Against Culture

This is one of my readings for a class I'm taking on Anthropological Theory. I was very struck by Abu-Lughod's excerpt. She argues against the concept of "culture" or "cultures" which tends to essentialize whole groups of diverse populations, presenting them as more coherent, timeless and discrete than they actually are. In her opinion, anthropology then should not be a study of culture, but rather a discipline emphasizing the particular, the situated, and the relational. By doing so, anthropology can better frame the generalized or universal, albeit never be able to truly demonstrate either generalizability or universality. In such cases, the map is not the territory.