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Culture is—
• Learned, as each person must learn how to
“be” a member of that culture
• Shared, as it offers all people ideas about
behavior
• Symbolic, as it is based on the manipulation
of symbols
• Systemic and integrated, as the parts of
culture work together in an integrated whole
• Culture is different from society, which we
say is “organized life in groups.” Animals,
then, may have society (such as ants and other
primates), but only humans can have culture and we
say that this is due to the symbolic, linguistic,
cognitive and existential properties associated with
the formation and maintenance of cultural systems.
• Culture is not bounded by geography or
politics and we shouldn’t assume that either of
these “boundaries” delimit the boundaries
of culture itself.
• Culture is a basic concept of anthropology,
though it is now being contested.
• Culture is constantly changing, just as
society as its social institutions undergo change.
• The concept of culture has been recently
critiqued by anthropologists and other social science
and humanities scholars. They offer that
culture—
• Is too essentializing, that is, it assumes
that all persons of a given culture will act in the
same way, believe the same things, etc.
• Is too bounded, that is it assumes that the
category of culture is meaningful, such as in
stating, “I understand Balinese culture.”
Is culture the same to each member of a given
culture? Is culture the same to each anthropologist
who studies it?
• Is critiqued by the presence of subcultures.
We will learn about subcultures later in the course,
but a subculture, such as Punk, might exist within a
larger culture only to borrow, adopt, pervert and
distort the mainstream culture, its symbols, values,
etc. Does the presence of subcultures, then, suggest
a critique of culture as a large, all-encompassing
formation?
• Brings with it problems of time and space.
Anthropologist Johannes Fabian in his Time and the
Other offers a powerful critique of the way that
anthropologists have simplified non-Western cultures
and belief systems through the use of concepts like
culture. We may have a totally different
understanding of time and space than the culture we
are studying, yet we might be inclined to subsume
that culture and its people under our own notions of
culture and belief.
• It is interesting to study how other
disciplines, such as cultural studies, feminism,
literary criticism, have latched onto the concept of
culture in their own disciplinary fields of
knowledge. For example, cultural studies uses culture
in a less-bounded, more in flux perspective. Some
scholars from cultural studies have an inherent
interest in how culture acts as a political
formation, specifically as they study the
articulations of symbolic systems with social class,
power, gender, etc.
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CULTURE
(from Keywords, by
Raymond Williams)
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated
words in the English language. This is so partly
because of its intricate historical development, in
several European languages, but mainly because it has
now come to be used for important concepts in several
distinct intellectual disciplines and in several
distinct and incompatible systems of thought.
The fw is cultura, L, from rw colere, L. Colere had a
range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor
with worship. Some of these meanings eventually
separated, though still with occasional overlapping,
in the derived nouns. Thus 'inhabit developed through
colonus, L to colony. 'Honor with worship developed
through cultus, L to cult. Cultura took on the main
meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in
Cicero, cultura animi, though with subsidiary
medieval meanings of honor and worship (cf. in
English culture as 'worship in Caxton (1483)). The
French forms of cultura were couture, OF, which has
since developed its own specialized meaning, and
later culture, which by eC15 had passed into English.
The primary meaning was then in husbandry, the
tending of natural growth.
Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process:
the tending of something, basically crops or animals.
The subsidiary coulter -- ploughshare, had travelled
by a different linguistic route, from culter, L --
ploughshare, culter, OE, to the variant English
spellings culter, colter, coulter and as late as eCl7
culture (Webster, Duchess of Malfi, III, ii: 'hot
burning cultures). This provided a further basis for
the important next stage of meaning, by metaphor.
