For more than a hundred years anthropology has been spreading sweetness and light. And now that the results are in—now that even the strangest customs from the remotest places have been recognized as truly human and entirely natural—it is plain that the popular verdict has been an enthusiastic assent. Its ethical understandings are widely regarded as benign. Its politics are as congenial to the liberal imagination as they are to the radical mind. Its broader implications have been sympathetically received by a wide range of people who have gladly melded its doctrines with their own. And if there is any one thing which explains this congeniality and appeal it is the persuasive conception of ‘culture’ which anthropology has bestowed upon the world.–Roger Sandall



Immanuel Wallerstein’s view of “culture” is especially attuned to its politicization, as an ideological construct, and as a weapon in contemporary civilizational debates in the capitalist world-system–culture as the ideological battlefield of the modern world system, as he says. It is a view of culture that I had adopted from before I entered anthropology for the first time, as a graduate student. One of Wallerstein’s favourite quotes is this:

“Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”

“Wenn ich ‘Kultur’ höre, nehme ich meine Pistole.”

–which is often attributed to Hermann Wilhelm Göring (photo), commander of the Luftwaffe in Nazi Germany. We are told by others that it was in fact a common Nazi cliché, that was varied and used by several prominent Nazi officials, and that the line originally came from the 1933 play, Schlageter, where the line was:

“Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning!”

The phrase has become popular beyond Nazi usage. On the Web we can read the following renditions, and if you trust Google, the phrase has become most popular throughout the last thirty years, maybe not more than in Nazi Germany, but certainly for longer. In each case, a view of culture is expressed, sometimes mocking the concept, other times trivializing it, and often pointing to the same ways it has become instrumentalized in contemporary conflict. I am not sure an anthropological conception–or which one–has won out here. If Sandall thinks anthropology’s conception of culture has been persuasive, it often sounds like anthropology merely provided a word, and others fill in its meanings. Here are some of the more interesting examples that I found playing on the Johst/Göring line, to be found widely, as copied here primarily from books, newspaper articles, and lastly websites.

What do I do when I hear the word “culture”? I reach for my copy of the Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual.



When I hear the word “culture”…

…I reach for my gum (Babe Ruth?)

…I know it must be an anthropologist speaking (Hillary Lapsley)

…I reach for my computer (Billy the Hacker)

…I reach for my source code (David Darts)

…I reach for my mirror (Eric Herring)

…I reach for my knife (Sidney Hook)

…I reach for my Bible (The Irish Times)

…I reach for my Rangers scarf (on a forum for discussion of politics in Northern Ireland)

…I reach for my dictionary (David Barton & Martyn Bond)

…I [also] reach for my dictionary (Paul Bowman)

…I reach for my statistics (The Economist)

…I reach for my wallet (Ayn Rand)

…I reach for my purse (unnamed Treasury official in Ottawa)

…I take out my checkbook (Barbara Kruger)

…I reach for a set of job descriptions? A training plan? An organization chart? (John O’Connell, Jon Pyke, Roger Whitehead)

…I reach for the doorknob (Newsweek)



…I reach for the remote control to flip channels before the show gets too boring [preceded by “When I hear ‘postmodern culture’] (Yahya R. Kamalipour)

…I don’t reach for my gun. Instead I reach for Marx or for Mills and say that there are elite and mass definitions of social situations (Gary A. Kreps)

…I reach for my textbook on institutional theory (Crooked Timber)

…I reach for my mouth (Andrew Duncan)

…I reach for my identity (John Tusa)

…I switch on the radio (Virginia Madsen)

…I reach for my sex (Scott Fraser)

…I reach for the strudel (Gary North)

…I sit down at the table (mi accomodo a la tavola) (Franco Castelli)

…a bird EmErgEs from his [Satan’s] mouth (Padcha Tuntha-obas)

…I reach for my NOM (another stupid lolcat, directed at another stupid lolcat)