Joana Breidenbach and Pál Nyíri have hit an unqualified homerun with their latest collaboration, Seeing Culture Everywhere: From Genocide to Consumer Habits. Their intention, stated in the book’s introduction, is to “understand the world as a rapidly changing product of global trends shaping our perception, rather than as a sum of historically continuous civilizations. We are interested in the mechanisms that make us see the world in terms of ‘cultures’” (23). Breidenbach and Nyíri are not so much attempting to solidify an existing (or make a new) definition of the term “culture” as they are delving into the various ways that the term “culture” has entered other realms of life. The breadth of their discussion is impressive, with topics ranging from academic theories to public policy, media, education policy, criminal justice systems, and the corporate world. Equally impressive is the approachability of the text. While writing in a high register and not shying away from wallowing in a conversational topic, the authors do not rely too heavily on jargon and discipline-specific points of view to make their argument, which is comprehensive and well constructed. The breadth of their discussion makes Seeing Culture Everywhere a useful text for many different classrooms and fields of research. However, the depth of the discussion makes the book perhaps better suited to upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses. This is probably not a book for an intro class, but for more advanced students it is a very useful text.
The individual chapters of Seeing Culture Everywhere dig into different broad topics, giving many examples culled from news reports, legal and governmental documents, and accounts from anthropologists and other researchers. Chapter 1, “Clashing Civilizations,” is largely a reaction to what the authors describe as Francis Fukuyama’s universalist and Samuel Huntington’s relativist explanations of social phenomena. Breidenbach and Nyíri give brief accounts of both Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s works before dismissing both as overly simplistic. The ultimate aim is to explain that the actual enormous complexity of culture makes it unsuitable to simplistic argumentation (either as cause or effect), but that the apparent familiarity of the trope of culture makes it especially susceptible to misuse or oversimplification. Huntington gets quite a bit of attention throughout the book, which gives the impression that the authors were indicting his theses particularly.
Chapter 2, “Culture,” presents the authors’ broadest thesis, that the term “culture” is poorly defined and understood in the many contexts in which it gets employed. International development is a focus of this chapter, with China playing a major role as exemplar. Chapter 3, “Culturalizing Violence,” shifts the focus to large-scale inter-group conflict, which often gets explained in the media and in policy making as “ethnic,” “cultural,” or “centuries-old.” Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia are the primary examples in this chapter, and the authors do a good job of delving into the complexities of the situations in those two countries, exposing the contradictions and oversimplifications of cultural explanations for these conflicts.
Chapter 4, “The Challenge of Multiculturalism,” turns the lens toward domestic public policy in several countries, and how the concept of multiculturalism has shaped various policy decisions and social issues. Education, veiling, forced marriage, immigration, religious freedom, and the Danish cartoon debate all get discussion here. In this chapter more than the others, the authors’ attempt at comprehensiveness is a bit detrimental. By trying to fit in too many examples, the chapter begins to feel like a laundry list at times, a series of instances wherein attempts at multiculturalism have caused problems. The exhaustive list seems to prevent as much depth of analysis in the chapter. There is analysis here, to be sure, but this chapter feels more heavily weighted down with examples and less infused with theorization than the others.
The next chapter, “Protecting ‘Indigenous Culture’,” returns to a more focused and analytical form. The authors use property rights, both tangible and intangible, and the concept of heritage to explore issues of ownership and indigeneity. Museum collections, landscapes, and what courts now call intellectual property are all discussed within the framework of culture and the rights to a cultural identity.
The last chapter of Seeing Culture Everywhere discusses the modern business world, where the terms “intercultural competence” and “intercultural communication” have become commonplace. This chapter is another indictment, this time of the cultural competence industry that sells corporations, governments, and private organizations on the necessity of understanding otherness. Breidenbach and Nyíri do not argue that this is an unworthy goal. Their issue is with the simplistic, uninformed, and untheorized understanding of culture that underpins much of the intercultural training out there. The lack of standards for claiming cultural expertise is called into question, as well as the essentializing aspects of Geert Hofstede’s and Fons Trompenaars’ brands of intercultural competence training. The critiques boil down to one point, that cultures cannot be reduced to the scores on a set of cultural trait spectra (how individual/communitarian is a culture? are they sequential or sychronic?).
The theme of oversimplification runs throughout Seeing Culture Everywhere. The authors demonstrate time and again that an oversimplified understanding of culture leads to problematic results. In their concluding chapter, they advance the notion that ethnographic engagement is the key. The imbalance between large-scale description of a cultural trait and that trait’s vernacular articulation(s) means that encountering the other ethnographically is necessary to be able to understand that culture’s culture. Breidenbach and Nyíri are not saying something new here, of course. This book is not breaking a new theoretical or methodological ground. It is, however, making the case in clear, comprehensive, convincing arguments that “culture” is a tricky concept made all the more difficult to grasp because of the ways in which it has been poorly understood and used. Their call for more fully realized understandings of culture is purposeful and timely. Seeing Culture Everywhere makes their argument very well, and it should be on anyone’s list of potential texts for use in class or cultural research.
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[Review length: 996 words • Review posted on March 30, 2011]