Tupelo, Miss. just after the American Civil War, boasted a shy gentleman whom we shall call Yancy. Yancy had never made much of himself. He had fought on the side of the Confederacy during the war, but no one had noticed, he had children who sometimes forgot his name, and a wife who over the years had sort of misplaced him.

There was one thing outstanding about the man: his beard. It was a long flowing affair that put one in mind of waterfalls and Old Testament prophets. It had in fact come to be regarded by the community as a kind of landmark.

Well, Yancy liked to smoke long, sinister Cuban cigars, and one sad day the inevitable happened, a hot ash fell on the beard. Yancy quickly put out the blaze, and was not injured, but the beard would never be the same.

The town was saddened , and, typical of bereavement, no one for a while knew what to say. A week after the event a friend visited Yancy, and having exhausted the weather and politics found himself making one of those idiotic remarks such occasion seems to inspire: that the accident was a great misfortune, but fortunately the old gentleman had been able to act as rapidly as he had, so preventing any greater damage. To which Yancy replied "Yessir, if I hadn't been right there, that beard would have lit up just like a haystack."

The observation forces itself upon us that just as it is a ludicrous mistake to say that we are "right there" for our beards (such of us who have them), so we commit some sort of howler when we profess to be "connected" with our cultures or claim that these are "connected" or "disconnected" with one another.

A beard requires a face and a person even to be a beard, so there is no question of such a person being "right there" or even of him being connected to it; for if there is a beard at all, it is as such inseparable from such a person.(Shaving does not separate beards from faces, but converts beards to sweepings). "Beard" is really only a noun of convenience, a kind of Irish Passport. It should strictly speaking be an adjective, and is reduced to a noun, not only for convenience but to accommodate our addiction to the easily named. So, when we talk of beards, we designate some bearded creature in such a way as to direct attention away from the creature toward one of his characteristics.

"Culture", however, has to do, not with a property of this creature. but the manner in which he acts, or, better, a set of similarities between the way a number of people, perhaps defined as a group by this very resemblance, behave. So, if "beard" is a shamefaced adjective, "culture" is (roughly) a closet adverb. Yancy himself is rightly indicated by a noun. We describe him speaking by use of the appropriate verb. His Southern accent, as it is the way he speaks, is then adverbial. If anything qualifies as an item of culture, I suppose it would be an American Southern accent, and who would ever talk of someone being "connected to his accent? .

None of this would matter much were it not for the unfortunate consequences of treating culture and like phenomena as if they were monstrous but intangible THINGS, heavy yet elusive lumps of unidentifiable stuff. .

Consider the following passage from a book about the Zimbabwe:

"Zimbabweans are experiencing pressures to assert and at times to invent cultural authenticity through ethnic identification, traditional religion, racial politics, and artistic themes. Ironically , this is an aspect of modernity's engulfment of difference by submerging it in a discourse of integration , unity, and commonality. Yet positions in between and marginal to old and new also struggle for space in Zimbabwe's inherited matrix of identities, as does a state that is itself multicentered and cross pressured." (Christine Sylvester, ZIMBABWE, THE TERRAIN OF CONTRADICTORY DEVELOPMENT (San Francisco: Westview Press) 1991, p.161

Notice the surpassing ugliness of this babble, the result in part of the motley array of vague, sinister substantives: "cultural authenticity", "moder nity", "engulfment", "matrix of identities", which if they mean anything must refer to the activities of individuals, or the manner in which such activities are undertaken. The noun form obscures and thus magnifies whatever meager thought lurks behind the verbiage, but more important, it appears to reduce such styles of activity to counters which it is the author's privilege to move about as she wishes untroubled by any nonsense about individual choice and initiative. Already the authoritarian pull of taking culture as a THING is evident.

This tendency to speak and write about dubious substances when we ought to be focused upon the activities of concrete individuals is not confined to discussions of culture. Margaret Thatcher once correctly remarked that there was no such thing as society only individuals going about their business (or perhaps meddling in someone else's). We might say as much of the State or the Nation.

Notice, indeed, how these concepts once congealed may be manipulated in support of some still further pseudo thing of such immoral tendency as to be at this happy moment even unfashionable:

"In summing up we can state the following: All these views {about the state} have their deepest root, not in the knowledge that the forces which create culture and values are based essentially on racial elements and that the state must, therefore, in the light of reason, regard the highest task as the preservation and intensification of the race, this fundamental condition of all human cultural development." (Adolf Hitler, MEIN KAMPF. (Houghton Mifflin co.,1971) p. 391

Once we have culture as an impersonal entity, we may equally invoke impersonal "forces" {that is "racial elements"} "which create culture and values", thus we have a delusive and pernicious clockwork, an illusory racial science in the name of which people may be slaughtered.

This sort of thing I suggest is harder to bring off if we think of culture and for that matter, race, state, society, etc. not as so many chess pieces to be moved about, but as shifting, ever-changing and ultimately ambiguous styles of activity, and anything but impersonal.

Just as Yancy unwittingly alienated himself from his beard by ludicrously putting himself "right there" for it, so we create distance and unnecessary mystery by "connecting" ourselves to our culture, and "connecting" cultures to one another. This is a mistaken idiom reflecting a viciously over simplified worldview. It distracts us from seeing culture as centered in the activities of individuals, and too easily degrades it into a barrier and a narcotic. I do not suggest that this or any mere grammatical reform will jabber in utopia. However, it is just conceivable that one day outrages such as "racial science" may become literally as well as morally unspeakable.