, it is deeply implicated in the emergence of a sense
This formulation of culture as territorialized content fixed of national/scholarly self: “It has been discovered that the
in the form of the nation-state reflects important transfor- United States is also a ‘world area’ worthy of an interdis-
mations of the concept at midcentury, transformations that ciplinary approach” (1950:5). Steward presents in tabular
480 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

form a comparative overview of the methodological and contemporary ideology of inculturation presents a stark il-
analytic practices of area studies. Of note is that his chart lustration of this play of pluralism and (masked) univer-
(and the chapter it accompanies) makes reference to studies salism present in other forms of multiculturalist discourse.
such as the Lynds’ Middletown (1929) as examples of work At the same time, the history of missionary Catholicism
focused on the United States “culture area,” examining na- in places such as Latin America dovetails in revealing ways
tional challenges of modernization as well as class and race with the midcentury ethos and institutionalization of area
relations (1950:30ff.). studies and so presents a powerful case for continuing this
So far, so Boasian. comparative examination of the culture concept across the
To be sure, the liberal managed pluralism (cf. Rafael second half of the Boasian century. Let me outline three
1994) of area studies reflects a certain hardening of Boasian points of convergence here.
relativism, yielding a map of discrete cultures. This is an im- First, the Benedictine emergence of area studies betrays
portant difference by midcentury, as once-porous Boasian its own missionary zeal: It is guided by a utopian faith in
culture areas are conceptualized as more tightly bounded an as-yet-to-be-perfected social science, which might serve
containers of traits (as Ira Bashkow notes in his article, this as a vehicle for self-understanding and national and in-
issue). But the midcentury moment shares with the Boasian ternational harmony. In Latin American community stud-
fin de siècle two important characteristics. First is a sense of ies, Steward observed, this entailed an analytic focus on
difference as a universal condition to which all are equally problems of modernization, on the interactions of Hispanic
subject. The plural community of nations of the postwar and native cultures, and on the “general problem of In-
world was conceptualized as a field of difference both exter- dian acculturation” (1950:32). Alongside this commitment
nal and patently evident to all nations. By the same token, to overcoming cultural differences went a diagnosis of con-
the Boasian historicist conceptualization of national cul- temporary social afflictions tied to them. Thus, among the
tural identity as a pattern developed out of a unique past discoveries of postwar social science was global poverty, the
asserts the integrity of U.S. distinctiveness as one in a global correlated conceptualization of a developing (third) world,
series of culture areas. Second, at both moments the author- and the necessity for scholarship to be tied to some form
itative knowledge of cultural difference appears as a nec- of applied intervention (Escobar 1995; Pletsch 1981). In
essary condition for ameliorating the problems difference settings like Latin America, the church at midcentury was
can foster. Though the telos may shift—from melting-pot explicitly engaged in this sort of ameliorative, developmen-
ecumenism to the promise of transcendent social scientific talist intervention. Second, the postwar period saw a dra-
knowledge, which, rather than effacing difference, would matic reengagement on the part of the church in many
domesticate it—in each instance difference is posed as a of the world areas that were also emerging as strategic tar-
challenge not yet in hand. gets for area studies. In the case of Latin America, there
In contrast, in contemporary multiculturalism, the ref- was a strong convergence between pastoral policy, institu-
erencing of difference already effects its encapsulation. This tional academic practice in the United States, and U.S. na-
encapsulation involves the rhetorical construction of cul- tional interest in the region. Third, and finally, over the
tural identity/difference with respect to a relatively silent ensuing decades, the pastoral position of elements of the
grid of comparison, a universal framework with respect to Catholic Church has shifted in ways that parallel changes in
which different identity positions are at once calibrated and scholarly and popular conceptualizations of culture. Thus, if
celebrated. More precisely, what is “silent” about this grid Catholic missionaries of the 1950s and 1960s shared many
of comparison is its tacit alignment with a dominant iden- of the concerns of scholars in area studies centers emerg-
tity within the global series. No longer a patently evident ing around the United States, the missionaries who were
external reality—the United Nations, the postwar geopolit- the subjects of my ethnographic research in the 1990s cate-
ical order—to which all nations/cultures are to some extent chized their indigenous flocks to reclaim and celebrate their
accountable, the current voicing of difference here is based ancestral culture in ways quite similar to the lessons taught
more closely in a particular cultural vantage: not one in the by the U.S. Census Bureau.
