Unit I. What is culture?

The view of culture – and the civilizing process – as a form of control is consistent with the recent turn in cultural studies and cultural policy toward a focus on the ways in which institutions discipline populations.

When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideal. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term ‘culture’ to refer to a universal human capacity. For the German sociologist, Georg Simmel, culture referred to ‘the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history’.

More recently, the centrality of culture as the spawning ground of creativity, which in turn is the major resource in the so-called new economy, has opened up a relatively unprecedented understanding of culture in which all three usages are harnessed to utility.

The meaning of culture varies within and across disciplines, thus making it difficult to narrate a neat linear history. Nevertheless, one can discern a major dichotomy between a universalist notion of development and progress, and a pluralistic or relativistic understanding of diverse and incommensurate cultures that resist change from outside and cannot be ranked according to one set of criteria. In this unit we will discuss the meaning of the term ‘culture’ and its relationship with the terms ‘civilization’ and ‘art’.

 

Тopic 1. Definition of ‘culture’

 

The word culture, from the Latin root colere (to inhabit, to cultivate, or to honor), generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. Different definitions of ‘culture’ reflect different theoretical orientations for understanding, or criteria for valuing, human activity. Anthropologists most commonly use the term ‘culture’ to refer to the universal human capacity to classify, codify, and communicate their experiences symbolically.

According to Raymond Williams, the noun form took, by extension, three inflections that encompass most of its modern uses: intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development; the way of life of a people, group, or humanity in general; and the works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity (music, literature, painting, theater, and film, among many others).

Although Williams considers the last to be the most prevalent usage, the extension of anthropology to urban life and the rise of identity politics in the 1980s (two changes that have left a mark on cultural studies) have given greater force to the communal definition, particularly since this notion of culture serves as a warrant for legitimizing identity-based group claims and for differentiating among groups, societies, and nations.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, universalist formulations understood culture as a disinterested end in itself (Kant), and aesthetic judgment as the foundation for all freedom (Schiller). Anglo-American versions of this universalism later linked it to specific cultural canons: Matthew Arnold referred to culture as “the best which has been thought and said in the world” and posed it as an antidote to “anarchy”; T. S. Eliot legitimated Europe’s claim to be “the highest culture that the world has ever known.” Such assertions, which justified U.S. and European imperialism, are currently disputed in postcolonial studies (Said), but they were already rejected early on by defenders of cultural pluralism and relativism such as Johann Gottfried von Herder, who argued that each particular culture has its own value that cannot be measured according to criteria derived from another culture.

In the post-Enlightenment, when sovereignty is posited in the people, the institutions of civil society deploy “culture” as a means of internalizing control, not in an obviously coercive manner but by constituting citizens as well-tempered, manageable subjects who collaborate in the collective exercise of power (T. Miller, Bennett). The universal address of cultural institutions, ranging from museums to literary canons, tends either to obliterate difference or to stereotype it through racist and imperialist appropriation and scientism, sexist exclusion and mystification, and class-based narratives of progress. Populations that “fail” to meet standards of taste or conduct, or that “reject culture” because it is defined against their own values, are subject to constitutive exclusion within these canons and institutions (Bourdieu).

Challenges to these exclusions generate a politics of representational proportionality such that culture becomes the space of incremental incorporation whereby diverse social groups struggle to establish their intellectual, cultural, and moral influence over each other. Rather than privilege the role of the economic in determining social relations, this process of hegemony, first described by Antonio Gramsci, pays attention to the “multiplicity of fronts” on which struggle must take place. The Gramscian turn in cultural studies is evident in Williams’s incorporation of hegemony into his focus on the “whole way of life”: “Hegemony is in the strongest sense a ‘culture’, but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes.” But hegemony is not synonymous with domination. It also names the realm in which subcultures and subaltern groups wield their politics in the registers of style and culture.

Indeed, in societies like the United States, where needs are often interpreted in relation to identity factors and cultural difference, culture becomes a significant ground for extending a right to groups that have otherwise been excluded on those terms. The very notion of cultural citizenship implies recognition of cultural difference as a basis for making claims. This view has even been incorporated in epistemology to capture the premise that groups with different cultural horizons have different and hence legitimate bases for construing knowledge; they develop different “standpoint epistemologies”.

The problem is that bureaucracies often establish the terms by which cultural difference is recognized and rewarded. In response, some subcultures (and their spokespersons) reject bureaucratic forms of recognition and identification, not permitting their identities and practices to become functional in the process of “governmentality, ” the term Michel Foucault uses to capture “the way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed.” On this view, strategies and policies for inclusion are an exercise of power through which, in the U.S. post-civil rights era, institutional administrators recognize women, “people of color, ” and gays and lesbians as “others” according to a multiculturalist paradigm, a form of recognition that often empowers those administrators to act as “brokers” of otherness.

