Cultures and Societies in a Changing World

Wendy Griswold

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781452289403
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

In the Fourth Edition of Cultures and Societies in a Changing World, author Wendy Griswold illuminates how culture shapes our social world and how society shapes culture. Through this book, students will gain an understanding of the sociology of culture and explore stories, beliefs, media, ideas, art, religious practices, fashions, and rituals from a sociological perspective. Cultural examples from multiple countries and time periods will broaden students' global understanding. Students will develop a deeper appreciation of culture and society from this text, gleaning insights that will help them overcome cultural misunderstandings, conflicts, and ignorance and that will help equip them to live their professional and personal lives as effective, wise citizens of the world.

1

Culture and the Cultural Diamond

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Culture is one of those words that people use all the time but have trouble defining. Consider the following stories about some of the wildly different things we envision when we talk about culture.

In September 2010 France’s Senate voted 246 to 1 to ban women from wearing a full-face veil (niqab or burqa) in public. Many Muslims argue that veiling, which they regard as defending female modesty from intrusive male eyes, is intrinsic to their culture. The minister of justice, on the other hand, says that the ban affirms French cultural values of dignity and equality. Girls growing up under these two cultures may feel torn by the incompatible rules for being a good French citizen and a good Muslim.

On a Friday evening in the college dining hall, a half-dozen students discuss their plans for the weekend. One says she’s going to a basketball game, another says he’s checking out a hip-hop group playing at a local club, and a third says she’s staying in to download some music and watch videos. A fourth mutters, “Study and sleep, just like always, no life,” while a fifth counters with “Party!” Then the sixth announces, “Well, guys, you may be wasting the weekend, but I’m going to get some culture. Tonight, I’m meeting friends at an art exhibit opening in a gallery downtown, and my girlfriend and I have symphony tickets for tomorrow.” His friends start making cracks about him being a culture vulture, while he jokes back about some people having more taste than other people.

An American conducting business in Tokyo hopes to land a lucrative contract for her firm. When her Japanese counterpart presents his card, she takes it casually with one hand, glances at it, and sticks it in her pocket. Subsequent relations with her Japanese prospect prove frosty, and her firm loses the contract. “Ah,” says an experienced friend, “you lost out because of a cultural misunderstanding. In Japan, the business card is considered an extension of the person; one treats the card with great respect, holding it with two hands and carefully putting it in a safe place. Americans don’t think of it that way; for them, the card is just a convenience. You insulted the very person you were trying to court.”

Fitness demands hours in the gym and years of self-denial pursuing the six-pack abs and lean musculature of the cultural ideal. The fit body carries a wealth of meanings—sexual attractiveness, discipline, health—but at the same time advertisers urge consumers to purchase this body, in effect, by spending both time and money (e.g., gym membership, personal trainers). One result is that fitness is more available to the affluent than to the poor. As both cultural ideal and cultural commodity, it helps reproduce class and gender inequalities (Dworkin and Wachs 2009).

In an urban mixed-race neighborhood, sociologist Elijah Anderson (1990) observes casual street encounters in which African Americans appear uncomfortable when they pass Caucasians walking their dogs, despite the dog walkers’ assurances that their pets are friendly. This results from a cultural difference, he concludes:

In the working-class black subculture, “dogs” does not mean “dogs in the house,” but usually connotes dogs tied up outside, guarding the backyard, biting trespassers bent on trouble. Middle-class and white working-class people may keep dogs in their homes, allowing them the run of the house, but many black working-class people I interviewed failed to understand such behavior. When they see a white adult on his knees kissing a dog, the sight may turn their stomachs—one more piece of evidence attesting to the peculiarities of their white neighbors. (222)

All five stories involve culture, but each seems to talk about very different things: national customs (handling business cards), activities considered elitist (attending the symphony), personal practices (going to the gym), and local variations in symbolic meanings (what dogs or veils represent). Together they suggest that culture, though rather hard to pin down, is important to understand. Cultural ignorance or misunderstanding, it seems, can lead to highly undesirable outcomes: lost business, interethnic tension, or an inability to participate in either the comic or the transcendent moments in human experience.

What is this concept called culture that can apply to such a wide variety of situations? Why do notions of culture inflame such intense passions that huge numbers of people—from sectarians in Mumbai to gang members in Chicago—regularly kill and die for their symbols, their beliefs, and their cultures? Moreover, how can we gain a better understanding of the connections between the concept of culture and the social world? This chapter addresses these questions.

