IRA BASHKOW

A Neo-Boasian Conception .of Cultural Boundaries

ABSTRACT For the past 30 years, anthropology's critics have repeatedly questioned the notion of "cultural boundaries," arguing
t hat concepts of culture inappropriately posit stable and bounded "islands" of cultural distinctiveness in an ever-changing world of
transnational cultural "flows." This issue remains an Achilles' heel- or at least a recurring inflamed tendon-of anthropology. However,
in the conception of boundaries, we still have much to learn from Boasian anthropologists, who conceived of boundaries not as barriers

to outside influence or to historical change, but as cultural distinctions that were irreducibly plural, perspectival, and permeable. In
---- .
this article, I retheorize and extend the Boasians' open concept of cultural boundaries, emphasizing how people's own ideas of "the
foreign "-and t he "own" versus the "other" distinction-give us a way out of the old conundrum in which the boundedness of culture,
as conceived in spatial terms, seems to contradict the open-ended nature of cultural experience. [Keywords: boundaries, culture concept,
Boasian anthropology, history of anthropology)
I
N THIS ARTICLE, I develop the outlines of a productive
conception of "cultural boundaries" inspired by the an-
thropology of Franz Boas and his students. Cultural bound-
aries have been a leading target of anthropological criticism
for the last 30 years. In the 1970s, for example, Eric Wolf
complained that cultures were too often conceptualized as
"bounded objects . . . like so many hard and round billiard
balls" (Wolf 1972:6, 14). And still today the problem of the
boundedness of culture is repeatedly raised in the field's
vanguard literature. A well-known example is the 1997 vol-
ume by Akhil 9J,!p.Jaand James Fe.tguson that seeks to un-
settle what is claimed to be a pervasive fiction that cultures
and bounded. !_he represent ation
as discrete geographical entities has been criti-
cized for aligning ai1tllrOPQ!Qgy witb the '"Coloniai"ideology
'of "indirect rule," as well as with the objectifications of cul-
promoted bz_ separatism and-nationalism (Asad
1973; Handler 1988; Leclerc 1972). This idea has also been
cdticized as a prop to inequality and domination, which
authenticates-as does the concept of "race"- dominant
groups' exclusion of those marked as "other" (Abu-Lughod
1991:142-143; Kahn 1989). all such critiques
of the pernicious functions served by cultural boundaries is
the commonly shared un_derstanding that all boundarie-s
are constructed and to some degree artificial From this
perspective, critiques of the idea of bounded cultures are
the counterpart of critiques of the idea that cultures can
be abstracted from history. Whereas critiques of ahistori-
cal culture focus on the neglect of processes and relation-
ships that extend across time, critiques of bounded culture
focus on the neglect of processes and relationships that
extend across space. But while the critiques olahistQrical
culture have led to important synfueses between histori-
cal and anthropological methods, there has been no
parable resolution in the case of the critiques of cultural
bmmctiuies. - - - -
In part, this longstanding theoretical impasse over cul-
tural boundaries reflects the recognition-arising around
the same time in political economy, philosophy, and
anthropology-that the commonsense notion of definite,
stable, and natural boundaries is problematic. 1nste<fd of
seeing cultures as naturally bounded objects that exist in
the world for us to discover, scholarship has
appreciated that cultural boundaries are constructs created
'Inlarge part through OWl! processes of re:Qresentation-
for example, (Clifford and
Marcus 1986; Gupta and Ferguson - 1997; Handler 1988;
Manganaro 2002; Marcus 1998; Moore 1999; Wagner 1975).
This, in turn, has led to a general reconftguration of our in-
tellectual values. Whereas boundaries were previously taken
for granted as useful natural qbjects to be validated by sci-
entific research, they are now valued primarily for the op-
portunity they provide to destabilize and deconstruct hege-
monic presuppositions by exposing the cultural work that
goes into representing them as natural or authoritative.
Boundaries also can be valued in contemporary discourse
as the background against which individuals' creative trans-
gressions and positively valued, mercurial, hybrid identities
.., American Anthropologist, Vol. 106, Issue 3, pp. 443-458, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 2004 by the American Anthropological Association.
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444 American Anthropologist Vol. 106, No. 3 September 2004
can be constructed. In our desire to stress fluidity and the
free appropriation of identity categories, the very notion of
boundaries has become emblematic of forms of difference
that are overly rigid, essentialist, and imposed: merely arbi-
trary divisions, unasked-for legacies from the past.
1
The theoretical impasse over cultural boundaries also
reflects the precedence given in discussions of globalization
to 'transnational connections and their novel formations.
It is not that scholars .have been unmindful of globaliza-
tion's darker, divisive aspects: the entrenchment of ethnic
conflicts, the mass mediation of political and religious ex-
tremisms, the enlarged reach of state terror, the global traf-
fic in. arms, and the widening inequalities dividing north
from south, rich from poor. However, in theorizing what is
new and distinctive about the condition of contemporary
globalization, scholars in anthropology and cultural studies
have tended to stress the breaching of national boundaries
by migration, mass communication, and trade, suggesting
the emergence of new forms of identity, economy, and com-
mark a break with the old modernist
order terms of nation-states. Scholars typically
increasing interconnectedness of the world us-
ingexamples like the dissemination of cultural commodi-
ties in cosmopolitan media like world music CDs and TV
shows. At the same time, nationalism is often treated as old
news, an ineradicable throwback to a problematic primor-
dialism that itself manifests outmoded theoretical concepts
of bounded culture. For example, when Arjun Apl,lildumL.
writes that recent critiques have "done much to free us of
the shackles of highly localized, boundary-oriented, holis-
tic, primordialist images of cultural form and substance,"
\
he is tarring previous anthropologists and Sikh secession-
\o
J ists with the same brush, since both appear guilty of natu-
ralizing the "boundary of a difference" to "articulate group
identity" (Appadurai 1996:13, 15, 46).
But there is something altogether remarkable about the
staying power of the anthropological critique of bounded
culture. For one thing, few current ethnographies are guilty
of positing inappropriately bounded cultural "islands." In-
deed, most ethnographic studies today address the translo-
cal connections that are entailed by neocolonial economic
structures, regional exchange systems, diasporic commu-
nities, immigration, borderlands, mass media, evangelism,
tourism, environmental activism, cyberspace, and so on.
Moreover, as Robert,Brightman (1995:520) has pointed out,
critics have never made a clear case for why such translocal
/ should, in themselves, be considered an argu-
ment for repudiating the concept of cultural
fact, boundaries are con_!!rrl!aJLy being asserted everywhere
b the we study, even-and, perhaps, especially-
.!!1 translocal situations, and they do not serve only il-
liberal functions like the reinforcement of prejudice and
the curtailment of freedom. B_oundaries also serve
sive,_t;:QJltrastive, constructive functions u!Cultl!_re.
even where they are con-
even where they are crossed.
to our thinking and writing, even our
writing about hybridity. But because recent scholarship has
failed to formulate a specifically anthropological concept of
boundaries that is distinct from the ethnic nationalist and
------- -- - ------
common-sense naturalized ideas that are so vulnerable to
the problem of boundaries remains
heel-or at least a recurring inflamed tendon-of the
discipline.
THE RELEVANCE OF BOASIAN ANTHROPOLOGY
Given this recurring inflammation, I believe it is time for
anthropology to revisit the concept of boundaries found in
the work of the Boasian cultural anthropologists of the first
half of the last century. To embrace the field's intellectual
legacy in this way is to stake out a different position toward
the past than has been customary in recent anthropologi-
cal work. Notwithstanding its sustained attack against the
metanarrative of progress, postmodern anthropology has
tended to emphasize the inadequacies of earlier anthropol-
ogy while accentuating its own disjuncture from it. In so do-
ing, it covertly perpetuates the very notion of progress that
it rightly calls into question. But if we take seriously that
the ongoing historical transformation of our discipline in-
volves much more than progress (toward what?), we should
do more than treat the past as a repository of errors; rather,
we should engage with what is worthiest in the genealogy
of our ideas.
cultural anth:copology had limitations. For in-
stance, the Boasians lacked our current, better understand-
ings of cultural structure and the politics of cultwe. But
they were highly sensitive to cultural hybridities, idiosyn-
cratic identities, and translocal
t l:1af are -today he1d to reveal the failure of the concept
of "bounded culture" itself. Their awareness of these is-
sues should be no surprise, since many Boasians were
first-generation immigrants or early feminist women who
were acutely conscious of their own sodal alienation and
marginality (Hegeman 1999:9; cf. Abu-Lughod 1991). In-
deed, in reference to languages Boas himself wrote of
"hybridization" (Boas 1940[1929]:220), and Alfred Kioeber
devoted a section of his anthropology textbook to the topic
of "cu!!!.ual hybridity" (1948[1923]:259). We may feel like
we are the first generation to grapple with the complexities
of identity, but the Boasians, grappling with them in their
time, created a rich ensemble of concepts for characterizing
culture, its relation to individual variation, and the ways it
is distributed over space and time.
What I offer here, then, is a look back to Boasian an-
thropology that is neither purely historicist (i.e., seeking
to understand past anthropology in its own historical con-
text) nor blindly recuperative (i.e., finding that current ideas
have past precedents). Instead, the position I take here en-
gages Boasian anthropologists as seminal thinkers, offering
a selective retheorization of their work that has implications
for current culture theory (see also Darnell 2001), especially
given the intense concern in the literature over cultural dis-
tinctions in the face of globalization. Specifically,
Bashkow A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries 445
that tlfe concepts of cultural boundaries are su-
perior to those perpetuated in recent critiques because (1)
more precisely defined and, therefore, aie of greater
analytical value and (i) they -cto .not cr eate absurd con-
. tradictions with common plate phenomena of _culture and
history.
