Abstract

Today the ways to use the notion of culture is a very problematic one, indeed it is very difficult to consider culture as a scientific category. Themes as cultural specificity are part of the resources used by political leaders to claim identity, by global marketing and political strategies, even by discourses aimed to legitimate post modern wars. It is a real risk, from this standpoint, that "culture" becomes one of the terms useful to mask western usual intention to make normal, to dominate or to destry alterity. Within anthropological debate, it is nowadays a main theme and a structural feature of the discipline the question concerning "culture", and the relating proposal to define a paradigm for studying culture based on continuity and not discontinuity, on the multiple dimensions of culture and not on cultural essences. Anthropology, for its reflexivity, for its critical vocation, for its diffidence toward every identity and authenticity claims, is perhaps the main theoretical and empirical perspective to grasp contemporary cultural dynamics. So, to analyse culture mean to underline "processes" and not "cultures", and to explain mediation between tradition and modernity, old meanings and new meanings, local meanings and global meanings.