process of becoming (as was the United States at midcen-
tury), but one that is utterly presupposable. It is in this light
that I read the authoritative enumeration and demonstra- THEOLOGY AND CULTURE: CATHOLIC ACTION,
tion of difference undertaken by the census and President LIBERATION THEOLOGY, INCULTURATION
Bush’s hegemonic celebration of Cinco de Mayo. And it is Though the history of Latin American Christianity spans
against this history of emergent presupposability and nat- five centuries of complex change, the contemporary de-
uralized universalism that we might gauge the audacious velopments of inculturation can be contextualized with re-
unilateralism of the current Bush administration in the in- spect to institutional and regional developments in the 20th
vasion and occupation of Iraq. century. Independence from Spain in the early 19th cen-
I can best illustrate this movement from area studies tury went hand in hand with strong anticlerical actions in
to multiculturalism and the shifting sense of relativism and many of the newly constituted nations of the region. Late in
culture that this has entailed by turning to my own ethno- the century, spurred by the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum
graphic research focused on missionary Catholicism. The (1891), asserting the interest of the church in the social
 Orta • The Promise of Particularism 481

conditions of modern states, the church began a gradual in Panama City, staffed by clergy from Chicago, was an early
process of reconsolidation in the region. In Bolivia, the Latin American exemplar of the Christian Family Move-
church undertook a reengagement with a society slowly ment and served as a model for innovative pastoral work
consolidating as a nation-state. Like other sectors of soci- throughout Central America in the 1960s (e.g., Berryman
ety, the “Bolivian Church” was concerned with the “Indian 1984). Similar connections are evident in the work of Ivan
problem” and dedicated itself to a tricky combination of Illich, known for his Center for Intercultural Formation in
aims involving the assimilation or integration of indige- Cuernevaca, Mexico, through which many missionaries to
nous populations within national society and the remedia- Latin America received language training and instruction in
tion of their “ignorance,” while at the same time rejecting the social sciences.
the secularizing premises of positivism underlying much of Prior to founding the center (in conjunction with Ford-
the nation-state ideology (Barnadas 1976; Demelas 1981; ham University), Illich had served as a priest in Puerto Rican
Salmón 1997). communities in New York and also as an educator in Puerto
By midcentury, the church’s effort to reengage with a Rico. His work thus embodies the connections between an
modernizing world took on new significance against the emerging pastoral concern with Latin American difference
crystallizing geopolitical and discursive backdrop of the and the position of the church in addressing the tensions
Cold War and the developing world. Pius XII’s encyclical associated with ethnic difference in the United States. Illich
Fidie Donum (1957), calling for renewed missionary activity came increasingly to criticize the activities of U.S. Catholics
in the emerging third world, was symptomatic of a broader in Latin America, casting their pastoral interest in the region
effort by the church to reinforce its standing in this postwar as an extension of modes of social activism once focused on
world order (Bühlmann 1978; McDonough 1992:218). The assimilated Catholic immigrants within U.S. society and,
pontiff was apparently acutely concerned for Latin America, thus, ignorant of the regional particularities of Latin Amer-
threatened as he saw it by the twin evils of Protestantism ican societies (McDonough 1992:270). In “The Seamy Side
and communism (Bühlmann 1978:154; Levine 1981:247). of Charity” (1967), Illich asserted a parallel between the de-
This was the start of what many in the Latin American velopmentalist ethos of U.S. missionization and the policies
Church today refer to as the “second” or “new” evangeliza- and practices of the United States in the region.
tion, signaled by a wave of missionary activity in the re- Interwoven with the developmentalism shaping
gion. Without losing sight of the presence of pastoral work- Catholic activity in the region were forms of regional eth-
ers from many nations, I want to underscore the promi- nic stereotyping that call to mind the discourse of “national
nence of U.S. clergy in this evangelical effort and argue that character” in midcentury anthropology and area studies.
the goals of midcentury missionization in Latin America These tended to involve the self-assessment of U.S. clergy
reflected an ethos of pluralism and progress in many ways as composed of sterner stuff reflecting the “can-do” spirit
continuous with the conceptualization of culture manifest of “American” national consciousness, in contrast with the
in the United States at the time. “emotional ardor” of “the Latin” (McDonough 1992:256).
