Anthropologists have always had their discrepancies with the word culture and its background significance. There have been numerous definitions that have filtered through the field, yet not one that everyone can accept or agree with. Franz Boas, an anthropologist in the early 20th Century, and his students, had a difficult time figuring out the objective of what culture is. Culture is about learning and shared ideas about behaviour. Although Boas and his students had a slightly different idea in mind. They ultimately reached a conclusion, a definition of culture in their view that is a contradiction in terms. Boas sates that, culture was expressed through the medium of language but was not reducible to it; more importantly, it was not race. Culture became everything race was not, and race was seen to be what culture was not; given, unchangeable biology, (Visweswaran, p. 72).Not only focusing on culture, but anthropology has a substantial connection as well. Anthropology is the field in which the study of cultural and biological variations among human groups is studied. The difficulty that some people have with characterizing culture is that they associate it with race, whereas that is not the case. The two are remarkably distinct. Race is something biological, a genetic trait that is innate, while culture is something that is educated and experienced.Kamala Visweswaran and Lila Abu-Lughod are two well distinguished anthropologists that are currently teaching at Universities in the United States. In their own articles, they speak about culture through an anthropologists view and detail their own opinions within. They may have some different opinions but each has their own strong arguments that prove their points. Lila Abu-Lughods article Writing Against Culture, was written in 1991, and was published inside the book, Recapturing Anthropology. Within the article, she discusses culture and many problems with it. The title ...
