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Keynote Talk
Saturday evening,
March 15th, 2008
SAS Annual Meetings
Staunton, Virginia
by
Richard Handler
Professor of Anthropology, Associate Dean of the College, University of Virginia
AND
Eric Gable
Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Mary Washington
Forget Culture, Remember Memory?
The culture concept, which became the central concept in American anthropology in the 20th century, had become ubiquitous in the wider society by century's end, but paradoxically, had become ever more suspect within academic anthropology itself. In American anthropology, "culture" survived its battles with "social structure" in the 1940s and '50s, and with Marxian economic determinism in the 1960s and '70s, but has struggled ever since against a set of new terms, like "practice," "identity," and "memory." In this paper, we sketch the contours of this theoretical shift as it has worked itself out in the anthropological literature and especially in the study of historical commemoration. Finally, given the fate of the idea of culture, we suggest some parallel shifts that might occur in the future of memory as a transdisciplinary concept.