In Bolivia the arrival of new religious orders—Oblates McDonough reports the views of some U.S. Catholics who,
from Canada, Maryknolls from the United States—was sup- while critical of feminized Latin Catholicism as a recipe for
plemented by an influx of secular priests from a number of social and economic stagnation, nonetheless wrote roman-
dioceses in the United States. The number of priests nearly tically about the redemptive androgynous merging of the
doubled during the period from 1965–68, with the per- “colder” efficient north with the warmth and sensitivity of
centage of foreign clergy increasing over this time. Of 899 the Latin character.
priests in Bolivia in 1968, 701 were foreign, with the ma- The pastoral reencounter I have been describing gen-
jority of these (690) coming from nations outside of Latin erated a range of pastoral practices spanning the relatively
America (Pascual and Aguilo 1968). In the same year, there conservative models of Catholic Action (dominant in the
were some 3,400 U.S. Catholic missionaries active in Latin 1950s) and liberation theology (the principal paradigm for
America (McDonough 1992:273). pastoral work among Aymara throughout the 1970s and
Priests who were active in Bolivia in the 1960s rue- early 1980s). While references to liberation theology call
fully reported to me that they came to Latin America ready up images of radical Marxist priests and of Catholics taking
to extend techniques of pastoral work common in the up arms in support of revolutionary causes apparently at
United States to social situations in Latin America. This loggerheads with the decidedly conservative and even re-
ranged from the most mundane strategies of consolidat- actionary tendencies of Catholic Action, these two pastoral
ing parish communities (say, through the formation of models are cut from the same modernist cloth. In the Latin
basketball leagues) to the extension of more formal tem- American context, for instance, both share a self-conscious
plates for pastoral work such as Catholic Action or the rejection of indigenous and colonial traditions seen as back-
Christian Family Movement.6 Traditions of Catholic social ward, polluting, alienating, and misleading. More generally,
work, steeped in U.S. contexts of urban pluralism and the these two paradigms share a modernist faith in secular ap-
experiences of immigrant Catholic ethnic communities in proximations of social/human perfectibility. Both partici-
the early 20th century, directly informed key pastoral sites pated in a developmentalist ethos that premised difference
in Latin America at midcentury. The San Miguelito Mission as a challenge to be transcended through its understanding.
482 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

Both reflected pastoral policy shaped in close dialogue with sermons to catechetical lessons to workshops that take the
geopolitics. Both reflected a spatializing Benedictine trans- form of collective ethnographic interviews, missionaries ex-
formation of the culture concept that retains key Boasian hort Aymara to recall and reflect on practices and beliefs all
traits. but lost from view. These are the dusty signs evoked in the
I have discussed this pastoral history in greater detail missionary parable quoted at the outset: survivals from the
elsewhere (Orta 1995, 1998, 2004). In broad strokes: Lib- distant past, masked by the dust and grime of history (and
eration theology achieved relatively few inroads among in- by the extirpative practices of the church).
digenous Andean communities. The reasons for this include Inculturation involves missionaries in the “fixing” of
tensions between the modernist models of church and wor- “Aymara culture” in the double sense described by Diane
ship espoused by liberationist priests and the local expecta- Nelson (1999) in her discussion of contemporary Mayan
tions of Catholicism in many Andean areas, as well as the ethnic politics in Guatemala. That is, missionaries aim both
effective suppression of progressive clergy in the region by to reform Aymara practices (by delimiting their meanings
the Vatican and the repressive actions of regional “national and conflating these with Christianity) and to stabilize or
security states” concerned with the perceived threat of the codify these practices. Specifically, the salvaged Aymara cul-
radical church. By the mid-1980s, many pastoral workers ture is to be evaluated in the light of what is presumed
in the region considered liberation theology a failed—or at to be universally translatable Christian meaning. This is in
least passé—experiment. large measure a positive evaluation, reflecting the mission-
The “theology of inculturation” reflects a self-conscious aries’ desire to embrace cultural differences and to local-
effort to reanimate pastoral activity and to turn away from ize Catholicism. Yet this is a qualified relativism. Not all
the class-based rhetoric emphasizing “God’s preferential op- traits pass the test. Moreover, traits that do pass the test do
tion for the poor” to an evangelical focus on the religious not emerge unchanged. The valorized difference is a con-
authenticity of “the other.” Emerging during the 1980s and verted difference through a pastoral alignment with puta-
early 1990s, these developments are coordinate with glob- tively transcultural Christian values. The particularity or dif-
ally identifiable shifts from class-based politics of identity ference of any Aymara trait is embraced to the extent that
to those premised on ethnic difference and multicultural- it is reducible to a transcendent core meaning or function.
