This dissertation is an examination of the "concept of culture" as it relates to conceptions of selfhood in the twentieth century United States. It traces these themes in the thought of a group of professionalizing anthropologists in the United States between the 1910s and 1930s. Known as the "Boasians," this group consisted of the German-Jewish immigrant anthropologist Franz Boas, his students Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, and the sociologist/anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. The dissertation provides a new view of the reasons why culture emerged in these thinkers thought, demonstrating that culture served as a medium to explore the meaning of selfhood in the context of the bureaucratic organization of modern life. In response to the powerful socializing and fragmenting forces that bureaucracies generated, the Boasians defined culture as an inquiry into the conflict between the individual and culture, and placed the problem of individual autonomy in the face of culture's powerfully molding forces at the center of their disciplinary discussion.

The dissertation proceeds in two stages. The first two chapters describe how the concept of culture emerged in the anthropologists' discussion in the 1910s, first in response to the relation to the shift to a modern organizational society and then in response to the militarization of US society during World War I. The third and fourth chapters explore the way Boas' students used their theories of culture to define alternate conceptions of modernist selfhood. Sapir and Kroeber drew upon a "spatial" modernist consciousness to describe selves who relied on a form of "positional agency" in which the self assumed different stances in relation to culture's dominant power. Building on this model and anticipating contemporary theories of "performative" agency, the female anthropologists Parsons, Mead, and Benedict conceived of an "en-gendered self," whose identity and political capacities were constructed by culture through social categories such as gender. The Boasians' examination of culture ultimately revealed a new dimension of "personal" politics, where the capacities of the modern self were formed in the give and take between culture and the individual.