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Book Review: Culture as Praxis

The original publication of Culture as Praxis marked an attempt by Bauman to acknowledge and move beyond sociological and anthropological assessments of culture that relied on modernist assumptions of linearity, predictability, and order. To the extent that Culture as Praxis signifies an extensive deconstruction of the idea of culture, his analysis should continue to be read by students of sociology and anthropology as a bridge between modernist and postmodernist accounts. This republication of the original text contains a new introduction that somewhat timidly demonstrates the influence of French post-structuralism and some New Social Movement thought on Bauman’s reconceptualization of culture. Much of what Bauman suggests is new and innovative in sociological conceptualizations of culture, identity, and praxis lies in New Social Movement theory, and postmodern theory. Unfortunately, Bauman fails to reveal the extent to which these new developments have impacted sociological theory. As a result, readers are left with only a glimmer of insight into contemporary applications of his now thirtyyear-old treatise. In the review that follows I will highlight aspects of each of the three chapters in the book, followed by a discussion of possible shortcomings. Culture as Praxis is separated into three segments or chapters, each representing core literatures characteristic of sociological and anthropological research on the topic of culture. In the first segment, Bauman takes the reader on a journey into the interminable academic debate over culture as a concept. Bauman first surveys debates in two broad literatures, one that elaborates on ancient Greek interpretations of the ways in which culture should be used to craft superior ethical and moral beings, thus, designating a hierarchical system that preserves privilege for the elite, and the other that views culture as a way to differentiate people within communities based on temporal, ecological, and geographic boundaries. Bauman’s emphasis on hierarchical elites appears in subsequent publications as criticism of the role played by intellectuals in the reproduction of dominant culture and ideology (1997). But it is in his analysis of the conceptualization of “culture as differentiation” that Bauman initiates what will, again in subsequent publications, appear as a destabilization of modernist sociological and anthropological accounts of culture. Bauman stresses the impossibility of cultural universals (i.e., metaphysics, essentialisms, master discourses, etc.), and the fluidity of signification. In the final section of the first chapter, Bauman sets up what will become his primary theme—the symbiotic association between social structure and agency as endlessly engaging in the process of creation and reiteration. In the second chapter, “Culture as Structure,” Bauman once again strides far ahead of the theoretical competition during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In