Culture

Srikant Sarangi
Table of contents

Several disciplines within the social sciences and humanities (e.g., anthropology, sociology, history, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, psychology) have accommodated the study of culture in their academic inquiries. A cursory glance at the volumes of literature written on the subject suggests that although these disciplines share the notion of culture in a rather loosely descriptive way, there is little agreement between them with regard to the exact nature of its theoretical and analytical underpinnings (see Keesing 1974 and especially Kluckhohn 1962 for an illuminating interdisciplinary debate on the concept of culture). Even within the discipline of anthropology which is centrally concerned with the culture concept, various branches of inquiry continue to be both united and divided in the way culture is conceptualized for investigation purposes. Following Barthes (1984) who considers interdisciplinarity in terms of creating a new object that belongs to no one, it is possible to view culture as a truly interdisciplinary project – the term means what we want it to mean in specific contexts of use.

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