1. “American Studies as a Discipline,” College English, No. 18 (01 1957), p. 179.Google Scholar

2. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), p. xi.Google Scholar

3. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 4.Google Scholar

4. There are exceptions to this judgment. R. W. B. Lewis's prologue to The American Adam—“The Myth and the Dialogue”—is an extraordinarily penetrating foray into explicit culture theory, and Marvin Meyers also wrote reflexively on what he called a cultural “persuasion” in The Jacksonian Persuasion. Here we can fault not Lewis or Meyers but, rather, the poor state of scholarly criticism in American Culture Studies; for the potentially valuable contributions of Lewis and Meyers to culture theory have rarely been discussed or built on in subsequent scholarly forums. In the case of Lewis especially, that is too bad. For his dialogue theory of culture, replete with its multiple “voices” and “parties,” might have helped us cope with our recent experiences of pluralism in America, and his sense that a culture should be understood not by what it is but what it argues about could have cut through much conceptual confusion in the recent debate over “modernization” among American cultural historians.

5. Dorson, Richard, The Birth of American Studies (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Lynn, Kenneth, “F. O. Matthiessen,” American Scholar, Winter 1976, pp. 85–93Google Scholar; Murphey, Murray, “American Civilization in Retrospect,” American Quarterly, 31, No. 3 (Bibliography Issue, 1979), pp. 402–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lydenberg, John, ed., Political Activism and the Academic Conscience: The Harvard Experience, 1936–41 (Geneva, N.Y.: Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1977).Google Scholar

6. Kelly, for example, has drawn on Berger and Luckmann in his book on nineteenth-century children's socialization literature; Mechling is employing Bateson's ideas in his forthcoming ethnographic-historical study of the Boy Scouts of America; and Lystra is using those of Geertz in her ongoing cultural study of nineteenth-century American love correspondence.

Several others in and around American Studies are also doing (or have done) application studies using these exemplars. For Berger and Luckmann these include Lonna Malmsheimer's analysis of New England funeral sermons, Kay Mussell's study of sex roles in nineteenth-century women's novels, John Wilson's inquiry into historical functions of “public religion” in American culture, Mechling's work on regionalism and Sacramento Valley studies, and Mechling and Merline Williams's use of the university classroom as a laboratory for witnessing the “social construction of reality.” For Bateson they include the forthcoming ethnography by Malmsheimer et al. of regional responses to the Three Mile Island situation, as well as Malmsheimer's photographic-historical portrait of the Carlisle Indian School. For Geertz they include Sandra Sizer's analysis of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century gospel hymns, John Wilson's previously mentioned study of “public religion” in America, and several of the historical essays in Higham, John and Conklin, Paul's anthology New Directions in American Intellectual History.Google Scholar

7. Looking at the cultural tools advanced by Berger and Luckmann, Bateson, and Geertz, it is interesting to note points of convergence among the three, also areas where perhaps they need to be supplemented by other tools for inquiry. All three look for pattern and form in human experience; they would concur with Mechling that “the subject matter of American Studies is not objects and events but relationships” (italics in original). All focus not on things or actions in human experience but on transactions; they employ dialectical models that witness culture in dialogue with what is around it—social structure, biology, nature. All focus not on particular cultures but on the human species as culture-bearing animals. All affirm that culture is not merely subjective, “in the mind,” but takes external, objective form in public arenas and social institutions. (This point is clearest in Geertz and in Berger and Luckmann.) And all do not simply analyze human culture but are reflexive about it; they aim to make their culture theories explicit.

Having acknowledged what they do say, it is important to note what they leave out, too. There are, it must be said, gaps in their modes of cultural analysis; if they illuminate some areas of human experience, they only dimly light or leave in the dark other areas. Berger and Luckmann, Bateson, and Geertz are obviously more concerned with external social-structural matters than were previous symbol-myth-image Americanists. Still, many areas of power and of political functioning, the influence of class, race, and gender, and the impact not only of culture but of subculture and of cultural plurality are not brightly illuminated by them. Similarly, they tell us little of regional variations—natural or cultural—in the way people behave, or of how number and proportion can be used as tools to understand social populations. And, finally, they are best when attempting synchronic connections among things cultural but, when compared to prior Americanists, are relatively weak on historical dimensions of human experience.

As Lystra remarks in her critique of Geertz, however, to note shortcomings is not to lament that these scholars failed to do everything. It is only to caution that their perspectives must on occasion be supplemented by those of other exemplars in the field.

8. Hofstadter, Richard, “History and the. Social Sciences,” in Stern, Fritz, ed., The Varieties of History (New York: New American Library, 1956), p. 364.Google Scholar

9. Fortunately several in the 1940s–50s generation did not follow Pearce's priorities either and instead labored heroically to create local programs in the field and build the national movement. Theirs is an untold story in the institutional history of American Studies. The classic “Walker Report” of 1958 outlines many of these institutional undertakings; when Pershing Vartanian's booklength history of the movement is published, the wider cultural meanings of these activities should get a hearing.

10. Hostadter, , “History and the Social Sciences,” pp. 359–70.Google Scholar