HOW BOASIAN ANTHROPOLOGISTS UNDERSTOOD
CULTURAL BOUNDARIES
While the Boasians differed sharply from one another in
the positions they took on many questions, they shared
three guiding in their understandiQ.gs...Qf cultural
!;Joy__ndaries.
2
C) . First, it was axiomatic to the
and eermeable. Boasian anthro-
pologists, whatever their differences, did not conceptu-
alize cultural boundaries as walls or barriers to external
influence. The central argument of Boas's critique of 19th-
century cultural evolutionism was that similarities be-
tween cultures-such as shared mythic themes, artistic mo-
tifs, rituals, and ideas-is not evidence that all cultures
progress according to the same laws, since the similari-
ties are Often II much better explained by the well known
facts of diffusion of culture; for archaeology as well as
ethnograPhY-teach us that intercourse between neigh-
boring tribes has always existed and has extended over
enormous areas" (Boas 1940[1896]:278). Against the evo-
J lutionist idea that each culture's development is driven
by universal, autonomous processes of change, Boas and
his students argued that cultural development is contin-
gent on the history of a people's interactions with their
neighbors.
Thus, as a principled matter, the Boasians were cen-
trally concerned with the diffusion-in today's parlance,
the "flows"-of people, objects, images, and ideas between
localities (Appadurai 1996). Indeed, to a large extent, their
purpose in drawing boundaries around cultures was pre-
cisely to gauge the historical traffic across them.
3
Many
of the doctoral dissertations directed were trait dis-
tribution studies which showed how a specific cultural
- - - -
as the "concept of the guardian spirit" (Benedict
region, acquiring var-
ied meanings, forms, and functions within different cul-
tures. No anthropologist since has stressed the importance
of diffusion in forming culture as emphatically as Robert
Lowie (1921:428), who hyperbolized in his oft-quoted sigh
that civilization .is a "planless hodgepodge," a "thing of
since it develops not according to
a fixed law or design but out of a vast set . of contin-
gent external influences. In Lowie's strongly antiprimor-
dialist view of culhue as intrinsically syncretic (Brightman
1995:531), cultures may be distinct from one another and,
thus, bounded, without this also implying that they are
discrete-since, in Lowie's view, there is no qualitative dif-
between traits "outsidei'

Other Boasians' _views on diffusion were complicated
by their complementary interest in the psychological pro-
cesses by which trai.!_s impo_tled into a culture were rein:.
terpreted in a manner consistent with what was already
there, thereby producing qualities of coherence or inte-
gration within a cultUre. This integrationist view was ex-
pressed most famously by Ruth in Patterns of Cul-
ture (1934:47), in which that cultures were
than the sum". ofthe

borrowed from since thos_: traits_:-:.ere r
by and within the _ of the re. No

doubt, Benedict coherence and f
as James Boon (1999:28) has noted, it is
unfortunately easy to misremember Benedict's argument in
Patterns as one that presents cultures as closed. In part this
is because sh e used three cultures that were "historically
as little related as possible" and, thus, maximally discrete
in the context in which they were presented; in part it is
because each ethnographic sketch was developed primarily
within a discrete textual unit, a chapter of its own (Benedict
1934:17; Boon 1999:25) . But for Benedict, cultural integra-
tion is not antithetical to the diffusiomst view that cultural

QOrous;J.o the contrary, it presumes it. Bene-
dict's premise is that cultures start with a "diversity" of
"disharmonious elements" provided by outside influence,
and these are integrated in an ongoing process even as new
material is imported (Benedict 1934:226). Where the im-
ported material has been integrated harmoniously, Benedict
treats it as a culture"'s achievement. She also recognizes that
is lacking "in certaiE_.cultures" and
others with conflict_iilJ.d dissonance, which she .onsigers
tl'le:Outcome of integrative processes being by dif-
rusionfStones (1934:225, 241). Benedict's conception ofCul-
-
ture is thus marked by an irreducible tension between the
complementary processes of Qiffi.lsiQ_n and integration, re-
flecting the characteristic duality of Boasian anthropology
(Stocking 1974:5-8). In this duality, cultures are seen on
the one hand as accidental assemblages of diffus_fd-in ma-
hand as the outcomes of processes
of
11
inner develo ment" that tend to mold such material Q
preexisting patterns (Boas 1940[1920]:286). r:,)
Second;-me- Boasians ey
To be sure, in theoretical statements, Boas often wrote
as if the "culture," the "people," the "tribe," and the
"society" were equivalent units, and his methodological
holism may be interpreted as positing a privileged delimita-
tion of cultures as "wholes" (Boas 1940[1887], 1940[1920],
1940[1932]:258, 1974[1889]; Stocking 1974:13). But his_
ethnogl'aphic dis_!!Q.gEish tribal
divisions from the cultures he (Boas 1964, 1966),
and from hiss ophisticated II cosmographical" perspective,
that the uni!)': predicated of a culture
that was constituted necessarily "only
in the mind of the observer" (Boas 1940[1987):645). It is
worth remembering, too, that Boas articulated his holism
in opposition to the comparativist typologies of the 19th
century social evolutionists, who interpreted any cultural
446 American Anthropologist Vol. 106, No.3 September 2004
element, such as totemic clanship or fired clay pottery, by
grouping it together with elements of apparently similar
type found in other cultures, and then ordering the result-
ing sets into hypothesized evolutionary sequences that rep-
resented hierarchies of progress within artificially discrete
domains such as kinship systems or food containers.
urged ipstead that such elements be interpreted in light
o_!_tJ!e cu}_!l!r.al wholes within which they are embedded-
not to set boundaries that would delimit cultural entities
as such but to provide an appropriate context for their in-
terpretation. And since there was no a priori limit on what
aspects of a culture might be most illuminating, cultures
eclectt!=
embracing not only a people's present-day ecological
conditions, livelihood, arts, social relations, and so on but
also "the history of the people, the influence of the regions
through which it passed on its migrations, and the peo-
ple with whom it came into contact" (Boas 1974[1887]:64).
conception, cultures appeared to have
boundaries when looked at from different and
it was just this theme that became increasingly central to
Boas's thinking over his career. In George Stocking's words,
the "consistent tendency" in Boas's thought was toward
"growing skepticism" of blanket classifications and toward
insistence on the discrimination between "distinct classifi-
catory points of view" (Stocking 1974:13-14). The thrust
, - of Boas's early fieldwork was to show that culture could
,. not be correlated wftn enVironmental
effectively decoupHng bound-arieSTrom geographi-
cal ones (Boas 1940[1896]:278, 1964[18S8]). Lcrter on,-iri. his
I Critique of racial assumptions, Boas showed that the corre-
lation of body form with hereditary lines was complicated
in the case of migration further, he demonstrated that in
general it was wrong to assume a coincidence of racial, cul-
tural, and linguistic groupings, since there were abundant
cases in which the application of different criteria of clas-
sification produced different groupings (Boas 1940[1912],
1938[1911], 1966a [1911]).
Boas's pluralization of boundaries is apparent in his stu-
dents' work as a basic assumption of method, and it informs
the Boasian interpretation of the controversial concept of
"culture areas." Although the term itself has sometimes
been assumed to refer to discrete, territorially bounded en-
tities, the "culture area" concept was embraced by Boasian
like- Edward Sapir and Kroeber primarily as
a means of making historical inferences from the geograph-
ical distribution of similar traits across localities, and it was
based on the critical assumption that it is "a normal, per-
manent tendency of culture to diffuse" (Kroeber 1931:264).
l
' Culture areas were conceived not as individual cultures
but as aggregations of cultures- what we might today call
lr "regions"-with the emphasis on past, rather than present,
f zones of cultural interaction (Boas 1940[1896]:277). The
Boasians recognized that the geographical bounding of ar-
eas was invariably arbitrary, but as Kroeber observed, "areal
limitation" was "only one aspect" of a "culture aggrega-
tion." theorlj_ic_?lly the "ultimate
1\} \.-&. J /-
emphasis" was "on culture centers instead of culture ar- 1
eas," since in practice what the method identified was par-I
tially zones of trait distribution implying se-\
quences of development and the radiation of influence from I
historically dominant centers (Kroeber 1931:251, 261). It
was for this reason that in Clark Wissler's (1917) study
of American Indian areas, boundary locations were pur-
posefully deemphasized-only drawn schematically on a
coarse-scaled map using straight lines that highlighted their
artificiality. Like Wissler's, the culture area schemes pro-
posed by Sapir and Kroeber broadly resembled the classifi-
cations which previous ethnographers of the Americas had
accepted as empirically obvious, but the Boasians'
went further in that they explicitly distinguished multiple
kinds of areas constructed on the basis of different sets of
criteria: for example, traits found in present cultures, ar-
chaeological findings, foods, technology, language, phys-
ical indices, kinship, and the environment. In short, even
when proposing geographically based culture areas, Boasian
anthropologists were careful to draw multiple boundaries
reflecting diverse classificatory points of view (Herskovits
1924; Kroeber 1948; Sapir 1949[1916]; Stocking 1992:136;
Wissler 1917).
5
The plurality of cultural boundaries was used by
Boasians as a point of contention against the French soci-
ologist Durkheim and the English functionalists Radcliffe-
Brown and Malinowski, for whom it was axiomatic that /
the social whole comprised a system of functionally in-
terdependent elements.