ism. In Bolivia, the practices of the church converge with “You shall judge the tree by its fruits” instructs one mis-
other discussions of Aymara ethnic identity of increasing sionary. Others offer various criteria for assessing cultural
sociopolitical salience. I thus take the missionary ideology practices: for example, that which people do out of fear is
of “inculturation” as a productive site for examining mul- not Christian; that which they do out of love and faith is.
ticulturalism, and so as symptomatic of important shifts in The anchor for this judgment is the person of Jesus, taken
the public concept of culture. both as a historically and culturally specific example of in-
The guiding premise of inculturation is that indigenous culturation, and as a primary resource for the retrieval of po-
beliefs and ritual practices reflect and embody local and cul- tentially culture-free Christian meaning. Like some groups
turally particular expressions of what missionaries take to of U.S. Christians who wear jewelry with the letters WWJD
be Christian values. Where colonial missionaries strove to (i.e., What Would Jesus Do?), Aymara are challenged to dis-
convince Andeans to abandon their indigenous ways and, cover, in interaction with the missionaries, a way of being
thereby, to become Christian, inculturationists insist that Aymara in the way that Jesus would have been Aymara. The
Andeans were Christian all along. This typically entails the anticipated result is an Aymara New Testament: an organic
identification and standardization of a set of discrete traits— realization of Christian meaning out of inherited Aymara
a specific repertoire of rituals—that come to stand for a cultural form. But note that this is not an assimilationist
posited “culture” that the missionaries aim to “recuperate” new covenant, effacing or minimizing cultural differences.
and “revalorize.” Thus, offerings to mountain deities de- The differences are, if anything, hypertrophied. But here,
nounced by earlier cohorts of priests as idolatry or as mysti- the enunciation of cultural difference entails its encapsu-
fying superstitions are embraced by inculturationist priests lation within a grid of universally translatable Christian
for fostering community solidarity and so as the functional meaning.
equivalent of Christian ritual. Aymara institutions of recip-
rocal exchange and indigenous forms of cooperative social
organization are similarly applauded as sociological indices BOASIAN RELATIVISM AND INCULTURATIONIST
of Christian values. Consumption of alcohol and coca leaf— MULTICULTURALISM
denounced by generations of missionaries as a vice, an ad- One result of this is a sort of motivated holism that can be
diction, and a waste of financial resources—are praised as contrasted revealingly with the holism prescribed by Boas.