These contemporary struggles over cultural citizenship and recognition can be traced to earlier battles over the attributes according to which anthropologists and sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s catalogued certain non-European and minority populations as “cultures of poverty.” This diagnostic label, first formulated by Oscar Lewis in 1959, references the presumed characterological traits – passivity, apathy, and impulsivity – that in underdeveloped societies impede social and economic mobility. We see at work here the narrative of progress and civilization that had been the frame within which anthropology emerged more than a hundred years earlier. Most anthropologists’ method had been comparative in a non-relativistic sense, as they assumed that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process from the most primitive to the most advanced.

Culture, which has been variously defined as the structured set or pattern of behaviors, beliefs, traditions, symbols, and practices (Tylor, Boas, Benedict, Mead, Kroeber and Kluckhohn) by means of which humans “communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (Geertz), was the ground on which anthropologists, even into the 1920s, sought to track the origins of all societies as well as their progress toward (European and/or Anglo-American) modernity.

In partial contrast, the relativist or pluralist cultural anthropology (often associated with Franz Boas) that arose during the 1920s began to critique the scientific racism that underwrote many of these accounts, to question the premise that any such accounting could be objective, and to argue that there were neither superior nor inferior cultures. Nevertheless, Boas and his U.S. and Latin American followers (Kroeber, Freyre, Benedict, Mead, Ortiz) believed that culture could be studied objectively, as a science, so long as description and analysis were not hamstrung by the anthropologist’s cultural horizon. Many of the U.S. studies were explicitly designed, in Margaret Mead’s words, to “give Americans a sense of their particular strengths as a people and of the part they may play in the world”.

By the end of the 1950s (coincident with the rise of cultural studies in Britain and American studies in the United States), the Boasian legacy as well as other salient anthropological tendencies such as British structural-functionalism and U.S. evolutionism waned and other trends rose in influence: symbolic anthropology (culture as social communication and action by means of symbols, cultural ecology (culture as a means of adaptation to environment and maintenance of social systems), and structuralism (culture as a universal grammararranged in binary oppositions that rendered intelligible the form of a society.

These largely systemic analyses then gave way in the 1980s to a focus on practice, action, and agency as the main categories of anthropological explanation, and also to a self-reflexivity that put the very enterprise of cultural analysis in question. Self-reflexive or postmodern anthropology criticized the writing practices of ethnographers for obscuring the power relations that subtend the ethnographic encounter, the status of the knowledge that is derived from that encounter, the relationship of ethnography to other genres (Marcus and Fisher; Clifford and Marcus), and even the analytical and political usefulness of the concept of culture itself (Abu-Lughod; Gupta and Ferguson; R. Fox). Related developments in postcolonial studies focused on transnational hybridity in contradistinction to national cultural homogeneity.

 

A common way of understanding culture sees it as consisting of three elements: values, norms, and artifacts. Values comprise ideas about what in life seems important. They guide the rest of the culture. Norms consist of expectations of how people will behave in different situations. Each culture has different methods, or " sanctions, " of enforcing its norms. Sanctions vary with the importance of the norm; norms that a society enforces formally have the status of laws. Artifacts – things, or material culture – derive from the culture's values and norms.

Julian Huxley gives a slightly different categorization of culture, dividing it into three inter-related subgroups – mentifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts – standing for ideological, sociological, and technological subsystems respectively.

Mentifacts are mental manifestations of culture – different ideas, beliefs, and knowledge and the ways in which these things are expressed in speech or other forms of communication. Socialization depends on the belief subsystem, that is, on mentifacts. The way people interact with each other, and the types of relationship they form, depends greatly on the dominant cultural belief systems. However, at the same time, the sociological subsystem governs interactions between people and influences the formation of mentifacts. That is to say, the quality of human interactions influences the formation of new ideas and beliefs that form cultural mentifacts. Material objects and their use make up the technological subsystem of culture, which is also strongly interconnected with other two subsystems.

In 1952, A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckholn compiled a list of more than 200 different definitions of culture in their book, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. They organized these diverse concepts of culture into eight categories:

Topical: A list of topics such as social structure, religion, economic system, and so forth;

Historical: Social heritage, or tradition, passed from generation to generation;

Behavioral: Shared, learned human behavior, a way of life;

Normative: Ideals, values, norms, or standards for life;

Functional: The way people solve problems and adapt to their environment;

Mental: Complex of ideas, or learned habits, that distinguish people from animals;

Structural: Patterned and interrelated ideas, symbols, or behaviors;

Symbolic: Arbitrarily assigned meanings that are shared by a society.

Finally, Kluckhohn suggested that " Culture is to society what memory is to individuals." Thus, culture can be viewed as the collection of information, experiences, ideas, and so forth that were found useful, widely adopted, and considered worth transmitting to future generations.