6
Little concerned with the chance
historical events that caused societies to change in un-
predictable ways, the Durkheimians an_cl the functional-
ists tended to discuss the past in terms of culture-internal
For the Boasians, by contrast, cul-
'ftlfafintegration was an ongoing process that could never
be fully completed and that was not necessarily unidirec-
9_onal; it was not teleological. In Benedict's writings espe-
cially, integration is something that, in the long view of a
culture's history, ebbs and flows, more or less intensely at
various times. So while the Zuni pueblos of two decades
earlier represented for Benedict a nearly perfect integra-
tion (Stocking 1992), such a climax could only be tempo-
rary, whether long or short lived. For Sapir (1949(1924]),
genuine or harmonious culture similarly had the capac-
ity to degenerate, for example into the alienation and
inorganic disintegration of modern U.S. life. Moreover,
the Boasians conceived of cultural integration eclectically
in terms that were partial, suggestive,_ an_q metap_horic:,
flffher than - functional Integration was to
l5e found, for example, in aesthetic and thematic coher-
ence in an analogy to styles of art and architecture; illfhe
patterning of symbolism and motivation, in an analogy to
gestalt psychology; in selective perception and valuation,
in an analogy to phonological apperception; and in distinc-
tive characterological qualities, in an analogy to Herderian
ideas of the unique spirit, genius, or geist of a nation or
people (Stocking 1974:8). From the perspective of Lowie,
who launched a sharp attack on Malinowski's "avowedly
Bashkow A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries 447
antidistributional, antihistorical" functionalism, any posi-
tion that "treats each culture as a closed system" implies
"absurdities" in demanding logically that there is a single,
definitive demarcation:
Social tradition varies demonstrably from village to vil-
lage, even from family to family. Are we to treat as the
bearers of such a closed system the. chief's family in
Omarakana, his village, the district of Kiriwina, the Island
of Boyowa, the Trobriand archipelago, the North Massim
province, New Guinea, or perchance Melanesia?
In defiance of the dogma that any one culture forms a
closed system, we must insist that such a culture is in-
variably an artificial unit segregated for purposes of expe-
diency. [Lowie 1935:235]
(,') Third, in contrast with recent anthropological writers
'..:!/ who have treated analytic concepts of cultural boundaries
J
as susceptible to t he same critiques as are people's folk ideas,
! the Boasians that the bQ!!!!daries they drew as
)
3g_alysts"'"Were not equivalent to the that peo-
ple drew for themselves. Whereas the former were under-
s tood to be theoretical propositions, created- as Lowie put
it, "for purposes of expediency" in analysis, ethnographic
description, and museum displays-the latter were them-
selves elements of culture that reflected the
distinguished "between 'my own' closed gr_Q!,!p_jind t J:!e out-
(Benedict 1934:7). Ingeed, the Boasians frequently
g!t!cized such distinctions and s<;i-
_!!l@cally _incOrrect . For example, was in effect
criticizing the naturalization of Western cultural boundaries
by insisting that such commonsense notions as "human
nature" and "racial inheritance" were but modern repack-
agings 9f a primal insider/outsider, us/ them folk distinc-
tion: Both notions, she argued, are folk concepts, even
if at times cloaked in scientific garb. Ideas of human na-
elevate
to the status of the universal y human, in much
the same way that the members of "primitive tribes" see
their own groups as the only t rue humans and regard out-
siders as nonhuman "in spite of the fact t hat from an ob-
jective point of view each tribe is surrounded by peoples
sharing in its arts and ... in elaborate practices that h ave
grown up by a mutual give-and-take of behaviour from one
people to another" (Benedict 1934:7). Similarly Benedict
argued that scientific ideas of "racial inheritance" are no
more than "mythology" when applied outside the narrow
scope of "family lines" and "small and static communities,"
since scientific analysis of large and dispersed groups always
shows "overlapping"-what is often nowadays termed hy-
bridity. According to "when 'racial heredity' is in-
vo ed, as it usually is, to rally a group of persons of about
the same economic status, graduating from much the same
schools, and reading the same weeklies, such a category
is merely another version of the in- and the out-group"
(1934:15-16).7 cu)j-ural critic, then, she belittled folk
boundaries as and parochial, in contrast to a
that_ would be inclusively humanistic
- -
and cosmopolitan. It was thus clear to Benedict that an-
thropology cannot uncritica1ly accept the folk boundaries
posited by a culture or nation and, indeed, that we ought
to be skeptical of them as a basic methodological stance.
So axiomatic was the distinction between folk and an-
alytic cultural boundaries that Sapir even felt it necessary
to point out that in certain cases it was possible for t hem to
coincide. So while the analytic "culture area concept" was
a "mere deSCription of cUltural flow," sometimes foj nd
that it also described of _Reople who under-
stan each other's culture and feel themselves as a unity"
(Sapir 1994: 100). This eotential for comp..rehension
was a "very real thing ... in the psychological sen!)e," and it
provided the
1
'psychological ground" for a "kind of com-
monality of feeling which transcends local and political
differences" (Sapir 1994: 100-101). This was not a primor-
dialist notion, since mutual understanding was found by
no means solely among groups that shared common ori-
gins but, rather, arose wherever "in the course of time the
cross-fertilization of traits has developed a common pat-
tern of culture" (Sapir 1994:100-101). Nor was it a notion
that depended on geographical contiguity, since "geograph-
ically contiguous groups are merely a first order approxima-
tion to the infinitely variable groupings of human beings to
whom culture in its various aspects is actually to be creq-
ited as a matter of realistic psychology" (1949[1932a]:519). I
As an example, Sapir described how a Sioux Indian who was ft _J r
captured by the Blackfoot would understand his situation t V 1
and, though among "deadly enemies," would "feel at home 1 j((t 1
in the culture" of his captors, unlike "a Pueblo Indian cap-
tured by a Plains tribe [who] would not feel at home-he
would not know what [his situation] was about"-because
the cultures were too different to allow for a "communal-
ity of understanding" (Sapir 1994:101). Sapir tQ.ought that
the movement from mutual comprehension .to "a feeling
' at unity" had the power to produce nations. Accordingj;p
' sapir, "the true psychological meaning of [the folk notion
of] culture area" is therefore "a nascent nation, and many
nations probably arose in this way"- though he cautioned
that "this notion of the culture area Should never be cqn- I
fused with t he notion of the state" (1994:100). It was only
a "cultural unity, the psychological ground" for a state,
yet it lacked the state's institutionalized apparatus for en-
compassing and reconciling diverse points of view (1994:
100).
8
What is especially interesting about the
Boasian anthropologists drew between analytic and folk
cultural boundaries is that they allow for a kind of medi-
ating border zone of culture, a zone of things that, from
the perspective of the people's folk boundary concepts, are
.regarded as foreign but that, from the perspective of the
analyst, might nonetheless be interpreted as internal to
their culture.
9
The Boasians conceived of this as a kind or-
foyer or vestibule of culture, in which newly imported ele-
ments of culture "waited," so to speak, as part of the pro-
cess of becoming assimilated. Kroeber's position was that
the waiting period was characteristically short, and that
American Anthropologist Vol. 106, No.3 September 2004
once-an element was integrated, its foreignness was quickly
iost to native awareness. He liked to cite the example of
modern Anglo-Americans who were unaware that items like
tobacco, paper, potatoes, and the alphabet were really cul-
tural imports. In his textbook he wrote: "As soon as a culture
has accepted a new item; it tends to lose interest in the for-
-eignness of origin of thi$ item, as against the fact that the
item is now functioning within the culture. One might say
that once acceptance is made, the source is played down
and forgotten as soon as possible" (1948[1923]:257). Sim-
ilarly, Boas, in his studies of folklore and art, emphasized
the forgetting of the foreign origin of borrowed material,
in line with his argument that people's current explana-
tions of folktale elements and art motifs are "secondary
rationalizations" that interpret them in terms of contem-
porary cultural interests and themes, obscuring or eclipsing
prior knowledge of true historical sources (Boas 1940[1996],
1938[1911]:214-219, 1966a:66).
But it was also possible for the foreign origins of as-
similated material to be institutionalized in memory and
even valued as such, and some Boasians found great the-
oretical interest in this fact. Mead, for example, portrayed
the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea as valuing certain
cult complexes, dances, and fashions precisely because they
were borrowed. Indeed, in this specifically "importing cul-
ture," the foreignness of objects was actively remembered,
since distance of .origin in the direction of the seacoast
was associated with increasing refinement and sophistica-
tion. To the Arapesh, foreignness as such did not neces-
sarily mean nonhumanity but could instead mean greater
wo.rldliness and civilization. Mead's analytic perspec-
tive, the fact that an item was imported did not make it
external to Arapesh To the contra!)', it was pre-
?sely in being categorized as an import from the beach or
beyond that an element could represent a positive value
within the distinctively Arapesh scheme of meanings, thus
showing that the zone of the foreign can itself play a
central symbolic role in the life of a people (Mead 1935,
1938).