forms of commensality; festival drunkenness is seen as a Thus, where Boas stressed the localized and historically par-
vehicle of interpersonal catharsis that serves as a means to ticular interrelation of multiple cultural traits as the basis
these Christian ends. of his claim that cultures be seen as complex wholes, mis-
Inculturation verges on salvage ethnography, as mis- sionaries seize on particular traits as metonymns of a now-
sionaries privilege and recuperate traditions thought to be presupposed discrete (and transhistorical) culture. More-
disappearing. In a variety of discursive genres ranging from over, such traits evoke a cultural whole whose integration
 Orta • The Promise of Particularism 483

arises from a complex interplay of local particularity and rationalizations that such a question elicits as prototypical
translocal translatability. The missionary method involves Aymaraness. Or, priests working with indigenous catechists
a focus on Aymara history, but this historical particularity engage in collective ethnographic interviews, eliciting de-
is subsumed by the larger universal framing narrative (or scriptions of a given rite as it is practiced in a number of
metabiblical plot) of revelation, here rendered as a revela- communities. Intercommunity variations are synthesized
tion of what was always already there. by the missionaries (in conjunction with the functionalist
Boas’s particularism served in large measure to dis- Christian gloss), and the prototypical ritual along with in-
rupt or qualify unrestrained comparativism. Similar sur- culturationist exegesis is copied down by catechists, who ap-
face forms or outward appearances, he cautioned (e.g., pear both as informants and students in this homogenizing
1940[1896]) could be shown to be dissimilar when particu- metacultural operation. Elsewhere (1998), I have stressed
larist ethnography revealed their disparate local meanings a certain resistance to this homogenization on the part of
or specific historical origins. Like effects need not be pro- catechists, for whom a sense of intercommunity variabil-
duced by like causes and apparently comparable traits may ity in ritual practices and secrecy in the knowledge that
have diverse functions in specific social contexts. In con- communities have of one another seems quite crucial. Data
trast, inculturation takes disparate outer forms and renders from other contexts of Aymara life suggest that uniformity
them commensurable through the evangelical discovery of is seen as sterile in contrast to the ramifying set of social
similar functional meanings and the operation of ultimate categories that organize indigenous Andean life, and intru-
historical causes. sive knowledge across social categories (between families,
These metacultural exegetical strategies present an in- between moieties of communities, between communities)
version of the Boasian notion of secondary rationalizations, is guarded against and perceived as threatening and antiso-
which was one possible outcome of conscious reflection on cial. Here, I want to underscore that this process of homog-
cultural practices as people invested them with meanings enization entailed by the practices of inculturation partici-
different from those they once had. Secondary rationaliza- pates in a prime characteristic of multicultural discourse—
tions have an ambivalent status in the Boasian view. On the focusing on what I call “macrolocal” frames of inclusion, as
one hand, secondary rationalizations obscure the archival distinguished heuristically from the “microlocal.”
function of culture; for Boas, they are the dust covering Microlocality refers roughly to the “face-to-face” com-
the sign. Inculturation, in contrast, proposes what we can munity or comparably immediate units of sociocultural ac-
see from a Boasian perspective to be secondary rational- tivity. Macrolocality, on the other hand, involves more in-
izations as revelatory autoethnography: Through prescrip- clusive categories of identity, such as “peasant,” “Indian,”
tive self-consciousness, inculturationists claim to recover or “Aymara.” The localizing thrust of inculturation involves
fundamental but now overlooked meanings from cultural an integration at the level of the macrolocal, at a certain cost
practices. for the microlocal. While the microlocal is figured relatively
That said, within the longer arc of the Boasian poli- horizontally and potentially reciprocally, the macrolocal
tics of culture, this suspicion of secondary rationalization is is always figured vertically, producing and aligning posi-
only part of the story. Secondary rationalizations are imped- tions of unequal order within a relationship of encom-
iments to the documentation of local cultural history. Yet passment. This is the fragility of locality “when subject to
they are also paradoxically symptomatic of the cultural plas- the context-producing drives of more complex hierarchi-
ticity documented most powerfully for Boas by the history cal organizations, especially those of the modern nation-
they obscure. Indeed, secondary rationalizations are imper- state” or, in this case, the global church (Appadurai 1995).
fect examples—but, nonetheless, potent evidence—of the This dominant position, moreover, acquires a certain in-
sort of metacultural self-consciousness that is the principal visibility, an absence of difference, further determining the
motor for Boasian assimilation. Inculturationists, leaning markedness of subordinate celebrated groups (cf. Handler
on a different sense of culture, aspire to a less obvious trans- 1988:159–181; Williams 1989:409ff.). The possibility of in-
formation: foregoing the melting pot or other metaphors of culturationists’ pluralism is predicated on the macrolocal-
process and, instead, fixing differences as discrete and en- izing embrace of Aymaraness as a particular voicing of uni-
during variations on a single universal theme. versal Christian meaning.
