Culture: the making, unmaking and remaking of an anthropological concept

Culture is a key concept in anthropology, but has also long become integral to how social actors conceive their own identities and group boundaries. In the context of identity politics culture is often understood as existing in more or less closed systems of values, norms, and world views that determine human action. How should anthropologists respond when a concept so central to their own discipline is practically 'naturalised' in public political discourse? How should they react in face of the overwhelming culturalisation of research perspectives in neighbouring disciplines, where culture has become so all-encompassing that practically everything becomes culture and the term's analytical value is eroded? Can and should culture be retained and further developed as an analytical category, and if so, how? In what ways can it serve as a concept that facilitates fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration? This paper discusses these questions by first presenting a brief, highly selective overview of the varied history of the anthropological culture concept, including the moments when it was subject to trenchant critique. Then it considers why anthropology as a discipline should retain culture as a key analytical concept, and what challenges anthropologists face in reformulating the term in a post-essentialist, constructivist manner.