4 - Improvising Culture

Summary

What links together purposive human acts is not the presence of the environment as a continuous adversary, but the network of expectations and retained memories which provides the context for the projecting forward of human agency.

(Thomas 1996a, 37)

In Chapter 3, I examined the way in which societies situate themselves in time using material culture. I showed how the materiality of objects is employed to signify qualitative temporal differences. I suggested that these systems of differences are produced and reproduced by the performance of activities which engender an active process of remembrance. I described this process as something akin to literary citation in which the citation of a work both refers to and revitalises its significance. In this chapter, I examine this concept further. I argue that if we accept citation as a useful device for thinking about the relationship between past and present activities, then the concept forces us to rethink how we conceptualise cultural practice more generally. In Chapter 3, I considered the nature of systems of differences synchronically over a single unitary historical period; in this chapter I discuss how the notion of citation helps us think diachronically about the nature of social change. In Julian Thomas's terms, I aim to examine the network of expectations and retained memories which produce the projection forward of human agency.