Despite a rhetorical similarity between Boasian rela- I find this distinction useful for thinking about the
tivism and inculturationists’ multicultural tolerance aimed shifting referent of “culture” as a politically mobilized con-
at localizing religious meaning, at issue in mission prac- cept from the Boasian fin de siècle to the present day. In trac-
tice is less historical particularism than an alignment of ing the path of this dusty sign through this anthropological
locality with respect to an overarching taxonomy of dif- century, we gain critical purchase on the concept as it is in-
ference. While from the perspective of the global church, voked as a presupposable feature of the current sociopolit-
inculturation is localizing, in its local enactment it is de- ical landscape. Alongside the melting-pot ecumenical faith
ceptively homogenizing: effacing local distinctions through implicit in Boas’s work, we now have a rather anemic mul-
metacultural reference and practice. For example, working ticulturalism lumping and aligning a presupposed plural-
with Aymara from a range of varied locales, missionaries ity of cultures held (and compelled) to be, as Richard Wilk
ask, “What would Jesus do?” They then take the secondary has pointed out, “different in uniform ways” (1995:118).
484 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

Neither is satisfactory. Yet, while this runaway success of in his multileveled focus on regional culture areas, compo-
the culture concept disproves the assimilationist future it nent tribes, and the practices of individuals and families.
was once used to leverage, this is not to discount the utility It is evident as well in a broader tension between his focus
of returning to the dusty source. Let me be clear. I do not on the collective cosmographic “genius of a people” and
think Boasian anthropology is adequate to the challenges his concern with the plight of the individual innovative
of contemporary anthropology. Nor do I think that Boas is “genius” of a people. “The same kind of struggle that the
the only relevant ancestor of our discipline. Boas is not the genius has to undergo among ourselves in his battle against
way; I am not a missionary. However, that the relativizing dominant ideas or dominant prejudice occurs among prim-
legacy of Boasian public anthropology has resulted in the itives and it is of particular interest to see in how far the
silencing of key attributes of the concept of culture and the strong individual is able to free himself from the fetters of
methodological and analytic practices by which anthropol- convention” (Boas 1940[1889]:638). The sense of localized
ogists seek to evoke it makes Boas a particularly useful object culture as porous and historically emergent obtains at every
of reflection. Moreover, Boas may be good to think with if level of focus. Such an understanding disrupts a conven-
only for his own silence regarding any systematic gloss of the tional assumption of microlocal traditional space as always
concept of culture. This is fruitful for our present situation already there, inertly available for macrolocalizing efforts,
because it is precisely the objectified sense of culture that is and offers one productive point of entry to an historicized
the enabling condition for macrolocal homogenization and examination of the relations of microlocality, macrolocal-
the sort of fetishized taxonomy of difference prescribed by ity, and encompassing frames of national and global power.
inculturationists and analogous multiculturalists. Indeed, Boas seems to have been centrally concerned
In this light we stand to gain much from a recuperation with the mediation across such levels of phenomena. This
of certain aspects of the Boasian project, of which I identify introduces the third recuperation, which has to do with an
three here. intersection of two issues. One involves secondary ratio-
The most basic of these concerns diffusion (as Bashkow nalizations. In addition to their movement through space
and Rosenblatt suggest, this issue). The Boasian emphasis on and time, Boas saw culture traits as moving along a di-
diffusion foregrounded the historicity of cultural phenom- mension of consciousness. Like linguistic phenomena, Boas
ena. Boas wrote, “There is no people whose customs have speculated that “many customs came into being without
developed uninfluenced by foreign culture, that has not any conscious activity,” while other customs with more
borrowed arts and ideas, which it has developed in its own explicitly conscious origins soon became habitual and be-
way” (1940[1889]:631). This analytic focus entails, first, an low the level of consciousness (1904:246f., 1911b). Where
entropic sense of culture. To relativizing discourses of mul- linguistic phenomena typically remain below the level of
ticulturalism that trade on stable contents filling each cul- conscious thought (and this made them attractive to the
tural container, we can offer the fundamental component of eliciting/observing Boasian ethnographer as a source of
Boasian relativism: change, refracted by the contingent par- pure historical data), “all other ethnological phenomena”
ticularity of geography, history, and (for Boas) the “genius” were prone to become at times the “subjects of conscious
of a people. Moreover, this focus on change requires a con- thought” (1911b:53). History, then, is a motor and medium
ceptualization of cultural boundaries as porous, which in for the origin of cultural traits, for their integration and their
turn compels analysis of the assimilation, transformation, routinization, and also for the emerging contexts that bring
and local reproduction of new ideas (1940[1889]:638). them anew to the attention of cultural actors. As Boas com-
Recognizing this at the core of the Boasian culture con- plained, this conscious attention in altered sociohistorical
cept, which positioned the historical challenges of “com- contexts often results in new explanations or justifications
plex civilizations” and those of “simpler,” “primitive peo- of cultural phenomena—secondary rationalization—which
ples” as of a kind, undercuts any straw man characterization “will be based on the general ideas current among the tribe
of the culture concept as fundamentally inadequate or ar- and related to the custom in question, but probably not at
chaic in the face of contemporary global complexity. It has all related to its historical origins” (1904:248).
