Few ideas are as important and pervasive in the discourse of the
twentieth century as the idea of culture. Yet culture, Christopher
Herbert contends, is an idea laden from its inception with ambiguity and
contradiction. In Culture and Anomie, Christopher Herbert conducts an
inquiry into the historical emergence of the modern idea of culture that
is at the same time an extended critical analysis of the perplexities
and suppressed associations underlying our own exploitation of this
term.
Making wide reference to twentieth-century anthropologists from
Malinowski and Benedict to Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, and Lévi-Strauss as
well as to nineteenth-century social theorists like Tylor, Spencer,
Mill, and Arnold, Herbert stresses the philosophically dubious, unstable
character that has clung to the culture idea and embarrassed its
exponents even as it was developing into a central principle of
interpretation.
In a series of detailed studies ranging from political economy to
missionary ethnography, Mayhew, and Trollope's fiction, Herbert then
focuses on the intellectual and historical circumstances that gave to
culture the appearance of a secure category of scientific analysis
despite its apparent logical incoherence. What he describes is an
intimate relationship between the idea of culture and its antithesis,
the myth or fantasy of a state of boundless human desire--a conception
that binds into a single tradition of thought such seemingly
incompatible writers as John Wesley, who called this state original sin,
and Durkheim, who gave it its technical name in sociology: anomie.
Methodologically provocative and rich in unorthodox conclusions,
Culture and Anomie will be of interest not only to specialists in
nineteenth-century literature and intellectual history, but also to
readers across the wide range of fields in which the concept of culture
plays a determining role.
