  Letters Archive
Tracing
"Culture" in Modernist America In 1917, Mabel Dodge, the subject of Gertrude Stein's
famous prose portrait, received a letter from her
husband, painter Maurice Sterne, that would change
the course of her interesting life. It began, "Do
you want an object in life? Save the Indians, their
art-culture—reveal it to the world!" Soon after,
Dodge renounced her role as the social center of the
New York avant garde, and made her home in what was
then a very remote northern New Mexico. In Taos,
Dodge became a central figure in another artists'
colony that would eventually include D.H. Lawrence
and Georgia O'Keefe, both of whom shared her
fascination with Native America.
There are a number of
ways to explain this modernist migration. For
impoverished artists (though Dodge was hardly among
them), Taos was a cheap place to live, and the
landscape was undeniably inspiring. Also, as Sterne's
letter suggests, the artists were attracted to the
Indians—or at least, to their primitivist fantasies
of them. Then too, in 1917 it did not seem so
unreasonable a thing to turn one's back on a Europe
in chaos and to seek out a place still largely
untouched by modernity and the horrors that
apparently went with it. A few short decades after
the end of the Indian wars, New Mexico seemed to
offer a new "art-culture" from which to draw
inspiration, and thus also an alternative "cultural"
homeland to Europe.
Thus, the passion with which
Dodge and others took up the cause of the Indians'
"art-culture" suggests not only a significant change
in perceptions of Native Americans, but a fundamental
transformation in how "art" and "culture" were
understood as well. In this reconception, Indians
were no longer designated the "primitive" antithesis
to the "civilized" Europeans. Indeed, romanticized
as possessors of an ancestral culture much along the
lines of Renaissance Italy or Tudor England, the
Indians' cultural accomplishments could be described
as comparable to those of Europe. Pueblo pottery and
Navajo rugs joined ranks with the products of the
great European painters and sculptors, and the
recently "discovered" African art traditions. This
is but one example of the general rearticulation of
ideas of "culture" that occurred in the early
twentieth century in the United States. Later, among
less elite groups of Americans, "culture" would come
to connote different but equally dramatic changes in
how people viewed their, and others', position in the
world. Though the term was employed in highly
specialized ways among social scientists, it also be
came an important part of the American vernacular.
Indeed, after World War II, "culture" had such
widespread usage that in 1950 two of anthropology's
more prominent practitioners were led to exclaim,
"Why has it rather suddenly become popular in the
United States, to the point that such phrases as
'Eskimo culture' appear even in the comic strips?" My
answer to the anthropologists would be that in these
beginning years of the Cold War, "culture" offered
the perfect vehicle for imagining a coherent set of
customs and values that could be called "American."
Though "Eskimo culture" was in the comic strips,
"American culture" was on their minds.
My "book-in-progress," The Democracy of
Cultures, is
an at tempt to grasp the significance of "culture" in
the context of American modernism. It both charts
and complicates many of the assumptions that have
been made about that very confusing con cept.
"Culture" is often defined as two separate ideas. On
the one hand, it is a term of value or a realm of
human existence associated with refinement or art
("high culture"); on the other, it is a technical,
value-neutral term of description, connoting the
customs, habits, and assumptions of a group of people
("Pueblo culture"). The first definition is usually
associated
with aesthetics, hierarchical evaluation, and the
work of Matthew Arnold; the second, with cultural
relativism, scientific detachment, and the discipline
of anthropology. Just as the former definition is
firmly associated with the Victorian era, the latter
could be said to be quintessentially a product of the
modernist moment, coined and popularized as it
largely was by the practitioners of the new academic
discipline of anthropology. But
as Mabel Dodge's
changing involvement with what might be called
"culture" should show us, these two usages of the
term are far less easily separable than this simple
distinction would suggest. While Dodge may not have
been able to conceive of Native American life without
having something like an anthropological
understanding of "culture," she was nevertheless
interested in "saving" Indian "art-culture" for
reasons that were at base aesthetic. In
fact,
similarly aesthetic interests were also prevalent
among those who were considered to be coiners of the
new, social scientific usage of "culture:" the
anthropologists. But this should hardly come as a
surprise, considering that the most prominent
anthropological theorizers of "culture" were based at
Columbia University, a few short subway stops from
Dodge's former home in Greenwich Village. Indeed,
Columbia anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Robert
Lowie, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Ruth Benedict were
influential in the same intellectual and artistic
circles in which Dodge and her friends traveled, and
several of the anthropologists, including Benedict,
Margaret Mead, and Edward Sapir, had serious artistic
ambitions.
Thus, the "cultural" discourse of the
period was one in which artists invoked relativism
and other aspects of the anthropological conception
of culture, while anthropologists in their turn
fretted about questions of individual "genius,"
aesthetic
standards, and morality. Given these complex
inter-influences, both "culture" and the modernist
moment of which it is a part must be rethought
together.
Thus, in my research I address the meaning
of "culture" in terms of the contradictions its
usages suggested: between the hierarchical and
value-neutral conceptions of the term, between the
aesthetic and the social-scientific, between the
technical-professional and the popular. Usages of the
culture concept in this period suggest still other
tensions, including anxieties about the relationship
between ethnic, racial, and national identities, and
the place of the individual within society. These
contradictions can be best illustrated by seeing the
anthropologists and other intellectuals and artists
of the period as engaged in a similar project of
"cultural" definition. There was a close, but often
slighted, historical relationship between the
founders of American professional
anthropology—including Boas, Mead, Benedict, Parsons,
and Sapir—and influential literary intellectuals
including Randolph Bourne, Constance Rourke, and Van
Wyck Brooks. Not only were these figures often in
communication with one another, but, as "public
intellectuals," they were also engaged in similar
political and cultural debates, over such disparate
issues as American nationalism; U.S. entry into World
War I; racism; birth control, marriage, and women's
rights; homosexuality; free verse; and the meaning,
content, and extent of American "culture" itself.