Two Ways of Looking at Culture

When sociologists talk about culture, Richard Peterson (1979) observed, they usually mean one of four things: norms, values, beliefs, or expressive symbols. Roughly, norms are the way people behave in a given society, values are what they hold dear, beliefs are how they think the universe operates, and expressive symbols are representations, often of social norms, values, and beliefs themselves. In the last decades of the twentieth century, sociologists added a fifth item to the list: practices. Culture in this recent view describes people’s behavior patterns, not necessarily connected to any particular values or beliefs. We discuss these various meanings later, but for now the point is that even such specialists as cultural sociologists use the word culture to stand for a whole range of ideas and objects.

The academic perspectives on culture can be sorted into two schools of thought. It is fair to say that most notions of culture stem from assumptions rooted in either the humanities or the social sciences, particularly anthropology. Although this book presents the social scientific perspective by and large, the distinctiveness of this stance emerges only in comparison with its counterpart in the humanities.

Before we begin, however, we must clarify one thing: Neither “culture” nor “society” exists out there in the real world—only people who work, joke, raise children, love, think, worship, fight, and behave in a wide variety of ways. To speak of culture as one thing and society as another is to make an analytical distinction between two different aspects of human experience. Think of the distinction as such that culture designates the expressive aspect of human existence, whereas society designates the relational (and often practical) aspect. Hugging dogs, paying respect to business cards, working out—these all describe methods for expressing our lives as social beings. The same object or behavior may be analyzed as social (a business card communicates information necessary for economic transactions) or cultural (a business card means something different to a Japanese than to an American). Now, oriented with this rough distinction between the expressive and the relational and with the recognition that both culture and society are abstractions, we may explore the two most influential seedbeds for contemporary thinking about the culture/society relationship.

“The Best That Has Been Thought and Known”

In common usage, the term culture often refers to the fine and performing arts or to serious literature, as in the facetious statement of the art-gallery-and symphony-goer, “I’m going to get some culture.” Culture in this sense, sometimes called “high culture”—as opposed to popular culture, folk culture, or mass culture—carries implications of high social status. The unthinking equation of culture with the arts results from a line of thinking, prominent in those disciplines collectively known as the humanities, whereby culture signifies a locus of superior and universal worth.

In the nineteenth century, many European intellectuals posited an opposition between culture and society or, as they often put it, between culture and civilization. As they used the term, civilization referred to the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying social upheavals. Contrasting culture with civilization was, therefore, a protest against Enlightenment thinking, against the belief in progress as an invariable benefit, against the ugly aspects of industrialization, and against what Marx called the “cash nexus” of capitalism whereby everyone and everything seemed evaluated on an economic basis. If civilization meant filthy tenements, factories spewing smoke into the air, and people treated as nothing more than so many replaceable parts, many thoughtful men and women wanted no part of it. They saw culture—entailing the wisest and most beautiful expressions of human effort—as its contrasting pole and the salvation of over-civilized human beings. This dichotomy set the alienating, dehumanizing effects of industrial civilization against the healing, life-enhancing capacities of culture. Typical of this polarizing tendency was the English social philosopher John Stuart Mill’s account, in his autobiography, of how his highly rationalized training in logic and economics brought him to a nervous breakdown. Only by reading Wordsworth’s poetry, he testified, could he restore his sanity.

The automatic question that arises today occurred to nineteenth-century thinkers as well: How can we believe in culture’s extraordinary, redeeming value without this belief turning into a narrow ethnocentrism, a hymn of praise to Western European culture as the summit of human achievement? Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), a British educator and man of letters, answered this question by formulating a universal theory of cultural value ([1869] 1949). Emphasizing culture’s potential influence in the social world, he harshly criticized Victorian England for its mindless materialism and its worship of machines and freedom (in other words, industrialization and democracy) without considering the ends to which either should be put. He feared a result of either dull, middle-class Philistinism or social anarchy produced by rioting workers. The aristocrats, whom Arnold dismissed as “barbarians” too busy hunting foxes to bother defending culture, would provide no help. Only culture could save modern society.

What constituted this salvation of humankind? Culture, Arnold asserted, was “a study of perfection.” Culture could make civilization more human by restoring “sweetness and light.” Although it is now used pejoratively to convey superficial amiability, Arnold intended the expression sweetness and light to refer to beauty and wisdom, respectively. He took the idea of sweetness and light from Jonathan Swift’s parable about the spiders versus the bees. Everyone thinks spiders are very industrious, Swift observed, but, in fact, spiders work only for themselves; they spin all those webs just to catch their own dinners. Bees, on the other hand, more properly admirable, unselfishly produce benefits for others: honey and the wax used in making candles or, in other words, sweetness and light. Arnold appropriated the more socially productive of Swift’s two creatures in his definition of culture. Like the honey and candles that come from bees, the beauty and wisdom that culture provides come from (1) awareness of and sensitivity to “the best that has been thought and known” in art, literature, history, and philosophy and (2) “a right reason” (an open-minded, flexible, tolerant intelligence).

