Culture is a thing. The reification of culture – regarding culture as a
thing – leads to a notion that ‘it’ is a thing that can act, almost independently
of human actors. There is no hint of individual agency here. … The
term is used as a shorthand way of referring, as we shall see, to bundles
of complicated cognitive and perceptual processes, and it is a series of
short (cognitive) steps from shorthand to metonymy to reification. But we
should be on guard, particularly since by reifying culture it is easy to overlook
intracultural diversity,