Although cultural boundedness has been targeted as
problematic in recent critiques of the culture concept, the
critiques are not really applicable to cultural boundaries as
they were conceived in Boasian anthropology. Aco;nding to
J{ l...t
Michael for example, the culture concept 1s
because it presupposes boundedness on the model of the
modern nation-state with its binary logic of territorial and
corporate membership: An individual is either inside the
boundary-as a citizen or a member-or is not (Kearney
1995). But for Boas and his students, culture was neither
modeled on the state nor confused with a polity. Indeed,
Kroeber and Sapir explicitly opposed conceiving of cultures
on the model of nations, their provinces, and other __po-
litical or sociological units (Kroeber 1948[1923]:226; Sapir
1949[1924]:329, 1994:100). Cultures, unlike nation-states,
tend to merge or blend into one another; in Kroeber's
terms, they "intergrade" (1948[1923] :261) . In general, the
Boasians were interested in classifying not persons but ele-
V'"'"\
riJ,,., '>
ments according to culture: They wrote of cultural "traits."
And they were by no means uncomfortable with construing
elements-or, for that matter, persons-ambiguously, as be-
ing either in or out of a culture depending on the point of
view.
The critiques of bounded culture have primarily fo-
cused on the spatialized units t hat form the province of
area studies and the autonomous tribal worlds conjured
by Radcliffe-Brownian structural-functionalism.
10
While
Boasian scholars did work in t hese veins, it was after the
mid-1930s when the Boasian paradigm had already be-
gun to dissipate (Silverstein 2004). As Stocking argues, it
is clear enough that the Boasians constituted a distinctive
"school" of anthropology in the 1910s, when Boas and his
students were united in their radical critiques of evolution-
ism and racialism, and in opposing the influence of eugeni-
cists and racialist anthropologists in the scientific establish-
ment. Two decades later, however, Boas's studen!s were no
longer a unified current within anthropology, as intellectu-
ally they were in fact diversifying and diverging from one
another (Stocking 1992:125). Many of the Boasians pub-
lished their most enduring works during this time, but in
retrospect it may be seen as the t wilight of Boasian an-
thropology. Already during this decade, many of Boas's stu-
dents (Mead especially) were becoming attracted to such ap-
parently more "scientific" approaches as Radcliffe-Brown's
comparative so.ciology, and the dilution of their collec-
tive intellectual potency continued and even accelerated
through the 1940s and after the war. During World War II,
as scientists of every stripe sought to apply their talents
to the war effort: Mead and Benedict compiled studies of
Japanese, Russian, and other "national characters," while
Ralph Linton was involved in founding wartime programs
in "area studies" that ultimately transformed the musty old
ethnological"culture area" concept into Cold War institutes
for Russian, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African stud-
ies (Bashkow 1991:179; Mintz 1998:29; Yans-McLaughlin
1984). In evalu'ating this work by current standards, we
should remember that Mead and Benedict were then writ-
ing primarily for nonspecialist wartime policymakers, and
their reliance on national boundaries as a basis for delimit-
ing cultural units makes sense given their polemical aims.
Indeed, a close reading of their work suggests that they un-
derstood the problems inherent in this kind of approach.
But in any case, such work marked a departure from clas-
sical Boasian anthropology, and the area studies institutes
reflected the new political context and intellectual trends
(Hegeman 1999:165; Pietsch 1981; Rafael)994; see Orta this
issue). Regardless of their historical and biographical con-
nections, the culture areas of Boasian anthropology were
constituted on a different basis from the areas that were in-
in postwar area A-; R;n;;-Lede;m;;_
has argued, the Boasian culture areas "were not drawn up
to fit national borders and were at odds with (if not ac-
tively subversive of) the interests and naturalizing claims
of nation-states" (Lederman 1998:431). Thus, it is not
the permeable, perspectivally relative culture areas of the
Bashkow A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries 449
Boasians to which recent critiques of cultural boundaries
apply.
THE BOASIAN PRINCIPLES ILLUSTRATED
BY OROKAIVA ETHNOGRAPHY
To move beyond the theoretical impasse over cultural
boundaries, I present a of cultural boundaries
that builds-.Q!!_ the Boasian J2Iincples I described. I
emphasize (1) that cultural boundaries are open and perme-
able, not barriers. which block the flow of people, objects, or
ideas; (2) that and interested, alwaysdrawn
relative to particular contexts, purposes, and points of view;
and "(3) that the divergence between the anthropologist's
analytic boundaries and people's folk boundaries creates a
7
'zone of the foreign" defined in terms of the "own" /"other"
distinctions that people themselves draw. _til three of these
points respond to problems associated with objectifying
cultural boundaries, which are in fact symbolic constructs,
_in tenl).S of spatial metaphors. I will elaborate these points
in the next section, but first I illustrate them with ethno-
graphic examples from my own work on Orokaiva people
in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
That the boundaries of Orokaiva culture are perme-
able need not be belabored. It has been more than a cen-
tury since the Orokaiva region was colonized by Britain
and, la_!.er, A_ustralia. While the colonial period-ended in
1975 with PNG's independence, people's lives have re-
. mained profoundly affected by neocolonial economic de-
velopment, the impress of an imported consumer culture,
mission Christianity, and Western schooling and health
care-all to such an extent that no credible cultural bound-
aries reflecting current conditions could be conceived as
nonporous. Certainly, there may be reasons for attempting
a historical reconstruction of PNG cultures before Western
contact, and in doing so we might impose a hard fictional
boundary between indigenous and Western cultures, filter-
ing out the more obvious imports of later times. But even
this questionable procedure results in cultural boundaries
that are characterized by porosity to earlier strata of influ-
ence, like dance genres, rituals, and linguistic elements im-
ported from other indigenous groups.
of Orokaiva culture may drawn ip
different they
_ Although the ethnonym Orakaiva originated
a colonial classification, in present times the Orakaiva
designation pas become a category of identity employed
by peo_ple themselves.
11
But it is not the only such cate-
gory. A friend of mine who, in some C.Q.n!ms, called him-
self "Orokaiva" would, in different contexts, differentiate
himself from "those other Orokaiva" and, instead, call him-
self "Binandere," using the name of his particular dialect
area. The boundaries that people assert are sensitive to the
context and their own immediate aims; this is so not only
in relation to what they call the "big name" (java peni)
Orokaiva but also to the many "smaller names" (java isapa)
that their identity in terms of dialect,
4
)dLA/rrc J.
region, village, hamlet, or clan Thus, it is not
that the historically imposed cultural category "Orokaiva"
represents a merely fictive bounding of culture. Rather, as
in so many cases of "ethnogenesis" studied by anthropolo-
gists, the colonial category has itself become a real catego_!Y
in people's lives, though not to the exclusion of other de-
marcations that remain significant.
A revealing example of the divergence between the an-
thropologist's analytic concepts of cultural boundaries and
people's folk concepts is the construction of
in Orokaiva culture (Bashkow in press).
12
To the Orokaiva
I encountered in my fieldwork, it was obvious that the
"whiteman" they spoke to me about represents my culture,
not theirs. Indeed, for them, the "whiteman" is paradig-
matically foreign: 'rt is a cultural other they convention-
ally contrast with themselves in various contexts of indige-
nous life. But from my analytic perspective, it was equally
clear that the "whiteman" is for many_pu oses an Orokaiva
communicated from one individual to another,
from generation to generation, in a way that makes it as
authentic a cultural inheritance as the most hallowed tradi-
tion. For several generations now, Orokaiva children have
been introduced to "whitemen" primarily by hearing about
them from other Orokaiva as they have grown up in the
village; they have been fed "whitemen's foods" by. their
mothers and wives; and they have themselves performed
the roles of whitemen in community development asso-
ciations, church councils, local government committees,
smallholder crop growers' boards, and various businesses.
Of course, Orokaiva interact with actual whites both in
town and in their villages. Indeed, a few Orokaiva have even
1
stayed with whites in their overseas homes. But these cross-
cultural experiences are inevitably interpreted from the ref-
erence point of their far more intimate acquaintance with
the construction -of whitemen perpetuated within their own
culture at h ome.
Similarly, with certain imported commodities that are
regarded by Orokaiva as the culture of whitemen, it is most
analytically powerful to treat them ethrwgraphically as a
part of Orokaiva culture, despite their foreign origins and
the fact that they are categorized as "foreign" from the
Orokaiva folk point of view. For-Orokaiva, the paradigmatic
"whitemen's foods" are boiled white rice, canned mack-
erel, and Spam-like cans of corned beef. Historically, these
foods were among the most prominent brought to the re-
gion by Australian patrol officers, but they have since be-
come central to a highly conventional construction of racial
characteristics that interprets these foods in opposition to
local taro and pork in terms of an elaborate set of indige-
nous contrastive qualities (Bashkow in press). Moreover, for-
eign "whitemen's foods" have become all but essential in
Orokaiva ritual feasts. Thus, even though they are imported,
"whitemen's foods" must be viewed ethnographically as a
living part of Orokaiva culture. For another example, in
their development activities, Orokaiva often try to work ac-
cording to Western clock time, which they call"whi em en's
!ime," in contrast to a second, more autonomistic pattern
r ""' ,t,
ci...
(,11'/VC".)
I I
;f.J, ,) . ( ' v
(,,,/ 1,. /' {
I ,. .
450 American Anthropologist Vol. 106, No.3 September 2004
of time use that people see as characteristic of their own
- culture. But from an analytic point of view this contrast
-; 'f'l itself is best seen as part of Orokaiva culture, since it is con-
structed largely in terms of the culturally distinctive virtue
1 , ( of social unity, which is dramatized when different individ-
';'
1
uals work t ogether in close synchronization. Thus, one can
see that the folk boundaries Orokaiva use t o distinguish be-
tween their culture and the foreign culture of whitemen are
in no way to be taken for granted as cultural boundaries in
ethnographic analysis; they are rather culture-internal dis-
tinctions that organize and give meaning to people's lives.