the added benefit of both spurring a historical accounting In a correlated set of arguments, Boas held cultural pat-
of the (public) diffusion of the culture concept and com- terns and linguistic structures to be always mediated in a
pelling a sharper accounting of salient contemporary dif- subjective encounter with the world. While the Boasian cul-
ferences that might distinguish the current predicament of ture concept certainly rests on the shaping force of inher-
culture from its modernist base. Finally, and more to the ited tradition on the concepts, the actions, and even the
present point, this lesson disrupts primordial constructions perceptions of individuals, Boas seemed to see social prac-
of locality implicit in macrolocal discourses and offers us tice as a process of holding such cultural inheritance always
an axiomatic model of porous entanglement as a starting subjectively accountable to the objective world. Despite its
condition for any unit of anthropological analysis. “social origin,” Boasian cultural knowledge is always prac-
The second recuperation I propose involves precisely tical knowledge, realized (and potentially reformed) in use.
these units of analysis. Boas offers us a nested particularism This is developed most clearly in Boas’s discussions of lan-
that evokes a scalar sense of locality, understood at every guage, where his attention to grammatical processes yielded
level as a convergence of culture and history. This is evident an examination of processes of reference and predication
 Orta • The Promise of Particularism 485

(Silverstein 1979; cf. Jakobson 1959; Lucy 1985; Whorf multicultural diversity of contemporary California and the
1956). Michael Silverstein, for instance, notes that rather immigrant diversity of turn-of-the-20th-century New York. I
than constituting thought, for Boas, “language, or the so- have argued that these are vastly different moments involv-
cial activity of using it, is the medium of the universal hu- ing significantly different conceptualizations of cultural dif-
man faculty of rationality, the ability to manipulate preposi- ference and its implications. The “Americanness” sustained
tional knowledge” (1979:196). There is then a tension in the by the melting pot was by no means presupposable; the
Boasian concept of culture between habituated presupposi- “Americanness” framing the demographic shifts in Cali-
tions about the world, and the fact underscored repeatedly fornia is utterly so. The Boasian concept of “culture” en-
by Boas that culture remains perpetually accountable to the tailed the panhuman capacity to eliminate difference; the
challenges of concrete contexts. “culture” of multiculturalism insists on its perpetuation.
These two issues come together in that cultural pro- Though I have been able here to sketch only some of the
cesses themselves emerge as part of the objective reality themes at stake in a history of the “Boasian century,” my
with which people wrestle. More than the unseen mover principal aim is to bring into conscious reflection elements
of traits, history is the medium for metacultural reflection: of a Boasian concept of culture whose silencing correlates
the shifting context in which people integrate foreign traits with the emerging public sense of culture.
in a local culture, rationalize traits that have risen into con- The heuristic distinction of micro- and macrolocal is
sciousness, and become newly self-consciousness in ever- imperfect. Yet I think it effectively draws our attention to a
emerging circumstances. This self-consciousness becomes particular asymmetrical organizing of difference that is as-
particularly acute in contexts of ethnic affiliation, especially cendant in recent political thought. My prime concern here
as a mode of consciousness shaped by situations of con- (and it is a Boasian concern) is with the way the rhetorical
temporary social complexity. This shifting sense of culture reification of the macrolocal masks the microlocal, which
as subjective and objective, process and product, tacit and never goes away, or at least is always being produced. The
transformed, provides a useful entree to a contemporary ex- macrolocalizing thrust of inculturation, for instance, is im-
amination of the nested articulation of macrolocalities and plemented through a host of microlocalizing practices—
microlocalities and the porous and complex regional histo- ranging from the situated activities of catechists in their
ries that give rise to them. communities to the no-less-situated interactions of mission-
aries with their Aymara interlocutors. This is, I think, the
case with a host of other macrolocal discourses. At issue
CULTURAL MONOPOLY here is an anthropology that is attentive to these complex-
A recent discussion of “Culture at the End of the Boasian ities of locality through the ethnographic examination of
Century” in Social Analysis 41(3) notes the ascendance of a the microlocal negotiation of macrolocalizing metacultural
view of culture as a container, implying a “world of homol- assertions.
