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Human cultural studies reached their zenith in their academic state of development in the US and abroad especially up until the 1970's, and then were eclipsed by the rise of neo-conservative political agenda's that had the concept of cultural correctness as a cornerstone of their platform of coercive conformity. By the early 1980's cultural anthropology came under direct attack and competition for research funding and hence received legitimacy largely by biologically minded anthropologists who sought to put nature over nurture and ultimate tried to link the explanation for human behavior and social organization and articulation to various forms of genetic determinism. This kind of argument gained momentum through the 1980's and into the 1990's. At the same time, there arose a form of anti-anthropological critique from the purported academic left--the humanities, which tended to undercut the scientific legitimacy of the discipline by attacking its central concepts and methods as theoretically untenable. Of course both sets of attacks had political and other structural motivations that reached beyond the problems of sound theory and method in the discipline.
It makes supreme sense that if we are to scientifically comprehend human behavior, we should seek it comparatively by transcending cultural boundaries, even and especially our own. To fail to come to terms with the relativity of cultural pattern is to risk the invisible but paradigmatically closed bias this pattern imposes on our view of the world. The scientific concept of culture is hardly found today used in any serious description of human behavior or social pattern. This is not to be misconstrued as the post-structural scientificity of the concept of culture, especially from a culture history paradigm, but rather as the failure to scientifically apply the concept of culture to an understanding of human pattern.
I am myself a cultural anthropologist, largely trained in the tradition of American Boasian cultural anthropology. It is expected therefore that I should place the principle of culture foremost in my investigations and attempts at constructively understanding human realities. Cultural studies are no less relevant today in a modernized world than they were a century or even a few decades ago when a stronger case for the survival of traditional non-western cultures could be made. Cultural anthropology today is something more than salvage anthropology nor is it the anthropology of acculturation. Contemporary challenges of anthropology involve the emergence of complex social structures and systems, often global in scope, and encompassing potentially a broad range of variable cultural patterns.
It is not so easy today to bound or define a "problem" for anthropology in terms of a distinctive ethnocultural grouping of people, hypothetically isolated in space and time from other similar or different groupings.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
