Page 65 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

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THINKING ABOUT CULTURE
IN A GLOBAL ECUMENE

Ulf Hannerz

Some years ago, we were getting short of storage space in our apartment in
Stockholm, so I decided no longer to put off excavating a large closet where I
realized a number of things might have accumulated over time which perhaps
no longer needed to be there. Far in the back, I recognized a large box, which
contained my field notes from my first anthropological research project, in
Washington, DC, about twenty years earlier. In the same box, moreover, were
several dense pages of more theoretical queries, which clearly I had jotted
down for myself on my way home. They were on the stationery of M/S Kungs-
holm, the passenger ship which had taken me back from the USA to Sweden
that time (when going by sea was still a very ordinary alternative to flying).
I was a bit amused, and embarrassed, as I looked at that brief summary of
some theoretical issues I had identified as worth thinking more about so many
years earlier. For it seemed these were the issues with which I was still more or
less preoccupied, and one might have thought that in a couple of decades I
should have moved on to something else. But then it may not be so unusual
among anthropologists that their first fieldwork is such a powerful experience
that it puts them on tracks where they will stay for a long time, even as the
landscape around the tracks keeps changing.
What those theoretical notes for myself were about was culture – how to
understand it, how to describe it. The ‘concept of culture’ had long been held
central to anthropology, but perhaps in truth, at the time, and with a few
exceptions, there was not always a whole lot of conceptualizing going on.
Many experienced members of the discipline were probably still most
inclined to repeat, a bit piously but rather routinely and effortlessly, the sort of
definition that would have been on one of the first pages of anthropology
textbooks for years: ‘a culture is a shared, integrated pattern of modes of
thought and action, transmitted from generation to generation’. Or something
like that.

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