From eCl6 the tending of natural growth was extended
to process of human development, and this, alongside
the original meaning in husbandry, was the main sense
until lC18 and eC19. Thus More: 'to the culture and
profit of their minds; Bacon: 'the culture and
manurance of minds (1605); Hobbes: 'a culture of
their minds (1651); Johnson: 'she neglected the
culture of her understanding (1759). At various
points in this development two crucial changes
occurred: first, a degree of habituation to the
metaphor, which made the sense of human tending
direct; second, an extension of particular processes
to a general process, which the word could abstractly
carry. It is of course from the latter development
that the independent noun culture began its
complicated modern history, but the process of change
is so intricate, and the latencies of meaning are at
times so close, that it is not possible to give any
definite date. Culture as an independent noun, an
abstract process or the product of such a process, is
not important before 1C18 and is not common before
mCl9. But the early stages of this development were
not sudden. There is an interesting use in Milton, in
the second (revised) edition of The Readie and Easie
Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660): 'spread
much more Knowledg and Civility, yea, Religion,
through all parts of the Land, by communicating the
natural heat of Government and Culture more
distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie
num and neglected. Here the metaphorical sense
('natural heat) still appears to be present, and
civility (cf. CIVILIZATION)is still written where in
C19 we would normally expect culture. Yet we can also
read 'government and culture in a quite modern sense.
Milton, from the tenor of his whole argument, is
writing about a general social process, and this is a
definite stage of development. In C15 England this
general process acquired definite class associations
though cultivation and cultivated were more commonly
used for this. But there is a letter of 1730 (Bishop
of Killala, to Mrs Clayton; cit. Plumb, England in
the Eighteenth Century)which has this clear sense:
'it has not been customary for persons of either
birth or culture to breed up their children to the
Church. Akenside (Pleasures of Imagination, 1744)
wrote: '... nor purple state nor culture can bestow.
Wordsworth wrote 'where grace of culture hath been
utterly unknown (1805), and Jane Austen (Emma, 1816)
'every advantage of discipline and culture.
It is thus clear that culture was developing in
English towards some of its modern senses before the
decisive effects of a new social and intellectual
movement. But to follow the development through this
movement, in lC18 and eC19, we have to look also at
developments in other languages and especially in
German.
In French, until C18, culture was always accompanied
by a grammatical form indicating the matter being
cultivated, as in the English usage already noted.
Its occasional use as an independent noun dates from
mC18, rather later than similar occasional uses in
English. The independent noun civilization also
emerged in mC18; its relationship to culture has
since been very complicated (cf. CIVILIZATION and
discussion below). There was at this point an
important development in German: the word was
borrowed from French, spelled first (lC18) Cultur and
from C19 Kultur. Its main use was still as a synonym
for civilization: first in the abstract sense of a
general process of becoming 'civilized or
'cultivated; second, in the sense which had already
been established for civilization by the historians
of the Enlightenment, in the popular C18 form of the
universal histories, as a description of the secular
process of human development. There was then a
decisive change of use in Herder. In his unfinished
Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind
(1784--9 1) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is more
indeterminate than this word, and nothing more
deceptive than its application to all nations and
periods. He attacked the assumption of the universal
histories that 'civilization or culture -- the
historical self-development of humanity -- was what
we would now call a unilinear process, leading to the
high and dominant point of C18 European culture.
Indeed he attacked what be called European
subjugation and domination of the four quarters of
the globe, and wrote:
Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have
perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to
manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end
of time your posterity should be made happy by
European culture. The very thought of a superior
European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty
of Nature.
It is then necessary, he argued, in a decisive
innovation, to speak of 'cultures in the plural: the
specific and variable cultures of different nations
and periods, but also the specific and variable
cultures of social and economic groups within a
nation. This sense was widely developed, in the
Romantic movement, as an alternative to the orthodox
and dominant 'civilization. It was first used to
emphasize national and traditional cultures,
including the new concept of folk-culture (cf. FOLK).
It was later used to attack what was seen as the
MECHANICAL (q.v.) character of the new civilization
then emerging: both for its abstract rationalism and
for the 'inhumanity of current Industrial
development. It was used to distinguish between
'human and 'material development. Politically, as so
often in this period, it veered between radicalism
and reaction and very often, in the confusion of
major social change, fused elements of both. (It
should also be noted, though it adds to the real
complication, that the same kind of distinction,
especially between 'material and 'spiritual
development, was made by von Humboldt and others,
until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the terms,
culture being material and civilization spiritual. In
general, however, the opposite distinction was
dominant.)
