The conceptual morass into which the Tylorean kind of pot-au-feu theorizing about culture can lead is evident in what is still one of the better general introductions to anthropology, Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man. In some twenty-seven pages of his chapter on the concept, Kluckhohn managed to define culture in turn as: (1) “the total way of life of a people”; (2) “the social legacy the individual acquires from his group”; (3) “a way of thinking, feeling, and believing”; (4) “an abstraction from behavior”; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a “storehouse of pooled learning”; (7) “a set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems”; (8) “learned behavior”; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) “a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men”; (11) “a precipi- tate of history”; and turning, perhaps in despera- tion, to similes, as a map, as a sieve, and as a matrix. In the face of this sort of theoretical diffu- sion, even a somewhat constricted and not entirely standard concept of culture, which is at
least internally coherent and, more important, which has a definable argument to make is (as, to be fair, Kluckhohn himself keenly realized) an improvement. Eclecticism is self-defeating not because there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but because there are so many: it is necessary to choose.
The concept of culture I espouse [ . . . ] is essen- tially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of sig- nificance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expres- sions on their surface enigmatical. But this pro- nouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication.