Topic 2. Culture or Civilization

 

Different definitions of culture reflect different theories for understanding, or criteria for valuing, human activity. Edward Burnett Tylor wrote, in 1871, that “culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, beleief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” (E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. Gordon Press, 1976).

Other valiant attempts to define and describe giant cultures have become familiar in the 20th century. O.Spengler, A.Toynbee, P.Sorokin, and A.L.Kroeber have each offered impressive systems involving the conception of a number of exclusive, durable, mortal macrocultures that have come to be called “civilizations”.

Each civilization has a history of its own. We might, therefore, refer to those who have considered the history of one civilization in relation to the history of others as comparative historians.

The term culture is used to describe the way men live in relation to one another. Sometimes the culture may be simple and complete, easy to understand as a whole, as is frequently the case with the island cultures studied by anthropologists.

The term civilization has been used almost synonymously with culture. This is because civilization and culture are different aspects of a single entity. Civilization can be viewed as the external manifestation, and culture as the internal character of a society. Thus, civilization is expressed in physical attributes, such as toolmaking, agriculture, buildings, technology, urban planning, social structure, social institutions, and so forth. Culture, on the other hand, refers to the social standards and norms of behavior, the traditions, values, ethics, morality, and religious beliefs and practices that are held in common by members of the society.

Civilizations are large and complex cultures, usually distinguished from simpler cultures by a greater control of environment, including the practice of agriculture on a large scale and the domestication of animals. They are technically advanced enough to use metals and to employ the wheel for transportation. These economic advantages give them enough of a surplus of food and necessities to free some of their members, at least in part, from subsistence work. This freedom usually leads to the building of cities, and the development of more complex art forms and some kind of writing to convey ideas and to maintain records. For whereas a simpler culture changes so slowly that it is usually studied in static terms, a civilization changes rapidly enough to be considered chronologically: it has a history.

Civilizations are composed of a multitude of integrated systems –regional and provincial systems of government, agricultural and industrial districts-each of which is broken down still further. I am taking this use of the term " system" from Sorokin. Alternatively, using Kroeber's term civilizations can be seen as being composed of “ patterns” – systems of art, philosophy, religion that are again broken down into various schools and movements. The patterns are the arrangements that give the parts a relationship to one another and to the civilization as a whole, whereas systems have their own unity, regardless of whether they happen to form a part of a still larger system.

All the characteristics of a civilization, then, tend to relate to and modify one another. Nations tend to borrow from one another, developments in art and history in one area tend to be modified by those in other areas, and all these interacting and modifying elements tend to give an image to the civilization as a whole. This image, in turn, pervades the civilization and tends to influence and modify the disparate elements. Once these characteristics become established, they tend to persist through this reciprocal reinforcement, even though the civilization is undergoing momentous change.

 

Let us observe some famous conceptions of civilizations and cultures.

One of the first scholars who thought about cultural differentiations was a Russian philosopher Nikolay Danilevsky who made in his work “Russia and Europe” a look at the cultural and political relations of the Slavic world to the Romano-German world. The work pioneered the use of biological and morphological metaphors in the comparison of cultures. Danilevsky compared the cultures and nations to biological species, denying their commonality, and arguing that each nation or civilisation is united by language and culture, which cannot be passed on to any other nation. Thus he characterised Peter the Great’s reforms as doomed to failure, as they involved the attempt to impose alien values on the Slavic world.

N.Danilevsky distinguished four categories of historical-cultural activity: religious, political, sociopolitical, and cultural; these gave rise to ten historical-cultural types: Egyptian, Chinese, Assyro-Babylonian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Muslim, Slavic, and Romano-German. He then applied his teleological theory of evolution, stating that each type went through various predetermined stages of youth, adulthood, and old age, the last being the end of that type. He characterised the Slavic type as being at the youth stage, and developed a socio-political plan for its development, involving unification of the Slavic world, its capital at Constantinople (now Istambul), ruled by an Orthodox Emperor. While other cultures degenerate in their blind struggle for existence, the Slavic world should be viewed as a Messiah among them. In Danilevsky’s view there is no genuine or absolute progress, however, as history is circular.

Aspects of Danilevsky’s book prefigured some of the theories in O.Spengler’s The Decline of the West. They are mentioned in A. Toynbee’s A Study of History. It was the subject of much controversy, however, and polarised its readers. On the one hand it was praised by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, while on the other it was severely criticised by such Occidentalists as N.Kareev, P.Milyukov, and N.Mikhailovsky.

An other Russian philosopher Konstantin Leontiev was the author the most remarkable book which is a volume of essays entitled The East, Russia, and Slavdom (1885-86). Like Danilevsky and Dostoevsky before him, he was ill at ease with the Western consumer society and the cult of material prosperity. Leontyev regarded traditional Russian Byzantism as a blessing and a strong antidote against further liberalisation of the country’s society. His aesthetic and political theories had some similarities to those of F.Nietzsche and O.Spengler. Preceding the latter's theory of the cyclical nature of civilizations and the West’s decline by several decades, Leontiev proposed that all societies undergo a state of flowering and increasing complexity followed by one of " secondary simplification", decay and ultimately death. Leontiev felt that the West had reached the beginning of the latter stage.

A pessimist, Leontiev made several predictions that turned out to come true. He prophesied that in the next, that is twentieth century, there would be a bloody revolution in Russia led by an " anti-Christ" that would be socialist and tyrannical in nature, and whose rulers would wield more power than their tsarist predecessors. He said that " Socialism is the feudalism of the future " He felt that only the harshest reaction could prevent this scenario. Leontiev also predicted that Germany would grow strong enough to make one or two, but no more, wars and that China would one day threaten Russia's power. He also claimed that technology would one day lead to universal destruction.

