By Susan Hegeman
In contemporary many years, historians and social theorists have given a lot notion to the concept that of "culture, " its origins in Western notion, and its usefulness for social research. during this ebook, Susan Hegeman makes a speciality of the term's heritage within the usa within the first half the 20 th century, She indicates how, in this interval, the time period "culture" replaced from being a technical time period linked essentially with anthropology right into a time period of well known utilization. She indicates the connections among this stream of "culture" into the mainstream and the emergence of a particular "American tradition, " with its personal styles, values, and ideology.
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Example text
Indeed, in a number of senses, twentieth-century anthropologists were delicately poised between social worlds. ”49 This experience of being alien must have been shared by a significant number of Boas’s foreign-born and second-generation students, but there is also a sense in which anthropologists in general courted alienation as a matter of their professional practice. While the fieldworker was never entirely absorbed into the culture of the other (not a positive thing, in any case, for these anthropologists, since that would entail losing one’s capacity to explain and contextualize), the anthropologist also stood apart from his or her own context, as its critic and interpreter.
While the fieldworker was never entirely absorbed into the culture of the other (not a positive thing, in any case, for these anthropologists, since that would entail losing one’s capacity to explain and contextualize), the anthropologist also stood apart from his or her own context, as its critic and interpreter. It is in this sense of self-conscious estrangement and mediation that anthropology in the early twentieth century seems most characteristic of its moment. And, I believe, it is on the basis of this gesture of critique, and position of exteriority, that anthropologists are most easily comparable to other modernist intellectuals working in America at the same time.
I will do this by addressing the period in terms of another seemingly self-contradictory idea: American modernism. 20 This view—one often produced and promoted by the artists most firmly associated with the period—has thus typically emphasized the significance of Pound and Eliot’s London; the Paris of Montparnasse and Shakespeare and Company; Prague; Vienna; Zurich; Berlin; and the newly international context of an e´migre´-filled World War II–era New York. Needless to say, such a vision severely limits American modernism’s participants—to a handful of Parisian exiles, and those who served in the Great War.