| Charles W. Nuckolls has for a decade given me hope that a genuine one-field anthropology may have a future as well as a virtually banished past. Whatever else this book contributes to, it contributes to the refutation of narrow, parochial, postmodernist thought. It is anthropology at its best. |
| I have long thought that Charles Nuckolls is our (anthropology's) next Kroeber. This latest book, Culture: A Problem That Cannot Be Solved, further confirms my conviction. But I must append (and amend myself): with this book Nuckolls shows himself to be a formidable, while engagingly readable, intellectual alchemist who is both heir to and amalgam of Weber, Kroeber, Durkheim, Freud, Sapir, Kluckhohn, and Spiro (among others), an alchemist who clearly has his own voice in the synthesis. Careful as Professor Nuckolls is with the details, say, of Melford Spiro's classic Micronesian Ifaluk studies, or with his own data from American psychiatry and Oklahoma culture, he does not shrink from bringing them to bear on anthropology as the science and art of understanding what it means to be human. His dialectic use of case study and comparative method are exemplary basic anthropology. Likewise, he shows unsurpassed linguistic and literary analytic prowess in his dissection of American psychiatric texts. His exegesis is the equal of any Geertz or fellow traveler in "local knowledge." |
| Much of the book focuses on psychiatry, but it is not primarily about an identity crisis-ridden medical specialty many of whose members are seeking a return to their (internal medicine) roots. Rather, psychiatry as profession, clinical ideology, and ethnomedical practice are the point of departure for, among other things, a meditation on American culture as a stream, a major tributary of which is European Protestantism; a synthesis of Freudian, Durkheimian, and Weberian analysis; the gendering of value and of pathology (female = histrionic, male = antisocial); the perpetuation of culture members' shared ambivalences through recurrent character |
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