Does culture have clearly identifiable, distributionally stable parts
sufficient to justify the particulate mode of understanding? Is culture
composed of elemental units, or is it merely convenient to think
this way? And, if culture does not consist of discrete parts, then
what? This article suggests that the quest for natural “units of culture”
is pretty much a doomed undertaking. There will be no periodic
chart for culture grounded in stable, essential properties
whether at the level of culture traits and complexes or at the cognitive
level of ideas and schemas. On the other hand, various methods
of data elicitation can produce replicable and superficially discrete
results, which gives some hope for the possibility of a methodological
particulatism. |