Page 102 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

96 CULTURAL STUDIES

root word ‘culture’ remains problematic. Culture, after all, is the invention and
key concept of anthropology. Yet, as anthropologist Terence Turner, among
others, has pointed out, the word culture is as unstable as its referent. It is a
shifting signifier—in other words, its meaning changes depending on the context
and the speaker.
For over a decade, the ambiguity of the ‘culture’ concept has engaged the
attention of anthropologists spurred on by the intervention of literary critics with
historians treading cautiously behind the sidelines. Turner notes that these
intellectual contestations produced a proliferation of theorizing, advantageously
opening a space for cultural studies as well as an erasure of clear disciplinary
boundaries.
I suggest that ‘culture’, as a key word, warrants our attention. It is a theme I
will pursue here as a reminder that ‘culture’ itself is a metaphorical construct
which served as the foundation for a literary genre—‘ethno-graphic realism’.
That is, writing representations of others, usually defined as non-white (a
category that has periodically included Irish Catholics, and eastern and southern
Europeans), non-Western people in general and ‘exotic primitives’ in particular.
4
The social vocabulary of culture is intimately linked to issues of representation
and therefore refers to questions of power: who has the power to define whom,
and when and how and, finally, for what purpose. This echoes the cautionary
remarks expressed by bell hooks against the danger of reinscribing patterns of
colonial domination if the ‘Other’ remains an object of study in newly
established cultural studies programmes. The relevance of calling the social
vocabulary of culture into question is intentionally to provoke conversation
about how to avoid developing (or alter existing) programmes of study which, as
Cornel West writes, ‘highlight notions of difference, marginality and otherness in
such a way that it further marginalizes actual people of difference and
otherness’.
Women’s studies scholar, Chandry Mohanty, persuasively argues that
‘culture’ has become a leading commodity for prejudice reduction in what she
aptly labels ‘the Race Industry’. She contends that culture ‘is seen as
noncontradictory, as isolated from questions of history, and as a storehouse of
nonchanging facts, behaviors and practices’ (1994:158). Difference is thus often
erroneously defined as cultural, rather than explicitly examined as the product of
structural inequalities and asymmetrical social relations. This tendency manifests
itself most prominently in undergraduate curriculum requirements, which have
commodified racial inequality under the label ‘cultural diversity’. As a result,
‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ have come to serve as euphemisms for ‘non-
white Others’ (the impolite translation of ‘minorities’). Furthermore, in this
playing field of diversity, insufficient attention has been drawn to the manner in
which W/whites are either an explicit or an imaginary target audience yet both
exclude themselves and have been excluded from the performance. 5 Critics of
this development contend that until the language of inclusion—with its