Collective Representation in American Anthropological Conversations: Individual and Culture [and Comments and Reply]

The paper is an investigation into the conversational processes which lead to a peculiarly American appropriation of the holistic intuition into the nature of culture. The individualism of American culture is well known. The fact that one can find in the United States many statements that go beyond individualism (e.g., in the Pragmatist tradition) is either ignored or used as an argument for the impossibility of speaking of an "American" culture. The paper criticises the latter statements on the ground that, in stereotypical American fashion, they place the locus of culture "in the individual," as an aspect of personality. It argues that a holistic understanding of cultural processes places their locus in the conversational processes within which action proceeds.This accounts for the fate of possibly holistic intuitions, e.g., those of Benedict, Bateson, Schneider, and Geertz, as these become "understood" or, rather, retold psychologically. The analysis is conducted in terms of the historical fate of the early work that became known as "culture and personality." It then traces the sources and evolution of the latest work to address itself to the same issues of cultural integration, particularly work in "symbolic anthropology," and shows how it contains elements that would justify a psychological appropriation. The paper ends with and appeal for the preservation of the holistic intuition in modern restatements of cultural structuring.