 The alternative accounts of culture that are considered below are all, at least in part, intended to respond to the essentialist challenge; their objective is, in other words, to generate a plausible account of what culture is, and correspondingly what it means to be a member of a particular cultural group, that can be deployed to make sense of legal and political controversies, and ideally adjudicate among them, without succumbing to the essentialist challenge. A caveat: the views of culture treated below should be understood as “ideal types”, characterized so as to understand its key features, how it is differentiated from other views, and why it does not fall victim (in its own estimation) to the essentialist challenge.