Preface

This issue of ISMO concerns culture. It is only fair to say that this could mean virtually anything. The following discussion makes some attempt to specify the range of interests and ideas that emerge from the articles. It may be useful, and I hope not too self-indulgent, to begin with some autobiography to explain my own position and give some background to my comments. I began learning in the field of social anthropology in Oxford in 1970, guided by Edwin Ardener, whom many (including myself) consider one of the outstanding intellects in British postwar social anthropology (see, for example, Chapman, 1989; Hastrup, 1989). Social anthropology in Oxford at the time was in the full flush of a theoretical revolution that has often been summarized as a shift from the study of function to the study of meaning (Ardener, 1971a; Pocock, 1961). Social anthropology in Great Britain had been institutionalized in the period between the wars under two major figures Bronislaw Malinowksi and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. These two were not, in their own view, in the same theoretical camp, but they are perceived, in retrospect, as sharing some important characteristics of the period. In particular, both conceived of their subject as a of society. Radcliffe-Brown, in 1957 (late in his career), published a collection of essays from previous decades and called it A Natural Science of Society. Malinowski, in 1944, published a theoretical manifesto called A Scientific Theory of Culture. There is neither space nor need to go into the detail of the arguments, but the message was clear enough societies were to be studied objectively, as if they were biological species or bits of the physical world; they were to be observed, classified, and detailed in such a way that a closed and determinate science would be developed a science that, bit by bit, would