Marking Boundaries: Culture as Category Work

Abstract

Contemporary social science is acutely aware of what happens when we mark or police boundaries. Cross-cultural research highlights such issues. Face-to-face interviews and e-mail exchanges with Asian businessmen appeared to suggest clear boundaries between Tanzanian African and Asian “culture.” However, such ready understanding raises two further issues. First, boundary marking might fit with a colonial methodology used by the early anthropologists to fix a boundary around “native” populations. Second, the very concepts of “culture” and “identity” need deconstruction. Using Sacks’s insistence on the inescapably local and self-constituting character of social interaction, the authors examine what is involved when ethnographers (and laypersons) use categories to describe the world. They conclude with an assessment of what remains of anthropology’s and sociology’s concept of culture given their tendency to fudge the boundary between the descriptive abilities of lay and sociological members.

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