ogous containers—from the Human Relations Area Files to There is a strong temptation in joining with other “neo-
the United Nations” (Lambek and Boddy 1997). Michael Boasian” reflections to don a bracelet with the mnemonic
Herzfeld (1997) similarly remarks on the increasing ten- WWBD (What Would Boas Do?). In thinking about the
dency to reify cultures as essences, invoked as part of claims present and futures of Boasian anthropology, I have tried
to sovereignty. Such reifications, he suggests, are “the only to begin by acknowledging the real limits of a neo-Boasian
ones likely to produce results in a world where other play- recuperation, turning then to a self-consciously presentist
ers have already established the scoring rules in this grand recuperation of certain Boasian perspectives. With Boas (I
game of cultural monopoly” (1997:108). I agree with these think), I take this partial, situated, and imperfect process of
observations but find them incomplete. I have been calling wrestling with history (including disciplinary history) as a
attention both to the “hardening” of the concept of culture humanizing one, and as an ongoing condition of the pos-
and to the contemporary encapsulation of cultural differ- sibility for a meaningful and relevant anthropology.
ence in ways that were less presupposable at midcentury.
The period between the founding of the Human Relations
Area Files (HRAF) and the present is marked by the rou- A NDREW O RTA Department of Anthropology, University of
tinization, institutionalization, and extension of the public Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801
concept of culture and the rules of monopoly to which it is
bound, such that the “grand game of cultural monopoly”
has emerged as the only game in town. NOTES
The board game Monopoly (like the HRAF) appeared Acknowledgments. This article has its origins in a paper presented
in the 1930s. Susman (1984) links the game’s popularity at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological As-
sociation in the session “The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Boasian
to the “domestication” of the concept of culture and the Anthropology,” organized by Matti Bunzl and Richard Handler. My
increasing circulation of a sense of an “American Way of thanks to Matti and Richard for their invitation to participate in
Life.” Perhaps one index of the transcendent presuppos- what has turned into a very long conversation about neo-Boasian
anthropology. Their comments and suggestions, along with those
ability of that “American Way” is evident in the analogy offered along the way by Ira Bashkow and Danny Rosenblatt, have
drawn by Ong in the New York Times article between the improved this article and this collection as a whole tremendously.
486 American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 3 • September 2004

This work is also indebted to teachers of mine—particularly Mar- Boas, Franz

shall Sahlins and George Stocking—from whom I have learned so 1904 Some Traits of Primitive Culture. Journal of American
much about the Boasian perspective with which I seek to grapple in Folklore 17:243–254.
this article. Finally, my continuing thanks to the Aymara commu- 1911a The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan.
nities and missionary communities in Bolivia whose kindness and 1911b Handbook of American Indian Languages, pt. 1. Bulletin,
generosity have enabled me to conduct the ethnographic research 40, Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, DC: Govern-
that I draw from here. ment Printing Office.
1. For the record, I would characterize a post-postmodern anthro- 1928 Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: Norton.
pology as one that takes seriously the lessons learned and critical 1938 The Mind of Primitive Man. Rev. edition. New York:
distance achieved by critiques of anthropology from within and Macmillan.
beyond the discipline yet remains committed to the possibilities of 1940 Race, Language and Culture. New York: Free Press.
ethnographic research as both a basis for saying things that matter 1940[1887a] The Study of Geography. In Race, Language and
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and comparative disciplinary purchase on the study of the human 1940[1887b] The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas
capacity of culture. Widely Apart. In The Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of
American Anthropology, 1883–1911. George Stocking, ed.
2. For Boas, the work of anthropological analysis was always un- Pp. 61ff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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