On the other hand, from the 1840s in Germany, Kultur
was being used in very much the sense in which
civilization had been used in C18 universal
histories. The decisive innovation is G. F. Klemms
Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit --
'General Cultural History of Mankind (1843-52)--
which traced human development from savagery through
domestication to freedom. Although the American
anthropologist Morgan, tracing comparable stages,
used 'Ancient Society, with a culmination in
Civilization, Klemms sense was sustained, and was
directly followed in English by Tylor in Primitive
Culture (1870). It is along this line of reference
that the dominant sense in modern social sciences has
to be traced.
The complexity of the modern development of the word,
and of its modern usage, can then be appreciated. We
can easily distinguish the sense which depends on a
literal continuity of physical process as now in
'sugar-beet culture or, in the specialized physical
application in bacteriology since the 1880s, 'germ
culture. But once we go beyond the physical
reference, we have to recognize three broad active
categories of usage. The sources of two of these we
have already discussed: (i) the independent and
abstract noun which describes a general process of
intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development,
from C18; (ii) the independent noun, whether used
generally or specifically, which indicates a
particular way of life, whether of a people, a
period, a group, or humanity in general, from Herder
and Klemm. But we have also to recognize (iii) the
independent and abstract noun which describes the
works and practices of intellectual and especially
artistic activity. This seems often now the most
widespread use: culture is music, literature,
painting and sculpture, theater and film. A Ministry
of Culture refers to these specific activities,
sometimes with the addition of philosophy,
scholarship, history. This use, (iii), is in fact
relatively late. It is difficult todate precisely
because it is in origin an applied form of sense (i):
the idea of a general process of intellectual,
spiritual and aesthetic development was applied and
effectively transferred to the works and practices
which represent and sustain it. But it also developed
from the earlier sense of process; cf. 'progressive
culture of fine arts, Millar, Historical View of the
English Government, IV, 314 (1812). In English (i)
and (iii) are still close; at times, for internal
reasons, they are indistinguishable as in Arnold,
Culture and Anarchy (1867); while sense (ii) was
decisively introduced into English by Tylor,
Primitive Culture (1870), following Klemm. The
decisive development of sense (iii) in English was in
lC19 and eC2O.
Faced by this complex and still active history of the
word, it is easy to react by selecting one 'true or
'proper or 'scientific sense and dismissing other
senses as loose or confused. There is evidence of
this reaction even in the excellent study by Kroeber
and Kluckhohn, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts
and Definitions, where usage in North American
anthropology is in effect taken as a norm. It is
clear that, within a discipline, conceptual usage has
to be clarified. But in general it is the range and
overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex
of senses indicates a complex argument about the
relations between general human development and a
particular way of life, and between both and the
works and practices of art and intelligence. It is
especially interesting that in archaeology and in
cultural anthropology the reference to culture or a
culture isprimarily to material production, while in
history and cultural studies the reference is
primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. This
often confuses but even more often conceals the
central question of the relations between 'material
and 'symbolic production, which in some recent
argument -- cf. my own Culture -- have always to be
related rather than contrasted. Within this complex
argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as
effectively overlapping positions; there are also,
understandably, many unresolved questions and
confused answers. But these arguments and questions
cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of
actual usage. This point is relevant also to uses of
forms of the word in languages other than English,
where there is considerable variation. The
anthropological use is common in the German,
Scandinavian and Slavonic language groups, but it is
distinctly subordinate to the senses of art and
learning, or of a general process of human
development, in Italian and French. Between languages
as within a language, the range and complexity of
sense and reference indicate both difference of
intellectual position and some blurring or
overlapping. These variations, of whatever kind,
necessarily involve alternative views of the
activities, relationships and processes which this
complex word indicates. The complexity, that is to
say, is not finally in the word but in the problems
which its variations of use significantly indicate.