As for Oswald Spengler, this German schoolmaster began his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) as an effort to comprehend the political events that preceded World War I. Eventually he enlarged his original scope, believing that politics could only be understood in relation to artistic and philosophical developments. His book is primarily a comparison of Western and Greco-Roman civilizations, with side glances at a half-dozen others. He is dogmatically insistent on the independence of civilizations from external influences. He writes with leaping flashes of intuition which may be exciting, inspiring, annoying, or baffling.

The British historian, Arnold Toynbee, began publishing Study of History a few years before the outbreak of World War II. Toynbee draws from a wider knowledge of history than Spengler; documents his material more thoroughly, and has at his command an astonishing amount of information on numerous and disparate subjects. He delineates more than twenty civilizations, though even for him Western and Classical civilizations provide the core of his support. He is less concerned than Spengler with characterizing civilizations, more concerned with the criteria by which they are to be determined.

A Russian-born Pitirim Sorokin tackled similar questions from a sociological viewpoint. He concentrates even more than Spengler and Toynbee on the Classical-Western tradition. His Social and Cultural Dynamics overflows with statistics on all conceivable components of a culture, from types of art and systems of truth to methods of government and practice of war. Sorokin has not only studied them, but has tried to weigh and measure them.

A.L. Kroeber, born four years before Spengler, did not publish his Configurations of Culture Growth (1944) until the latter part of World War II (though it was virtually completed nearly a decade earlier). He suggests areas for further investigation without trying to supply final answers to his own questions. He has consistently attempted to reconcile conflicting views of his fellow writers in the field without interpreting them, as Sorokin tends to do, in his own terms. He approaches civilizations from an anthropological viewpoint, seeing them as more complex, but not magically different, from simpler cultures. He is the most comfortable of the four in dealing with non-Western cultures.

Describing civilization’s existence Spengler uses a term ‘ soul’ that appears at the beginning of a civilization’s existence and pervades and directs it throughout. This view has been modified by Kroeber who sees the ‘ soul’ only as a generalization about the relatedness of the patterns to the whole. Spengler has also been criticized for overdrawing his characterizations and for overstressing their pervasiveness. For him, “pure and limitless space” describes the West, “the sensuously-present individual body” the Greco-Roman, a “wandering way” the Chinese, and so on. We all know they are simplifications and that they may have to be modified for different situations, but if civilizations are going to be described at all, we must try to pick out those characteristics that make them unique.

A number of other 20th-century scholars have made significant contributions to comparative history The British Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie, anticipated Spengler and Toynbee in his bold, scarcely-supported speculations about the nature and development of civilizations, the relations between them, and the nature of progress. Christopher Dawson, British Catholic historian, approaches the subject as a student of comparative religion, avoids constructions of central theories and, like Kroeber, stresses the importance of intermediate cultures. Quincy Wright, drawing heavily on Toynbee for theoretical support, concentrates on the structures of international societies. Shepard Clough focuses on the relationship between the development of civilizations and their economic system. Philip Bagby, an American anthropologist, outlined methods and suggested studies that ought to be undertaken in comparative history, but his early death prevented him from completing any significant study of his own.

Two other comparative historians, writing more recently, have made important contributions. Rushton Coulborn concentrated on the origin and revival of civilizations. He stressed the tendency of civilizations to endure and recover, the importance of style in determining their delineation, and the necessity of remaining receptive to partial comparisons (uniformities) without imposing a rigid, overall structure. Carroll Quigley has written a concentrated, sophisticated explanation of The Evolution of Civilizations (1961).

If civilizations have an internal consistency, if they have discernible, unique characteristics, then they can be distinguished from one another. Not that they do not interact and collide and occasionally destroy one another. But once they have a chance to develop, once they become sufficiently large and complex, they can withstand a considerable amount of buffeting and still retain their identity One civilization rarely receives material from another without changing the nature of that material to fit its own patterns. Anything that can be transmitted without change is concerned with basic, mechanistic functions – and if such things are not transmitted they may be reinvented anyway when the need arises.

A good measure of agreement has already been reached on the methods for delineating civilizations, and on when and where these civilizations existed. Disagreements exist on whether more stress should be placed on the existence of specific patterns such as language, religion, technological development, and forms of art, or on the existence of historical processes and distinctive phases of development. Disagreements also persist on the margins of time and space, on whether smaller, less developed or interrupted cultures should be called civilizations at all, and whether long, irregular periods of history should be studied as one or more civilizations.

Out of this discussion separate civilizations are generally distinguished in the following areas:

 

- the Far East between 2000 BC and the present

- India between 2500 BC and the present

- Egypt between 4000 BC and 300 BC

- the Middle East between 4000 BC and the present

- the Mediterranean between 3000 BC and AD 1500

- Western Europe between AD 700 and the present

- Central America between AD 1 and AD 1600

- Western South America between AD 1 and AD 1600

 

Further, there is a pronounced but less frequent tendency to distinguish an Islamic civilization around the southern Mediterranean between 500 and the present, an Orthodox civilization in eastern Europe at roughly the same period, and a civilization in Japan, since possibly 400 BC, that has been sufficiently distinct from China to merit separate classification.

In discussing the delineation of civilizations, there is a tendency to be apologetic because there are so few examples. Toynbee is sorry because he can find only 30 while the lucky entomologist has all those millions of specimens to work on. He asks us to be patient because in a few hundred thousand years, if all goes well, which (he says) it probably will not, we shall have many more samples. More anthropologically-oriented historians, on the other hand, think we can partly make up for this difficulty by making studies of intermediate and primitive cultures, which will be easier to handle and will throw more light on methods of study in tackling the larger systems.