One of the main questions in measuring cultural development has always been in which norms can that development be measured. There are more than 6, 000 communities in the world, and as many different languages. Such diversity naturally led toward the development of different beliefs, values, practices, and visions that each of those communities possess, and consequently toward different expressions of those values and beliefs – through the development of material, tangible things: Arts, crafts, architecture, means of transportation, and so forth.

The French philosopher Louis Althusser conceptualizes society as a structured whole which consists of relatively autonomous levels –legal, political, cultural whose mode of articulation (or effectivity, as he says) is only determined " in the last instance" by the economy. What matter are the differences between the levels and not the apparent mirror role that each element plays in expressing the identity of the whole. So, for scientific Marxism, there is no " society" but only modes of production which evolve in history and are permanently inherent in the relatively autonomous levels of the structured whole.

In its turn Marxist science rejects the idea of a universal human nature and embraces theoretical anti-humanism. This eliminates the individual as in any sense a conscious actor in producing social relations. Individuals are not prior to social conditions. Each subject is an agent of the system.

Althusserian analysis was absorbed by British cultural studies in the 1970s. Here are three key ideas. 1. The main ideological instruments of society – law, religion, education, family – are just as important as economic conditions. 2. Culture is neither totally dependent on nor totally independent of economic conditions and relationships. 3. Ideology does not construct “false consciousness” as traditional Marxists had always argued.

Thomas Kuhn (1922-95) in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) introduced a very important notion for Cultural studires – paradigm. Kuhn sensed that the traditional history of science was too simple. His study of Aristotle led him to the illuminating insight that each set of theories has its own validity. Out of this came his key idea of paradigm – the unquestionable basis on which “puzzle-solving normal science” is done, until there is a crisis resulting from the inability to progress and an accumulation of anomalies.

Some anthropologists insist upon the plurality of cultures, some also tend to view a given culture in the singular. Some admit the idea of the plurality of historically conditioned cultures into anthropology, some believed that culture itself is an ongoing creative process through which people continually incorporate and transform new and foreign elements. For instance, F.Boas argues that it is through such adaptations that a culture arrives at an integrated spiritual totality. He notices that cultures become manifest as distinctive coherent systems.

The idea that culture refers to a systematically harmonized whole with each therefore comprising a shared and stable system of beliefs, knowledge, values, or sets of practices held sway for a very long time in anthropology. It is a notion strongly embedded in all functionalist, structural-functionalist and structuralist thought.

Thus this notion of the homogeneity of culture flourished and developed through many versions, but in the direction that assumed the fixity, coherence and boundedness of cultures.

J.Fabian takes a position of ‘ontological realism’ assumed with respect to culture which understands tradition as something real, to be found outside the minds of individuals, and objectified in the form of a collection of objects, symbols, techniques, values, beliefs, practices and institutions that the individuals of a culture share. It is a position that has much at stake, for in portraying cultures as having objective reality over and beyond individual agency, the foundation is set for what is thought to be the development of a true science of anthropology.

In the 1960s there was a move away from the earlier emphasis upon culture as customary or patterned behaviour, to a stress upon culture as idea systems, or structures of symbolic meaning. Each culture was understood in this later view to consist of a shared system of mental representations.

As David Schneider saw it, culture consists ‘of elements which are defined and differentiated in a particular society as representing reality – the total reality of life within which human beings live and die’ (‘Notes toward a Theory of Culture’, in K.Basso and H.Selby (eds) Meaning in Anthropology, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.1976. p.206). In this view culture is not just shared, it is intersubjectively shared.

It is similar to a Parsonian / Weberian systemic, ‘symbol- and meaning-centred’ concept of culture became the centre-piece of a ‘unified theory of action’ designed to provide a mighty and authoritative theoretical linkage between all the social sciences.

Culture, as a conceptual structure made up of representations of reality, was understood to orient, direct, organize action in systems by providing each with its own logic. Culture gave purpose to the social system, and ensured its equilibrium.

Behaviour out of sync with the system’s cultural valuations was said to be abnormal, deviant, dysfunctional, with the implication being that it was aculturally, or anticulturally, driven. It took some time for this powerful law-and-order concept of culture to be seriously questioned.

However, over the past couple of decades anthropology has increasingly been involved in a crisis over its representational theories of meaning, and at the same time expressing deep regret over its former misdirected scientific hopes – those as envisioned by our more sociologically oriented masters, who used the natural sciences as the yardstick for judging our own success. What is particularly being called into account is the understanding of cultural (collective) representations as a template for social action, with its related unfortunate effect – all those anthropological portrayals of cultural dopes who act unconsciously in accordance to underlying structures of shared symbolic meaning.

