For much of its 150-year-old history, anthropology has been a discipline of the human sciences that has at least implicitly sought the definition of culture. The way we have traditionally set upon our search has been to gather materials from multiple places and times with the tacit presumption that lining them up, or looking at them in comparative relief, would give us a greater knowledge, and maybe even a definition, of culture in its many permutations. For it was culture – the material, embodied (as well as conceptual and verbal) lens through which life is perceived, experienced, and navigated – that we knew to be at the base of collective human existence. Our assumption was that, if we could collect as many examples of its operations on the ground as possible, we could better understand the whole, that great human phenomenon of culture.

And yet “culture” is a contested term if ever there was one. As our discipline has developed, and deepened, we have learned that culture is curiously resistant to definition, both in the singular – “culture” – and in the plural – “cultures.” Cultural meaning has the extraordinary capacity to mean many things to many people, and even to ourselves as individuals over the course of our lives; it is both necessarily fragmented and that which enables coherence. Poke and prod as we might, it seemed that we could not find a way to reconcile our search for the general in perennially expanding investigations of the particular. Everything humans think or do might be culture, or cultural, and yet the more we tried to pin down the concept of culture, the more it eluded our grasp.

This book emerged out of a set of four lectures that together took up the question of our disciplinary search for the meaning of culture through the lens of method. There are innumerable histories of anthropology, and this text is not intended as another: it is rather a reflection on the genealogies – the lineages – of the methods of anthropology, and an enquiry into the historical relation of our subject to the way we have studied it.