|
|
"culture" defined since K&K 1952?
Gessler, Nicholas (gessler@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Thu, 19 Jan 1995 09:47:00 PST
Thank you to the many subscribers who replied privately with the following
reference (which is available in two editions), and a number who requested
that I post the results. THE main reference is:
Author: Kroeber, A. L. (Alfred Louis), 1876-1960
Title: Culture; a critical review of concepts and definitions, by A.
L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn. With the assistance of
Wayne Untereiner and appendices by Alfred G. Meyer.
Published: Cambridge, Mass., The Museum 1952.
Also: New York, Random House, a Vintage Book 195?.
Series: Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and
Ethnology, Harvard University, v. 47, no.1.
The second part of my question asked for a "more systematic (and by
implication recent) survey or quantification... of our use of the term," and
Joan Miller contributed a circa 1959 Talcot Parsons short article. The
concensus is that K&K's treatment is out of date, but that nothing more
recent has appeared. What I am really looking for would be something
analogous to an archaeological artifact clustering based upon an analysis of
attributes. It would be a constellation of clusterings in n-dimensions of
variable-space (definition-space) for the associations of the word "culture."
This general "ignorance based" procedure for classifying texts can be
meaningful, and is (to be) described in SCIENCE in an article by Marc
Damashek of the National Security Agency.
Nick Gessler
UCLA - Anthropology
gessler@anthro.sscnet.ucla.edu
|