How does culture work? Arnold, the educator, saw culture in terms of its educational potential. He maintained that culture enables people to relate knowledge, including science and technology, to conduct and beauty. Civilization potentially relates harmoniously with knowledge, beauty, conduct, and social relations—a Greco-Roman view—and culture can bring about this harmony. Culture is not an end in itself but a means to an end. It can cure the social ills of unrestrained materialism and self-satisfied Philistinism by teaching people how to live and conveying moral ideas. In a sense, Arnold believed, culture can be the humanizing agent that moderates the more destructive impacts of modernization.

Arnold’s conception of culture holds that it addresses a different set of issues from those addressed by logic or science. Surprisingly, German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), whom we shall encounter often in this book, took the same view. In his essay “Science as a Vocation,” Weber laid out the limits of what science cannot do to set up his arguments about what science can do. The limits are what interest us here. What meaning for our lives can science offer? Weber suggested none (1946:143, 153):

Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: “Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’” … Science today is a “vocation” organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe.

To answer Tolstoi’s question and find a meaning for their lives, Weber asserted, human beings must look to prophets and philosophers, to religion and ideas. Most generally, they must turn to culture.

Weber was a scientist and Arnold a man of letters, but both emphasized the separation of culture from everyday life in modern society and its ability to influence human behavior. This way of looking at culture is traditionally associated with the humanities (although contemporary humanities disciplines are more critical). The traditional humanities viewpoint

• evaluates some cultures and cultural works as better than others; it believes culture has to do with perfection. Deriving from a root word meaning “cultivation,” as in agriculture, this sense of culture entails the cultivation of the human mind and sensibility.
• assumes that culture opposes the prevailing norms of the social order, or “civilization.” Harmony between culture and society is possible but rarely achieved.
• fears that culture is fragile, that it can be “lost” or debilitated or estranged from socioeconomic life. Culture must be carefully preserved, through educational institutions, for example, and in cultural archives such as libraries and museums.
• invests culture with the aura of the sacred and ineffable, thus removing it from everyday existence. This separation is often symbolically accentuated: Bronze lions, for example, guard the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago (and many libraries and museums elsewhere). Because of its extraordinary quality, culture makes no sense if we consider only its economic, political, or social dimensions.

It is important to recognize this “traditional humanities viewpoint” as an ideal type, with contradictions and complexities smoothed away for the sake of comparison. Moreover, it describes a rarified “high culture” definition that few contemporary humanities departments would endorse. Nevertheless, this understanding of culture lies deep in most people’s thinking. Consider, for example, the revulsion much of the world feels over looters ransacking treasures from the art museums and archeological digs of Iraq. Observers are horrified that looting, and the illicit market for rarities that supports it, reduces something precious and sacred to a mere commodity and in so doing decimates the cultural heritage—“the best that has been thought and known”—of the Iraqi people. Such a value-laden view of culture can often be seen as elitist, but at the same time it is widely held.

“That Complex Whole”

During the nineteenth century, the new disciplines of anthropology and sociology simultaneously advocated a very different way of thinking about culture than that put forth by Matthew Arnold. An early statement of this position came from the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who reacted strongly against the smugness of European culture at the end of the eighteenth century. Fascinated by traditional folk verse and the poetry of the Old Testament, Herder regarded such oral literature as spontaneous products of innate human creativity that sharply contrasted with the more artificial literary output of an educated elite. If all humanity comprised natural poets, how absurd to think that the European educated classes had somehow cornered the market on the “best that has been thought and known.” Or, as Herder put it:

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. (Williams 1976:79)

Herder argued that we must speak of cultures, not simply culture, for the obvious reason that nations, and communities within or across nations, have their own, equally meritorious cultures.

This view of culture as a given society’s way of life was introduced to English anthropology by E. B. Tylor, who dismissed the whole culture-versus-civilization debate out of hand in his book Primitive Culture ([1871] 1958:1): “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” This wide-ranging anthropological definition of culture has dominated the social sciences, including contemporary sociology, ever since. Sociologist Peter Berger (1969), for example, defines culture as “the totality of man’s products,” both material and immaterial. Indeed, Berger argued that even society itself is “nothing but part and parcel of non-material culture” (6–7). Although social scientists don’t all agree to quite so expansive a definition, they don’t agree on much else about culture either. Back in the 1950s when two anthropologists counted the different definitions of culture used in the social sciences, they came up with more than 160 distinct meaning...