Abstract
The use of political culture that was considered in the previous chapter differed from those considered in earlier chapters both in its methodology and its purpose.1 Both method and purpose were interpretive. Contrary to what Tucker at times suggests, interpretivism does not exclude explanation; but it does exclude the particular type of explanation that has been criticized under the heading of ‘comparative political culture research’. What sort of explanation, then, is provided by the interpretive use of political culture? Answering this question is the main purpose of this chapter. We will approach the answer in a series of steps, some suggested by analyses already considered and some introduced for the first time. As in the previous chapter, not all of the writings we will consider explicitly use the concept of political culture. However, within interpretivism it is artificial to draw firm boundaries between culture and concepts such as ideology. In the first stage of the argument of this chapter, a range of anthropological sources will be used to illustrate what may be termed a broad ‘movement of thought’, by which is meant a very general rearticulation of concepts and explanations. The movement may in a preliminary manner be characterized as one from an emphasis on culture to an emphasis on interests and social structure. The relationship of this movement to the arguments of preceding chapters is already apparent, and will be made clearer in the following pages.
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Notes
Their common membership of the category of ‘political culture research’ is, on the other hand, suggested by this observation of Lucian Pye’s: ‘Through the works of… Hannah Arendt, among others, we know something about the distinctive human or cultural basis of totalitarianism; and through the works of Almond and Verba, among others, we know something about the civic culture basic to stable democracy.’ Lucian W. Pye, ‘Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism’, American Political Science Review 84, 1990, 3–19, p. 13.
Archie Brown, ‘Conclusion’, in Archie Brown (ed.), Political Culture and Communist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 149–155.
Quoted in A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage Books, n. d.) (originally published as Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 47, 1952), p. 81.
Mead had celebrated sexual freedom in Samoa; Freeman on the other hand wrote of repression, a cult of virginity, and furthermore of claims by the inhabitants that Mead was misled. Subsequent defences of Mead have shown, however, that the issues of fact are by no means straightforward, and this is what makes the argument seem like one over mood. See Ivan Brady (ed.), ‘Speaking in the Name of the Real: Freeman and Mead on Samoa’, American Anthropologist 85, 1983, 908–947.
James A. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 16.
Ernest Gellner, The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays on Anthropological Method and Explanation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987) (originally published as Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences, 1973), p. ix; Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes, p. 8.
Roger M. Keesing, ‘Theories of Culture’, Annual Review of Anthropology 3, 1974, 73–97, p. 73.
Richard Basham and David DeGroot, ‘Current Approaches to the Anthropology of Urban and Complex Societies’, American Anthropologist 79, 1977, 414–440, pp. 430f.
See Edmund Leach, Social Anthropology (London: Fontana, 1982), ch. 1 for an account of the differences between social and cultural anthropology.
See the discussion in A. L. Epstein, Ethos and Identity: Three Studies in Ethnicity (London: Tavistock; Chicago: Aldine, 1978), pp. 10f.
M. Gluckman, ‘Anthropological Problems Arising From the African Industrial Revolution’, in Aidan Southall (ed.), Social Change in Modern Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 67, 69.
Abner Cohen, Two-Dimensional Man: An Essay on the Anthropology of Power and Symbolism in Complex Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 92–96.
Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester: Ellis Horwood; London and New York: Tavistock, 1985), p. 44.
Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, ‘atWhy Ethnicity?’, Commentary 58, 1974, 33–39, p. 33. For a survey of recent writing on the political use of ethnicity, see James McKay, ‘An Exploratory Synthesis of Primordial and Mobilizationist Approaches to Ethnic Phenomena’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 5, 1982, 395–420. An interesting example of the earlier confidence about assimilation is provided by Stephen Meyer’s account of the Ford Motor Company’s attempted Americanization of its substantially immigrant workforce. Ford’s’ sociological Department’ aimed to improve workers’ domestic environment, attending to matters such as cleanliness, table manners and etiquette. Stephen Meyer, ‘Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914–1921’, Journal of Social History 14, 1980, 67— 82, pp. 71–75. A graduation pageant from the Department’s English school featured a model ‘melting pot’, fifteen feet in diameter. The effort, Meyer reports, was undermined by the erosion of the monetary incentive on which it was predicated, a down-to-earth illustration of the influence of material circumstances on the survival or otherwise of ethnic attachments.
Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975), pp. 6f.
Jonathan Lieberson, ‘Interpreting the Interpreter’, in New York Review of Books 31, 15 March 1985, 39–46, p. 46.
See Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), pp. 26–29.
Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 15.
For a critique of the influence of Geertz on the development of the republican ‘paradigm’, see Joyce Appleby, ‘Republicanism in Old and New Contexts’, William and Mary Quarterly 43, 1986, 20–34.
See, for instance, Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 141–146.
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 67–75.
Alfred Schutz, ‘Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action’, in Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 7, 19.
David Middleton and Derek Edwards, ‘Conversational Remembering: a Social Psychological Approach’, in David Middleton and Derek Edwards (eds), Collective Remembering (London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990), quotation from p. 43.
William Roseberry, ‘Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology’, Social Research 49, 1982, 1013–1028, p. 1022.
Quoted in Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 21f.
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© 1993 Stephen Welch
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Welch, S. (1993). Political Culture and Interpretation. In: The Concept of Political Culture. Macmillan/St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22793-8_7
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