![]() ![]() ![]() Parsimony and added value, however, never seemed to have much currency among students of culture, who proudly point to the many attempts to define what culture is, and they reference Kroeber and Kluckhohn, who identified 281 definitions in their 1952 book Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. ![]() It also must have organizing power in the sense that it helps to establish relations with other concepts and adds value overall. Following Deutsch (1963), a fruitful definition must be parsimonious and focus on the truly critical characteristics of the phenomenon. Most definitions are neither true nor false they are ultimately judged by their fruitfulness in advancing our understanding of a phenomenon. For a long time, anthropology developed along a different path, with its emphasis on the “other”-that is, non-Western, nonstate societies and cultures. ![]() But mostly the framing was implicit, almost taken for granted in the sense that students of the social sciences in the United States read and studied American society just as the British or the French did theirs. This framing was sometimes explicit: an early example is Aaron’s influential book on German sociology (1935) much later examples include Lipset’s American Exceptionalism (1996) or Huntington’s Who Are We? (2004). Yet the social sciences, which emerged during the end of the “old” globalization phase-when the nation-state was naturalized-engaged in an epistemological framing of cultures, values, and identities close to the notion of the nation-state. Envisioning cultures, values, and identities as the product of past exposures and interactions also means that the notion of national cultures and national society is historically highly questionable. ![]()
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