In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susannc Laager remarks that certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. "Die sudden vogue of such a grande idee, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she says, "to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict …ver más…

In the face of this sort of theoretical diffusion, even a somewhat constricted and not entirely standard concept of cul¬ture, which is at least internally coherent and, more important, which has a definable argument to make is (as, to be fair, Kiuckhohn himself keenly realized) an improvement. Eclecticism is self-defeating not be¬cause there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but be¬cause there are so many: it is necessary to choose.
The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance, he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis ol^ it to be therefore not an.experimental science in search of law but an in¬terpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. But this pro¬nouncement, a doctrine in a clause, demands itself some explication.
Operationalism as a methodological dogma never made much sense so far as the social sciences are concerned, and except for a few rather too well-swept corners—Skinnerian behaviorism, intelligence testing, and so on—it is largely dead now. But it had, for all that, an important point to make, which, however we may feel about trying to define cha¬risma or alienation in terms of operations, retains a certain force: if you want to understand