13
This divergence between folk and analytic boundaries
shown in the Orokaiva case gives the anthropological cul-
ture concept a way out of the old conundrum, in which cul-
tural distinctiveness implies cultural boundaries that would
seem t o place strict limitations on the kinds of experiences
that people can have and on the extensibility of their cul-
ture t o novel situations. The distinctions that Orokaiva
draw between their own and "whitemen's culture" reside in
the zone of the foreign: WJle they are things that Orokaiva
themselves consider to be outside t heir culture, from an an-
alytic point of view they must be considered t o be a part of
it since they are interpreted in terms of Orokaiva categories,
values, assumptions, and interests, and they are assimilated
!O distinctively Orokaiva forms of practice. This zone of the
foreign is an intrinsically flexible and accommodating part
of their culture; it is what allows Orokaiva.to interpret their
novel experiences using their preconceived notions of oth-
ers that are constructed in a dialectical relationship with
their ideas of themselves. Although such a construction of
the oth er is often derided as ethnocentric projection, it is
undoubtedly universal. Its value to anthropology lies in the
way it releases Appadurai's (1988:37) "incarcerated" native
from the bounds of his cultural cell, by allowing us to rec-
ognize that cultural boundaries, rather than imprisoning
people, can paradoxically serve t o extend cultures across
_them, to t he limits of people's experience. There is really
no contradiction between the boundedness of culture and
the open-ended nature of cultural experience, because cul-
ture itself provides a schema for incorporating external
ments in the very possibility of constructing.an element C\S
foreig!l
THE BOASIAN CONCEPTION OF CULTURAL
BOUNDARIES RETHEORIZED AND EXTENDED
Just because cultural boundaries do not really contain cul-
tures within them does not mean that they are meaningless
and of no account; it just means that we h ave been misled by
the spatial images conventionally used to depict them, espe-
cially the line (whether "straight" or "curved"). Drawn lines
appear to block things from passing across them, and they
appear t o create discrete domains, when in reality, cult!rf. l
boundaries are less like barriers than they are like
5
olds or frontiers that mark the movement across t hem and
even create the motivation for relationships with what lies
beyond. Another problem with lines is that the divisions
they represent are continuous and complete. Lines have an
uninterrupted extension-in formal geometric terms, the
space between any two points on the line is filled by inter-
vening points-and they appear to create nonoverlapping
entities that are closed to each other. But as we will discuss,
cultural boundaries-whether they are conceived in geo- r
graphical, social, or conceptual space- may be discontin-
uous and In a provocative passage, Appadurai
proposes that we should think of cultures as "possessing
no Euclidean boundaries"-and although he does not say
very clearly what h e has in mind by way of alternatives,
suggesting only that we instead use a "fractal metaphor"
and recognize that cultural forms overlap (1996:46)-he is
right to point out that cultural boundaries are easy to mis-
interpret when drawn as lines. To rethink th e_meaJ!ings of
the lines we draw to represent boundaries, I now extend
Boasian anthropology's three guiding principles about the
boundaries of culture.
,First, we should recognize that cultural boundaries, in :
and of themselves, do not exclude or contain. All too often,
we tend to confuse th e concept of "boundaries" with that of
"barriers"-which, by definition, bar, hinder, or block. Ex-
amples of barriers are the colonial color line, rugged moun-
tain ranges, barbwire fences, and poverty, ail of which can
impede or deny persons' access to objects, places, ideas, and
resources. Boundaries do not actually separate; they only de-
marcate or differentiate; they do not exert force to exclude
or contain any aspects of culture. What call _a
"hard boundary" is, in our t erms, a symbolic boundary that
_has been fortified by some kind of barrier, which "holds t he
line," making it hard t o cross over, like Jim Crow laws in the
segregationist South (Banton 1983:125ff.). Similarly, what
the term boundary.maintenance really refers to is t he shoring
up of a boundary with barriers. But many boundaries are
not sh ored up at all.
A nice illustration of the distinction between bound-
aries and barriers may be found in the borders of nations,
states, counties, and so on. Such political boundaries are
defined in taw in terms of latitudes, longitudes, and the
middles of rivers. They are symbolic representations that
exist independently of the fences and checkpoints that in
some places secure them. This is important, since more of-
t en than not there are no markers or barriers on the ground.
Because barriers are expensive t o construct and maintain,
they are usually set up only where cross-border traffic is of
political concern. Along major roads, we pass checkpoints
marking n ational boundaries and signposts for the bound-
aries of st at es and counties. Similarly, news reports show us
pictures of boundaries in conflict zones like Gaza, where as
I writ e this, Israel is building a high concrete wall to keep
Palestinians out. But such boundaries are well in the minor-
ity. Off the road, amidst fields, and away from conflict
zones, most boundaries are invisf'?le. So although our at-
tention is drawn most often t o hard boundaries that are
shored up by barriers, barriers are by no means essential to
the definition of boundaries, and we need t o be careful to
distinguish them theoretically.
Bashkow A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries 451
t . Moreover, not all cultural boundaries can be repre-
f sen ted in maps. Some of the most important ones must
be conceived of as abstract typological distinctions. Return-
ing to our example of the boundary Orokaiva construct be-
tween whitemen and themselves, what we are faced with is a
constellation of typified feature contrasts (e.g., dark vs.light
-skin, eaters of garden-grown foods vs. eaters of store-bought
foods, generous and hospitable vs. closefisted and aloof,
etc.). The constellation has a core and periphery in that cer-
tain highly conventionalized contrasts are salient and often
remarked on, while other contrasts are drawn idiosyncrat-
ically in particular contexts and are ideologically unelabo-
rated. Nevertheless, these culturally salient feature contrasts
are distributed_ deal of empty space, since many
a.spects _9_f ;ge ass2;gned no special value in terms of the
_9rokaiva/whiteman distinction (Bashkow 1999:183-199).
For example, personality (as opposed to behavioral) charac-
teristics are not seen by Orokaiva as generalizable, and they
are generally not among the dimensions of contrast that
Orokaiva elaborate in typifying themselves and whiteman
others (Bashkow 2000:295). Thus, t_he boundary between
Orokaiva and whitemen's culture does not create a compre-
hensive division but, instead, contrasts certain focal areas
only, leaving others untouched. In short, the boundary be:
tween Q!okaiva and whitemen's culture is not complete and
continuous, but partial and fragmentary.
1
The porosity of cultural boundaries, which seems coun-
' terinlullive when we objectify boundaries as solid lines,
l
follows easily when we hQ_ld of s atial metaphors
li represent them instea_cDJs conceptual structures centered
t on symbolic contrasts or Of!f!!E.itions. It is a structuralist tru-
'ism that opposed terms like self and other define one an-
other reciproca.\ly, so that the very opposition which de-
fines a boundary serves as a conceptual conduit by which
the other gets smuggled into the world of the self. More-
over, such conceptual structures, far from precluding trans-
gressive feature reversals, seem to invite them, the way a
Rubik's Cube invites being turned or mythic symbols in-
vite transformation within the structure of Levi-Straussian
matrices. Indeed, it is the reversal of specific features that
evokes, casts into relief, and activates the larger structure of
relationships within which those features are opposed. For
example, when Orokaiva "turn whitemen" in church ac-
tivities, schooling, and village business, the normal opposi-
tion between whitemen and Orokaiva is in no way undone,
inasmuch as the activities in which people are engaged are
nevertheless understood to be a part of whitemen's culture.
To the contrary, the reversal dramatizes and draws attention
to the contrast, paradoxically affirming and substantiating
, the cultural boundary in the very act of transgression.
Second, extending our understanding of the Boasian
principle of multiplicity, we should recognize as a cardinal
principle that no single way of drawing a cultu.ral bound-
ary can serve every purpose. That cultural boundaries do
not mark the edges of discrete social, political, economic,
and technological systems is clear enough in the case of
conceptually defined typological boundaries like those just
discussed: As is illustrated by the Orokaiva construction
of the boundary between themselves and whitemen, such
,-boundaries may distinguish even where
act closely or interpenetrate socially. But the point is partic-
ularly re1evant fu the complex case of mapped boundaries-
that is, bounda.ries we do locate in geographical or social
space. As noted by several critics, social scientists have of-
ten tended to speak of cultural boundaries as interchange-
able with the edges of integrated social totalities (Gupta and
Ferguson 1997; Hays 1993). That is to say, a culture's lim-
its are taken from the territorial bounda.ries of the corre-
sponding social collectivity (e.g., the boundaries of Iatmul
culture are given by the limits of the territory occupied by
Iatmul people). These cultural boundaries are then legit:_
imated by bringing to bea.r as many additional criteria-
political, linguistic, historical, and so forth--:;as pos-
sible (Handler 1988:7). But as the Boasians knew, a general-
compartnientalization _Qf_human is chimerical.
They found no basis forassuming an ideal of
the boundaries of collectivities, cultures, languages, and his-
torical populations or races. Indeed, our knowledge of the
possible bases on which human worlds can be segmented
has only increased since their time. The old Boasian triad of
race, language, and culture ramifies today into a larger set of
demarcational viewpoints that include varied constructions
of society, polity, economy, geography, interactional fields,
<;ollective identities, ethnicity, cultural practice, linguistic
codes, communicability and comprehension, and regional
networks (see Brightman 1995:519). To come to grips with
such complexity, it may be helpful to explore an analogy
from the linguistic concept of "isogloss."
The linguistic concept of "isoglosses" represents an al-
te ati o the more familiar idea of language boundaries.
f. (i$.Q.glo is a line drawn by dialect mapper..s to
fa linguistic;kature. The feature may be
a lexical item, like the use of "hoagie" for a type of sand-
U.s. citizens elsewhere call a "sub" or "hero," ,01-
ll might.be a feature of
(morphology), semantics, or synta!(. Contrary to out
naive view of dialects as discrete entities, the isoglosses of
distinct features often fail to coincide; instead, they form
tangled patterns of crisscrosses and loops, making it im-
possible to establish a definitive line of demarcation be-
tween dialects. Indeed, isoglosses rarely coincide even at the
boundaries of languages, in which the patterns they form
resemble stretched-out bundles or tangled skeins more than
they do thick redrawn lines. Isoglosses crisscross language
boundaries because features can be shared across geneti-
cally distinct languages, such as with click sounds borrowed
from Khoisan by Bantu-speaking people as they moved into
southern Africa. The nonconvergence of isoglosses cenjgll
to the basic dialectological phenomenon of dialect chajp-
Ing, whereby adjacent communities readily
another's speech, while those at a greater remove find com-
prehension more difficult, until at a certain distance mu-
tual understanding becomes all but impossible. In this well-
attested henome QD, the.l:!Qlmdaries between language s
452 American Anthropologist Vol. 106, No. 3 September 2004
!';annQ_t be uniquely fixed: Given a chain of partial mutual
intelligibiiil:)T, it is never clear where to draw the line. Where
dialect chains span conventional language divisions like
Spanish and French, the boundaries they cross are drawn in
only one of many ways supportable by linguistic evidence,
though they may have dense historical and political moti-
vation (Crystal1987:25-33). The lesson dialectologists draw
from this is not that distinguishable languages do not exist,
but that the way one draws their boundaries depends on the
12.articular language features one chooses to emphasize, and
_that ultimately one must keep in mind multiple isoglosses
and one's purpose in drawing the boundaries in order to
create an accurate picture. Cultural boundaries are tl!us sim-
ilar to isoglosses in that they are irreCluCI1:5ly multiple. and
reflect different criteria, and also in that even where they
coincide with conventional political and social divisions,
\ they should not be identified with them theoretically.
14
.r ' Third, and finally, extending our understanding of the
Boasian distinction between analytic and folk boundaries,
we should recognize the importance of a generative concep-
tion of culture, in which culture is not only the product of
-but also the precondition for meaningful action,
_and expression (see Rosenblatt this issue). To be sure, such
a conception may not be necessary to every project that ap-
peals to a distinction between analytic and folk boundaries.
For example, when we engage in what Richard Handler has
called the "destructive analysis" of assumptions underly-
ing identity politics in ethnic nationalist movements, the
important function of our analytic boundary concept is to
provide critical distance from the folk concepts of interest;
it is the standpoint from which we are at sufficient remove
from the folk concepts that we can refute false primordialist
claims, such as that multiple boundaries of national iden-
tity, culture, language, ancestry, and so on converge (Han-
dler 1985). But it would be wrong to let such a critique take
over our anthropological culture concept entirely, as Ap-
/ padurai does when he suggests that we "regard as cultural"
only those differences that people use to express or sub-
stantiate the boundaries of group identities (1996:13). The.
problem with the culture-as-identity view is that it effec;.:
tively eliminates any basis for distinguishing between an-
alytic and folk views except insofar as they imply differ-
ent evaluative stances toward the same substantive claill)..
Most crucially, in order to understand how boundaries can
_themselves be a creative part of culture, we need to move
beyond tRJ notion that cultural boundaries are motivated,
by sl'i"" Jtedness, whether it is conceived of in objective terms
(shared language, ancestry, territory, social habits, or other
traits) or in subjective terms (shared feelings of belonging).
_What we need to appreciate is that boundaries can
' ductively defined in terms of a relationship of mutual com-
prehension.
Such appreciation is evident in Sapir's writings on cul-
ture and the individual. For Sapir, it was plainly
to conceptualize culture purely in terms of shared ness, since
individuals differ so markedly from one another in every
imaginable respect. Underlying Sapir's conception of cul-
ture is the idea that people's perception of a commonality
of culture is founded more on relations of mutual com-
prehension than on actual sameness or identity. What is
required is only that people can understand one another,
if only partially and imperfectly; indeed, Sapir remarks on
how forgiving and elastic such perceptions of mutual intelli-
gibility can be, given people's tendency to t ry to make sense
of things by attending to that which is intelligible in their
experience and disregarding that which is incomprehen-
sible. He gives the example of two individuals who live as
neighbors within the same town: "The cultures of these two
individuals" may be "significantly different, as significantly
different, on the given level and scale, as though one were
the representative of Italian culture and the other of Turkish
culture," and, yet, "such differences of culture never seem
as significant [to people] as they really are ... partly because
the economy of interpersonal relations and the friendly am-
biguities of language conspire to reinterpret for each indi-
vidual all behavior which he has under observation in t he
terms of those meanings which arerelevant to his own life"
(Sapir 1949[1932a]:516). The possibility of negotiating dif-
ferences to arrive at what may be an exagger11ted impression
is, for Sapir, what allows individu-
als of diverse backgrounds to feel themselves participants in
a shared or "generalized culture" even as they each "uncon-
'SaoUsly abstract'' for themselves from it some idiosyncratic.
"wor1a of meanings" (1949[1932a]:515). Mutual intelligibil-
ity is also the aspect of culture that enables people to express
meanings that are previously unknown within their culture
but that can nonetheless be readily grasped by others
thus, must be considered a legitimate part of the culture out '
of which they arise.
15
So, for example, when Sapir describes - 4
Two Crows' rejection of a conventional Omaha pattern, this
cultural rebel's distinctive response commands our atten-
tion: Again, it is the capacity of his distinctive response to
be intelligible to or "communicat[ed] to other individuals"
that provides the psychological basis for his idiosyncrasy to
someday become orthodoxy-by means of "some kind of
'social infection' "through which it might "lose its purely
personal quality" (1949[1938] :5 71, 5 73). From Sapir's per-
spective, it is thus not only things that conform to a shared
norm that should be construed as a part of a culture but also
things that deviate from the norm in recognizable ways: In- ,,
deed, is the symbolic field within which deviations r
can be meaningfully interpreted (Handler 1983:211; Sahlins
1
'_
1 985). And it is in just this way that people's frameworks
for interpreting the differences between "their own" and
"foreign" cultures are themselves paradoxically an authen-
tic part of their culture; the foreign itself is incorporated
within the very cultural perspective from which it is seen
as external. Indeed, what Sapir wrote of fashion and culture
could as well be said of the foreign and culture: Ideas of the
foreign are culture in the guise of departure from culture
(Sapir 1949[1931]:374).
Viewing culture solely in terms of identity relations
is inadequate for understanding this paradoxical aspect of
boundaries: that in separating cultures, boundaries actually
Bashkow A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries 453
facilitate the interpretation and integration of cultural -dif-
ference within a culture. Whatever the forms it takes, the ex-
perience of foreignness is part of everyone's world, and cul-
tural boundaries, in serving to map, evaluate, and delimit
culture, simultaneously project it onto the foreign other, eth-
nocentrically, in the form of the projecting culture's values
and self-conceptions. In effect, cultural boundaries are cru-
cial sym_El.Q!kdivisions that enable people's action, thought,
and expression relating to, as with otper things, the foreign.
And, for this reason, it is inadequate for the analytic culture
concept to portray boundaries functioning solely to confine
and exclude, such as has been the tendency in our field's
most elite theoretical discourse in recent years. Instead, our
culture concept must be a generative one that provides
the basis for meaningfulness and creative expression and
action.
WHY A THEORY OF CULTURAL BOUNDARIES
IS NECESSARY
If boundaries were barrier-like walls that separate cultures
from one another, as some critics have depicted them, it
would seem obvious that they are theoretical constructs
anthropology would do well to be rid of; after all, global-
ization processes disrupt, diasporize, and hybridize cultures
communities, making boundaries at best irrelevant and
at worst patently wrong. Moreover, when we think of the
pernicious colonialist, nationalist, and discriminatory pur-
poses that the idea of boundaries has served, we find further
support for rejecting them in the harm they may cause.
However, this critical position is too limited. It assumes
and perpetuates a common-sense conception of "natural
boundaries" that is analytically flawed, and it generalizes
about boundaries' harmful functions based on a biased and
narrow set of examples. In the remainder of the article, I
suggest that (1) cultural boundaries are necessary for our
thinking and writing, so it is not realistic to repudiate t_!le
general concept of "bounded culture" as such; (2) cultural
boundaries remain important phenomena in the worlds
that we study even under circumstances of interconnection
and globalization; and (3) cultural boundaries do not exclu-
sively serve harmful or discriminatory purposes, but a mix
of undesirable and desirable ones, so that a pan-situational
moral critique of boundaries as an analytical concept is un-
founded.
'A) First, cultural boundaries are necessary for thinking and
writing about human cultural worlds. As we know from
the teachings of both Saussurian and Boasian structuralisms
(see Hymes and Fought 1981), symbolic value derives from
systems of contrast, making the very possibility of meaning
dependent on representations of categorical difference. In
this way thinking about culture is no different from other
kinds of symbolic processes that human beings engage in.
