The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism

The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism. Michael A. Elliott. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Examining American writing at the turn into the twentieth century, Michael Elliott provides a fascinating study of the intersection between literary realism and anthropology's ethnography. These two genres attempted to caprure group-based difference, an effort he dubs "culturalist" writing (xiii). The parallels between realism and ethnography become clear, as both genres depended upon dedicated observation and recording, and Elliott terms this convergence "cultural realism" (xviii). Focusing on writing by and about ethnic and racial minorities, he explores culturalist texts by African American, Native American, and European American writers, including Franz Boas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, James Mooney, Francis La Flesche, Zitkala-Sa, Charles Eastman, and Zora Neale Hurston. Elliott begins by reviewing how anthropologist Franz Boas helped to establish the "culture concept." A "cultural particularist" (24), Boas differentiated race from culture and argued against a hierarchy of cultures,...