“Ethnographies”: American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology

Abstract

When henry nash smith defined American Studies in 1957 as “the study of American culture past and present, as a whole,” he summarized more than two decades of a wide-ranging and self-consciouscriticalanalysis of culture in the United States and, at the same time, initiated the search for theunifiedor holistic “method” through which American Studies would, finally, achieve maturity as an (interdisciplinary) discipline. The 1930s were the decade when, as Warren Susman pointed out years ago, the complexity of American culture as well as the culture concept were discovered and discussed in the wider public. We think of the work of cultural anthropology, of the studies in cultural relativism by Margaret Mead or of patterns of culture by Ruth Benedict that emphasized the unity of cultures and often were written with a self-critical look at American culture in mind. What was, however, even more important was the fact that during the 1930s American culture manifested itself as amulticulture, as a culture that was characterized even more by variety, heterogeneity, tensions, and alternative traditions than by the strong drive toward national identity and consensus. Cultural anthropologists, critics, and (“documentary”) writers such as “native anthropologist” Zora Neale Hurston, Constance Rourke, or James Agee (with photographer Walker Evans, inLet Us Now Praise Famous Men) worked out radical new methods and strategies of culturalcritiqueand ethnographicwritingin the study of American cultures, in the plural. Thus, historian Caroline F. Ware, writing for the American Historical Association inThe Cultural Approach to History, could argue in 1940 that the “total cultural approach” does by no means imply that American culture is something like an organic unity, but that “American culture”isexactly themultiplicityof regional, ethnic, and class cultures and the interactions of these cultures in terms of rhetoric as well as of power,notsome “common patterns” or the Anglo-Saxon tradition the “other” groups have to “contribute” to.