It is necessary to look also at some associated and
derived words. Cultivation and cultivated went
through the same metaphorical extension from a
physical to a social or educational sense in C17, and
were especially significant words in C18. Coleridge,
making a classical eC19 distinction between
civilization and culture, wrote (1830): 'the
permanent distinction, and occasional contrast,
between cultivation and civilization. The noun in
this sense has effectively disappeared but the
adjective is still quite common, especially in
relation to manners and tastes. The important
adjective cultural appears to date from the 1870s; it
became common by the 1890s. The word is only
available, in its modern sense, when the independent
noun, in the artistic and intellectual or
anthropological senses, has become familiar.
Hostility to the word culture in English appears to
date from the controversy around Arnolds views. It
gathered force in lC19 and eC20, in association with
a comparable hostility to aesthete and AESTHETIC
(q.v.). Its association with class distinction
produced the mime-word culchah. There was also an
area of hostility associated with anti-German
feeling, during and after the 1914-18 War, in
relation to propaganda about Kultur. The central area
of hostility has lasted, and one element of it has
been emphasized by the recent American phrase
culture-vulture. It is significant that virtually all
the hostility (with the sole exception of the
temporary anti-German association) has been connected
with uses involving claims to superior knowledge (cf.
the noun INTELLECTUAL),refinement (culchah) and
distinctions between 'high art (culture) and popular
art and entertainment. It thus records a real social
history and a very difficult and confused phase of
social and cultural development. It is interesting
that the steadily extending social and
anthropological use of culture and cultural and such
formations as sub-culture (the culture of a
distinguishable smaller group) has, except in certain
areas (notably popular entertainment), either
bypassed or effectively diminished the hostility and
its associated unease and embarrassment. The recent
use of culturalism, to indicate a methodological
contrast with structuralism in social analysis,
retains many of the earlier difficulties, and does
not always bypass the hostility.
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Culture Definitions
(Many
from Kroeber and Kluckholn)
Culture is derived from the Latin cultura, from the
verb colere, with the meaning of tending or
cultivation. In Christian authors, cultura replaced
the meaning of worship. The Old French form was
couture, later replaced by culture.
General
1. “culture, or civilization…is that
complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society”
(E.B. Tylor, 1871)
2. “a particular state or stage of advancement
in civilization; the characteristic attainments of a
people or social order” (Webster, 1929)
3. “culture embraces all the manifestations of
social habits of a community, the reactions of the
individual as affected by the habits of the group in
which he lives, and the products of human activities
as determined by these habits” (Boas,
1930)”
4. “it [culture] obviously is the integral whole
consisting of implements in consumers’ goods, of
constitutional characters for the various social
groupings, of human ideas and crafts, beliefs and
customs” (Malinowski, 1944)
5. “culture is that complex whole which includes
artifacts, beliefs, art, all the other habits
acquired by man as a member of society, and all
products of human activity as determined by these
habits” (Kluckhohn and Kelly, 1945)
6. “…culture in general as a descriptive
concept means the accumulated treasury of human
creation: books, paintings, buildings, and the like;
the knowledge of ways of adjusting to our
surroundings, both human and physical; language,
customs, and systems of etiquette, ethics, religion
and morals that have been built up through the
ages” (Kluckhohn and Kelly, 1945)
7. “culture…refers to that part of the
total setting [of human existence] which includes the
material objects of human manufacture, techniques,
social orientations, points of view, and sanctioned
ends that are the immediate conditioning factors
underlying behavior” (Herskovits, 1948)
Historical
8. “the culture of a group is the sum total and
organization of the social heritages which have
acquired a social meaning because of racial
temperament and of the historical life of the
