Ethnographic fieldwork had been undertaken mainly in colonial situations characterized by contact between conquering and conquered cultures. This experience produced a theory of cultural cross-fertilization (acculturation) and culture change. A legacy of colonialism was the great differential between wealthy and less wealthy parts of the world. The “development project” undertaken by the wealthier nations after World War II to relieve colonial poverty and diminish global inequities produced various cultural theories of development based on continuing anthropological research as well as strong critiques of the discipline’s role in development.

Cultural anthropology has maintained its concern for the history of change in particular cultures. Kroeber was the most notable cultural historian among Boas’s students, examining change over the long term on a scale that connected easily with the historical sociology of Max Weber and the social history of Fernand Braudel. The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed a striking invigoration of historical anthropology that took issue with utilitarian and materialist interpretations of cultural stability and change, emphasizing the importance of symbols and their meaning for all human action. Marshall Sahlins was a leading proponent of this school of “historical anthropology.”

Cultural ecology also has its roots in an earlier cultural anthropology, particularly the study of the geographic and environmental context of culture change. The neo-evolutionist Leslie White reacted to the idealism of the cultural approach, turning his attention to the progress of technology in harnessing energy to serve the survival and subsistence needs of cultures. Cultural ecology has sought to produce a more quantitative discipline than is characteristic of most cultural anthropology, which has remained rooted in the humanities.

Culture and the humanities

The humanistic roots of cultural anthropology produced some of the major tendencies of the latter half of the 20th century. Cultural anthropology in America has long studied the folklore, music, art, worldview, and indigenous philosophies of other cultures. Humanistic scholarship typically makes qualitative or interpretive statements about complex patternings or configurations of experience and local meaning such as can not easily be done by formal scientific procedures. In the 1950s, Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, two of the most eminent anthropologists of the period, undertook a major effort to assay the meaning of “culture” in anthropology; they concluded that it was best understood as the knowledge, belief, and habits embodied in symbolic discourse. The symbolic anthropology that flourished in cultural anthropology from the 1960s to the ’80s was mainly concerned with the interpretation of the complex meaning of symbols in local experience.

An important contribution to redefining cultural anthropology in the 1970s was the interpretive movement promoted by Clifford Geertz. He argued that the main consequence of fieldwork was the anthropologists’ densely interwoven, symbol-laden field texts (“field notes”) and that their main products were the texts interpreting these texts, the ethnographies themselves. Anthropological work should be thus seen as a text-oriented interpretive task practiced on the rich complexities of culture and social action. A further step along this path challenged anthropology with the “writing culture” movement, which pointed up the biases implicit in the anthropologist’s positioning in field research, and his or her choice of voices to hear and materials to write about in the ethnographic text. Geertz thus enabled many anthropologists of all persuasions to recognize the limits of objectivity and the inevitable “partiality” of anthropological practice and publication. A related critique came from feminists in anthropology who pressed the case of culturally influenced gender bias in fieldwork and writing.

These developments were followed in the 1990s by the “writing against culture” movement, which expressed misgivings about a common form of anthropological thought that imposed excessive and disadvantaging “otherness” on the cultures and peoples studied. This movement implicitly reasserted the humanist universalism of anthropology and pointed up how other cultures were described in terms that distanced and dehumanized them. This was a very direct and forceful challenge to customary descriptive and categorizing practices, and it provoked strong debate in the discipline. The exchange between the Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere and the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins concerning the interpretation of precolonial native thought in the Hawaiian Islands was a late 20th-century episode in the continuing debate between cultural universalism and cultural particularism.

Symbolic anthropology gave rise to a new theme, the role of metaphor—or, more broadly, all the tropes, or figures of speech—as symbolic representation of proper conduct. This is an ancient scholarly interest, dating from Aristotle in Western thought but not unique to Western civilization. Partaking of both humanistic and scientific analysis, this approach is fruitful both for insight into the mind and the organization of experience and for the understanding of the constraints and creative possibilities the “play of tropes” contributes to expressive culture.

The turn of the millennium saw a renewal of the relationship between anthropology and the humanities, as the concept of culture was adopted as the centrepiece of “cultural studies,” with its focal interest in “multiculturalism.” The self-identification of many minorities in American society brought with it a large number of new areas of study in the humanities. Humanists, to be sure, were, from the turn of the 20th century, influenced by the anthropological work of James George Frazer and others. However, these new humanistic approaches to the study of the relation of changing thought and value to the changing social, political, and economic circumstances of a globalizing market, though not grounded in extended fieldwork and empirical ethnography, posed an important challenge to anthropology’s claim to be the interpreter and arbiter of the culture concept. “Cultural studies” posed a challenge of collaboration between anthropology and the humanities. The movement away from the study of small-scale societies and a new focus on the study of emergent “public cultures” in the global arena was a significant anthropological response to this new interest in culture in the humanities.