Jonathan Friedman

"No matter what the vagaries of the culture concept, the idea that people live in meaningful structured worlds has been common to both European and American anthropologies... If there are no such collective structures, then anthropology can be replaced by psychology or at best social psychology and we are back to Tarde versus Durkheim, but this time to reverse the course of intellectual history. All of this is the result of reducing culture to individually held substance."

"The contemporary left stands for the global, the individual—for liberalism and multiculturalism and even the postnational, i.e., a world which in fact is closer to the ideology of neoliberalism. A major shift here is the shift from class to culture as the heart of struggle. The working class, or what is left of it, is now considered to be reactionary and racist and it is the new bourgeoisie, the “latte left,” that bears the revolutionary struggle. But of course there is no revolutionary struggle; the latte left is the defender of the status quo."