group” (Park and Burgess, 1921)
9. “…culture is not a state or condition
only…culture…is what remains of men’s
past, working on their present, to shape their
future” (Myres, 1927)
10. “…we may regard culture as the sum
total of the possessions and the patterned ways of
behavior which have become part of the heritage of a
group” (Winston, 1933)
11. “…the social heredity is called
culture. As a general term, culture means the total
social heredity of mankind, while as a specific term
a culture means a particular strain of social
heredity” (Linton, 1936)
Normative
12. “…those historically created selective
process which channel men’s reactions both to
internal and to external stimuli” (Kluckhohn and
Kelly, 1945)
13. “culture is the term used to refer to the
way that the members of a group act in relation to
one another and to other groups” (Lasswell,
1948)
Emphasis on Ideals or Values Plus
Behavior
14. “culture is dissipation of surplus human
energy in the exuberant exercise of the higher human
faculties” (Carver, 1935)
Psychological
15. “culture, in the form of regulations
governing human behavior, provides solutions to
societal problems” (Ford, 1939)
16. “culture consists of traditional ways of
solving problems…culture…is composed of
responses which have been accepted because they have
met with success; in brief, culture consists of
learned problem-solutions” (Ford, 1942)
Emphasis on Learning
17. “…culture…may be defined as all
behavior learned by the individual in conformity with
the group” (Davis, 1948)
18. “culture is socially transmitted behavior
conceived as an abstraction from concrete social
groups” (Aberle, 1950)
Emphasis on Habit
19. “culture is the rationalization of
habit” (Tozzer, pre-1930)
Structural
20. “culture consists of pattern and
functionally interrelated customs common to
specifiable human beings composing specifiable social
groups or categories” (Gillin, 1948)
21. “culture is the working and integrated
summation of the non-instinctive activities of human
beings. It is the functioning, patterned totality of
group-accepted and –transmitted inventions,
material and non –material” (Turney-High,
1949)
Genetic
22. “…that part of the environment which
man has himself created and to which he must adjust
himself” (Willey, 1927)
23. “culture is the sum total of all that is
artificial. It is the complete outfit of tools, and
habits of living, which are invented by man and then
passed on from one generation to another”
(Folsom, 1928)
24. “culture consists of all products (results)
of organismic nongenetic efforts at adjustment”
(Bernard, 1941)
25. “the accumulated transmissible results of
past behavior in association” (Carr, 1945)
26. “a short and useful definition is: Culture
is the man-made part of the environment”
(Herskovits, 1948)
Emphasis on Ideas
27. “a culture is a social structure, a social
organism, if any one prefers, and ideas are its
germs” (Ward, 1903)
Emphasis on Symbols
28. “culture is all behavior mediated by
symbols” (Bain, 1942)
Residual
29. “that which distinguishes men from animals
we call culture” (Ostwald, 1907)
Incomplete
30. “culture may defined as what a society does
and thinks” (Sapir, 1921)
31. “culture is largely a sign
configuration…” (Morris, 1946)
32. “…culture is human energy organized in
patterns of repetitive behavior” (Bryson, 1947)
Others
33. “culture is a term that is repeatedly used
without meaning much of anything at all, a vague
gesture toward a dimly perceived ethos…”
(Greenblatt, 1995)
34. “culture is the system of knowledge more or
less shared by members of a society” (Keesing,
1981)
35. “[culture is] distinctly human; transmitted
through learning; traditions and customs that govern
behavior and beliefs” (Kottak, 1991)
36. “culture was the most important concept that
held American anthropology together” (Yengoyan,
1986)
37. “even though the term has been discussed in
countless books and articles, there is still a large
degree of uncertainty in its use—anthropologists
employ the notion in fundamentally different
ways” (Hatch, 1973)
38. “…most local cultures worldwide are
products of a history of appropriations, resistances,
and accommodations” (Marcus & Fischer, 1986)
39. “…[no] assumptions about closed
boundaries within which cultural meanings hold sway:
“a culture” as a bounded unit would give
way to more complex conceptions of interpenetration,
superimposition, and pastiche” (Keesing, 1993)
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