The world of meaning, as Roy Wagner insists, cannot articulate with a natural science format, which must by the very nature of its task (of objectification) ignore, mystify, disdain, doubt personal invention and concrete imagination. Wagner, one of the most persuasive in his critique of the idea of shared, stable systems of collective representations, suggests that cultural meanings are not constituted of the signs of conventional reference, but instead “live a constant flux of continual re-creation”. He goes on to say that “the core of culture is…a coherent flow of images and analogies, that cannot be communicated directly from mind to mind, but only elicited, adumbrated, depicted” (Wagner R. Symbols that Stand for Themselves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.1986. p.129).

Any fieldworker who has worked carefully with the telling and learning of myths, or the performance of rituals, should recognize the wisdom of Wagner’s insight into the poetics, creativity, individuality, inconsistencies, contradictions of such cultural processes. As T.Ingold says (‘Introduction to Culture’, in T.Ingold (ed.) Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life, London and New York: Routledge. 1994. p.330, his italics), ‘what we do not find are neatly bounded and mutually exclusive bodies of thought and custom, perfectly shared by all who subscribe to them, and in which their lives and works are fully encapsulated’. What we do find can be much more challenging, and, as one antidote to the treatment of culture through the lens of representational theories of meaning and other grand theory, many anthropologists today are focusing upon the dialogics and poetics of everyday behaviour. In so doing the primary concern is with living, experiencing, thinking, affectively engaged human beings who follow (in varying degrees and a myriad of manners) particular lifeways. It is antagonistic toward all those attempts to create ‘objective’ abstract structures that have the effect of dismissing much of what the rest of the world has to say.

From another side, C. Geertz once advocated viewing culture as “ a set of control mechanisms ” – plans, recipes, programs, instructions –which reduce the individual potential for living thousands of lives to the narrowness and specificity of his or her actual accomplishments in one. By virtue of this notion of culture, anthropologists could hope both to “seek complexity, and order it”. In this formulation he continued a long methodological tradition in anthropology which may be characterized by the term ‘holism’.

Whether arguing in terms of ‘culture’, as here, or ‘society’, ‘social structure’, ‘community’, ‘class’, or some other collective notion, the assumption persisted that both elucidation and explanation of sociocultural phenomena – what precisely they were, what they meant, where they came from, what their implications were – could be derived only from an abstract and holistic contextualization.

Socio-cultural phenomena, in the common shorthand, were to be known as “greater than the sum of their constituent parts”: individual actors and acts, individual lives, gave onto something other, something transcendent – onto the phenomena of socio-cultural wholes. Here were total systems, social or cultural, structural or symbolic, linguistic or behavioural, which might be seen to emerge out of everyday individual interactions but which were in fact ontologically prior to both actors and their exchanges, and overdetermining of them. To explain the individual and actual, in short, was to contextualize it within the general, the collective, the impersonal.

 

In conclusion we can say that in modern Cultural studies a notion ‘culture’ can be defined as the social production and reproduction of sense, meaning and consciousness. It is also the sphere of meaning, which unifies the spheres of production (economics) and social relations (politics). If you are planning to use the term culture as an analytical concept, or if you encounter its use, it is unlikely that you will ever be able to fix on just one definition that will do for all such occasions.

However, it will often be possible to use or read the word clearly and uncontroversially: Welsh culture, youth culture, a cultured person, Victorian culture, working-class culture, intellectual culture; or even a cultured pearl, bacterial culture, agriculture, cultivation of the soil. The trouble arises when you notice that even in these examples the term culture seems to mean half-a-dozen different things. What on earth do all these things share that can be encompassed by the single

term? The answer, oddly enough, is nothing.

The term culture is multi-discursive; it can be mobilized in a number of different discourses. This means you cannot import a fixed definition into any and every context and expect it to make sense. What you have to do is identify the discursive context itself. It may be the discourse of nationalism, fashion, anthropology, literary criticism, viti-culture, Marxism, feminism, cultural studies, or even common sense. In each case, culture’s meaningwill be determined relationally, or negatively, by its differentiation from others in that discourse, and not positively, by reference to any intrinsic or self-evident properties that are eternally fixed as being quintessentially cultural. Further, the concept of culture cannot be ‘verified’ by referring its meaning to phenomena or actions or objects out there beyond discourse. What the term refers to (its referent as opposed to its signified) is determined by the term itself in its discursive context, and not the other way around. Given this, it will come as no surprise to learn that its established senses and uses result from the history of its usage within various discourses. It stems, originally, from a purely agricultural root; culture as cultivation of the soil, of plants, culture as tillage. By extension, it encompasses the culture of creatures from oysters to bacteria. Cultivation such as this implies not just growth but also deliberate tending of ‘natural’ stock to transform it into a desired ‘cultivar’ – a strain with selected, refined or improved characteristics.