Reflections on the Nature of Cultural Distributions and the Units of Culture Problem

Abstract

Does culture have clearly identifiable, distributionally stable parts sufficient to justify the particulate mode of understanding? Is culture composed of elemental units, or is it merely convenient to think this way? And, if culture does not consist of discrete parts, then what? This article suggests that the quest for natural “units of culture” is pretty much a doomed undertaking. There will be no periodic chart for culture grounded in stable, essential properties whether at the level of culture traits and complexes or at the cognitive level of ideas and schemas. On the other hand, various methods of data elicitation can produce replicable and superficially discrete results, which gives some hope for the possibility of a methodological particulatism.