Comparison is also inevitable if we are to acknowledge the
particularity of human cultural worlds. To avoid all formula-
tion of comparative perspective in our ethnography would
be untenable; all it would do is leave the implicit contrast
for readers to supply, which they would do from their own
cultural frames of reference. Once again, we see that the
symbolic distinctions we draw need not map onto spatially
discrete units. Indeed, it is where different cultures meet
tll.at people feel the distinctions of culture most acutely,
since these are so often relevant to navigating their complex
social landscape. So it is as well with identity: The complex-
ities of contact between people of different identities only
intensify people's awareness of identity distinctions-all the
more so when multiple or ambiguous identifications are at
play.
Indeed, so necessary are cultural boundaries to our
thinking and writing about human cultural worlds that they
are invariably presupposed by the very arguments offered
against them. The classic argument that cultures cannot
be thought of as bounded because they are connected to
one another through relations of politics, trade, migration,
and influence presupposes that we can think of the cultures a/
as distinct from one another and, thus, connectable (Wolf
1982:6). Another example is the poststructuralist argument
that cultural boundaries are absurd given that individuals'
identities may be culturally hybrid, "in-between," or impure
(Abu-Lughod 1991; Bhabha 1994:219). Here, too, the argu-
ment presupposes the idea of boundaries even as it chal-
lenges it, since it presumes an ability to recognize the terms '
that are hybridized (Robbins 2004:327-333) . No doubt it is
true, as Kirin Narayan observes, that "we al.J. belong to
eral communities simultaneously," and we participate in
'different cultures and different identities in different con-
texts (1993:676). But this realization, far from rendering cul-
tural boundaries moot or inapplicable, makes it all the more
necessary to have them constructively theorized, since it
illustrates that the boundaries of cultures, identities, and
communities cannot be drawn simply in terms of groups of
individuals.
Second, cultural boundaries are not made irrelevant /13)
by globalization, since they do not depend on an absence
of interaction across them (see Barth 1998[1969]:10). It is
thus wrong to depict the concept of bounded culture as ir-
reconcilable with translocal connections. In the world of
globalization, old tribal distinctions like Nuer versus Dinka
and Tlingit versus Haida have not become obsolete but, in-
stead, are refashioned in contexts like tourism, media rep-
resentation, and political and legal action.
alization itself produces new forms of distinctiveness and
identit y politics. As Benjamin Barber has argued, even as
globalization is bringing the world together "pop culturally
and commercially," it is fostering the proliferation of localist
movements and identity politics, and intensifying people's
awareness of them through possibilities of mass mediation
and diasporic communities (Barber 1995:9). Global commu-
nication and commerce oblige people to operate in increas-
ingly multicultural environments, in which they become
ever more aware of cultural differences and the complex-
ities of identity. Advertisers and marketers objectify cul-
tural boundaries in their niche marketing of culturally cus-
tomized advertisements and products; promoters of tourism
American Anthropolbgist Vol. 106, No. 3 September 2004
local cultural distinctiveness to attract visitors
from outside; and parochialist demagogues, ethnic nation-
alists, and religious extremists l:lroadcast their opposition
to the amorality and uniformity associated with Western
cultural imperialism and with globalization itself. Thus, in-
.stead of rendering cultural boundaries obsolete, globaliza-
tion has amplified certain boundaries and multiplied the
contexts in which people deal with them-a situation not of
boundlessness but, rather, of boundary "superabundance"
(Brightman 1995:519).
@ Third, it is of course true that_ cul!Ural are o!-
ten drawn xenophobic_glly use:j_n wayuh_q.t are harm-
an ra.<jst. But from that- it
does not follow that boundaries qua boundaries are per-
nicious; to argue so would be no more valid than to cite
the use of missiles as a condemnation of Cul-
tural boundaries are also often drawn and used for positive
pu!poses.-They are what permit the recognition of style, ai-
'lowffig items of clothing, music, and so on to be connected
to genres. criticize what is un-
satisfactory in a prevailing cultural order, by pointing to
the plausibility _of better alternativ:_es. Anthropology itself
has often served productively as a voice of cultural critique,
and the same might also be said of our own controversial
discourses of primitivism, exoticism, surrealism, and orien-
talism (Clifford 1988; Hegeman 1999; Marcus and Fisher
1986). of" othernesS.:' platform for
self-critique is by no means unique to the West (Chen 1992).
FoTeXaiilpie, Orokaiva, too, criticize themselves and their
using others as foils. During my stay with them, I
often heard Orokaiva discuss problems such as jealousy and
violence that concerned them in their own society by posit-
ing an exotic alternative world of whitemen in which such
problems are absent. Indeed, the more widely we cast our
net in studying actual contexts of boundary making, the
less boundary politics seem reducible to inherently nega-
tive functions like exclusivist dominance. Certainly, in New
Guinea societies, people readily seize on all manner of con-
trasts in linguistic and cultUral practice in order to position
themselves within regional worlds that they construct as
fields of recognized differences-a form of boundary mak-
ing that may be compared to distinctions of class and style
in our own lives. It might even be shown that boundaries
serve in general to facilitate communication across social
and cultural difference. Even a nation-state boundary that
is fortified with a border fence to exclude "flow" facili-
tates communication, if only by giving the message that
"you cannot pass here with impunity" (Handler and Segal
1990:147).
WHY CULTURAL BOUNDARIES SO TROUBLE US:
CO.MING TO TERMS WITH OUR
. OVER DIFFERENCE
I expect that in the long view of history, the intense prob-
lematization of cultural boundaries in anthropological the-
c:xywill appear to reflecta deeper anxiety surrounding issues
of difference in the late 20th century. Whereas the Boasians
took cultural difference as given and emphasized people's
ability to overcome it through acculturation and transcul-
tural insight, anthropologists in our time have become skep-
tical of the concept of "cultural difference" in general and
wary of specifying cultural contrasts in particular cases for
fear of overstating them. Our anxiety stems from our. height-
ened awareness of the negative dimension of essentialized
otherness and exoticism, as made plain in the pioneering
work of Edward Said (1978) and anthropology's critics. It is,
moreover, nurtured by laudably progressive humanistic and
egalitarian impulses, like our wish to represent the other in
ways undistorted by the dialectical relation with our con-
cepts of ourselves, as well as in ways that preserve the other's
"coevalness" with ourselves, so that the possibility is left
open for the other to participate fully in all parts of our re-
ality (Fabian 1983). But the anxiety over cultural
may also be seen as a historical peculiarity of the late 20th
century, reflecting the fact that we are acutely self-conscious
of our prodigious power and wealth. Indeed, so troubled are
we by our dominant position that the mere identification
of an other has come to be equated with deprecation: It is
as if labeling another as different from us must surely be
some kind of put-down, a pejorative, at least implicitly (see
Obeyesekere 1992). Hence the paralyzing contradiction of
contewporU}' discourse:. While qi-;ersity' in
the abstract is objectify particular differences
has become
16
- --
There is certainly reason not to fetishize difference.
When channeled with restraint as methodological caution,
our anxiety can prevent facile exoticism. But we should not
perpetuate an aversion to boundary making as a govern-
ing principle of anthropological theory. In the first place,
to identify othering with inferiorization is to reassert, al-
beit unintentionally, the universalist Enlightenment con-
ceit that the Western scholarly elite is a global cultural apex,
denying the possibility of the kind of relativist t,mderstand-
ing anthropology has long valued. Second, by devaluing
difference, we are led again to overemphasize relations of
identity or sharedness as the basis for culture, and to dis-
count the role of meaningful differences in the constitution
of social life (Handler and Segal 1990:136ff.; Segal 2001) .
TI:ID:d, when we one-sidedly emphasize negative attitudes
toward the other such as deprecation and contempt (see
Said 1978), we overlook thefact t)l.at oeople feel not only a
A
fear of the alien but also the ure of the foreign. In failing to
acknowledge that comparison can be affirmative of an other
as well as negative, we underestimate the significance of
people's ambivalence toward the other and toward the self
as well (Sax 1998). Indeed, even at the level of practical pol-
itics, our shyness of difference does not serve us well. We do
not practice true pluralism when we soft-pedal differences,
thus that we are all the same: A viable pluralism
demands the acknowledgement of significant differences,
and the recognition that differencecan be the basis of pro-
ductive relationships of mutual understanding,
and respect.
17
As severaCwriters have noted, the "embrace
Bashkow A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries 455
of hybridity and liminality," which is often put forward as
a displacement of difference, does not offer a politics that
is necessarily more egalitarian, forgiving, or liberatory; we
know that hybridity, too, can cause conflict and serve as
'a"Q.asis for dominance (Kapchan and Strong 1999:247). In
- short, the postmodern idealization of a world without shib-
boleths is a red herring. A'f'
01
f'"' '
It is a sign of the peculiar intellectual ethos of our times
that merely sophistic arguments have become so influen-
tial. The pervasive notion that boundaries could be inval-
idated by their artificiality, instability, fuzziness, and lim-
inality should be no more convincing than a claim that
the transitional periods of dusk and dawn render invalid
the distinction between night and day (Ian Fraser, e-mail
to asaonet listserv, September 3, 2002; cf. Hays 1993). And
we readily equate bounded culture with problematic es-
sentialism, even though boundaries offer the sole basis for
constructing entities in a nonessentiallst way. As Andrew
Abbott (2001:277) has shown, viable sociocultural entities
can be created entirely through a process of bounding,
by yoking together particular sites of difference to form
an apparently enclosing frontier. Drawing boundaries and
positing essences are really altemative ways of construct-
ing cultural entities. And while our strongly antiessentialist
commitment should be leading us to focus on the distinc-
tions which create boundaries, the unease over difference
that characterizes the anthropology of our times has pre-
vented us from doing so.
IRA BASHKOW Department of Anthropology, University of
Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4120
NOTES
Acknowledgments. The writing of this article was supported in part
by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and from
a Richard Carley Hunt Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship from the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. It incor-
porates material from my fieldwork in the 1990s that was sup-
ported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-
search and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad
Fellowship. I thank Matti Bunzl for inspiring the article, Richard
Handler for help in editing it, and the American Anthropologist edi-
tors and reviewers for many helpful suggestions. Thanks also go to
Matthew Meyer, Daniel Rosenblatt, Daniel Segal, and Rupert Stasch
for reading drafts of the manuscript, and to the students in my fall
2000 graduate seminar on Boasian Anthropology at the Univer-
sity of Virginia particularly Sevil Baltali and Suzanne Menair, for
their contribution to my general understanding of the writings of
Boasian anthropologists. I am grateful to George Stocking for his
encouragement of my work over many years. My wife, Lise Dobrin,
helped me develop ideas of this article in numerous conversations
and provided invaluable help in strengthening the final version
with her careful editing; my debt to her extends well beyond this
article and knows no bounds.
1. In the culture of academia, the current discomfort with bound-
aries is reflected in a trend of devaluing disciplinarity. The tradi-
tional boundaries of scholarly fields have become associated with
intellectual stuffiness and narrowness of perspective, as opposed
to the pathbreaking departures and exciting unconventionality as-
sociated with scholarly work that is valorized as interdisciplinary.
Particularly in the humanities, hewing to scholarly boundaries im-
plies a lack of originality, independence, and spunk. To avoid the
humdrum staidness of work conducted within the boundaries of
traditional fields, scholarship is routinely evaluated (in grant com-
petitions, job descriptions, etc.) on the basis of how successful it is
in creatively transgressing or, best of all, reconfiguring disciplinary
demarcations.
2. In what follows, I focus on the views of Boas, I<roeber;
Sapir, Lowie, and Benedict, neglecting other students of Boas-
such as Ruth Bunzel, Cora DuBois, Manuel Gamio, Alexander
Goldenweiser, Esther Goldfrank, MelVille Hersl<ovits, Zora Neale
Hurston, Alexander Lesser, Elsie Clews Parsons, Paul Radin, Gladys
Reichard, and Leslie Spier- whose work is surely entitled to a fuller
share of our attention. In my incomplete readings of these authors,
I have not found significant exceptions to the arguments developed
here.
3. Obviously, this was not their only purpose. So, for example,
Boas was interested early on in showing that many cultural bound-
aries did not coincide with topographical or ecological ones, and
I<roeber revisited this issue later on by mapping where cultural and
ecological boundaries did coincide, in order to explain the edges of
culture areas in terms of subsistence resources.
4. Thus, Lowie is emphatic on the point that cultural boundaries
cannot serve as boundaries of the ethnographer's inquiry. He urges,
dauntingly: "A science of culture must, in principle, register every
item of social tradition, correlating it significantly with any other
aspect of reality, whether that lies within the same culture or outside"
(1935:235) . .
5. An additional point raised by Sapir was that not all areas are
of "equal weight and cogency" and that "not all people can be
fitted into such a scheme" (1994:99). Although he himself had
offered what was perhaps the subtlest analysis of culture areas
(Sapir 1949(1916]), Sapir felt that "too much of a fetish has been
made of the culture area concept" (1994:99; see also Benedict 1934:
230).
6. While it is true that the French and the English distinguished
their concept of "society" from "culture," this distinction was not
clear-cut, and the British concept of "society" was treated by the
Boasians in effect as just another classificatory point of view from
which "cultural" boundaries could be drawn.
7. The presupposition that racial boundaries were natural and,
thus, truly scientific was deeply entrenched at the time that
Benedict was writing. Prior to the mid-1920s, when the validity of
racial distinctions could no longer be upheld with scientific testi-
mony and U.S. courts began relying instead on "the understanding
of the common man," the kinds of justification used in decisions
about who was "white by law" depended on the scientific corrob-
/
"separate but equal" facilities, the Supreme Court decided that the
very light-skinned, racially mixed Homer Plessy was black on the
grounds that "racial differences lay outside the law, beyond and
before any act of human agency". (Hale 1998:23).
8. Kroeber's conception of "nationality" as distinct from nation )
or state is similar to Sapir's: "Whereas languages. and cultures are!
objectively alike or unlike, unitary or distinct," the nationality,
I<roeber wrote, "is fundamentally subjective" in that it is "es-
sentially a feeling of distinctness or unity, of sense of demarca- /
tion between in-group and out-group" (1948[1923) :226). For more
on Sapir's distinction between analytic and folk boundaries, see
1949(1932b):360, 1949(1927):343. I
9. The converse is, of course, also possible: Things that" people con-
sider their own may be regarded as foreign from some analytic per-
spective. This, too, was a point that the Boasians made to confront
U.S. chauvinism, most famously in Ralph Linton's chestnut "One
Hundred Percent American" (1937). It was one of Boas's standard
arguments against Eurocentric racism that Western achievements
in no way implied a racially superior aptitude on the part of West-
erners, since so many of them were products of others' "genius"
that had been borrowed (Boas 1938[1911], 1974[1894]).
10. Brightman notes that critics have tended to characterize past
scholarship in terms that are questionable as intellectual history.
Their rhetorical strategy has often been to depict past work selec-
tively in a way that identifies its most essential features as pre-
cisely those aspects which are most "uncongenial to contemporary
456 American Anthropologist Vol. 106, No. 3 September 2004
disciplinary beliefs," while overlooking those aspects which are
consistent with such beliefs and continuous with the present
(Brightman 1995:527). It should be noted that structural-
functionalism is not even the best example to criticize for the reifi-
cation of cultural boundaries. That honor may go instead to Marvin
Harris's "cultural materialism" and other neoevolutionist, cultural
ecological, and materialist anthropologies that posit bounded "so-
ciocultural systems" t o be analyzed independently of one another
as natural entities (Harris 1979:47).
11. The boundaries of the Orokaiva were proposed and refined by
colonial officers and colonial anthropologists who worked out sim-
ilarities and genetic relationships among varied Papuan "tribes" in
the early 1900s. Although these boundaries had a basis in cultural
and linguistic similarities, they used them in large part for their own
administrative convenience; nonetheless, they also recognized that
this classification collapsed cultural distinctions that were impor-
tant to the people themselves and that remained politically mean-
ingful. So even while the term Orokaiva was naturalized to some
extent as covering a "group of tribes who are considered to belong
to one stock and speak affiliated languages," colonial officers con-
tinued to express a working knowledge of multiple kinds and scales
of cultural demarcation by routinely using locality, tribe, subtribe,
and dialect names to refer to specific "Orokaiva" groups with their
own political interests and cultural peculiarities (Williams 1930:2,
see also Patrol Reports 1909-74).
12. In PNG English, black and white are common terms that are
used to talk about race. They correspond to a range of other ex-
pressions in English (e.g., national and European), Tok Pisin (e.g.,
blakskin and waitskin) , and local vernaculars (e.g., Orokaiva hamo
mume and hamo agena). Orokaiva refer to whites most frequently
using the term taupa, borrowed from Police Motu. I use whitemen,
my gloss for taupa, specifically to refer to whitemen as Orokaiva
constructions. I do not mark distinctions among different national-
ities (Australian, German, Chinese, etc.); interestingly, in Orokaiva
\ construction, Chinese are categorized as "white," instead of being
f seen as "people of color" as they are in the United States. While
Orokaiva do distinguish among such categories for certain pur-
poses, they are most often ideologically backgrounded within a
polarized black/white scheme that (as in racial constructions else-
where) tends to subsume many other dimensions of meaningful
difference among persons.
13. Just as analytic boundaries are plural and interested, so too are
Orokaiva folk boundaries. Orokaiva themselves do not always agree
about what is "their own" versus "whitemen's" culture, and an
individual may draw boundaries differently in different contexts.
14. Linguists' recognition that language boundaries are shaped by
politics is expressed neatly in the aphorism that "a language is a
dialect with an army and a navy." By and large, linguists seem less
troubled than are anthropologists by the fact that their objects of
study are not naturally bounded entities. Similarly, though Western
folk ideology often assumes monolingualism to be the natural hu-
man state of affairs (Dorian 1998), sociolinguists have no expecta-
tion that there should be a one-to-one mapping between languages
and speakers. To my knowledge, the existence of multilingualism
has never been advanced as an argument for the fictive nature of
linguistic boundaries.
15. A concept that might be useful here is the continuum between
productive and passive cultural competence. In the case of the for-
mer, people have the cultural mastery necessary to act creatively
within a culture, whether in ways that produce ordinary appro-
priate responses, or in ways that innovate, as Sapir. describes. In
the case of the latter, although people may have a relatively good
understanding of the meanings of others' acts, their own cultural
abilities are limited primarily to routine interchange and highly
standardized functions. Greg Urban (2001) distinguishes between
replication and dissemination along similar lines, but with the fo-
cus on cultural items that may be produced or consumed rather
than on the producers. or consumers themselves.
16. Hence, too, the strategy of superficial de-exoticization com-
mon in recent ethnography, a strategy that stresses the ways
in which "exotic" others are like us (e.g., Balinese priests use
cell phones), in contrast to the more profoundly relativist de-
exoticization predicated on rendering others comprehensible to us
by showing their reasonability in relation to other particularities of
their own world.
17. I am indebted to conversations with Drew Alexander for help-
ing me appreciate the practical requirements for pluralism in the
face of key social differences.
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