The Concept of Culture

A History and Reappraisal

Martyn Hammersley

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030229818
• eBook ISBN: 9783030229825
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

While the term 'culture' has come to be very widely used in both popular and academic discourse, it has a variety of meanings, and the differences among these have not been given sufficient attention. This bookexplores these meanings, andidentifies some of the problems associated with them, as well asexamining the role that values should play in cultural analysis.

The development of four, very different, conceptions of culture is traced from the nineteenth century onwards: a notion of aesthetic cultivation associated with Matthew Arnold; the evolutionary view of culture characteristic of nineteenth-century anthropology; the idea of diverse cultures characteristic of twentieth and twenty-first century anthropology; and a conception of culture as a process of situated meaning-making – found today across anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. These conceptions of culture are interrogated, and a reformulation of the concept is sketched.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a variety of fields, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and education.

© The Author(s) 2019

Martyn HammersleyThe Concept of Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22982-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Martyn Hammersley¹

(1)

Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Martyn Hammersley

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

The word ‘culture’ is widely used in the social sciences. However, the intended meaning is often far from clear. In this introductory chapter, the history of the term is briefly sketched, and an outline provided of how it has been used in social science. There has been variation in whether ‘culture’ is treated as singular or plural. Two versions of a singular interpretation have been influential: the first is concerned with aesthetic and ethical cultivation; while the second is a developmental conception in which history is portrayed as involving a growth of Culture. There have also been two pluralistic conceptions. One interprets cultures as whole ways of life. The other focuses on the ubiquitous processes of meaning-making that occur in diverse local contexts, and the role of distinctive symbol systems or discourses within these.

Keywords

the Meaning of ‘Culture’the History of ‘Culture’CivilizationSubcultureMatthew ArnoldCulture and anthropologyCulture and sociology

End Abstract

‘Culture’ is one of the most widely used terms in the social sciences. Yet, while its meaning has long been recognized as problematic—Trilling (1967: 10) described the ‘semantic difficulties’ as ‘notorious’—it is often employed in ways that ignore this. Furthermore, its most common mode of usage today overlaps to some degree with the meaning of other terms, such as ‘tradition’, ‘civilization’, ‘custom’, ‘myth’, ‘perspective’, ‘worldview’, ‘ideology’, ‘discourse’, and ‘habitus’. These are not in any straightforward sense synonyms, but they have a close (if rather murky) relationship with ‘culture’ in the social scientific lexicon. And they are themselves by no means unequivocal in meaning. For instance, ‘ideology’ is sometimes treated as equivalent to ‘worldview’, which corresponds with some interpretations of ‘culture’, though its predominant sense implies a false representation or form of understanding that has negative consequences. Similarly, ‘discourse’ can refer to speech, but also to a particular system of phrases that formulate some domain in a distinctive way; and, as Howarth (2000: 2) notes, there are even commentators who treat it as ‘synonymous with the entire social system, in which discourses literally constitute the social and political world’. Again, the overlap with some meanings of ‘culture’ is obvious here. There is uncertainty and confusion surrounding all these terms, then; and in my view, this seriously obstructs social scientific analysis.

So, my aims in this book are quite specific. First of all, to clarify the different senses that have been given to the word ‘culture’, through examining some of the contexts in which these have been developed and deployed. As we shall see, this is a complicated story, but I believe it repays careful attention. I will also outline some key theoretical contrasts in which the concept is implicated; and, towards the end, I will suggest how the problems to which these give rise could be avoided through a reformulation of the concept for the purposes of sociological analysis. In the Epilogue, I briefly address the relationship between use of the concept in social science and its role in evaluative discussions about what is a worthwhile life, what is the good society, how societies ought to be changed, whether particular institutional or local practices are right or wrong, and so on.¹

Help in clarifying the meaning(s) of ‘culture’, and perhaps even in resolving the conceptual problems associated with it, can be gained by examining its etymology . Williams (1983: 87) traces its origins to the Latin words ‘colere’ and ‘cultura’, a core meaning of which was ‘the tending of natural growth’; and, by metaphorical extension, this came to refer to the intellectual and moral development of human beings—with an ambiguity about the extent to which this needed to be actively induced.² The notion of ‘cultivation’ is closely related, along with the German concept of Bildung (meaning ‘personal or spiritual development’) (Bruford 1975), which was modelled on Cicero’s concept of ‘cultura animi’ and the understanding of this developed in early modern Europe (on which see Corneanu 2012). This was the foundation on which some later usage of ‘culture’ built, though we should also note the links back to Greek debates about the relationship between nomos and physis (see Guthrie 1971).