Thus, Franz Boas's founding work in the field of
anthropology can be discussed fruitfully not only
alongside his more public statements against
scientific racism and against U.S. participation in
World War I, but also together with the work of such
thinkers as W.E.B. Du Bois and Randolph Bourne: all
offer conceptual alternatives to racist and nationalist
discourses of the period, and hence reveal the
political dimensions of the creation of relativist
conceptions of culture. Similarly, literary critic
Van Wyck Brooks's important statement on "Highbrow"
and "Lowbrow" tendencies in American culture can be
interestingly compared to anthropologist Edward
Sapir's essay "Culture—Genuine and Spurious." Both
writers rejected cultural relativism to some degree,
to insist on the social and personal necessity of
thinking in terms of hierarchies of cultural value.
But perhaps even more importantly, both demonstrate
how the idea of "culture" presented new confusions
about how to understand the individual's place within
the social whole: how much of me is "cultural," and
how much is unique to me alone? What hap pens to me
as an individual if the "culture" of which I am a
part is debased, immoral, or stifling? The
answers
to these pressing questions are partially offered in
works such as Waldo Frank's book-length essay Our
America and Ruth Benedict's widely-read
Patterns of
Culture, and in the work of such writers as
Sherwood
Anderson and Jean Toomer. For them, plural "cultures"
were conceived of in spatial terms, as a range of
aesthetic and political possibilities open to the
cultural traveler disappointed with his or her own
milieu. Out there some where, in other words, was the
"culture" that "fit," one's authentic homeland. This
kind of "cultural" imagination can, I think, help us
understand the modernist regionalisms of better-known
literary figures, including Willa Cather and even
William Faulkner. It also goes a long way toward
explaining some of the fascinations of Taos for the
artists who migrated there. It
is my contention
that some thing interesting happened to "culture as a
result of this regionalist usage. Regions of the
United States, notably the South and the Midwest,
became the sites from which to articulate tensions
within the United States between the cultural and
political centers of American life and their
peripheries. Through an account of the politics of
regionalism in this period, and an examination of
Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merell Lynd's influential
community study, Middlletown (which was taken to
offer a kind of baseline "culture" for America), I
argue that the term "culture" came increasingly to
connote a static social entity, often associated
with a stereotypical "Middle America." This idea of
"Middle America," convergent with both an increasing
vernacular acceptance of the word "culture" and the
development of an expanding middle class, came, in
turn, to connote a unique stratum of cultural taste:
the "middle brow." Midwestern regionalist artists,
notably Thomas Hart Benton, used the emergence of
this "culture" of the middle to challenge the power
and opinions of the New York based art establishment,
and to consolidate in the minds of many the
relationship between "middlebrow" taste and
political, aesthetic, and social conservatism.
Meanwhile, East Coast intellectuals of the political
and aesthetic vanguard saw in this development a
potential threat not only to established claims to
cultural authority, but to a project of social and
artistic transformation associated, in part, with
the concept of culture itself. The result, as the
decade closed, was an emerging "highbrow" anxiety
about attempts to represent "culture." Among
American anthropologists, "culture" diminished
somewhat in importance as a discipline-defining
concept, and more popular
discussions of "culture" became largely absorbed into
debates over class and cultural value. In the work
of such writers as Dwight Macdonald, Clement
Greenberg, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, "culture"
would be deployed against the tastes of the masses,
for whom they developed a new vocabulary of de
graded taste: "Masscult," "Midcult," "kulchur, "
"kitsch. " My
research thus treats "culture" as a
critical term that was deployed in a specific
historical period, with indefinite and unpredictable
consequences. Among modernist intellectuals,
"culture" promised a conceptual framework for
resolving certain tensions of American social life in
the period, and for reconceiving society in new and
potentially transformative ways. But I would argue
that the lasting consequence of the modernist
redefinition of culture was to
allow for the idea that American
literary and artistic life existed,
developed, and
thrived independently of its European models.
With wider usage, it also enabled a particular
new kind of group identity, in
which citizens of the United
States imagined that they thought
and behaved and lived in a distinctly "American"
way.
We can now see with historical perspective that both
of these ideas—the
uniqueness of "American" artistic traditions, and the
distinctness of an "American" people—were useful
fictions in their contexts: the isolationism of the
interwar moment and the exceptionalism of the Cold
War. Much of the interesting scholarly work on
American life in recent years has been devoted to
showing not only how complexly heterogeneous is the
citizenry of the United States, but also how almost
any art tradition that we would care to call
distinctly "American" is actually the product of
centuries of circulations of people, ideas, and
materials from all the world's continents. But
even
given these dramatic revisions, "culture" seems to
have adapted and moved on, transmuted by the needs
and issues of our moment—in academic descriptions of
these new global identities and processes, and in the
various volleys of the more public "culture wars." In
the academy, "culture's" remarkable re-emergence as a
critical term, especially in the humanities, of ten
seems easily dismissed as resulting from its
centrality to the consolidation of new disciplinary
formations such as "cultural studies.
However,
much of the vehemence, and a surprising amount of
the substance, of the current debate over "culture"
is a holdover from an earlier moment—as in, for
example, the passion with which many invoke the idea
of an "American culture." It is my hope that, as we
engage in these new sites of "cultural" struggle, we
remember the complexity, seriousness, real
interdisciplinarity, and public spirltedness of a
previous generation s cultural negotiatlons .
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