Deborah F. Weinstein has written an original and deeply researched investigation of the uses and abuses of the culture concept, which anthropologists developed in the early 20th century as a category apart from nature, unlike 19th century anthropological practice. Culture meant, in the simplest formulation by the Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and his students, the totality of habits of thought and conduct that people acquired as the consequence of belonging to society. If culture had become, in the 1930s and 1940s, a free-floating concept, divorced from nature, biology, and biological processes, nevertheless psychologists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists felt obliged to create a new unified concept of culture and personality, with social role being the connection between the individual and society. It is the great merit of Dr. Weinstein's work to show how this culture concept was imported into family therapy, and how it was recast, stretched, and contorted into various distinct meanings, not all of which had much to do with one another. From the notion of culture and personality the family therapists imported culture into what became the family system and, eventually, the family network as a series of nodes from one point to another, thus undercutting the notion of a unified family or culture. To show, and to a great extent explain, this historical process is a very impressive scholarly accomplishment, deserving of our award.
--by the 2002 Burnham Prize Committee: John I. Brooks III, James Capshew, Hamilton
Cravens, Harro Maas, and Richard von Mayrhauser.