In its early employment, the word ‘culture’ was frequently treated as interchangeable with ‘civilization’, but in some contexts their meanings began to diverge (and there was variation in the distinction involved). Indeed, in the nineteenth century, there were influential writers who saw ‘culture’ as referring to what was being lost as a result of the advance of ‘industrial civilization’. This reflected, in part, an opposition between literature, art, and craft, on the one hand, and how science and technology were reshaping society, on the other. And the contrast here was often formulated as between organic growth and mechanical artificiality. Such a view was central to the thinking of Matthew Arnold—poet, literary critic, and school inspector—whose work was a particularly important influence on the subsequent development of the concept of culture, at least in English-language accounts. By contrast, within anthropology, the terms ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ were treated as virtual synonyms in the nineteenth century—here the focus of investigation was the evolution of society from primitive to advanced stages. And, in broad terms, this also corresponds with some later usage of the term ‘civilization’, where it is taken to refer to the level of ‘development’ of Western societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see, for instance, Ferguson 2012).³

An important tension within the meaning of the term ‘culture’ relates to whether it is singular or plural. In the nineteenth century, it tended to be used in singular form by both cultural critics like Arnold and by anthropologists, despite the important difference in the meanings they gave to it. However, even in the eighteenth century, Herder had argued for the plurality of cultures and suggested that each must be understood in its own terms (see Wells 1959; Forster 2010). Herder’s ideas were subsequently taken up in the Romantic Movement, sometimes encouraging an emphasis on the value of ‘folk culture’ and of distinctive national cultures. Other important inheritors of Herder’s ideas were writers in the tradition of nineteenth-century German historicism (Iggers 1968; Beiser 2011) and the ‘Völkerpsychologie’ of Steinthal and Lazarus, subsequently developed by Wundt into a form of cultural psychology (Kalmar 1987; Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 10–11). Building on this body of work, in the early twentieth century, partly under the influence of German anthropology (Stocking 1995; Penny and Bunzl 2003), social and cultural anthropologists in the US and the UK began to frame their discipline as concerned with studying ‘other cultures’, rather than with charting the evolutionary development of ‘Culture’.⁴

The term ‘culture’ was also important in German sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century, notably in the work of Simmel, Alfred and Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim (see Frisby 1984: ch 4; Inglis and Almila 2016: chs 3, 4, and 6). In this context, the primary focus was the distinctive nature of modernity and its cultural consequences (see Loader 2015). Here, the meaning given to the term was closer to that of Arnold than to either of the senses employed by anthropologists: it reflected the opposition between culture and civilization mentioned earlier. The development of modern forms of life—involving commercialism, industrialization, and an emphasis on scientific and economic rationality—was regarded by these sociologists as irreversible, but at the same time there was concern about what was being lost in terms of Culture as a result.

Within Anglo-American sociology, the concept of culture also came to play an important role, for example in countering the dominant influence of economics and its narrow concept of ‘rational action’. Even Sumner, an advocate of laissez-faire economics and a social Darwinist, assigned a key role to ‘folkways’ and ‘mores’ in understanding human action (Sumner 1906; Tufts 1907). And, later, social classes, minority ethnic populations, religious sects, and youth groups came to be seen as displaying distinctive cultures or subcultures, or as representing counter-cultures (Mintz 1956; Cohen 1955; Cloward and Ohlin 1960; Yinger 1960, 1984; Miller and Riessman 1961...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Two Singular Conceptions of Culture: The Aesthetic and the Developmental
• 3. ‘Culture’ in Sociology and Cultural Studies
• 4. Problems with the Concept of Culture and a Suggested Reformulation
• 5. Epilogue
• Back Matter