Culture and Individual Responsibility: Touchstones of the Culture Defense

Disputes over cultural minority groups' rights, anthropologists recognize, belong on the discipline's watch. Curiously, little corresponding interest is expressed in socially problematic relationships between cultural identities and individual responsibilities, despite fierce, ongoing debates waged publicly in the United States and elsewhere over the responsibilities citizens share. This essay builds a foundation for the cultural analysis of individual-responsibility assessment with case studies taken from the "culture defense" literature. A culture defendant blames her culture for an offense she commits in a bid for leniency from the court. Establishing proof of cultural dictation (expressed by the slogan "My culture made me do it"), it happens, is a daunting task, transporting judicial inquiry into barely charted territory. Hence, the culture defense raises challenges for any broader investigation of culture and responsibility: How to understand the mechanisms of cultural dictation. By isolating those mechanisms, this analysis pursues other, related objectives. It combats stubborn misconceptions about the scope of the culture defense, in the process widening the field's boundaries, and toward that end anticipates roles for anthropologists as expert witnesses and consultants in the trials of culture defendants. Since mechanisms of motivation and reasoning underpin culturally dictated action, contributions expected from cognitive anthropology to assessments of individual responsibility in the law are also addressed. In that regard the analysis performs another function. It plots common ground between fields seen to go their separate ways ordinarily, namely the anthropology of law and psychological anthropology.