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, underwriting the third inadequate idea